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Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Richard Simmons later moved to Minneapolis where he attended West High School and then the University of Minnesota. While at university he competed in fencing and swimming and also acted in a few theater productions. He left the Twin Cities in the 1930s and spent several years traveling the world, working on freighters and tankers.

Eventually he settled in Los Angeles where, according to one story, Louis B. Mayer saw him breaking in an Arabian horse and immediately offered him a screen test. Simmons played a number of minor parts in MGM movies but finally achieved a degree of fame in the mid-1950s when he starred in the half-hour syndicated TV series, "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" (1955). With his horse Rex, and his husky King, Preston brought law-and-order into the 1890s Gold Rush as a member of the Northwest Mounted Police. Each episode ended with Preston hugging his dog and saying: "Well, King, it looks like this case is closed."