Darryl Hickman

Darryl Gerard Hickman was born on July 28, 1931, in Hollywood, California, to Milton Hickman, an insurance salesman, and Katherine Hickman, née Ostertag. He was the older brother of actor, television executive, producer, and director Dwayne Hickman, who graduated from the same institution, Cathedral High School in Los Angeles, four years after Darryl's 1948 graduation. Over the course of his life, Hickman worked as an actor, screenwriter, television executive, and acting coach. He died on May 22, 2024, at the age of 92.

Hickman's entry into the entertainment industry came in the mid-1930s, when a dance-school director discovered him and enrolled him as a student. Paramount Pictures signed him to a contract the following year, and he attended the studio's school in California alongside classmates Gene Nelson and Jackie Cooper. His first film role was as Ronald Colman's son in The Prisoner of Zenda in 1937. Two years later, Paramount casting agents led by Leroy Prinz screened more than a thousand children for parts in The Star Maker, a Bing Crosby vehicle, and Hickman secured one of those roles. His performance impressed Crosby sufficiently that the singer alerted his older brother and talent agent, Everett Crosby, to the young actor.

Also in 1939, Hickman was cast by 20th Century Fox in its adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda. He portrayed Winfield Joad, the youngest child in a family navigating the hardships of the Great Depression. The film earned Ford an Academy Award for Best Director and Jane Darwell the award for Best Supporting Actress. In 1941, Hickman appeared in Men of Boys Town, playing a reform-school juvenile delinquent opposite Mickey Rooney, with at least one contemporary review noting that Hickman nearly stole the picture from his co-star. That same year he appeared in The Human Comedy as a mentally slow child, and in 1942 he made a featured appearance as Frank in the Our Gang comedy short Going to Press. In 1944, he played a bad-boy antagonist opposite Jimmy Lydon in Henry Aldrich, Boy Scout.

Among his most prominent mid-decade credits was the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven, in which he acted alongside Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde. Hickman later recalled Tierney as aloof on set, though her performance earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination. As the sole surviving cast member, he contributed commentary to the film's DVD release. In 1946, he portrayed the younger version of Van Heflin's character Sam Masterson in the film noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers; to make the resemblance credible, Heflin supplied a photograph of himself as a teenager to makeup artist Wally Westmore. A newspaper that year described Hickman as one of Hollywood's top juveniles. In later years, Hickman became critical of child acting, arguing that the profession deprives young performers of a normal childhood, and he pursued therapy to address his own experiences.

Hickman graduated from Cathedral High School in 1948, and in 1951, finding the transition to adult life difficult after years in the spotlight, he briefly entered a Passionist monastery before returning to Hollywood approximately one month later. He served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, interrupting his efforts to rebuild his acting career. One of his more notable adult film roles came in 1956, when he played Al in Tea and Sympathy. In 1957, he appeared in the Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece" as murderer Steve Harris, and he was featured in two episodes of The Untouchables. In 1959 and 1960, he appeared in three episodes of his brother Dwayne's CBS sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, playing the older brother Davey. He also appeared twice in the television Western Gunsmoke in 1959, and in 1961 he starred in the short-lived series The Americans. Several episodes of The CBS series The Nanny later featured him as well.

Hickman's Broadway career extended from 1961 to 1969. In 1963, he appeared in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, substituting for star Robert Morse. He subsequently appeared in the touring company of George M! in 1969. In 1976, after a seventeen-year absence from film, he took a minor role as Bill Herron in Network.

Beyond performing, Hickman built a parallel career as a television executive and writer, working primarily in New York City. He wrote scripts for several 1961 episodes of The Loretta Young Show and served as associate producer of the long-running soap opera Love of Life in the early 1970s. He was also a producer on Norman Lear's A Year at the Top in 1977, during the production of which he reunited with Mickey Rooney, his co-star from Men of Boys Town. In April 2007, Hickman published a book on acting technique, The Unconscious Actor: Out of Control, in Full Command, in which he traced the development of his approach through his work with various actors and directors. He identified working with Spencer Tracy and George Cukor on the 1942 film Keeper of the Flame as a particularly formative influence, an admiration also documented in James Curtis's 2011 biography Spencer Tracy: A Biography.

On November 28, 1959, Hickman married actress Pamela Lincoln, with whom he had appeared in the film The Tingler. The couple had two sons and divorced in 1982. Their younger son, Justin, died by suicide at the age of 19 in 1985.