Rondo Hatton was an American journalist and occasional film actor with a minor career playing thuggish bit and extra parts in Hollywood B movies, culminating in his elevation to horror movie star-status with Universal Studios in the last two years of his life, and posthumously as a movie cult icon. He was known for his unique facial features, which were the result of acromegaly, a syndrome caused by a disorder of the pituitary gland.
Early years
Hatton was born in the Kee Mar College girls' infirmary in Hagerstown, Maryland. The family moved several times during Hatton’s youth before settling in Hillsborough, Florida. He starred in track and football at Hillsborough High School and was voted Handsomest Boy in his class his senior year. In Tampa, Hatton worked as a sportswriter for The Tampa Tribune. He continued working as a journalist until after World War I, when the symptoms of acromegaly developed. Acromegaly distorted the shape of Hatton's head, face, and extremities in a gradual but consistent process. He eventually became severely disfigured by the disease. Because the symptoms developed in adulthood, the disfigurement was incorrectly attributed later by film studio publicity departments to elephantiasis resulting from exposure to a German mustard gas attack during service in World War I. Hatton served in combat and served on the Pancho Villa Expedition along the Mexican border and in France during World War I with the United States Army, from which he was discharged due to his illness.
Acting career
Director Henry King noticed Hatton when he was working as a reporter with The Tampa Tribune covering the filming of Hell Harbor and hired him for a small role. After some hesitation, Hatton moved to Hollywood in 1936 to pursue a career playing similar, often uncredited, bit and extra roles. His most notable of these was as a contestant-extra in the "ugly man competition" in the RKO production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He had another supporting-character role as Gabe Hart, a member of the lynch mob in the 1943 film of The Ox-Bow Incident. Universal Studios attempted to exploit Hatton's unusual features to promote him as a horror star after he played the part of The Hoxton Creeper in its sixth Sherlock Holmes film, The Pearl of Death. He made two films playing "the Creeper", House of Horrors and The Brute Man.
Death
Around Christmas 1945, Hatton suffered a series of heart attacks, a direct result of his acromegalic condition. On February 2, 1946, he suffered a fatal heart attack at his home on South Tower Drive in Los Angeles. His body was transported to Florida and interred at the American Legion Cemetery in Tampa.
Legacy
Hatton's name – and simple but brutish face – have become recurring motifs in popular culture. In season 6, episode 4 of the 1970s television series The Rockford Files, Jim Rockford, exasperated at a friend who dismisses himself as unattractive, exclaims "You're no Rondo Hatton!" Hatton's physical likeness inspired the Lothar character in Dave Stevens' 1980s Rocketeer Adventure Magazine stories, and in Disney's 1991 film version, The Rocketeer, in which the character is played by actor Tiny Ron in prosthetic make-up. The 2000 AD comic book character Judge Dredd, who is rarely seen without his helmet, used "face-changing technology" to make himself look like Hatton in issue 52 – the first time the character's face was shown unobscured. The name "Rondo Hatton" was also in a list of suspects obtained by Dredd during the case. As the artistBrian Bolland revealed in an interview with David Bishop: "The picture of Dredd’s face – that was a 1940s actor called Rondo Hatton. I've only seen him in one film." Additionally, the character "The Creep" in the Dark Horse Presents comic-book series strongly resembled Hatton. Hatton is regularly name-checked in the novels of Robert Rankin, and credited as appearing in films that are either fictional, or in which he clearly had no part, such as the Carry On films. Rankin's references to Hatton routinely occur in the form of "he had a Rondo Hatton". Another namecheck occurs in Rafi Zabor's PEN/Faulkner-award winning 1998 novel The Bear Comes Home, where the name is used as a nickname for good-natured but unrefined minor character Tommy Talmo. In the 2004 Stephen King novel, The Dark Tower VII, a character is described as looking "like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the 1930s, who suffered from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and psychopaths..." The episode of Doctor Who entitled "The Wedding of River Song" features Mark Gatiss as a character whose appearance is based on Hatton's, credited under the pseudonym "Rondo Haxton" for his performance. A documentary being produced in 2017, Rondo and Bob, looks at the lives of Hatton and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre art director Robert A. Burns, a self-described expert on Hatton. The full story of Hatton's life is told in the Scott Gallinghouse-Tom Weaver-Robert J. Kiss book "Rondo Hatton: Beauty Within the Brute", which also includes exhaustive production histories of his Universal horror films.
Rondo Hatton Awards; cultural references
Since 2002, the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards have paid tribute to Hatton in name and likeness. The physical award is a representation of Hatton's face, based on the bust of "The Creeper", whom Hatton portrayed in the 1946 Universal Pictures film House of Horrors.
