There are times when somebody may become a star but they have more humble beginnings. Such was the case with Earl Holliman, a man who was working at a theater in Shreveport, Louisiana but he wanted to do more.
As a young actor, he did have some ambitions but he was constantly being told that he didn’t look the part. He struggled from one audition to the next until he finally went to the Paramount studio barbershop and got a new look.
Earl was born in 1928 and when he was 14, he earned $0.25 per hour at a job. He worked at Shreveport’s Strand Theater and began saving his money. He saved a few dollars and when he was 15, he hitchhiked to Hollywood.
“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.”
He thought that he had failed so we came home to finish high school. He then did a hitch in the Navy and eventually ended up in Los Angeles at a radiocommunication 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.”
Hollywood continued to tell him that he didn’t look the part, and even though he was a good actor, he wasn’t handsome enough to be the leading man in the role. He fell between being a character actor and the lead.
His big break came when he got a new look and was in Forbidden Planet. He went to the barbershop, had his hair cut about 1/4 of an inch long, and suddenly he was a character.
He was in The Girls of Pleasure Island, and later, The Rainmaker. In that film, he worked with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn and he still feels it is his favorite film.
In the 1970s, he worked on the television show Policewoman along with Angie Dickinson. He said: “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].”
Now that he has left the screen, he still continues to be busy fighting for animal rights. This includes some unusual animals, such as injured doves, and a blind possum, and he has a thing for pigeons. He says he feeds at least 500 of them a day.
He may have started from humble beginnings but he has left his mark on the world.
