John Dehner
John Dehner, also credited Dehner Forkum, was an American stage, radio, film, and television character actor.
From the late 1930s to the late 1980s, he amassed a long list of performance credits, often in roles as sophisticated con men, shady authority figures, and other smooth-talking villains. His credits just in feature films, televised series, and in made-for-TV movies number almost 300 productions.
Dehner worked extensively as a radio actor during the latter half of that medium's "golden age," accumulating hundreds of additional credits on nationally broadcast series. His most notable starring role was as Paladin on the radio version of the television Western Have Gun – Will Travel, which aired for 106 episodes on CBS from 1958 to 1960.
He continued to work as a voice actor in film, such as narrating the film The Hallelujah Trail. Earlier in his career, Dehner also worked briefly for Walt Disney Studios, serving as an assistant animator from 1940 to March 1941 at the company's facilities in Burbank, California. He appeared in Columbo episodes "Swan Song" with Johnny Cash, and as Commodore Otis Swanson in "Last Salute to the Commodore". He appeared in a two-part episode of Mission: Impossible.
Early life
Born in 1915 in New York City on Staten Island, John Dehner was the middle child of three children of Ella Susana and Ralph LeRoy Forkum. Dehner's father was an accomplished artist who was widely recognized in the United States as a landscape painter, illustrator, and a specialist in painting "highly realistic" backgrounds for stage productions and later for animated features and shorts. Dehner's mother was a gifted musician with artistic talents as well. Prior to the 1920s, Ella Forkum even collaborated with her husband on art projects and in some instances was co-credited for helping him to compose content for his drawings and paintings widely used in newspaper and magazine advertising. One example is a full-page advertisement in the March 18, 1917, issue of the Washington, D.C., newspaper Evening Star. That ad is for Djer-Kiss, a very exclusive line of French perfumes and soaps. It depicts a highly stylized, fairytale-like scene of young women bathing beneath a waterfall. The artwork itself bears the attribution to both of Dehner's parents, to "R.L. + E.D. Forkum".By the early 1920s, R. L. or "Roy" Forkum's growing artistic reputation earned him a commission that allowed him to take young Dehner and the rest of his family to live in Oslo, Norway while he produced illustrations for an elaborate publication celebrating the music of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. It was in Oslo that Dehner gained his first experiences performing publicly in musicales and school plays. Following the completion of his work on the Grieg project, Roy took Ella and the children for extended stays in Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, and finally in Paris, where for two and a half years in the French capital's suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine, Dehner and his two sisters, Amy and Alice, continued their education in public schools.
Schooling in France
Dehner's studies in France expanded his interests in art, music, and theater, as well as in the sport of fencing, in which he demonstrated sufficient skills by his early teens to qualify as a "champion" competitor. In her interview with Dehner in 1959, Marcia Minnette, a reporter for the New York trade magazine TV-Radio Mirror, quotes the actor's recollections of attending French schools three decades earlier, in particular his reactions to the rigorous study and strict discipline demanded by his teachers:Living and studying in Europe "at a formative age" certainly expanded Dehner's knowledge of different cultures and languages. In addition to becoming fluent in Norwegian and French, he also spoke "some" Swedish, Spanish, German, and Italian. That broad knowledge of languages would prove to be very helpful later during his acting career, when Dehner's characters were required to speak with accents or to sprinkle their English dialogue with various foreign words and phrases.
Return to the United States from Europe
While in France, Dehner's parents separated in Paris and on November 15, 1929, were granted a divorce there. Ella Forkum soon returned to the United States with 14-year-old Dehner and his sisters and resettled in the Riverview Manor section of Hastings-on-Hudson, a village located approximately 20 miles north of midtown Manhattan, where Dehner's father resided separately. Between 1930 and 1932, "Dehner Forkum", his mother, and sisters were cited periodically in society columns in the New York Herald Tribune, which reported their attendance and personal performances at charity events, dances, music recitals, and plays presented in Hastings. In February 1932, as part of their high school's bicentennial celebration of George Washington's birthday, Dehner and his older sister Amy performed in Conway Cabal, a historical play written by one of their classmates. The siblings then acted the next month in an adaptation of the 1900 novel Monsieur Beaucaire, a production that won Hastings High School first prize in a regional competition for student plays.After graduating from Hastings High School in June 1932, Dehner enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art in Manhattan, evidently with intentions to pursue a career in art like his father, who soon relocated to California to continue painting and to work in set design and later drawing backgrounds and storyboards for animation projects being made by Walter Lantz, Walt Disney, and other producers. Despite Dehner's early work in amateur stage productions and his natural talents and training as a painter and sculptor, he did not immediately embrace acting or studio art as a long-term profession.
