As an actor, Ben Chapman never landed a star-making role. Far from it. He had small parts in only a few films, including an uncredited bit part in "Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki."
But Chapman nevertheless achieved a degree of movie immortality -- and he did it without uttering a word of dialogue or even showing his face.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, March 20, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 80 words Type of Material: Correction
Chapman obituary: The obituary of Ben Chapman, who played the title character in the 1954 film "Creature From the Black Lagoon," in the Feb. 24 California section said that as a Marine in the Korean War he received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. Chapman did not receive the awards he claimed to have earned, according to Marine Corps officials and a copy of Chapman's military Report of Separation, the Marine Corps Times reported this week.
The 6-foot-5 ex-Marine played the title character in "Creature From the Black Lagoon," the classic 1954 3-D monster movie that quickly developed a cult following that has endured.
Chapman, a retired Honolulu real estate salesman, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, said his longtime companion, Merrilee Kazarian. He was 79.
For Chapman, playing the so-called Gill Man in "Creature" was the role of a lifetime.
"In the big picture, he achieved a small amount of success as an actor, but for baby-boomer 'monster kids,' he was the bomb," Tom Weaver, author of the 1992 "making of" book "Creature From the Black Lagoon," told The Times on Friday. "I wouldn't hesitate for a second to call it the most famous Hollywood monster movie of the '50s," Weaver said.
Chapman, who was briefly a contract player at Universal in the early '50s, always said landing the Creature role was "a matter of being in the right place at the right time." He was on the studio lot one day, when he was called into a casting director's office.
"They were looking for an imposing creature, and at 6-feet-5, I filled the bill," he told the Palm Beach Post in 2003.
In the film, which stars Richard Carlson and Julie Adams, a scientific expedition venturing along the Amazon River in search of fossils of a legendary prehistoric man-fish unexpectedly encounters a live specimen, who terrorizes them but falls for the expedition's only female (played by Adams).
"The Creature suit was a one-piece outfit that zipped down the back with dorsal fins, hands that were gloves, feet that were like boots," Chapman told the Honolulu Observer several years ago.
"They had me lay on a table, take a complete plaster of Paris mold of my body, then design this costume. I couldn't lose or gain weight, or it wouldn't fit right. The whole experience was like climbing into a large body stocking with creases."
Chapman told Weaver that he got so hot on the sound stage wearing the costume, which included a large helmet-like head, that someone had to stand by with a water hose to cool him off.
