Biography
Born Richard Sandlin Fullerton in Marion, NC he spent his first six years down Highway 70 in Old Fort looking up at Mt. Mitchell from his maternal grandparents' front porch, and lived subsequently in Lincoln, England, Lake Charles, LA, and Fort Worth, TX, due to his father's profession as a Command Pilot in the USAF. Upon his dad's death in 1960, he and his mother moved to Winston-Salem, NC., but Richard continued to attend prep school in Austin, TX until his graduation in 1963.
He won a "best supporting actor" award for his performance as Thomas Putnam in "The Crucible" in his junior year because he, fortunately, knew Reverend Paris' lines better than Reverend Paris did, and was elected Senior Speaker by his class, which might have been a sign of things to come, but was probably pure coincidence...
Knocking the dust of Texas from his boots, he spent almost three semesters at Duke University and a summer School at Wake forest in the middle before deciding that he should take a break from higher education and try his hand at running a smelting furnace in a Durham, NC junkyard for a spell, found he had a certain knack for it, and grew shoulders and forearms which would come in handy in later pursuits.
After coming within an inspired 15-yard broad jump of burning off his feet to the ankles in the spring of 1965, he was weighing other career options when a timely suggestion from his desperate mother resulted in an audition for the North Carolina School of the Arts, aborning, and after a second and final summer working in a tobacco factory, to remind him of what he did NOT want to pursue, found himself being higher educated again in the fall, as a play-writing major, of all things, at aforementioned NCSA. Unfortunately, they had failed to hire anyone to instruct him in his major, and he was forced to pretend to study acting for a year, which he found confusing, but intriguing, nonetheless...
After setting a world record by being thrown out, in, and back out of school again within the space of a week (an amusing anecdote omitted because it's complicated), he found himself on the way to California in June of 1966 with a hundred dollars in his pocket and the decision to become an actor in his head because the new dean of the drama department had suggested he wasn't cut out for it. After a summer spent on Catalina Island chopping weeds, washing dishes, frying hamburgers and learning to speak Californian he found himself in Method Acting class in Hollywood and got serious about it.
He spent three years in exercise and scene study while frying more hamburgers, working in another junkyard, spending three quarters majoring in Drama at UCLA before drifting away from education again, driving a cab, building sets, assistant stage managing, and got his Equity card in 1970 playing Lucky in the Century City Playhouse's acclaimed (yes, it was) production of "Waiting for Godot", directed by Lew Palter, for whose production of "Private Life of the Master Race" Richard had, co-incidentally, run lights three years previously. "Art" is funny that way...
By 1974 he'd scratched out a SAG card somehow, and finally got a real agent in 1977 through lucky coincidence and a pushy girlfriend and landed a double episode of "Little House on the Prairie". The rest is, as they say...well...the rest.
For the next seventeen years Richard continued to act on stage, in commercials, industrial films, TV, the rare feature, got his AFTRA card, built large portions of a couple or three theaters, drove some more cab, continued scene study with a couple of other teachers, started building houses, remodeled a couple or three stores on the Sunset Strip, wrote a column for a monthly magazine called "Country Connections" for a number of years, got married to Susan Grace Deneen, with whom he had a son, Colin, and when they moved back to NC in October of '94 took with them two motor vehicles and a 28' trailer crammed to the brim, which is a lot more than they arrived with.
Did I mention he tied for first with some guy from Princeton in a national collegiate writing contest while he was at UCLA and got some poetry published? Probably not.
Since he returned to NC he's pretty much continued to do what he was doing paragraph before last, except that he started doing a lot more film than previously, and less TV, "Country Connections", alas, went under, and he hasn't driven a cab in 35 years, and only rarely ridden in one. Oh yeah, he went back to NCSA after 30 years and get his BFA - educated at last. His son, not to be outdone, became an extraordinary classical guitarist, earned a MFA and moved to NYC.
Richard earned his pensions and the fully vested health care, but things have slowed down because old guys are expected to look more benign than he can usually manage while awake, so he figured to invest in IMDb Pro to see if he couldn't get things kick started again. And that's why there's a biography here...
