Hugh O'Brian

Hugh O'Brian, born Hugh Charles Krampe on April 19, 1925, in Rochester, New York, was an American actor and humanitarian who worked across television, film, and Broadway until his death on September 5, 2016. The son of Hugh John Krampe, a United States Marine Corps officer, and Edith Lillian Marks Krampe, he spent portions of his childhood in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and later in Winnetka, Illinois, where he attended New Trier High School before transferring to Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. There he lettered in football, basketball, wrestling, and track. After a single semester at the University of Cincinnati, he enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War II and, at seventeen, became the youngest Marine drill instructor on record.

Following the war, Krampe had been accepted to Yale University for the fall of 1947 with plans to study law, but a chance encounter in Hollywood altered his path. While attending rehearsals of the Somerset Maugham play Home and Beauty with an actress he was dating, director Ida Lupino asked him to step in when the lead actor failed to appear. His performance earned a strong review and a contract offer from an agent. His stage name came about by accident: a program misspelled his surname as "Krape," prompting him to adopt his mother's family name, O'Brien, though that too was misspelled on subsequent materials as "O'Brian," and he retained that spelling permanently. Lupino subsequently cast him in her film Never Fear, and he went on to sign a contract with Universal Pictures.

O'Brian's most prominent television role came in 1955, when he was cast as Wyatt Earp in the ABC Western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which ran until 1961. To prepare for the part, he purchased Stuart N. Lake's biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal and cultivated a working relationship with Lake, who consulted on the series during its first two seasons. The show, which debuted alongside Gunsmoke and Cheyenne, helped establish the adult Western as a television genre and consistently ranked among the top ten programs in the United States throughout its run. O'Brian later reprised the role in two episodes of Guns of Paradise in 1990, the television movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw in 1991, and the independent film Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone in 1994, the last of which combined new footage with colorized sequences from the original series.

During the 1950s and 1960s, O'Brian made appearances on The Nat King Cole Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, all in 1957. He starred in a 1962 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "Ride the Nightmare" and appeared as a guest attorney in a 1963 episode of Perry Mason. He served as guest host on The Hollywood Palace in 1964 and on the rock music series Shindig! in 1965, and was a panelist on the CBS primetime programs Password and What's My Line. In 1971 he filmed a television pilot called Probe, which led to the NBC series Search, running one season from 1972 to 1973. He also appeared in a featured role in the two-hour premiere of Fantasy Island in 1977.

His film work spanned several decades and included Rocketship X-M (1950), The Lawless Breed (1953), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), White Feather (1955), The Brass Legend (1956), Come Fly with Me (1963), In Harm's Way (1965), Love Has Many Faces (1965), the Agatha Christie adaptation Ten Little Indians (1965), and Ambush Bay (1966). He played the last character killed on screen by John Wayne in Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976), and had a cameo as the father of the two lead characters in the comedy Twins (1988).

O'Brian's Broadway career extended from 1959 to 1967. He appeared in the musical Destry Rides Again and starred in the plays First Love and Cactus Flower. In 1963, the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he had lived as a child, awarded him the key to the city, presented by Mayor George Coe.

Beyond performing, O'Brian founded the Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership Foundation, known as HOBY, in 1958 following a nine-day visit with physician and theologian Albert Schweitzer. The nonprofit youth leadership-development program serves high school sophomores through more than seventy programs across all fifty states and twenty countries, sponsoring approximately ten thousand students annually. Since its founding, more than five hundred thousand young people have participated in its programs. In 1965, O'Brian also created and endowed the UCLA Hugh O'Brien Acting Awards, which for more than twenty-five years provided cash payments and opportunities for promising students in the UCLA School of Fine Arts Theatre program to gain agent representation.