Vitals

Hugh O’Brian as Hugh Lombard, romantic adventurer

Austrian Alps, Winter 1965

Film: Ten Little Indians
Release Date: September 10, 1965
Director: George Pollock
Wardrobe Credit: John McCorry

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

American movie and TV actor Hugh O’Brian was born 100 years ago today on April 19, 1925.

During World War II, the teenage Hugh Krampe followed his father’s footsteps and joined the U.S. Marine Corps, becoming the youngest drill instructor in the branch’s history. While a young recruit at Camp Pendleton, Hugh participated in a boxing match refereed by none other than John Wayne, who was shooting a film nearby. More than three decades later, the two actors’ paths would cross again when Hugh appeared in Duke’s final film, The Shootist (1976), portraying the last character that John Wayne would shoot on screen.

After his discharge from the Marines, Sgt. Krampe embarked on an acting career initially marred by misspellings. When a program incorrectly spelled his name as “Hugh Krape”, the young actor decided to avoid even more embarrassing clerical errors and took his mother’s maiden name O’Brien as his last name; when even this was misspelled as “O’Brian”, the re-christened actor shrugged and stuck with it. It was thus as Hugh O’Brian that he rose to fame portraying the title character in 229 episodes of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp on ABC, establishing himself as a strapping and charismatic leading man.

O’Brian was a substantial enough star by the mid-1960s to command the “Tony Danza treatment” when he was cast in British filmmaker Harry Alan Towers’ first of three increasingly ill-advised adaptations of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel And Then There Were None; Christie had named one of the ten strangers Philip Lombard, though O’Brian’s casting evidently prompted someone to rechristen the character as Hugh Lombard. Continue reading →