Richard was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up on dairy farm. His father had immigrated from Guernsey and his mother from County Mayo in Ireland.  Their backgrounds had nothing to do with the world of the theatre and latterly film and television.

Richard joined the school drama club as a means of making friends after moving to Hollywood Florida in his teens.  His drama teacher advised him that he could make a living as an actor and after travelling all over Europe and North Africa after graduation Richard entered the drama program at Wayne University in Detroit, Michigan. 

After graduation he went back to London where he was offered a Fringe Theatre production playing of all things a baby in a pram in a Thornton Wilder play.  The play was picked up by the BBC, Richard was granted a union card and a career had begun. 

Richard toured Britain and Europe with Paddy Fletcher’s Incubus Theatre Company for a year.   It was a hectic and enjoyable period. It was during this time that Richard developed a life long hatred of theatrical boarding houses, greasy breakfasts and shared bathrooms.

Richard auditioned for a small British film called Stardust starring David Essex as a rock star and won the part of the American music lawyer who with Larry Hagman as his manager makes Essex a global star.  

“On the Saturday night I was performing in a dingy youth theatre in Rotterdam and on Monday morning I was filming by the pool at the Marbella Beach Club in southern Spain.”

The first time he heard a clapperboard snap and heard the word “Action!” Richard fell in love with film.  “Lawrence of Arabia was the first film that made me understand film as an art form and making my first film was a dream come true.

Stardust led to a career in British television then his first American blockbuster, Rollerball.  Richard decamped to LA for the opening of the film only to find that his role as a corporate assassin had been cut.  While in LA his agent sent him to a small studio to audition for, “…this space Western Lucas is doing for Fox…” Richard takes up the story, “I was taped reading Han while a casting assistant read Greedo.  Brian DePalma was at the audition and he had me audition for Carrie.”  He got the role of the high school principal who dies a bloody death in the telekinetic climax. The only problem was that the film could not get a green light for shooting.  Richard waited for nine months in LA but the film didn’t come together so he returned to London to do some television.  By then Star Wars was in production atElstree Studios and he was offered the role of a customs officer at Mos Eisley. “It was two lines so I turned it down,” Richard remembers.

The actor who took the part waited at the studio to do his two lines but George sent him home at lunch. He had cut the scene from the script. “A month later I was offered Admiral Motti. It was a high profile part and I said yes immediately.”

The scene has become one of the iconic moments from the entire saga. 

More television and film followed, then after a run of bad scripts causing him to rewrite his dialogue Richard began writing for television with his old Incubus partner Paddy Fletcher.   They wrote benchmark episodes of The Bill, wrote the epic last episode of The Bretts and were lead writers on Boon, the late Michael Elphick’s hugely popular detective series.  They worked on Love Hurts where Richard was reunited with one of the Stardust stars, Adam Faith.

In the mid eighties Richard sold a solo project, Solano Grove, a biopic of the British composer Frederick Delius.  The project went into development with endless film companies for the next fifteen years.   “It has earned me a small fortune but I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing the clapperboard snap on the first day of filming on that one.”

At this time Richard was about to be a father,  “I had several film projects in turnaround with different companies, one company had gone under and I was fighting to get a script separated from their assets and I couldn’t get arrested as an actor.  I did a screen test for Robert Zemeckis for Roger Rabbit. My screen test was sent to LA as Bob arrived back in London, this happened twice.  I was about to be a father and I needed a job.”   The casting director got Richard into a meeting with Robert Zemeckis three weeks after Richard’s daughter Rhiannon was born.  “It was a short meeting.  Too short, I thought.  I was putting on my coat and leaving when the casting director came out and told me that Bob had cast me.”

Roger Rabbit was another groundbreaking project as Star Wars was nine years before.  Each scene was shot on four cameras four times with the actors doing the voices of the “Toons” onset.  Sometimes scenes were shot thirty or forty times.  “Walking across a room with Toons running around  could take a week.  It took great concentration and it was the toughest film I’d ever done.  But that just made it more special. Robert Watts, a Star Wars alumni was producing, Bob Z. is one of the great directors. He has a great sense of film and a great sense of humor.  My wife Cheryl brought four month old Rhiannon to the set one day.  Bob lent over to look at her and she got a death grip on his nose.”