Richard Sanders is a retired American actor and screenwriter. He played quirky news anchorman Les Nessman on the CBS sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–1982). Most of his acting career has been on television.

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Richard Sanders
Richard Sanders as Les Nessman and Howard Hesseman as Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati
Born	Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater	Carnegie Institute of Technology
Occupation(s)	Actor, screenwriter
Years active	1971–2006
Spouse	Marilynn Marko-Sanders

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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. There, he was a classmate of René Auberjonois and Aubrey Wilson, among others.^{[citation needed]}

After graduating from college, 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 Bernoulli.^{[citation needed]}

Sanders resides in Woodinville, Washington.^[1] He is married to Marilynn Marko-Sanders.^{[citation needed]}