Rondo Hatton was a football and track star in his high school in Hillsborough, Florida. He was also named the "Handsomest Boy" in his graduating class. He had planned on joining the military even before WWI, fighting in the Mexican Border War and then in WWI where he was exposed to mustard gas which damaged his lungs when in the trenches outside Paris, France. Hatton was discharged and returned to Florida, becoming Tampa Tribune's sports writer.
At that same time, he developed acromegaly where his pituitary gland slowly deformed the soft tissues and bones in his face, hands, and feet leaving him deformed which was possibly caused by the mustard gas. But around the time he was covering the local filming of Henry King's "Hell Harbor," the director came up to him and offered him a role. Hatton and second wife Mabel Housh moved to Hollywood in 1936 and he was offered many small roles in huge films from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939) and "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943). Universal had billed him as "the monster who needs no makeup." He was best known for playing the "Creeper" in "Pearl of Death" (1944) along with posthumously released "House of Horrors" and "The Brute Man" in 1946. Hatton would die after a series of heart attacks as a result of acromegaly on February 2, 1946.
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