Richard Boone often played in Westerns and action films.

Richard Allen Boone (June 18 1917, Los Angeles, California – January 10 1981) was an American actor who starred in over 50 films and was notable for his roles in Westerns. Most famously, he was the star of Have Gun - Will Travel.

Biography

Boone, a direct descendant of a brother of frontiersman Daniel Boone, was the middle child of a well-to-do corporate lawyer. He left Stanford University prior to graduation and tried his hand at oil-rigging, bartending, painting and writing before joining the Navy in 1941. Boone served as an aviation ordnance man and saw combat on three ships in the South Pacific during World War II.

After the war he used the G.I. Bill to study acting with the Actor's Studio in New York. Serious and methodical, Boone debuted on Broadway in 1947 in the play Medea, as well as Macbeth (1948) and The Man (1950).

In 1950, Boone made his screen debut as a Marine in Halls of Montezuma. He starred in three movies with John Wayne: The Alamo as Sam Houston, Big Jake and The Shootist.

From 1954 to 1956, Richard Boone became a familiar face when he appeared weekly as the star of Medic, receiving an Emmy nomination for Best Actor Starring in a Regular Series in 1955.

However, it was his second television show, "Have Gun - Will Travel," in which Boone became a national star with his role of Paladin. The show ran from 1957 to 1963 with Boone receiving two more Emmy nominations (1959, 1960).

During the 1960s Boone appeared regularly on other television programs. He did stints as both a guest panelist and as one of the What's My Line? Mystery Guests on the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV quiz show. On his visits to that show, he talked with host John Charles Daly about their days working together on the TV show The Front Page.

Boone also had his own anthology television show, The Richard Boone Show. Even though it only aired from 1963 to 1964, he received his fourth Emmy nomination in 1964. Along with The Danny Kaye Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Richard Boone Show won a Golden Globe for Best Show in 1964.

The six foot, two inch (1.88 m) Boone continued to star in many more movies, commonly as villains, with his pock-marked face, tobacco-fuelled bass voice and sullen demeanor a gift to directors of his most notable films, The Raid (1954), Man Without a Star (1955 King Vidor), The Tall T (1957 Budd Boetticher), The Alamo (1960 John Wayne), The War Lord (1965 Franklin Schaffner), Hombre (1967 Martin Ritt), The Arrangement (1968 Elia Kazan) and The Shootist (1976 Don Siegel).

He directed the final scenes of The Night of the Following Day (1968) at the insistence of star Marlon Brando, as Brando could no longer tolerate what he considered to be the incompetence of director Hubert Cornfield. The film is generally considered the nadir of Brando's career, though it didn't hurt Boone, who as usual, was cast as the heavy.

He starred as Hec Ramsey (a turn-of-the-20th-century Western-style detective who preferred to use his brain instead of his gun) in the TV series of the same name in the early 1970s. Boone returned to The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York — where he had once studied acting — to teach it, in the mid-1970s.

He was married three times: to Jane Hopper (1937  – 1940), Mimi Kelly (1949 – 1950), and Claire McAloon (1951), by whom he had a son, Peter.

In 1965, he came third in the Laurel Award for Best Action Performance — Sean Connery won first place with Goldfinger and Burt Lancaster won second place with The Train.

In his final role, he played Commodore Matthew Perry in Bushido Blade. He died soon afterward of throat cancer in St. Augustine, Florida. His ashes were scattered in the ocean off Hawaii.

Filmography

Movies

• Halls of Montezuma (1951)
• Call Me Mister (1951)
• The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)
• Red Skies of Montana (1952)
• Return of the Texan (1952)
• Kangaroo (1952)
• Way of a Gaucho (1952)
• Pony Soldier (1952)
• Man on a Tightrope (1953)
• Vicki (1953)
• The Robe (1953)
• City of Bad Men (1953)
• Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953)
• The Siege at Red River (1954)
• The Raid (1954)
• Dragnet (1954)
• Ten Wanted Men (1955)
• Man Without a Star (1955)
• Robbers' Roost (1955)
• The Big Knife (1955)
• Battle Stations (1956)
• Star in the Dust (1956)
• Away All Boats (1956)
• The Tall T (1957)
• Lizzie (1957)
• The Garment Jungle (1957)
• I Bury the Living (1958)
• Ocean's Eleven (1960)
• The Alamo (1960)
• A Thunder of Drums (1961)
• Rio Conchos (1964)
• The War Lord (1965)
• Hombre (1967)
• Kona Coast (1968)
• The Night of the Following Day (1968)
• The Arrangement (1969)
• The Kremlin Letter (1970)
• Madron (1970)
• Big Jake (1971)
• Against a Crooked Sky (1975)
• Diamante Lobo (1976)
• The Shootist (1976)
• The Big Sleep (1978)
• Winter Kills (1979)
• The Bushido Blade (1981)

TV

• The Front Page (1949)
• Medic (1954)
• Have Gun — Will Travel (1957)
• The Richard Boone Show (1963)
• In Broad Daylight (1971)
• Deadly Harvest (1972)
• Hec Ramsey (1972)
• Goodnight, My Love (1972)
• The Great Niagara (1974)
• The Last Dinosaur (1977)
• The Hobbit (He was the voice of Smaug the Dragon) (1977)

Trivia

While at the height of his "Paladin fame" — a series that prided itself on its historical accuracy — it was noted by Time that Boone had worn a leather jacket with a zipper, although zippers had not yet been invented at the time in which the series was set. No one at the time the series was first aired, however, seems to have noticed that almost without exception, the female characters' costumes had zipper closures in the back.

According to one trivia book, Paladin's first name was "Wire." This came from the business card Paladin gave people, that read: "Have Gun Will Travel. Wire Paladin, San Francisco."

External links

• Richard Boone at the Internet Movie Database

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