In Shreveport, Louisiana, a theater’s dark hallways were used to usher moviegoers to their seats approximately eighty years ago, when Earl Holliman was doing this.
However, he yearned to be on screen.
Struggling through auditions, the ambitious young actor was repeatedly told, “You just don’t look the part,” so he went to the Paramount Studio barbershop and changed his look.
Learn more about the Golden Globe-winning actor and the hairstyle that helped kickstart his career by continuing to read!
Earl Holliman, a 1928 Louisiana native, had always wanted to star in a motion picture.
He worked at Shreveport’s Strand Theater when he was around 14 years old, earning 25 cents an hour to usher moviegoers to their seats.
The future celebrity “saved a few bucks” and “hitchhiked to Hollywood” at the age of 15.
“I brought along a pair of dark sunglasses, which I associated with Hollywood, and, on my first day in Hollywood, I went to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and I remember walking up and down the forecourt of Grauman’s [where movie stars put their handprints and footprints] in my dark glasses, hoping everyone would wonder who I was,” Holliman, 95, said in a earlier interview. “I didn’t last long. I thought I’d be able to get a job, but I couldn’t get one.”
The young man went back home, feeling like a failure, and finished high school. He enlisted in the military following graduation, which allowed him to enroll in a Los Angeles radio communications school.
“Whenever I’d get liberty [shore leave], I’d hightail it over to the Hollywood Canteen, and I met people I’d later work with, like Roddy McDowall. Later, I applied for and was accepted at the Pasadena Playhouse,” said Holliman, who had a small role in the 1953 film Scared Stiff with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.
But Hollywood was cruel to the ambitious man, who during auditions kept hearing, “You just don’t look the part.”
“I was told that, even though I was a good actor, I wasn’t handsome enough to be a leading man and I wasn’t offbeat enough to be a character actor. I was just kind of in between,” he recalled.
In an attempt to become famous and secure a part in the 1953 motion picture The Girls of Pleasure Island, Holliman made the decision to have cosmetic surgery.
‘Funny-looking haircut’
Describing his big break that came with his new look, the star of Forbidden Planet says, “Well, when I sat in the barber’s chair…they cut my hair about a quarter of an inch long and in the front it laid down like bangs…and, with my big ears, my broken nose, my two front teeth, my little eyes and my funny-looking haircut, I was suddenly a character actor. Just like that.”
Following his casting in The Girls of Pleasure Island, Holliman featured with Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker (1956), for which he won a Golden Globe.
“That’s still my favorite film,” he says in a 1991 interview with the Calgary Herald. “It was the one that made all the difference in lifting my career to a whole new plateau.”
Over the ensuing years, Hollywood icons like John Wayne, Dean Martin, Kirk Douglas, and Rock Hudson shared the screen with Holliman, who also enjoyed success in the music business.
The star of the television series Wide Country later portrayed Sergeant Bill Crowley in the television series Police Woman, which starred Angie Dickinson, from 1974 until 1978.
Speaking of the chemistry he shared with his co-star, who’s now 92 years old, the Giant star says, “She was very sexy yet at the same time there was something about her you wanted to protect, a little girl quality, that made you want to put your arm around her and say it was going to be [okay].” Holliman continues, “We were together 12 or 14 hours a day and Angie’s very opinionated, when she thinks she’s right that’s the way it is, and we had our share of disagreements, but you could tell we had a warmth. It looked like two people who adored each other. It was there.”
The Thorn Birds actor, who was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1977, announced his retirement from acting in 2000, following a string of brief roles in TV shows including the Twilight Zone and the brief Delta, starring Delta Burke, and movies like Bad City Blues (1999) and The Perfect Tenant (2000).
Animal advocacy
He has now stepped away from the screen to concentrate on his work as an animal rights activist.
The former celebrity doesn’t care who gets hurt; she’s helped injured doves, blind possums, and battered cats.
He likes pigeons as well.
“I feed at least 500 of them a day. In fact, it’s like a pigeon McDonald’s at my property,” he says.
For 25 years, Holliman presided over Actors and Other Animals, a group that had the support of several well-known people, including the late Betty White, Lily Tomlin, Valerie Bertinelli, and Wendie Malick.
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