Well it was the TELEVISION series The Adventure of Robin Hood which went out on ITV in the mid 1950s that really made Richard Greene a major star – OK he had been around a long time and had a film career behind him – but it was this series that went so well both in the USA and here that really cemented his fame.

I have to say, he was very good in the role.

ITV tried hard to latch on to their success here – and next we got The Adventure of William Tell with William Conrad but although it was good, it didn’t quite have the impact of this one.

The Above is an earlier Picture from February 1949 – Richard Greene and his wife Patricia Medina pack before flying to the USA.

They  were actually divorced just over two years on from this picture being taken, and much later, in 1960, she married film actor Joseph Cotton, a marriage that lasted until he died.

He was in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, Richard Greene  described it as a ‘golden age’ and ‘quite, quite mad,’ his friends included – what could only be described as a Who’s Who of Hollywood –  Greta Garbo, Tyrone Power, Ronald Colman, Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.

With the fortune he later would earn from the worldwide syndication of 143 Robin Hood episodes in the 1950s and early 1960s, Greene became a tax exile in Ireland and ran a luxury racing yacht and country mansion.

He also bought a 400-acre stud farm and within three years became one of Ireland’s leading breeders. He  later sold them all before returning to Britain 10 years ago for a limited stage and television comeback.

His daughter, Patricia, said that, at the time of his death in  Norfolk at the young age of 66 in 1985, that ‘He still had quite a fan club and was receiving letters requesting signed pictures,’

Greene, who lived alone after being separated from his second wife, Beatrix Summers, in 1980, received treatment for a brain tumor three years before he died.

I always think of him as , one of the actors whose career was badly affected by the Second World War in that he joined up and saw service for his country, but after the War he didn’t have the same prestige, although he came back with a bang with Robin Hood.

Maybe though we have to turn this around and say that, at least he did come back from War unharmed, unlike so many, and he did also come back to a job and a career – so I have reassessed the above comments – and have to say, he was VERY lucky.