Richard Denning was a tall, athletic, and very handsome actor who, thanks to those attributes, had no trouble finding work when he entered show business in the late 1930s. Born Louis Albert Denninger Jr., he was the son of a garment manufacturer. After finishing high school, he enrolled at Woodbury Business College and majored in business and accounting, graduating cum laud with a master's in business administration. But he was never fond of accounting, so he started becoming involved in little theater groups as a hobby and was encouraged to compete in a radio contest called "Do You Want to Be an Actor?", winning a screen test at Warner Brothers. After winning first place on the radio show in 1936, he decided that he did. Denning appeared in B films in the late 1930s and 1940s, as well as on radio. He was Lucille Ball's hubby on the radio version of My Favorite Husband and Jerry North on Mr. & Mrs. North, a role he carried over to television in 1952. His handsome face was also seen on live playhous series of the 1950s, most notably Ford Theatre, and he starred in The Flying Doctor (as an American M.D. in Australia) and in Michael Shayne (as the suave detective).
By the 1960s he was less active. Eventually he and his wife, Chilean-born actress Evelyn Ankers, moved to Hawaii to enjoy a well-earned retirement. "It's about as close to paradise as we could find on earth," he once commented, "and we love it more each day." However, even there producers came looking for him; he was persuaded to play the recurring role of the distinguished-looking governor on Hawaii Five-O, which was filmed on the islands.