Some actors are born actors, who dream of show business as soon as they're able to learn a piece for the Christmas pageant. But, others just sort of fall into it, as a career that overtakes them while they have nothing better to do. You'd never think someone like John Dehner would have fallen into that latter category -- with that voice and that skill one would imagine he had cultivated his theatrical ambitions from a very early age. But, all that skill manifested itself when John Dehner was trying to find his way in a very different field.

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Dehner came into the world in 1914 under the decidedly non-theatrical name of John Forkum -- a boy from the wilds of Staten Island who seemed to do everything well. He was a gifted artist, adept with both pencil and brush, and he was an excellent pianist. With all these abilities, the young man was never quite sure what he wanted to do.

Deciding to try his hand as an artist, young Johnny Forkum found his way west, where he landed a job with the Disney Studios. You didn't work for Disney if you didn't know what you were doing, and you didn't work for Disney if you didn't have ambitions to do what you were doing even better. Like most young Disney-ites, Johnny found himself attending classes, studying, thinking, and working to enhance his skills. By the turn of the forties, he'd risen up the latter to assistant animator -- cleaning up rough pencil drawings presented by the lead animators, filling in in-between drawings, and generally polishing the artwork for the camera. He worked on such prestigious features as Bambi and Fantasia. In 1941, he even made a brief appearance on screen in a live-action segment of The Reluctant Dragon. It was Johnny's first film role, but it wouldn't be his last.

Of course, you can't go far in show business calling yourself “Forkum,” so it wasn't long before the aspiring performer strode forth with a tough, manly name suited to his new aspirations. You might not bother with Johnny Forkum, but you'd certainly return a phone call from John Dehner. And, people did. His rugged good looks got him small film roles, which got bigger as the years went by. His rich baritone voice got him jobs narrating the occasional short subject -- and carried him, predictably enough, into radio.

The war was a factor, as well. During his hitch in uniform, Dehner found himself dealing with public relations -- a discipline requiring highly-developed verbal skills, a razor-sharp mind, and the gift of diplomacy. He emerged from the service with an interest in broadcasting, ending up at two of Los Angeles' more popular independent stations as an all-around hand -- announcing, disc jockeying, news and commentary. It was in the latter category that he earned a Peabody Award for his coverage of the first United Nations Conference. He might have gone on to become one of the medium's distinguished pundits, on the scale of a Kaltenborn, Shirer, or Murrow -- but in the end, he decided that he liked acting better.

Dramatic radio, of course, offered ample opportunities for a sharp-witted man with a golden voice. Starting out in locally-produced dramatic features at KMBC, Dehner soon became a regular presence at the networks in supporting roles on an astonishing number of programs through the latter half of the forties. Name any prominent drama, name any low-budget sustainer, and there's a very good chance that it, at one time or another, included John Dehner in its cast. And, every part he played, he played well.

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He was especially popular in western roles. Something about his distinctive voice just seemed to go along with saddle leather, sagebrush, and Colt .45’s. He was often cast as a frontier villain, tough and hard -- a frequent adversary for the likes of Matt Dillon, or the anonymous troublemaker blowing into town on the occasional Escape western. Director Norman Macdonnell was particularly fond of Dehner's voice, and whenever he was in charge of a series you could expect to find John Dehner somewhere close by. Other CBS directors like Elliott Lewis and Antony Ellis made him a favorite as well.

Dehner's definitive radio roles, both of them in Westerns, came near the end of the medium's creative life, finding their way to the air in 1958 as part of a final burst of quality before the end. Antony Ellis was responsible for the first, tapping Dehner as the leading man in the unusual drama Frontier Gentleman. Here was a Western Dehner different from his more common roles as an icy outlaw -- a refined, courtly Englishman named J. B. Kendall. Hearkening to the journalistic phase of Dehner's own background, Kendall was a former Army officer now working as a reporter for a British newspaper -- assigned to tour the untamed West and produce local-color pieces for consumption by London readers. Kendall wasn't a mere curiosity seeker or adventurer, however -- his separation from the British army had occurred under unfavorable circumstances, and his assignment to America was as much a personal exile as it was a job -- giving the character an air of melancholy that seemed to perfectly suit Dehner's firm but weary portrayal. As a man of culture and personal refinement placed in a world the opposite of his own in every way, J. B. Kendall was the ultimate outsider -- unable to form close personal bonds, always on the move, and rarely expressing the aching loneliness at the core of his being. Dehner brought all this to life with just the nuances of his voice. Frontier Gentleman didn't run long -- only a single season -- and was all but forgotten until recordings were exhumed by radio enthusiasts in the 1960’s and 1970’s -- but it stands high in retrospect as one of radio's most nuanced dramas.

Dehner's second definitive role came courtesy of Macdonnell, who was tapped to bring a popular television western to radio in the fall of 1958. Have Gun, Will Travel came to CBS-TV in 1957 and, in those days of a Western on every corner, it stood out for its stylized lead character and hard-boiled plots. The series told the story of a man named Paladin -- an elegant gentleman of uncertain background who presented himself as a master of many disciplines, among them the expert use of a sixgun. In those free-booting days of gun law, ample opportunities existed for such a man, and Paladin established himself as a hired problem-solver...a Let George Do It sort of figure for the 1870’s. Basing his operations in the lively port of San Francisco, Paladin traveled the west for his clients, ready to kill or be killed, but always acting in the interest of his own particular code of justice. Actor Richard Boone brought Paladin impeccably to life on television, but for radio, for Norman Macdonnell, there was only one choice -- in more than a few ways the character was John Dehner.

The result was one of the few successful transferals of a television property to radio -- a program that, in some ways, outshone its original. Dehner's Paladin was one of the most compelling characters on the air -- the ultimate refinement of the adult Western themes Macdonnell had been exploring on the air since the late forties. Paladin was a gentleman -- but a ruthless gentleman, a man to be feared as much as to be respected. In lesser hands such a character might have emerged as a broadly caricatured superhero, a saddle-bound Batman, but John Dehner brought him to life.

John Dehner had many lives of his own. After dramatic radio passed from the American scene in the early 1960’s, he remained a busy and popular character actor on television, appearing regularly on Westerns for as long as that genre remained popular. He later turned up on the dozens of cop and private-eye shows that crowded the cowboys off the tube in the seventies, and even tried his hand with situation comedies (usually as stern authority figures at odds with wacky protagonists). Whatever the role, whatever the characterization, John Dehner could do the job. No matter the role, and no matter what he tried to do in real life, he was very, very good at it.