Biography
A classic Hollywood heavy, Hal Baylor made a half-century's worth of film and TV appearances, nearly all of them capitalizing on his imposing stature. The Midwesterner earned an athletic scholarship to Washington State and was a boxer and Marine before embarking on an acting career. His boxing skills served him well on two of his earliest films--"Joe Palooka in Winner Take All" and the classic noir film "The Set-Up," starring Robert Ryan. As boxer Tiger Nelson he had an on-screen bout with Ryan that remains a classic of the genre. He had several roles in war films, the most famous being in the John Wayne drama "Sands of Iwo Jima" in 1949, playing recruit Private "Sky" Choynski. He played another boxer in "Breakdown" and was a football player in "Jim Thorpe--All-American." He appeared with Wayne again in the 1953 adventure "Island in the Sky" and alongside Linda Darnell in the drama "This is My Love." Another signature part came in the war drama "The Young Lions," playing an anti-Semitic soldier who torments Montgomery Clift's character. By the 1960s his film roles had become infrequent, but he appeared regularly on TV in shows like "Bonanza" and the sci-fi classic "Star Trek." In the 1970s he returned to the big screen with small roles in the Western "One Little Indian" and the cult sci-fi film "A Boy and His Dog."
