Richard Paul
Richard Paul is an actor, born 1940.
Richard Paul was working toward a doctorate in clinical psychology when he abandoned the therapy career for performing, which explains less about the work than you would hope. He was a trained mimic with a large stock of American and foreign dialects, and he used them the way character actors use anything that gets them hired.
Television took him. He starred in the sitcom Carter Country from 1977 as Mayor Teddy Burnside, then spent decades as one of the faces American drama reached for when a script needed a mayor, a functionary, or a man with an official title and a weak spine. He returned repeatedly to Cabot Cove as Mayor Sam Booth in Murder, She Wrote, and turned up on Full House as Mr. Strowbridge.
The strangest thread in his work is Jerry Falwell Sr. Paul was cast as a character based on Falwell in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati because he resembled him, and then played Falwell himself in two separate productions afterwards. It is a small career built partly on a likeness he never asked for. He died in 1998.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Richard Paul
Eating Raoul is the one to watch, and it is not close. Paul Bartel's black comedy about a respectable couple with an extremely practical answer to their money problems is the only film here with a real point of view, and Paul's Mr. Cray belongs to its world of bland Californians doing appalling things in good taste.
After that, Murder, She Wrote is where he is most himself: the recurring small-town mayor, permanently out of his depth and entirely certain that he is not. Any Cabot Cove episode with Sam Booth in it will do. Carter Country is the lead role, a late-1970s Southern sitcom that never aged into rerun immortality. Full House and Exorcist II: The Heretic are single-serving curiosities, a family sitcom guest in one and a man on a plane in the other.