Richard Whorf

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Richard Whorf (June 4, 1906 – December 14, 1966) was an American film actor who later became a director. Whorf was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He began his acting career on the Boston stage as a teenager then moving to Broadway when he was 21. Early on, he was in a production of Taming of the Shrew at the Lunt-Fontaine. He moved to Hollywood and became a contract player in 1930s and 1940s movies before becoming a director in 1944. He appeared in films which include Christmas Holiday (1944) and Blues in the Night (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Keeper of the Flame (1942). He directed a number of television programs in the 1950s and 1960s, the best known being the CBS hit comedy The Beverly Hillbillies.

His hobby was painting; he sold his first painting at age 15 for $100. Many of his small town landscape paintings reflected his American worldview and seemed to be inspired by painters like Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell. In the March 17, 1963 "TV Channels" syndicated gravure newspaper magazine, his painting career was profiled and his knotty pine studio photographed. For the article, he told a reporter, "Who says that a man has to do one thing?"