Richard Anderson(1926-2017)

Richard Anderson appeared in high school plays, served a hitch in the United States Army and, upon his discharge, began doing summer stock, radio work, a movie bit part (a wounded soldier in Twelve O'Clock High (1949)) and all the other minor jobs required of your basic struggling actor. He did comedy scenes on a "screen test"-like TV series called Lights, Camera, Action! (1950) and impressed the right people at MGM, who offered him a contract. After leaving MGM he continued to dabble in movies while at the same time becoming a huge presence on TV. He was a regular (Police Lt. Drum) during the last season of TV's Perry Mason (1957); in the series' last episode, he interrogated witnesses to a murder in a TV studio--the witnesses being played by the "Perry Mason" crew. In the highly-rated last episode of The Fugitive (1963) he played Richard Kimble's (David Janssen) brother-in-law, and is briefly suspected of being the real killer of Kimble's wife. A regular on The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Anderson had more recently produced the TV-movie reprises of that series.