Billy Chapin

Billy Chapin was an American child actor whose screen and television career ran from the 1940s into 1959. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, he began as an infant in uncredited film roles before earning the New York Drama Critics Award for most promising young actor of the year for the 1951 Broadway musical Three Wishes for Jamie. He played Christie Cooper in The Kid from Left Field (1953), then appeared in Tobor the Great (1954) and Naked Alibi (1954). In 1955 he took the role of John Harper in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a film that initially failed with critics and audiences but later became a classic and entered the National Film Registry in 1992. He also appeared in Violent Saturday (1955) and made his final big-screen appearance in Tension at Table Rock (1956), after which he worked only on television until 1959. He died in 2016.