University studies, 1935–1937
By the fall of 1934, Dehner and his sisters left New York with their mother and relocated to the West Coast, where Amy enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year Dehner enrolled as well at Berkeley to continue his formal studies in fine arts. While at the university, he also gained more practical experience acting in campus stage productions and refining his musical talents by playing piano and composing arrangements for three local dance bands. Later school and military records indicate that he decided to leave Berkeley in the summer of 1937 after completing two years of study.Professional stage training
Dehner left Berkeley at the end of his second year to return to New York City to try acting in professional stage productions. There he joined a troupe associated with the Moscow Art Theatre, where he obtained intensive training in the "system" of method acting established by Soviet theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. Years later, long after Dehner had established himself as a popular actor in films and on radio and television, he credited MAT for profoundly influencing his performance style, although it was a style that over time required him to adjust substantially his acting techniques in order to achieve widespread success with American audiences. In particular, he recognized Mikhail Chekov, a former student of Stanislavski and the leading consultant to the New York troupe, as being professionally "'the most important man in my career.'" The Los Angeles Times in a 1971 interview with Dehner recounted how his approach to acting evolved with his MAT training:One of the notable stage productions in which Dehner was cast in New York is The Bridal Crown by Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Premiering on Broadway at the Vanderbilt Theatre on February 5, 1938, the play was presented under the auspices of the Experimental Theatre of Manhattan. Brooks Atkinson, then a critic for The New York Times, reviewed the stage work by "The New York Players", whom he characterized as "serious-minded" and composed of "young people with a passion for the theatre and in most cases slim pocketbooks". While citing "Dehner Forkum" among the principal actors and serving in the role of "Mats", Atkinson deemed the troupe's overall effort to be only "a respectable student performance".
Dehner continued to perform, although sporadically, in other plays in New York and with a few nearby stock companies. He did receive some financial support from his mother, but the lack of consistent, paid acting work required Dehner to find employment elsewhere in the city to support himself, including taking daytime jobs as a sales clerk in a tobacco shop and parking cars at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Frustrated by his meager lifestyle and the limited prospects of establishing a livable stage career in the city, he decided by the end of 1939 to return, as he described it, to the "life-line" of California.
Return to California
Upon his return to California, Dehner did not resettle in Berkeley to resume his university studies or to find an off-campus job there. His mother, who by then was living on Arch Street in Berkeley and managing a "variety store", chose to remain in the city while Dehner relocated to Southern California, to Los Angeles County, where in Hollywood there were greater opportunities for trained actors and artists to find employment in the film industry. An added advantage to moving there was that Dehner's father was already working regularly for different studios. One was Walt Disney Studios, where Roy Forkum served as a "story artist" at new facilities being constructed by Disney in Burbank, just a short distance from Hollywood. Dehner moved in with his father and new stepmother, Eileen, who were living in a house that Roy owned in Burbank at 454 South Fairview Street.Walt Disney Studios
The 1940 federal census also documents that both father and son were employed that year at "motion picture studios"; Roy Forkum, as an "artist"; and 24-year-old Dehner, as a "new worker & student". Other period records, however, provide some details about Dehner's work at that time, more specifically that he, like his father, was working at Disney, where as an animator he assisted in producing drawings for Disney's 1940 animated classic Fantasia as well as for The Reluctant Dragon and for the early development of Bambi.Dehner worked for a year at Disney, and in the previously cited 1959 interview with TV-Radio Mirror he describes his job there as an in-betweener, as an assistant artist "who draws everything that goes 'in between' bits of action as sketched by the animators." Dehner states in that interview, "Sometimes, I spent days merely drawing curly lines to simulate waves, or leaf outlines, or horizons." A Disney film distributed by RKO Pictures in 1941 actually shows Dehner working at the studio. Titled The Reluctant Dragon, the first part of the film follows American actor and humorist Robert Benchley taking a behind-the-scenes tour of various production departments at Disney's facilities in Burbank. Benchley in one segment visits a storyboard room for Disney animators who are portrayed composing and drawing a future cartoon short featuring the character "Baby Weems". A very young Dehner is briefly shown among fellow staff greeting Benchley and later doing a sketch of Baby Weems while making a remark in his subsequently familiar voice. Struggling actor Alan Ladd portrays one of the storyboard artists, with the most screen time, excitedly explaining the storyboards. Later that same year, Ladd would be cast in This Gun for Hire at Paramount, paving the way for his becoming one of the screen's top box office draws.