Vintage Hunk: Ray Danton

Ray Danton was never a major star and is pretty much forgotten today. He had a few starring roles, including The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, and he eventually became a well respected director. Dark haired, well built, and possessing a great baritone voice, Danton was an imposing figure and one of the sexiest men to ever grace a movie screen. He usually played villains, and his sex appeal was in direct contrast to the drab, bland, Eisenhower years when he started.

Born Raymond Kaplan in New York City in 1931, Danton was a child radio actor and did a number of stage roles, including the London production of Mister Roberts. After serving in Korea, Danton signed a contract at Universal Pictures playing an Indian in his first film, Chief Crazy Horse. However, his first important role in a film was at MGM in the Susan Hayward biopic I'll Cry Tomorrow. Danton played David, the love of singer Lillian Roth's life. When he dies young, Lillian turns to drink and her downward spiral begins. Susan Hayward was magnificent as the alcoholic singer, winning an Oscar nomination, and Danton as her incredibly touching and handsome doomed suitor certainly helped the overall film.

Moviegoers (including myself) soon learned that Danton was much more fun and sexy when playing bad guys. Growing up in the late 1950s and early '60s, I was bored with the blond and bland dolls like Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue. I started looking for Danton's films because he was dark and dangerous. I loved him in the Dorothy Malone Too Much, Too Soon where he plays a bum husband who enjoys hitting tennis balls at his lovely wife. In two of the best B films of the 1950s he played a serial rapist and then a mental patient; in The Beat Generation, the great Film Noir Encyclopedia lauds Danton's performance as the "aspirin kid rapist" as "icily self assured," while Danton is equally mesmerizing in The Night Runner, a real gem of a film where he plays an escaped mental patient who ends up at a Florida motel involved with the owner's daughter.

Danton's best starring role was in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, a neglected gem that shows the actor at his very best: virile, tough and sexy. He followed this plum role with The George Raft Story, but unfortunately this biopic had to fictionalize much of its plot as the real story would have produced numerous lawsuits.

In 1954 Danton married gorgeous Julie Adams, a beautiful fellow Universal player, who was the creature's love interest in the camp classic Creature from the Black Lagoon. They had met when Danton was testing for a role in Adams' film Six Bridges to Cross. The couple had two sons and divorced in 1981.

The sad truth is that Danton came to Hollywood at the wrong time. Had he arrived in the early 1940s or late 1960s, he might have become a much bigger star. The studio system was dying when he arrived in the '50s and Universal (except for Rock Hudson) did not have much star making power.

Danton died of a kidney ailment in 1992. He was only 60 years old. He had become a very successful television director and seemed destined for a long career behind the camera. While many, including his son Mitchell, would say we could only speculate on what made Danton such a special presence, as a closeted gay teenager I knew the truth. Ray Danton was dark and dangerous and oozed a smoldering sex appeal. Coupled with that great voice and fantastic body, he was a talented actor who projected a forbidden intensity that was alien to the sunny, vacuous mid-century America.