Peter Mark Richman, a prolific actor known best for his roles as Reverend Snow on Three’s Company and Dynasty attorney Andrew Laird, has died of natural causes at the age of 93, reports Deadline. The star, who had over 130 television credits to his name, died Thursday morning in Woodland Hills, California. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Helen Richman, their five children and six grandchildren.
Born April 16, 1927, in Philadelphia, Richman’s eight-decade career in entertainment came after he became a licensed pharmacist at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. He eventually made his way to the stage in New York as a member of the Actors Studio in the 1950s, starring early on in his career in Calder Willingham’s End as a Man. He then went on to appear in A Hatful of Rain and Masquerade on Broadway and starred in more than 400 performances of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story.
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Making the transition from stage to film, Richman first appeared on the silver screen in 1956’s Friendly Persuasion, going on to appear in Black Orchid, The Strange One, The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2: The Smell of Fear and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. On television, he became well-known for his recurring role on Three’s Company as the father of Suzanne Somers’ Chrissy Snow, and also was a returning character on Dynasty as the Carrington family attorney. He would also go on to appear on Beverly Hills, 90210, Longstreet and in guest star roles on The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Murder She Wrote, The Fugitive, Bonanza, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Throughout his career, Richman also worked as a playwright, putting on a hit one-man show, 4 Faces, which was turned into a movie in 1999, in which he also starred. He told The Los Angeles Times in 1995 of his show, “I’ve fulfilled other writers’ ideas for a very long time. Sometimes I enhanced their ideas because they weren’t sure of what they were saying. I once had to rewrite a Broadway play out of town and hide what I was doing from the rest of the cast because the writer was paralyzed. He didn’t have a clue.”
He also developed a passion for painting at an early age, Richman told the Times. “I’m not a ‘celebrity painter’ who took up painting when he became a celebrity,” he said at the time. “I have an academic art background. I studied drawing from the time I was a kid. At 9, I used to go to the Philadelphia Graphic Sketch Club.”
In 1990, Richman was awarded the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s Silver Medallion for outstanding humanitarian achievement and was also honored that year with the Sybil Brand Humanitarian Award from the Jeffrey Foundation.
