Rondo Hatton

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Rondo Hatton (April 22, 1894 – February 2, 1946) 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 Tampa, 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 (as is common with the disorder), 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.

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Acting career

When Hatton was covering the shooting of Hell Harbor (1930) and recruited him for a small part, director Henry King noticed him. Hatton took to Hollywood in 1936 to begin a career in similar, often uncredited, bit, and extra roles. In the RKO's production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, his most notable of these was as a contestant extra in the "ugly man tournament" (which he loses to a heavily made up Charles Laughton). In the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, Gabe Hart, a member of the lynch mob, had a new supporting role as a member of the lynch mob.

After he appeared in The Hoxton Creeper (aka The Hoxton Horror) in Universal Studios' ninth Sherlock Holmes film, The Pearl of Death (1944), Hatton's unusual features promoted him as a horror actor. He made two films starring "the Creeper," House of Horrors, and The Brute Man, which were both shot in 1945 but not released until after his death in 1946.

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