Paul Hampton

Biography: American actor Paul Hampton started out a leading man in his first picture, Senior Prom (1959), a minor Columbia teen-oriented second feature distinguished only by its musical acts (Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Mitch Miller, Connee Boswell, Bob Crosby, Les Elgart, Freddy Martin) and the fact that its associate producer was the Three Stooges' Moe Howard! Hampton was still playing youngish men in 1969, when he portrayed a trigger-happy punk in the Clint Walker western More Dead Than Alive. Two years later, Hampton was back in frontier garb as a supporting player on the James Garner TV series Nichols. Paul Hampton survived the Hollywood jungles into the '70s and '80s, working in films enjoying critical prestige (he was fifth-billed in Diana Ross' Lady Sings the Blues [1972]) and other films beloved by no one except the Public (Hampton was the lead in director David Cronenberg's grisly They Came from Within [1975]).