David Hedison, a native of Providence, Rhode Island (born May 20), began his acting career with the Sock & Buskin Players at Brown University before moving to New York to study with Sanford Meisner and Martha Graham at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. From there, he moved to off Broadway productions and a film contract with 20th Century-Fox.
 

His work on the New York Stage includes Turgenev's A Month in the Country, directed by Sir Michael Redgrave and starring Uta Hagen, for which he won a Theater World Award, Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent and Clifford Odets' Clash by Night. He toured with Anita Gillette in the National Company of Neil Simon's Chapter Two and appeared in Los Angeles in the West Coast premiere of Alan Bowen's Forty Deuce, and in the Allan Miller production of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? in the role of Larry Parks. He also toured with Elizabeth Ashley in the Joseph Hayes' new play, Come into My Parlour, and was in the world premiere run of Bernard Slade's Return Engagements. In addition to appearing in A. R. Gurney's Love Letters with Anita Gillette in 1998, David has also appeared in Alone Together, First Love and  as the long-suffering husband in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, MA in 2002.

While at Fox, Hedison made two television series: Five Fingers and the long-running Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as Captain Crane. He has also appeared in a great variety of roles, from the PBS Television Theatre's production of Oliver Hailey's For the Use of the Hall, directed by Lee Grant, and the NBC mini-series A.D., directed by Stuart Cooper, to ABC's Dynasty II: The Colbys. For five years, he played Spencer Harrison in the NBC daytime series Another World. He has worked extensively on British television, including the BBC presentation of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke in the role of John Buchanan opposite Lee Remick and performed in a West End production of James Leo Herlihy's Bad Bad Jo Jo.

Between the stage and television work, he has maintained a steady career in feature films, from his first film under contract to Fox, The Enemy Below (1957), with Robert Mitchum, to the popular Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 (2002) with Michael York and Michael Biehn. He played Felix Leiter in two James Bond films, Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill. Film buffs will also remember him in the title role in the original version of The Fly. The film was selected as one of the "Sci-Fi 100" in Entertainment Weekly as being one of the all-time greatest works of science fiction.

In recent years, David has also starred in Fugitive Mind (1999) with Michael Dudikoff and Gil Gerard, and Mach 2 (2000) with Brian Bosworth and Michael Dorn. David's two most recent films, Spectres and Death by Committee were released in 2005. 

In January of 2004, David debuted on the CBS Daytime drama The Young and the Restless as Judge Arthur Hendricks, an old flame of Katherine Chancellor.  Soon after his arrival in Genoa City, Arthur was revealed to be the biological father of Katherine's new found daughter, Jill Foster Abbott.  Jill was given away at birth and adopted and was only now beginning to know her birth parents.  Arthur saw Kay through her relapse into alcoholism, helped stage the intervention that sent her to rehab, and when Kay was sober, they became engaged to be married.

When Arthur's bitter stepson, Harrison, learned of the marriage, he came to Genoa City, told Katherine he believed Arthur was responsible for the death of his mother and planted fake insurance papers that Jill found.  She confronted Arthur and demanded to know the truth. Heartbroken his new found family would believe a stranger over him, Arthur broke the engagement and left town. David's last airdate on Y & R was November 29, 2004.