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For Richard Todd the football player, see Richard Todd (football player)

Richard Todd
from the trailer for Stage Fright (1950).
Birth name	Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd
Born	June 11, 1919 (1919-06-11) (age 88) Dublin, Ireland

Richard Todd (born June 11, 1919) is a British actor.

Born Richard Andrew Palethorpe-Todd in Dublin, Ireland, his father Andrew William Palethorpe Todd was a British officer who gained three caps for Ireland at rugby before the First World War. He moved to Devon, England when very young and attended Shrewsbury School. During his early career, he acted in regional theatres, before co-founding the Dundee Repertory Theatre in 1939.

Richard Todd served as an officer and paratrooper in the British 6th Airborne Division during the Second World War. One of the first British officers to land in Normandy on D-Day, he met up with Major John Howard on Pegasus Bridge — he would later appear in the film The Longest Day (1962), where he played Major Howard himself. Richard Todd was a member of the 7th (LI) Parachute Battalion during his time in the Army.

After the war, he gained fame in the London stage version of The Hasty Heart (as Lachlan MacLachlan), which took him to Broadway. He returned to England to appear in the film version and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role in 1949. He later appeared in the film The Dam Busters as Wing Commander Guy Gibson, probably the role for which he is best known. Americans probably best remember Todd for his role as the United States Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall in the film version of Catherine Marshall's best selling biography, A Man Called Peter. He was the first choice of author Ian Fleming to play James Bond in "Dr. No" but a scheduling conflict gave the role to Sean Connery.

In 1953, he appeared in a BBC Television adaptation of the novel Wuthering Heights, as Heathcliff. According to Nigel Kneale, who scripted the adaptation, the production came about purely because Todd had turned up the BBC and told them that he would like to play Heathcliff for them. Kneale was forced to write the script in only a week as the broadcast was rushed into production.^[1] He continued to act on television, including roles in Virtual Murder, Silent Witness, and in the Doctor Who story Kinda in 1982. His active acting career extended into his eighties.

He was married to the actresses Catherine Grant-Bogle, whom he met in Dundee Repertory (1949-1970, two children) and Virginia Mailer (1970-1992, two children). In 2006, he was reported as living in the village of Little Ponton near Grantham and attended a preview of a new Robin Hood TV series made by the BBC. As of 2007, Todd resides in the village of Little Humby some 8 miles from Grantham.

On 25 April 2006 the Daily Mail did a feature on the tragic death of two of Todd's four children to suicide. Peter, Todd's eldest son from his first marriage, shot himself in the head on 21 September 2005 - the same method his half-brother Seumas had used 8 years earlier. Peter's reason was that his marriage was ending, Seumas's was thought to be due to a depressive reaction to severe acne and the anti-acne drug he was taking. Todd's mother also committed suicide when he was 19, though he says 'her death didn't affect me badly ... we had been close but just before she died, we disagreed. She didn't want me to go on the stage. There were various differences and I had lost affection for her'. His sons' suicide has affected him very profoundly however and he admits to visiting their adjoining graves regularly. On his courage in getting on with life, Todd says 'it is rather like something that happens to men in war. You don't consciously set out to do something gallant. You just do it because that is what you are there for'.

• The Hasty Heart (1949)
• Stage Fright (1950)
• The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952)
• The Sword and the Rose (1953)
• Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue (1954),
• The Dam Busters (1955) as Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC
• A Man Called Peter (1955) as Peter Marshall
• The Virgin Queen (1955) as Sir Walter Raleigh
• D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)
• Chase a Crooked Shadow (1957)
• Yangtse Incident (1957)
• Saint Joan (1957)
• Danger Within (1958)
• The Longest Day (1962)
• Operation Crossbow (1965)
• The Boys (1962)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Richard Todd

• Richard Todd at the Internet Movie Database
• BBC Inside Out - Richard Todd
• Richard Todd - Biography
• Richard Todd - A Day to Remenber