inktober 2024: series 2 week 3

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Week 3 of the “Horror Actors of the 1940s” series in JPiC’s “Inktober” continues with Rondo Hatton.

Rondo Hatton was a star athlete at Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Florida, excelling in track and football. He was also voted Most Handsome Boy in his senior year. After high school, he worked as a sportswriter for The Tampa Tribune. Soon after service during World War 1, Rondo began to develop symptoms of acromegaly. The disease distorted the shape and definition of his head, face and extremities. The disease, incorrectly identified as elephantiasis, was believed to have been contracted from mustard gas exposure during the war, which was also a misdiagnosis.

Director Henry King discovered Rondo while he was covering production of King’s film Hell Harbor for the Tampa Tribune. King, finding his unusual look somewhat appealing, cast Rondo in a small role. This led to a larger, though still uncredited, role in 1939’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame as well as an extra in The Ox-Bow Incident as a member of a lynch mob.

Universal Studios used Rondo’s image to promote its horror movies, cast him as “The Hoxton Creeper” in the Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death. He made two more big-screen appearances as “The Creeper,” the hulking figure with which he became closely associated.

Rondo’s acromegaly brought on a series of heart attacks in 1945. In early 1946, a massive heart attack claimed his life at age 51.

Many years later, Rondo’s familiar face has been featured, copied and parodied in a number of films, television shows and even cartoons. “The Creeper” character in Scooby Doo was an homage to Rondo, as was the fearsome “Lothar” in Disney’s 1991 adaptation of the 80s comic The Rocketeer. Since 2002, the “Rondo Award” is presented to outstanding achievement in various forms of the horror genre.

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