Name: Sterling Hayden
Date of Birth: 26 March 1916 In 1941, Paramount studios started advertising him as "The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies!" Was first choice of producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown to play the role of Quint in Jaws (1975), but Hayden's tax problems with the US government--he lived outside the country and if he entered the US he would have been arrested--precluded his taking the role. Dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and became a sailor, earning his master's license by the age of 21. When the US ... entered World War II, Hayden changed his name to John Hamilton to obscure his Hollywood past, and joined the Office of Strategic Services--the predecessor of the CIA--headed by Col. "Wild Bill" Donovan, whose son Hayden had sailed with. Trained in guerrilla warfare, Hayden operated a fishing boat off of Yugoslavia to pick up downed Allied pilots and to supply Josip Broz Tito's Communist partisans. He won a Silver Star and a promotion to captain by the time he was discharged in 1945. He had also become enthusiastic about Communism, and joined the Communist Party after he returned to Hollywood. According to Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley's book "Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s", he was recruited by actress Karen Morley, who was a party activist, and screenwriter and future director Abraham Polonsky assigned him to a group of backlot workers to learn union militancy. He and others like him were, according to Billingsley, tasked with swinging the Screen Writers Guild to the supposedly Communist-controlled Conference of Studio Unions, which launched a strike against the studios in 1946-47. Communist Party membership was secret, and they were to keep their identities secret from other non-Communist industry and union people, Billingsley claimed. Hayden later joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of politically active Hollywood actors that included John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye and John Garfield that opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee's persecution of the Hollywood 19, who were suspected of Communist Party membership (the 19 later devolved into the Hollywood 10). Huston vetted the group's members to ensure that none of them were or had been Communists, and when it came out that Hayden was one, the group broke up. Members like Bogart felt that they had been used by the Communist Party, and were not amused. Had four children with Betty Ann de Noon. The couple married and divorced three times and went through a nasty custody battle. He was the original choice to play the knife thrower Britt in The Magnificent Seven (1960). The part went to James Coburn when Hayden proved unavailable. Bought a canal barge in the Netherlands and moved it to Paris to live on it part of the time (1969). Had six children: Christian, Dana, Gretchen and Matthew with Betty Ann de Noon; Andrew and David with Catherine Devine McConnell. In his childhood, he lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and Maine. Read more Sterling Hayden movies (actor)User Comments |
