A Man With No Name

Richard Young doesn’t have a big role in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” We never even learn the name of his character--a roguish adventurer who’s identified in the credits as “Fedora.”

Still, he’s mighty pivotal to the Indy Jones saga. As it turns out, it’s his character who gives the young Indy (played by River Phoenix) his trademark hat. And who provides inspiration for the Indy “look.”

“When he gives him the hat, it’s a kind of passing of the torch,” muses Young.

Young is currently in Corsica, where he is starring as a retired secret agent in the film, “Eye of the Widow.” Co-starring F. Murray Abraham, Martin Landau and Ben Cross, it’s based on a popular series of European books by Gerard DeVilliers.

“Things are rolling along,” enthused Young, 38, who will also be seen opposite Tom Selleck in the late summer entry, “Hard Rain.” (Young plays a narcotics agent gone bad.)

It was an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced “Amazing Stories”--in which he played Davy Crockett--that led to a phone call (“a year and a half later”) which led to “Indy III.”

“Steven Spielberg’s office asked if I could come over for a chat.” During that chat, Spielberg told him about a role that he called “the Indy prototype.”

Filming of the prologue required more than four weeks of shooting in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. “It was great fun,” said Young, who did his stunts, including running atop a moving train.

During a break in filming, Young discovered that he and star Harrison Ford had something in common other than clothes. “I’ve been pounding nails for years--doing carpentry in between my roles. It’s kept me grounded in reality,” said Young, who is in the midst of building a home for his family in New Mexico.

“So we didn’t talk about acting. We swapped carpentry techniques.”