Was hurd hatfield gay
Throughout his career in film, television and stage productions, American actor Hurd Hatfield(1918-1998) was always connected with the Hollywood film, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945). Playing the title role in Oscar Wilde’s tale of a vain young man who trades his heart to retain his youthful appearance made him a luminary. That fame was a double edged sword, however, because he was unable to shake the notoriety of the role, and just five years later he was appearing in a string of B-movies.
"I have been haunted by 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'," he said. "New York, London, anywhere I'm making a personal appearance, people will talk about other things, but they always obtain back to Dorian Gray."
Born in Modern York City in 1918, Hatfield (1951 photo at right) won a scholarship to study acting at Michael Chekhov's Dartington Hall organization in Devon, England. Returning to the United States with Chekhov's company in 1939, he began a sexual affair with fellow troupe member Yul Brynner a year later. Unlike Brynner, however, Hatfield remained exclusively homosexual his entire life. During the time the corporation was playing on the West Coast, Hatfield was signed by
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From the ill-fated Wallace Reid in 1913 to Ben Barnes in 2009, the onscreen voice of Dorian Gray and his Adonis-like good looks have gone through as many different interpretations as there have been production versions of the novel, but perhaps still the most remembered is that of Hurd Hatfield in Lewin’s 1945 film. This is not to say that Hatfield bore a great deal of resemblance to Wilde’s description of the character, which states that “he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his fine-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair” (Wilde, 1891: 19). One would be hard-pressed to say that Hatfield was “wonderfully handsome”, and his hair is dark rather than golden, and yet he does fit a different, often ignored, description which comes slightly earlier in the first chapter of the novel where the designer Basil Hallward, looking at his unfinished portrait, described Dorian as looking “as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves” (ibid: 6). This notion of Dorian being delicate, even precious, may be what Lewin was trying to portray when he cast Hatfield in the title role of the film. Richard Barrios concurs with this idea, writing that h
CODED CLASSIC HORROR THEORY “The Uncanny & The Other”
“Scenes of excessive brutality and gruesomeness must be cut to an absolute minimum.”
“As a cultural index, the pre-Code horror movie gave a freer rein to psychic turmoil and social disorientation because it possessed a unusual freedom from censorship… the Hays Office admits that under the Code it is powerless to take a be upright on the subject of ‘gruesomeness.‘(Thomas Doherty)
Horror films in particular have made for a fascinating case study in the evolving perceptions of queer presence; queer-horror filmmakers and actors were often forced to lean into the trope of the “predatory queer” or the “monstrous queer” to claim some sense of power through noticeability and blatant expressions of sexuality.- Crucial Queer Horror Films by Jordan Crucciola-2018
Though Hollywood execs refused to show explicit queerness, they were willing to settle for scripts that dealt with characters who were social outcasts and sexually non-normative. The horror genre is perhaps the most iconic coded queer playground, which seems to have an affinity with homos
This is an update of a controversial post from 2012. Be sure to read the shit storm of four dozen reader comments at the end.
Bisexual Russian-born actor Yul Brynner (1920-1985) began his career playing guitar and singing gypsy songs among Russian immigrants in Parisian nightclubs. His fluency in Russian and French enabled him to build up a following with the Czarist expatriates in Paris. After a brief stint as a trapeze artist with the famed Cirque D'Hiver company in France, he started acting with a touring company in the early 1940s. He was soon on his way to becoming the first ever bald stage and movie idol.
In 1941 Yul Brynner traveled to the U.S., where he began an affair with American actor Hurd Hatfield (1918-1998), best known for playing the title role in the 1945 production The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both men were enrolled at the Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and many of their classmates hold since confirmed the affair. Michael Chekhov (1891-1955, nephew of Anton), mentored performers such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Palance, Patricia Neal, Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Leslie Caron, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Anthony Quinn, Jenni