BILLY CHAPIN

4 Dec

(28 December 1943 – 2 December 2016)

The child actor Billy Chapin had a film and TV career that lasted about eight years up to 1958. He had uncredited appearances as a baby and a tot in the mid-1940s before television took hold in 1952. His first film, Affair With a Stranger (1953) starred Jean Simmons, his next, The Kid From Left Field had Dan Dailey and Anne Bancroft. He also worked with Dailey on There’s No Business Like Show Business, playing the Johnnie Ray character aged ten. Tobor the Great was a space age tale of robots, Naked Alibi was a film noir with Sterling Hayden, A Man Called Peter starred Richard Todd, and Violent Saturday was another film noir.

Chapin will, however, be mainly remembered for playing the boy in The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s only directorial outing for which he personally selected the boy on account of his incredible expertise in film acting. Chapin’s last film was a B-western, Tension at Table Rock in 1956. For his stage debut in Three Wishes for Jamie in 1951, Chapin won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for most promising newcomer.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

BILLY CHAPIN

PETER VAUGHAN

FRITZ WEAVER