[2] After serving in the United States Navy as a Seabee, he met his wife Judy at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and with her encouragement, he began acting in campus theater plays.

He took the lead role in William Castle's suspense thriller, Homicidal (1961) and was cast as one of the sons of Jimmy Stewart's character in the Civil War film Shenandoah (1965).

He was featured in 1964 as Dan Collins in an episode of Gunsmoke titled "Chicken" in which a man gets an undeserved reputation as a gunman when he is found at a way station with four dead outlaws at his feet.

[citation needed] Corbett also guest-starred in an episode of The Virginian, entitled "The Awakening",[3] in which his character, David Henderson, is a destitute former minister who has had a crisis of faith and comes to Medicine Bow just as a dispute breaks out at a local mine over safety issues.

In the 1970s, he had guest-starring roles on the television shows The Mod Squad, Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, Police Woman, The Rockford Files, and Barnaby Jones.