Richard Ney, 87; Actor Became an Investment Advisor

Richard Ney, a former actor with matinee-idol looks who became an investment counselor and author of best-selling books about the stock market including “The Wall Street Jungle,” has died. He was 87.

Ney died Sunday at his Pasadena home of heart problems, said his wife, Mei-Lee Ney.

As an actor, Ney’s best-known film was the 1942 “Mrs. Miniver,” which earned six Academy Awards, including best picture and a best actress Oscar for Greer Garson. Ney, two years younger than Garson, portrayed her son in the film and in 1943 married her. Their union lasted until 1947.

Ney, a native New Yorker, studied drama at Columbia University. Among his other films were “The Late George Apley” and “Ivy,” in 1947; “Joan of Arc,” starring Ingrid Bergman, in 1948; “Babes in Bagdad,” starring Paulette Goddard and Gypsy Rose Lee, in 1952; and “Midnight Lace,” starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison, in 1960.

Ney abandoned acting in 1961 for a different career, subsequently telling The Times, “I became an investment advisor so people would leave me alone.”

After Ney’s first advice book, “The Wall Street Jungle,” became a bestseller in 1970, Times columnist Richard Buffum praised the former actor’s writing as “lean, lucid, delivered with the zeal and pungency of a born muckraker.”

Ney -- in other books, lectures and a newsletter, and on “The Ney Report” on cable television station KWHY -- delighted in raking muck about how the stock market operated. From the early 1960s, he advocated computerizing “buy” and “sell” orders and regulating the entire operation as a public utility.

He often referred to stock exchanges as a “great bingo game” and explained the art of investing to a Times business writer in 1968 by saying: “It’s all pure and simple gambling. I tell clients that, and I admit I’m part of the system. How much do you need to be in the market? About $50,000, at least, so you can stand to lose $25,000.”

In the investment game as well as show business, Ney considered looking the part to be half the battle. He drove a Rolls-Royce, he said, to assure people that he firmly believed in capitalism.

Ney joined the Navy during World War II and served as an ensign in the Pacific theater.

His wife is his only survivor.