33 Facts About John Dehner

John Dehner, credited Dehner Forkum, was an American stage, radio, film, and television character actor.

John Dehner continued to work as a voice actor in film, such as narrating the film The Hallelujah Trail.

John Dehner appeared in Columbo episodes "Swan Song" with Johnny Cash, and as Commodore Otis Swanson in "Last Salute to the Commodore".

John Dehner appeared in a two-part episode of Mission: Impossible.

John Dehner's father was an accomplished artist who was widely recognized in the United States as a landscape painter, illustrator, and a specialist in painting "highly realistic" backgrounds for stage productions and later for animated features and shorts.

John Dehner's mother was a gifted musician with artistic talents as well.

That broad knowledge of languages would prove to be very helpful later during his acting career, when John Dehner's characters were required to speak with accents or to sprinkle their English dialogue with various foreign words and phrases.

The next year John Dehner enrolled as well at Berkeley to continue his formal studies in fine arts.

John Dehner left Berkeley at the end of his second year to return to New York City to try acting in professional stage productions.

Years later, long after John Dehner had established himself as a popular actor in films and on radio and television, he credited MAT for profoundly influencing his performance style, although it was a style that over time required him to adjust substantially his acting techniques in order to achieve widespread success with American audiences.

John Dehner continued to perform, although sporadically, in other plays in New York and with a few nearby stock companies.

John Dehner did receive some financial support from his mother, but the lack of consistent, paid acting work required Dehner to find employment elsewhere in the city to support himself, including taking daytime jobs as a sales clerk in a tobacco shop and parking cars at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

An added advantage to moving there was that John Dehner's father was already working regularly for different studios.

John Dehner moved in with his father and new stepmother, Eileen, who were living in a house that Roy owned in Burbank at 454 South Fairview Street.

Additional physical exams during routine screening for his candidacy revealed that John Dehner had a stomach ulcer, one so severe that it prompted army physicians by the end of 1941 to honorably discharge him from military service on medical grounds.

John Dehner then moved to radio station KFWB, broadcasting from Los Angeles, where he was part of a news team that won a Peabody Award for its reporting on the first United Nations conference held in San Francisco in 1945.

John Dehner was one of three actors to perform as Scotland Yard inspector Peter Black on the radio crime drama Pursuit, which aired on CBS Radio between 1949 and 1952.

John Dehner starred in two Western series on CBS Radio in 1958.

Only a week after the final broadcast of Frontier Gentleman in November 1958, John Dehner premiered as the gunfighter-private detective Paladin on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel.

John Dehner made his first "big screen" appearances in the early 1940s after he was discharged from the army, performing in uncredited bit parts while still working predominantly in radio.

Steadily during his early years of film acting, John Dehner established a reputation among casting directors and theater audience as a reliable performer who could portray a myriad of characters, although most often in villainous roles as crooked gamblers, evil bankers, distinguished foreign spies, grifters, edgy gunfighters, and other "heavies".

John Dehner was cast in at least 63 features released during that decade and fully half of those pictures are Westerns, several of which offered Dehner the most substantial parts of his screen career.

John Dehner, playing the villain as an "Indian-hating rancher", shared top billing with fellow American actor Robert Ryan and British actor Torin Thatcher.

In 1964, John Dehner co-starred with Wally Cox in Invitation to Ohio, a film sponsored by the Ohio Bell Telephone Company.

John Dehner plays in a supporting role but on the "right side" of the law, portraying a district attorney.

John Dehner was cast, at times repeatedly, as a guest star or major supporting character in over 40 Western series.

Campbell observes that being a frequently working supporting actor like John Dehner has distinct advantages over the higher pressures and role requirements of stardom:.

John Dehner portrays, for example, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the 1974 ABC presentation The Missiles of October; and for his final role on television, which originally aired on November 23,1988, he appears as Admiral Ernest King in part seven of the 12-part World War II dramatic miniseries War and Remembrance.

John Dehner did not, though, leave behind entirely theater work.

Two months later, in November 1962 at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, John Dehner joined Lee Marvin again, along with James Whitmore, Louis Nye, and Paul Fix, to play pirates in a production of Peter Pan with Peggy Webber in the title role.

Three years later, in Los Angeles, John Dehner wed Evelyn Elliott, a native of California.

In 1992, a little over three years after performing in the televised miniseries War and Remembrance, John Dehner died at age 76 in Santa Barbara, California due to complications from emphysema and diabetes.

John Dehner's body was cremated and the ashes interred at the city cemetery in Carpinteria, a small seaside community situated a short distance east of Santa Barbara.