Richard Crenna

Actor long on the verge of stardom

Richard Donald Crenna, actor and film director: born Los Angeles 30 November 1926; twice married (one son, two daughters); died Los Angeles 17 January 2003.

The actor Richard Crenna was a stalwart of radio and television for over 60 years, but stardom on the cinema screen eluded him despite fine performances in such films as The Sand Pebbles and Body Heat. He is best known to cinemagoers for his portrayal of Colonel Trautman, the former Vietnam War commander of the muscular hero Rambo in First Blood and two sequels. "This film series has given me the kind of recognition I've never before had as an actor," he said in 1987. "I feel like I'm part of a cult happening."

Born in 1926 in Los Angeles, where his father was a pharmacist and his mother ran a small hotel, he broke into show business at the age of 10. "A teacher came into the playground," he recalled, "to say they were auditioning for a radio show, Boy Scouts Jamboree, at a local studio."

Crenna and nine classmates were hired for the show, and he was such a hit as "the boy who does everything wrong" that he stayed on it for 11 years while also performing on many other shows. Mainly he played what he later called "all the adenoidal kids" on radio, including the squeaky-voiced Waldo on Burns and Allen, and the ardent Oogie Pringle, suitor of the teenage heroine of A Date with Judy. On the long-running comedy series Our Miss Brooks, he played the dim-witted student Walter Denton and, when the show transferred to television in 1952, its star Eve Arden insisted that Crenna be in the show, though he was really getting too old for the part.

At the same time Crenna began a lifetime battle for actors' rights, taking on the Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan to ensure that actors received residual payments for their work. "Radio actors always got residuals, but TV actors didn't," he said:

I felt that residuals meant more employment, not less. Reagan didn't want to face the issue at first. Finally, we won.

Years later, Crenna was to play Reagan in the television movie The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001).

Crenna made his screen début playing the brother of the baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean in The Pride of St Louis (1952). He played his original role when Our Miss Brooks was filmed in 1956, but during the Fifties he worked mainly on television. In a classic I Love Lucy episode in 1952, Crenna and Janet Waldo played teenagers with mad crushes on Lucy and Ricardo, who try to deter them by dressing up in old clothes and wire-rimmed glasses.

For six years (1957-63) he played the grandson of a mischievous rustic (Walter Brennan) whose West Virginia clan move to California, in The Real McCoys. Feeling bored with the role in its fourth year, he asked if he could direct some episodes. "Without Brennan's approval, I couldn't have done it," he said. He directed 30 episodes in two years, and he was to direct many other TV shows, including episodes of No Time for Sergeants and Lou Grant.

Crenna gave one of his finest screen performances when he played the dour, duty-bound gunboat captain in Robert Wise's The Sand Pebbles (1966). The film starred Steve McQueen, whom Crenna found difficult to befriend: "I found him to be extremely cautious about allowing people to enter his life." Crenna was one of the vicious crooks who terrorise a blind Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967) and he played Richard Aldrich, the New Englander who married Gertrude Lawrence (Julie Andrews) in Star! (1968).

During these years he seemed on the verge of true cinematic stardom, but it was television that continued to provide his finest opportunities, though his occasional film roles were invariably well received. He was Kathleen Turner's strong but cuckolded husband in Lawrence Kasden's sultry film noir Body Heat (1981); in First Blood (1982) he was the colonel who stops the former Green Beret Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) from wreaking carnage, a role he was to reprise in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988); and he won acclaim for his slick card-sharp in Garry Marshall's The Flamingo Kid (1984), a coming-of-age tale starring Matt Dillon.

In 1985 Crenna received an Emmy for his performance in the TV movie The Rape of Richard Beck, in which he was a determinedly macho, sexist cop whose attitude regarding rape undergoes a drastic change after he is sexually attacked. In the spoof of Rambo-type movies, Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), Crenna good-naturedly parodied his original role as a character called Colonel Denton Walters (a homage too to his earlier fame as Walter Denton in Our Miss Brooks). Recently he had been appearing as Tyne Daly's love interest (they were to have been married next month) in the series Judging Amy.

Crenna was married for 46 years and had three children. Kathleen Nolan, who played his wife in The Real McCoys, said of him,

The fact that over his entire career, with all the tabloids and all the garbage out there, there has never been one negative thing said about Richard Crenna – that is pretty phenomenal.

At the time of his death, he was on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors and still fighting for their rights. The actress Sally Kirkland said,

He was just a saint for the union. During the strike he came out on the strike line over and over and over. And this was a man who worked. His humility was such an example to all actors.

Tom Vallance