Richard Devon was an Americancharacter actor and voice actor who between the late 1940s and 1991 performed in hundreds of roles on stage, radio, television, and in feature films.
Early life
Richard was born in Glendale, California in 1926, the only son of four children of Florence H. and Luca Ferraiole. His father, a native of Italy, immigrated to the United States in 1901 and lived in Pennsylvania before moving to California, where by 1930 he was employed as a waiter in a Los Angeles cafe. To supplement his family's modest income, Richard later worked part-time as a stable boy and then as a riding instructor at an equestrian "academy" in Griffith Park. That early experience with horses would prove useful in his future acting career, especially for his roles in Western films and television series. Following his graduation from high school, Richard had a series of other jobs, including work as a mail carrier at Monogram Pictures, a laborer at a plant nursery, a "mechanic's helper", and as a doorman at the Hollywood Palladium.
Career
In the 1950s Devon began performing as a character actor in many Four Star Television series, although his work was not limited to a single production company or network. He appears, for example, as Ed Pike in the 1959 episode "Yellow Fever" of the Western series Colt.45, which was produced by Warner Bros. and originally broadcast by ABC. Devon's lengthy television credits include Richard Diamond, Private Detective, The Rifleman, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Johnny Ringo, Space Patrol, Trackdown starring Robert Culp, The Tall Man, Gunsmoke, The Rebel, The Virginian and its spin-off, Bonanza, Laredo, Daniel Boone, The Monkees, Lassie, The Twilight Zone episode "Dead Man's Shoes" in 1962, three episodes of Perry Mason from 1964–1966, and . Devon had a regular role as well as on the CBS series Yancy Derringer, performing the part of Jody Barker, a pickpocket and sometime cohort of the lead character played by Jock Mahoney. He also played the role of Cole Striker, a crook, in the 1963 episode "Incident of the Buryin' Man" on CBS's Rawhide. He provided the voice of Batman on episodes of the radio version of The Adventures of Superman. Devon's "big screen" career consists of at least two dozen feature films. Some of those productions are The Undead, War of the Satellites, The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze, The Comancheros, and the Battle of Blood Island.
In December 1959 Devon married Patricia A. Riopelle. They remained together for over 50 years, until Devon died of vascular disease in Mill Valley, California in 2010.
