Actor Hugh O’Brian, who starred as Sheriff Wyatt Earp in one of television’s earliest Westerns, has died at age 91.
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So popular and so much a part of popuculture was O’Brian that he showed up as Earp, uncredited, in the 1959 Bob Hope Western comedy “Alias Jesse James”, as well as in the 1960 TV movie “The Secret World of Eddie Hodges”; when the actor guested on “Make Room for Daddy” in 1956, the episode was entitled “Wyatt Earp Visits the Williamses”, according to Variety.
“Wyatt Earp”, on the other hand, was based on a real-life Western hero, and some of its stories were authentic.
Portraying what the show’s theme song described as the “brave, courageous and bold” frontier lawman, O’Brian wore a black frock coat, a gold brocade vest, a string tie and a flat-brimmed black hat – and he kept the peace with the help of a “Buntline Special”: a.45 revolver with an extra-long barrel. O’Brian also performed on Broadway in Destiny Rides Again, First Love, and The Odd Couple.
Decades later, O’Brian showed up as Earp in two 1989 episodes of the TV western “Paradise”.
He later reprised the role of Earp for a cameo in 1994’s Wyatt Earp: Return To Tombstone movie.
As O’Brian once said of the TV western that made him a star: “It’s been a great horse, and she keeps coming around the corral”.
His credits included “The Lawless Breed” (1953); “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954); “Come Fly With Me” (1963); “Love Has Many Faces” (1965); “Exit From a Plane In Flight, a Rod Serling script produced by “Chrysler Theater” in 1965; “Ten Little Indians” (1965); “The Shootist” (John Wayne’s final film in 1976), and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny DeVito comedy “Twins”.
In 1972-73 he starred with Doug McClure, Anthony Franciosa and Burgess Meredith in the NBC series “Search”.
But O’Brian’s most enduring legacy is off-screen.
In the mid-1950s, O’Brian took a trip to Africa with Nobel Peace Prize victor Albert Schweitzer, and in 1958 founded the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership, a non-profit rooted with the aim to inspire a global community of youth and volunteers to a life dedicated to leadership, service, and innovation.
In summer 1958, O’Brian accepted an invitation to visit Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa at a clinic the Nobel Peace Prize victor had set up along a river to care for patients, including many who had leprosy.
For O’Brian, it was a life-changing experience. Hugh’s impact on young leaders and on the world can not be understated.
Hugh Charles Krampe was born in Rochester, New York. At 17 he became the youngest Marine drill instructor, according to the TCM website.
“If I wanted to see her, I had to go to rehearsals”, he recalled in a 2009 interview with The Times. “That’s how I got started”.
“They left the “m” out of Krampe, ‘” he said in a 2013 Times interview. “When we were on the set, they didn’t have to cut away [when Earp drew on a rival] – they could stay with me, and all of a sudden [the gun] was out”.
A third-billed starring role as a wheelchair-bound paraplegic in the Ida Lupino-directed 1950 movie drama “Never Fear” marked what O’Brian later described as his “real beginning” as an actor.
While starring as “Wyatt Earp”, he founded the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY) in 1958 “to establish a new generation of leaders in the volunteer and service fields”. In 1964, he established the Hugh O’Brian Acting Awards competition at UCLA.
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O’Brian was one of the first celebrities to do an entertainment tour of Vietnam and organized/directed a company of Guys & Dolls for a USO tour there.
