Darryl Hickman

***Darryl Gerard Hickman*** (July 28, 1931, Hollywood, California, USA) is an American former film and television actor, television executive, and acting coach. Hickman was born in Hollywood, California to Milton and Katherine Hickman. His father sold insurance and his mother was a housewife. In the mid-1930s, Darryl was discovered by a dance school director and subsequently became a student there. The following year, the famed Hollywood studio Paramount signed a contract with the child actor. His first film role was as Ronald Colman's son in The Prisoner of Zenda in 1937. He attended Paramount's school in California and had classmates like Gene Nelson and Jackie Cooper.

In preparation for the 1939 Bing Crosby movie The Star Maker, Paramount casting agents, led by Leroy Prinz, interviewed over 1000 children. Hickman won one of the parts in the film. Pleased with Hickman's performance, Crosby notified his older brother and talent agent Everett Crosby of the young actor. After this, he went on to appear in multiple motion pictures throughout the 1930s and 1940s in a wide array of genres. A busy performer, he would sometimes work at different films simultaneously.

In 1940, he was cast in 20th Century Fox's film adaption of John Steinbeck's best-selling novel from 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford. He portrayed the role of "Winfield Joad", the youngest member of a family trying to cope with the hardships of The Great Depression. The film was a critical and commercial success, with Ford winning an Academy Award for Best Director, while actress Jane Darwell won for Best Supporting Actress. Another notable role during this time included the war-time melodrama The Human Comedy, where he played a mentally slow child. Hickman made a featured appearance as well as "Frank" in the 1942 Our Gang comedy short Going to Press.

Hickman graduated from Cathedral High School in Los Angeles in 1948 (his brother Dwayne graduated from the same school in 1952). Finding it hard to adjust to adulthood after being in the limelight for most of his childhood, he retired from show business to enter a monastery in 1951 as a passionist monk. He returned to Hollywood around one month later. He continued acting, but with fewer roles than he had at the peak of his career. He also began acting for the first time in the then-new entertainment medium of television. The switch did not always turn out successfully, for many shows were cancelled for various reasons in the early years of television. Hickman's ongoing efforts to reinvigorate his acting career were interrupted for two years while he served in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956.

In 1959 and 1960, Hickman appeared on younger brother Dwayne Hickman's CBS sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, playing his older brother Davey in three different episodes: "The Right Triangle" (1959), "Deck the Halls" (1959), and "Where There's a Will" (1960). In 1961, Hickman starred in a short-lived TV series The Americans. Aside from film and television, Hickman also starred in Broadway productions, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning play How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1963, substituting for star Robert Morse. In 1976, after a 17-year hiatus from movies, Hickman had a minor role as "Bill Herron" in the film Network.