Goodeve attended the Taft School, a boarding high school in Watertown, CT..
Goodeve moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1975. His earliest role was on a fifth season episode of Emergency!. After a February 1977 screen test, he signed up as a cast member of Eight Is Enough, taking over a role played in the show's pilot episode by Mark Hamill.
When Eight Is Enough ended in 1981, Goodeve appeared in guest roles in series such as The Love Boat, T.J. Hooker, Dynasty, and Fantasy Island, among others.In the summer of 1984 Goodeve hosted "Solid Gold Hits". In 1985-86, he played Michael James "Woody" Woodward in the soap opera One Life to Live. He reprised his Eight is Enough role in two reunion movies during the late 1980s and also appeared on several episodes of Murder, She Wrote.
Goodeve moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1989 with his wife and three children. Soon after moving there, he began appearing in the recurring role of Rick Pedersen, the ill-fated bush pilot in Northern Exposure. He also began contributing to KING-TV's Evening Magazine and starting hosting that station's travel show Northwest Backroads in 1998.
More recently he began hosting "If Walls Could Talk" and Homes of our Heritage on Home & Garden Television. He has done voices for video games, including the role of Wolf O'Donnell in Star Fox: Assault , the Engineer in Team Fortress 2, and various voices for F.E.A.R.. He also lent his singing voice to Bob Rivers's Twisted Christmas series of holiday CDs.
He is active in his Presbyterian church in Seattle, engaging part-time in an itinerant music ministry in the region.
In 2006, Grant Goodeve appeared as George Bailey in Seattle's Taproot Theatre Company's production of "It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play".
