Celebrity Biographies
Richard Erdmann
He triumphed above all as Leonard, the old man who led the rebellious students in “Community”. But his career has spanned eight decades, having worked with iconic filmmakers from Hollywood’s golden age, including Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz and Fred Zinnemann. Suffering from senile dementia for some time, Richard Erdman died on March 16, 2019, at the age of 93, in a nursing home in Los Angeles.
Born on June 1, 1925, in Enid, a town in northern Oklahoma, John Richard Erdmann already belonged to his high school theater group. A stage manager, Newton Winburne, encouraged him to try his luck in Hollywood. He decided to move to the movie mecca where he was quite lucky, because shortly after settling there he had already signed a contract with Warner, as a fixed actor. He began his journey with a brief appearance as a post boy in Mr. Skeffington , opposite Bette Davis and Claude Rains . For the house he was also a soldier in Objective: Burma , by the aforementioned Curtiz, the Hoffy barracks chief, in Traitor in Hell , by Wilder, and he was one of the protagonists of Men, by Fred Zinnemann ., where Marlon Brando debuted. “Brando is impressive, but he still has a thing or two to learn from a Hollywood actor named Richard Erdman ,” wrote one critic at the time after the premiere.
Fans of the fantastic genre remember him above all for his work as the protagonist in “A kind of stopwatch”, one of the most acclaimed chapters of the Twilight Zone series . He played Patrick McNulty, who after being fired invites a stranger to have a few beers who gives him a watch that can stop time, power that he will use for his own benefit. In the war film Tora! Torah! Torah! (1970) he played Colonel Edward F. French, the communications officer who missed the warnings of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Divorced in 1950 from the also actress, artist and short filmmaker Leza Holland, he joined the poet and illustrator Sharon Randall, to whom he was united until her death in 2016. The latter was the mother of his only daughter, also a writer, who accidentally died at 56 from an accidental drug overdose.
Occasionally Richard Erdman worked as a filmmaker, first directing an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show . In 1971 he directed the animal family TV movie Mooch Goes to Hollywood , about a dog trying to make it in the entertainment industry. From 2009 to 2015, he played his most remembered role, in Community , where he played Leonard Rodríguez, a grandfather who had been at Greendale school since 1975, starring in all kinds of acts of vandalism, but who has no intention of graduating.