David Brian served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II. Persuaded by Joan Crawford to try his hand at film acting, he joined her in Hollywood and, in 1949, signed a contract with Warner Brothers. The New York City native appeared in such films as The Damned Don’t Cry! and Flamingo Road with Joan Crawford, and Beyond the Forest with Bette Davis. He also had a role in the film Springfield Rifle, which starred Gary Cooper and in the John Wayne movie The High and the Mighty (1954) as Ken Childs. Brian’s most critically acclaimed performance was as the fair-minded, resourceful Southern lawyer defending condemned, but innocent Juano Hernandez from a vicious, bigoted lynch mob, in Intruder in the Dust (1949). For this role, he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor. In the 1950s and 1960s, Brian was active in television with guest roles in dozens of shows ranging from dramatic to comedic, from CBS’s Rawhide to NBC’s I Dream of Jeannie. In the mid-1950s, he portrayed the lead character on the crime drama TV show, Mr. District Attorney.

On January 15, 1963, David Brian guest starred in the episode “Protective Custody” of NBC’s Laramie western series as Walt Douglas, an official of the stage line, who arrives in Laramie seeking his estranged daughter, Alicia, portrayed by Anne Helm. Series character Jess Harper (Robert Fuller) knows Alicia as a saloon hostess using the name Lenora. Alicia is involved with two outlaws, Cass and Willard, played by Ron Hayes and Gregory Walcott, respectively, who aim to steal a mining payroll. Series character Slim Sherman (John Smith) tries to bring about reconciliation between Walt and Alicia, but Alicia shoots her father. Slim keeps the wounded Walt and Alicia at his relay station pending a hearing while Cass and Willard plan to seize the payroll when it is dropped off at the relay station. In 1968, he portrayed the character of “John Gill”, Kirk’s professor from Starfleet Academy and figurehead “Führer” on the Naziesque planet of Ekos, in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Patterns of Force”. David Brian died in 1993 at the age of seventy-eight of heart disease and cancer in Sherman Oaks, California.