Richard Crenna, who gained fame on television’s “Our Miss Brooks” and “The Real McCoys” but made a successful transition to drama on television and in movies, died Friday. He was 75.
Mr. Crenna died of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Penni, said Saturday. His daughter Seana said, “This came very sudden.”
Mr. Crenna’s role on the CBS drama series “Judging Amy” was recently put on hold as he battled cancer.
He began his more than six-decade career as a child radio actor in the late 1930s. Television viewers were introduced to him as Walter Denton, the squeaky-voiced, not-so-bright high school student on Eve Arden’s “Our Miss Brooks,” when the popular radio series moved to TV in 1952.
By the time he left Walter Denton behind in 1956 after appearing in the “Our Miss Brooks” feature film, Mr. Crenna, the perpetual juvenile, was pushing 30.
In 1957, he graduated to an adult role as the married Luke on “The Real McCoys.”
Kathleen Nolan, who played his wife, Kate, until the final year of the show and was a close friend for more than 50 years, said Saturday that Mr. Crenna “was just the best there was.”
He made the break from comedy to drama in 1964 as the star of “Slattery’s People,” a weekly series in which he played an idealistic, reform-minded state legislator.
Although the show was canceled before the end of its second season, it allowed Mr. Crenna to accept a high-profile role as the humorless and unexpectedly courageous gunboat captain in director Robert Wise’s 1966 epic drama “The Sand Pebbles,” starring Steve McQueen.
In the 1980s, Mr. Crenna played critically acclaimed supporting roles in the film noir hit “Body Heat” and the coming-of-age film “The Flamingo Kid.” Garry Marshall, director of “The Flamingo Kid,” said, “He was one of the rare ones that could do both [comedy and drama] and also be a human being off the set. I think he had success both as an actor and as a dad to his children.”
In 1985, he received an Emmy as outstanding actor in a limited series or special for “The Rape of Richard Beck,” in which he played a sexist, macho cop whose attitudes about rape undergo a dramatic change after he is sexually attacked.
Crenna made three short-lived returns to television sitcoms: “All’s Fair” with Bernadette Peters (1976-77), “It Takes Two” co-starring Patty Duke (1982-83) and “Pros and Cons” opposite James Earl Jones (1991-92).
A Los Angeles native, Mr. Crenna was the son of a pharmacist father and a mother who managed a number of small hotels the family owned.
While attending junior high, he signed up for drama class, but only “because I’d already taken wood shop,” he once recalled. “Besides, I noticed that all the prettiest girls were in dramatic class, and also the goof-offs. That was for me.”
One day, he recalled, “A teacher came on the playground to say they were auditioning for a radio show, `Boy Scout Jamboree,”‘ at the nearby KFI radio studio. Nine of his classmates, including future comic Mort Sahl, were hired to become “The Beaver Patrol.” He remained on “Boy Scout Jamboree” for 11 years, one of the many radio shows he worked on.
Other survivors include a son, Richard Anthony Crenna, and another daughter, Maria Crenna.
