The Creeper Painting

This acrylic painting pays tribute to the film actor Rondo Hatton, as the character commonly referred to as "The Creeper" Rondo Hatton was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, on .April 22nd, 1894. He died in Beverly Hills, California on February 2nd, 1946. He was nicknamed "the Ugliest Man in Pictures". Rondo was an American journalist, and occasional film actor, with a minor career playing thuggish bit and extra parts, in Hollywood B movies. These movies culminated 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. Rondo's 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. Rondo Hatton as he appeared in the 1913 Hillsborough High School yearbook. 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 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 l,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 was 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) n 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 released posthumously). Around Christmas 1945, Hatton suffered a series of heart attacks, a direct result of his acromegalic condition. On February 2nd, 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. This painting was first unveiled at the Carter Sexton Gallery on Laurel Canyon, in Studio City, California, on Saturday, October 13, 2018. It was one of three entries by Jonathan Morrill that was accepted into their annual Halloween exhibition

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:16 W x 20 H x 0.5 D in

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