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Rondo K. Hatton (April 22, 1894 – February 2, 1946) was an American soldier, journalist and occasional 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. ==Biography== Hatton was born in Hagerstown, Maryland to Stewart Price and Emily Zarring Hatton, a pair of Missouri-born teachers. The Hatton family moved several times during Rondo's youth, to Hickory, North Carolina, and to Charles Town, West Virginia, and at last to Tampa, Florida, where family members owned a business. Following his father's death, Hatton, his mother, and his younger brother Stewart moved in with his maternal grandmother in Tampa. There he obtained work as a sportswriter for the local newspaper.〔U.S. Census for 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930〕 He worked 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. Hatton, who reportedly had been voted the handsomest boy in his class at Hillsborough High School, 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 his 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. Director Henry King noticed Hatton when he was working as a reporter with ''The Tampa Tribune'' covering the filming of ''Hell Harbor'' (1930) 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 were as a contestant-extra in the "ugly man competition" (which he loses to a heavily made up Charles Laughton) 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 (aka The Hoxton Horror) in its sixth Sherlock Holmes film, ''The Pearl of Death'' (1944). He made two films playing "the Creeper", House of Horrors (filmed in 1945 but not released until 1946, after his death) and ''The Brute Man'' (1946, also posthumously). Hatton died of a heart attack (a direct result of his acromegalic condition) in 1946. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Rondo Hatton」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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