Richard Crenna

Veteran Actor Richard Crenna Dies at 76

Richard Crenna , the Emmy award-winning character actor who starred as a lovesick teenager on "Our Miss Brooks" and Sylvester Stallone's Green Beret mentor in the "Rambo" films, has died. He was 76.

Crenna, whose credits also included "Wait Until Dark," "The Flamingo Kid," and television's "The Real McCoys," died Friday of pancreatic cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, daughter Seana Crenna said Saturday.

"This came very sudden," she said.

Born in Los Angeles , Crenna's career began at the age of 10 when he broke into radio. The squeaky-voiced youngster appeared on "Burns and Allen" later, he played love-sick teen Walter Denton on "Our Miss Brooks," moving with the show when it switched to television.

"For the first 20 years I was almost exclusively a radio actor _ until television came in," Crenna told The Associated Press in 1999. "In those days, radio actors were considered actors who could talk, but they couldn't walk and talk at the same time."

Crenna disproved that theory, playing pitcher Daffy Dean in 1953 film "Pride of St. Louis" and bringing his Denton character to television and the big screen.

Anyone know what other shows young Richard Crenna might have been on before World War II?