Biography for
Clu Gulager More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

16 November 1928, Holdenville, Oklahoma, USA

Birth Name

William Martin Gulager

Height

5' 11" (1.80 m)

Spouse

Miriam Byrd-Nethery

(1952 - 6 January 2003) (her death) 2 children

Trivia

Father, John Gulager, was a Broadway actor-vaudevillian who worked with George M. Cohan.

Got nickname from his father for the clu-clu birds who were nesting at the Gulager home at the time Clu was born.

Clu and his wife, Miriam Byrd-Nethery, had two sons - John Gulager, born in 1958 and Tom Gulager, born in 1965.

Signed with Universal in the 1960s as a contract player.

Revitalized his career in the 1980s in scores of horror flicks that took advantage of his ever-growing, wild-eyed eccentricities.

Started out in experimental theatre in Paris under the guidance of actor Jean-Louis Barrault.

He was in the Marines, stationed at Camp Pendleton from 1946 to 1948.

He grew up an only child on his alcoholic uncle's farm near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Clu (the nickname means "Red Bird") is part Cherokee and is Will Rogers' cousin.

Mentor and longtime friend of Patrick Thomas.

Attended Northeastern State College, Tahlequah, Oklahoma (now Northeastern State University) in the late 1940s.

Friends with: Robert Fuller, James Drury, Doug McClure, John Smith, Clint Walker, David Carradine and Clint Walker.

Was Earl Hamner Jr.'s first choice for the male lead role in "Falcon Crest" (1981) that starred Jane Wyman. He appeared in the pilot episode "The Vintage Years," but was not rehired, therefore, Robert Foxworth took over the role until his departure in 1987.

Personal Quotes

I don't have fun acting. I don't enjoy acting. I think acting is very painful. There may be those joy boys and joy girls who claim that acting is the stuff of life, but I think most artists find that their art is very painful and very laborsome and very difficult under the best of circumstances, almost a killing kind of process. You can have fun during a picture but there's also a great deal of creative pain involved in something like this for me. There's not much happiness in the creative process.

Those with obsessions never learn. Those with a compulsion to make films are fucked in the beginning, fucked in the middle, and fucked in the end. You can call it madness, you can call it being an artist, or you can call it ruining your life. But we have not learned one God-damned thing.

We need to laugh, we need to be scared, we need to hug our girl in the theater. It lightens the load of this crummy life.