'River Runs Through It' actor Arnold Richardson dies at 96

HELENA, Mont. — Arnold Richardson was not the best-known Montanan to appear in a Hollywood movie, but his solitary bit part — as the elderly Norman Maclean in "A River Runs Through It" — remains one of the most iconic cinematic images of the state, partly responsible, for better or worse, for the explosion in the popularity of fly fishing in the 1990s.

For Richardson, who retired to Townsend and died Dec. 6 at 96, the response to a casting call in a Livingston newspaper led to an enjoyable brush with fame and a well-paying job one autumn. It was also a fitting highlight in a lifetime of love for Montana's fish and streams and wild places.

"He could spend literally days on a river," his stepson, Norman Spencer, said by telephone from his home in Florida. "The whole concept was almost transcendent. ... It's almost like he was transformed when he got on a river."

"Hours would go by," Spencer said. "I'd be ready to go home. He'd still be there fishing and have no concept of what time it was. He would just really get lost in it."

It's been said, Spencer noted, that trout don't live in ugly places.

"They live in some of the most beautiful, serene areas, the mountains, in cold clean water," he said. "It's always very picturesque types of locations, where the water is always pristine. Because the fish need to have ice cold water to live."

Richardson was born in Maine in 1914 and worked with his father in construction endeavors. After he finished high school, they moved to Washington state, where the elder Richardson created a company making wooden blinds.

Arnold became a bricklayer and spent much of World War II as a civilian on government projects throughout Alaska, before moving back to Maine.

But the life of a bricklayer involved lots of travel, and some of that brought him to Montana, where he learned to fly fish in the late 1940s, Spencer said.

A big moment in his fishing life came around 1948 outside Mack's Inn, on the Henry's Fork of the Snake River in Idaho, where he caught so many fish, in such spectacular fashion, that it earned him a free T-bone steak.

"The chef told me his customers seated at the window went wild over my fishing," Richardson told the Independent Record in 2005. "He said that any time I wanted to come and fish outside the restaurant, he'd give me a free meal."

He also got work as a fishing guide, which paid more than bricklaying. He kept on guiding, and his reputation grew, into the 1950s, Spencer said.