In the 1940s, Rondo Hatton achieved fame of a sort as the only movie monster who couldn't take his horrific make-up off when he went home, and although he died more than 50 years ago, he is still a cult favourite, his image cropping up whenever a truly ugly mug is required. In truth, what happened to him in Hollywood was exploitation at its most crass, but Hatton went along with it and used his terrible disease to commercial effect like many a "human oddity" before and since.
He was born in Maryland in 1894 and after a college education in Tampa, Florida, where his family moved in 1912, he joined the National Guard. When the first World War broke out he was sent to France to fight. It has been speculated that breathing in a large amount of German poison gas in the trenches somehow accelerated his acromegaly, a condition caused by overproduction of the growth hormone by the pituitary gland which results in gross enlargement of the bones of the face and hands.
Back in the US, he became a journalist in Tampa, but by 1930 his once-handsome appearance had changed so alarmingly that he felt obliged to capitalise on the situation by moving to Hollywood, making his first film, Hell Harbour, the same year. For the next 10 years, he did bit parts, notably as the first entry in the Contest of Fools won by Charles Laughton's Quasimodo in 1939's Hunchback of Notre Dame.
As the years rolled by Hatton got uglier - acromegaly is a degenerative disease - and got his first really big break as The Hoxton Creeper in Universal's 1944 Sherlock Holmes' movie, Pearl of Death. For the same studio, he made Jungle Captive the next year and, again as The Creeper, House of Horrors in 1946.
Hatton was an atrocious actor, with a flat, inexpressive voice, incapable of delivering the simplest line of dialogue with anything resembling conviction. He wasn't really an actor at all, of course, and appeared in films just to be screamed at.
In 1946, Universal top-billed him in The Brute Man, a film which poignantly echoed his own story in some respects: Hatton played a handsome college football hero whose face is horribly disfigured in a laboratory accident. The twice-married actor, in real life a gentle and kindly man by all accounts, died of a heart attack brought on by his condition while the film was in postproduction and the nervous studio hived The Brute Man off to PRC, lowest-of-the-low Poverty Row outfits.
In 1992, his Creeper character was resurrected for the lavish spoof of Saturday-morning serials, Rocketeer (which is on Network 2 at 6 p.m. tomorrow).
More on Rondo Hatton at http://wvnvm.wvnet.edu/uOe53/ rondo.html