John Hart(1917-2009)

Tall and athletic, and possessed of "movie star" good looks, John Hart acted on the stage of the renowned Pasadena Playhouse as a young man, before making his screen debut in a supporting role in director Cecil B. DeMille's big-budget The Buccaneer (1938). With these physical assets and early acting credentials, the native Los Angeleno seemed bound for bigger and better things but military service slowed his momentum: Returning to Hollywood after World War II, he found himself back at the proverbial starting line. Hart soon fell into the low-budget Western and serial rut, but he served with distinction in many youth-oriented productions: He was the perfect embodiment of radio-comic strip hero Jack Armstrong in a 1947 serial, rode the Western plains in 52 episodes of TV's The Lone Ranger (1949) (playing the Masked Man) and brought life to James Fenimore Cooper's courageous frontiersman Hawkeye in TV's Last of the Mohicans (1957). In more recent years, he worked behind-the-scenes (as a cameraman, post-production supervisor, dubbing supervisor, etc.).