Richard Anderson appeared in high school plays, served a hitch in the Army and, upon his discharge, began doing summer stock, radio work, a movie bit part (a wounded soldier in Twelve O'Clock High) and all the other minor jobs required of your basic struggling actor. He did comedy scenes on a "screen test"-like TV series called Lights, Camera, Action! and impressed the right people at MGM, who offered him a contract. After leaving MGM he continued to dabble in movies while at the same time becoming a huge presence on TV. He was a regular (Police Lt. Drum) during the last season of TV's Perry Mason; in the series' last episode, he interrogates witnesses to a murder in a TV studio--the witnesses being played by the "Perry Mason" crew. In the high-rated last episode of The Fugitive he plays Richard Kimble's (David Janssen) brother-in-law, and is briefly suspected of being the real killer of Kimble's wife. A regular on The Six Million Dollar Man, Anderson has more recently produced the TV-movie reprises of that series.
His first wife was the daughter of Alan Ladd. His second wife was the daughter of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg. In The Six Million Dollar Man, Richard's character worked for a government department called the OSI. In real life, he did an orientation video for a real government department called the OSI, which was very different from the fictional one. Is one of the very few actors to play the same regular character on two different series simultaneously. From 1976 to 1978, he played Oscar Goldman on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Leo G. Carroll, Martin E. Brooks, Marla Gibbs, David Hasselhoff and Fred Dalton Thompson are among the other actors to have done this. In July 2005, appeared as a guest at the Western Film Fair in Charlotte, North Carolina along with Ty Hardin, Henry Darrow, Donna Douglas, Elena Verdugo, Jo Morrow, Ed Nelson and Adrian Booth.