His other notable roles include Jonathan Cooper in Stage Fright (1950), Wing Commander Guy Gibson in The Dam Busters (1955), Sir Walter Raleigh in The Virgin Queen (1955), and Major John Howard in The Longest Day (1962).

He was previously a Captain in the British Army during World War II, fighting in the D-Day landings as a member of the 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion.

[3] Richard spent a few of his childhood years in India, where his father, an officer in the British Army, served as a physician.

[4] He first appeared professionally as an actor at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park in 1936 in a production of Twelfth Night.

He also appeared as an extra in British films including Good Morning, Boys (1937), A Yank at Oxford (1938) and Old Bones of the River (1939).

Todd enlisted soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, entering the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in late 1939.

In his memoirs, he describes seeing the bomb pass through the ceiling in front of him before he was blown out of the building by its blast, landing on a grass bank and suffering lacerations; five cadets were killed in the incident.

[5] On the day he received his commission, he tried to join several friends at the Café de Paris in London, but could not get a table booked for the evening.

[5] For a short while he was posted, at his request, as liaison officer to the 42nd Armoured Division then applied to join the Parachute Regiment to have a better chance at seeing action.

[6] During the operation he met Major John Howard on the bridge and was involved in helping to repulse counter-attacks by the German forces in the area.

Far more popular was The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), in which Todd played the title role for Walt Disney Productions.

Disney reunited the Robin Hood team in The Sword and the Rose (1953), with Todd as Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk.

Nigel Kneale, responsible for the adaptation, said the production came about purely because Todd had turned up at the BBC and told them that he would like to play Heathcliff for them.

The success of Man Called Peter led 20th Century Fox to offer Todd a four-picture contract.

Amethyst (1957) was an attempt to repeat the success of The Dam Busters, with the same director (Michael Anderson) and Todd playing another real-life hero.

Then there were more thrillers, with Never Let Go (1960), directed by John Guillermin and co-starring Peter Sellers in a rare straight acting role; Todd gave what has been called one of his best performances.

[20] Few of these films had been overly popular but Todd was still the top-billed star of The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961), with Laurence Harvey and Richard Harris.

(In an odd twist, another actor, Patrick Jordan played the role of Lt. Todd in the movie); this was his biggest hit for some time.

Todd claims William Wyler offered him the lead in The Collector but the actor felt he was miscast and persuaded him not to cast him.

"It was not the first time that I had talked myself out of a picture — there had been The Guns of Navarone, League of Gentlemen and Ice Cold in Alex — but this latest stupidity of mine came when I desperately needed to make another important international film.

In the 1980s, his distinctive voice was heard as narrator of Wings Over the World, a 13-part documentary series about the history of aviation shown on Arts & Entertainment television.

Todd continued to act on television, including roles in Virtual Murder; Silent Witness and in the Doctor Who story "Kinda" in 1982.

[citation needed] Todd was the first choice of author Ian Fleming to play James Bond in Dr. No, but a scheduling conflict gave the role to Sean Connery.

In the 1960s, Todd unsuccessfully attempted to produce a film of Ian Fleming's The Diamond Smugglers[13] and a television series based on true accounts of the Queen's Messengers.

On 7 December 1997, Todd's youngest son Seamus Palethorpe-Todd 20, shot himself in the head with a shotgun lying on his bed at their home in Lincolnshire while home on a break from Newcastle University where he was a first year student studying politics;[26] an inquest determined that the suicide might have been a depressive reaction to the drug he was taking for severe acne.