Richard Sanders

Richard Kinard Sanders (born August 23, 1940) is an American actor best known for playing the quirky news anchorman Les Nessman on the television sitcom, WKRP in Cincinnati. Sanders was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Thelma S. and Henry Irvine Sanders. After graduating from Leavenworth High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, he was enrolled in the Fine Arts Department at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) as an acting major from 1958 to 1962. There he was a classmate of Rene Auberjonois and Aubrey Wilson, among others. After graduation, Sanders studied Shakespearean theatre in England on a Fulbright Scholarship, and served a stint with the Peace Corps in the states of Paraiba and Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Sanders joined Gordon Jump and Frank Bonner in reprising his original WKRP role on The New WKRP in Cincinnati in the early 1990s. He has guest appeared on other television shows, including Lou Grant, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Alice, Newhart, Murder, She Wrote, Designing Women, and Married... with Children, and has also acted in the mini-series Roots: The Next Generations, the animated series Inhumanoids, the horror film Lovers Lane, and the Robert De Niro/Cuba Gooding Jr. film Men of Honor. Besides being an actor, Sanders is a screenwriter, having written, among other works, several episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati. In 1993, he starred in the computer game Day of the Tentacle as the voice of Bernard.