Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Hugh O’Brian dies at 91


Hugh O’Brian dies at 91. Wyatt Earp made him famous. HOBY made him meaningful.




Hugh O’Brian was one of the forefathers of the modern western, maintained a headline-generating love life and was (maybe) one of the youngest Marine drill sergeants in American history. For all that, he is beloved for creating a leadership program.

He died on Monday at the age of 91 from a variety of unspecified health issues.


Originally born Hugh Charles Krampe, he changed his name to O’Brien (from his mother’s side), because it was prone to less misspelling.

They misspelled it anyway, he told the Los Angeles Times in 2013.

“They left the ‘m’ out of Krampe,'” he told the newspaper of his first Playbill. “I decided right then I didn’t want to go through life being known as Huge Krape, so I decided to take my mother’s family name, O’Brien.”

But they misspelled that too, as ‘O’Brian’ and “I just decided to stay with that.”

O’Brian enlisted in the Marines at 17, where he claimed to be the youngest drill instructor in Marine Corps history, even though the Marine Corps doesn’t track that sort of statistic, according to the New York Times.

He moved to Hollywood after his service, preparing to enter law school until he was discovered by director Ida Lupino who, legend has it, met him at an audition.


In 1955, he landed his breakout role as the titular character in “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,” a show that birthed a more adult-focused western with darker, more complex story-lines.

Until then, most westerns were aimed at adolescent audiences, according to Vulture.

In contrast to those teenager-aimed westerns, in which gunfights would “seem as long as a pre-invasion naval barrage,” according to a 1957 New York Times article, O’Brian’s Earp would try to avoid shooting altogether. When he did, he wouldn’t shoot to kill, true to the real Earp’s legacy.

He played Earp in the all-American style of a western lawman, first seen by Gary Cooper in “High Noon.”

As the 1957 New York Times piece stated, “it portrays a man of thought and conscience, a nonpareil triggerman who hates to kill.”

This was long before the Clint Eastwood-style hard-drinking men with dark pasts became the western archetype.
And he cared about making the show realistic — he called it the “most authentic Western series that was on the air.”



“You know, when they fire guns on TV shows, they don’t usually use a full load because no one could handle the sound of that full .45 going off fifteen or twenty times a day, he told Cinema Retro. “In my case, I insisted on using the full load. The crew behind the cameras all wore ear plugs. The person I was shooting at wasn’t going to be there the next day, anyway. Believe me, it made a hell of a difference when it came to the reaction of that individual when the actual .45 load was shot off. It was quite loud and they would automatically fall down.”

Throughout his film career, which lasted through into the early 2000s, he shared the screen with screen legends like Kirk Douglass, Rock Hudson, Spencer Tracy, Patricia Neal, Marilyn Monroe and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Hugh O’Brian on the beach
Hugh O’Brian (Photo from Hugh O’Brian’s Facebook Page)


In one of his smaller but more memorable roles in “The Shootist,” he played the last character ever to be killed by John Wayne on screen, Variety reported.

He also made headlines for his robust romantic life, which included a tryst with Princess Soraya, the ex-wife of the shah of Iran and another that led to a 1969 paternity suit in which he was found to be the father of a 16-year-old boy named Hugh Krampe, Jr. He was ordered to pay $250 monthly support.

“I sure had my share of fun and an awful lot of ladies,” he told the AP in 2006.

He finally settled down at 81, when he married his longtime girlfriend Virginia Barber in 2006. In a symbolic gesture that this would be his last wedding, not just his first, he held the ceremony in a cemetery, the New York Times reported.

But for all his success in film and his amorous adventures off-screen, an outpouring of love and memories Monday came from young people, many of whom probably never caught an episode of “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp” and, if they did, likely watched it on YouTube, not an old set powered by cathode ray tubes.




Though O’Brian was known to most as Wyatt Earp, those who he most inspired knew him as an inspirational leader and a mentor through a program he founded in 1958: The Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership organization, or HOBY for short.

More than 470,000 people have attended the program.

Its cornerstone is a week-long seminar each summer that teaches leadership skills to high school sophomores. The program began in Los Angeles and now includes 70 seminars across the country.

Cindy Bishop, the Louisiana Leadership Seminar Chair for HOBY’s program and the administrator of O’Brian’s Facebook page, told The Washington Post via telephone early Tuesday morning that O’Brian remained an active part of HOBY until his health began deteriorating in 2015.

He visited the Louisiana program, and spoke to the students there in almost every one of the past 15 years. And that was one of about 70 programs.

“He had such a tremendous impact on the world,” Bishop said. “I spent most of the day crying.”

O’Brian founded HOBY in 1958, after being inspired by the work of the Nobel-prize winning Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

As Bishop relayed her friend’s story, O’Brian met Norman Cousins at a cocktail party in 1958. Cousins mentioned an upcoming trip to spend time with Dr. Albert Schweitzer at his clinic in Africa which treated many leprosy patients, and O’Brian asked to join.

“I spent some good time there at this clinic,” O’Brian told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “During the day I helped build baby cribs, pass out food and then in the afternoon we’d go upstream where the leper colony was. I had anywhere from two to 3 1/2 hours with him every night in his little hut. He had such a passion for youth … and thought nothing had been done to try to reach young people and help develop positive attitudes and build leaders for the future.”

After his nine days at the clinic, before O’Brian’s 48-hour flight back, Schweitzer took the actor aside and asked what he was going to do with his experience.

“I don’t know,” O’Brian reportedly said. “But I’ve got 48 hours to think about it.”

When he returned to the U.S., he founded the Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership nonprofit organization.

The program’s alumni includes some famous names, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who wrote in a statement, “Hugh O’Brian was far more than a Hollywood actor to me.”

He told the New York Times, “Hugh O’Brian’s impact [is] a large part of why I became governor of my state.”


Many HOBY alumni used the hashtag #BecauseofHugh on Twitter Monday evening to express their gratitude for HOBY.

Using that hashtag, one user tweeted, “I was able to ditch expectations and make life choices that were authentic to me.” Another tweeted, “I realized my potential to help others was my most fulfilling and boundless endeavor.” A third tweeted, “I’m no longer afraid to BE MYSELF and stand up for women who have been sexually assaulted,”




Not only did he remained involved toward the end of his life, he was insistent — sometimes even stubbornly so — on being involved every little detail, according to Bishop.

Bishop recalled the last time the two were together in June of 2014. They were driving from the small Louisiana town of New Iberia to Lafayette for a dinner, but O’Brian wanted to stop to look at storage spaces for the program. (The next day, he’d want to look at palm trees).

Bishop said they didn’t have time, but O’Brian was adamant. So adamant, in fact, that he threw open the door of the moving car.

Bishop slammed on the breaks and told him if he cared so much, he could walk, at which point O’Brian closed his door and acquiesced.

When Bishop tried broaching the subject to see if the two were at odds, O’Brian stopped her.

“Well, Cindy,” he reportedly said, “if we weren’t such great friends, we couldn’t get in such a terrific fight.”

She laughed as she told the story, looking upon the memory with fondness — to her, it was an example of how deeply he cared.

To attend the program, as Huckabee wrote, there was only one vital requirement, more of a request: “We were to write him a letter on our birthday each year until we were thirty.”

Bishop said O’Brian received thousands of letters each year.

And she remembered him saying, “I wouldn’t take $1 million for one letter, and that makes me the richest man in the world.”





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