Description
I love to draw interesting faces—strange, bizarre, gaunt, freakish—anything but conventionally attractive. I’ve always seen beauty in the grotesque. No one has ever fit the bill better than the wonderfully distorted mug of film actor Rondo Hatton (1894–1946). He suffered from a disfigurative disease called acromegaly, which caused his face to morph into a bizarre caricature. As a child, I thought, “Imagine, a horror movie actor who didn’t need makeup.”
But Rondo was more than just a memorable face. Hatton and Tor Johnson have been my muses, and I’ve been drawn to—and drawn—their distinctive faces many times over 40 years. This portrait will appear on the cover of Scott Gallinghouse’s new Hatton bio, Beauty Within the Brute (published by BearManor Media). I also wrote the book’s Afterword, and many of my vintage works featuring Rondo will be reproduced in the book.
— Drew Friedman