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John Dehner
John Dehner Forkum (November 23, 1915 – February 4, 1992) was an American 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" (1974) with Johnny Cash, and as Commodore Otis Swanson in "Last Salute to the Commodore" (1976). He appeared in a two-part episode of Mission: Impossible.
Born in 1915 in New York City on Staten Island, John Dehner was the middle child of three children of Ella Susana (née Dehner) 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.
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:
John says, "American delinquents should be sent to French schools. At the first infraction of a rule, a boy's face is banged against his desk top. Or his knuckles are soundly rapped with an oak ruler. Kids learn—at a formative age—that discipline is the first law of life; the second and third laws are application and accomplishment. We had Thursdays and Sundays off, but we left school on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons with enough school work to keep us busy for a week instead of a day."
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.
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John Dehner
John Dehner Forkum (November 23, 1915 – February 4, 1992) was an American 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" (1974) with Johnny Cash, and as Commodore Otis Swanson in "Last Salute to the Commodore" (1976). He appeared in a two-part episode of Mission: Impossible.
Born in 1915 in New York City on Staten Island, John Dehner was the middle child of three children of Ella Susana (née Dehner) 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.
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:
John says, "American delinquents should be sent to French schools. At the first infraction of a rule, a boy's face is banged against his desk top. Or his knuckles are soundly rapped with an oak ruler. Kids learn—at a formative age—that discipline is the first law of life; the second and third laws are application and accomplishment. We had Thursdays and Sundays off, but we left school on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons with enough school work to keep us busy for a week instead of a day."
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.
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