The Stage

Richard Todd

Published Tuesday 5 January 2010 at 12:40 by Michael Quinn

A war hero who parachuted on to the Normandy beaches on D-day, Richard Todd made his name playing clean-cut military heroes with upper lips as stiff as a backbone, most notably as Wing Commander Guy Gibson in the 1955 British film The Dam Busters.

The son of an army major, Todd was born in Dublin on June 11, 1919, and trained at Italia Conti, appearing in crowd scenes in two Will Hays films while still a student. He made his stage debut in 1936 at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, before touring with the Welsh Players and joining Dundee Repertory Theatre in its opening season in 1939.

His first role after the war, as a bitter, fatally wounded Scottish corporal in The Hasty Heart provided his breakthrough. He went on to appear in its Broadway run and a 1949 film adaptation alongside Ronald Reagan, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe. The success took him to Hollywood to appear in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, take the leads in Disney’s Robin Hood and Rob Roy, and play Walter Raleigh to Bette Davis’ The Virgin Queen. For Otto Preminger, he played Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, in St Joan.

He returned to the Normandy beaches in two epic films, D-day - the Sixth of June and The Longest Day, in which his real self was played by another actor, Todd having refused the role because, “I did not do anything special that would make a good sequence.”

Reputedly Ian Fleming’s first choice for James Bond, he missed the role due to filming commitments but made a number of other notable films, including The Yangtse Incident, The Long, the Short and the Tall, and a re-make of The Big Sleep directed by Michael Winner.

He made his television debut in 1953 playing Heathcliff in Nigel Kneale’s version of Wuthering Heights and among his relatively rare appearances on the small screen were Doctor Who, Murder She Wrote, Midsomer Murders, Holby City, Heartbeat and 14 episodes of the family drama Boy Dominic.

West End appearances in the sixties included An Ideal Husband at the Strand and Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus at the Haymarket. In 1970 he co-founded Triumph Theatre Productions with Paul Elliott and Duncan C Wheldon. He toured with the RSC’s The Hollow Crown to America in 1974 and appeared in Business of Murder for eight years at the Mayfair Theatre.

For a time a successful dairy farmer, Todd was twice married and twice divorced. He had four sons. Aged 90, he died from cancer on December 3.