Any list of impossible-not-to-love movie stars should have room at the top for George Hamilton. After all, the perpetually tan actor has been working for more than six decades (thanks to movies like Crime & Punishment USA and Love at First Bite, he’s a Golden Globe winner and three-time nominee) and became a Hollywood legend due to both his talent and his perpetually cool personal style.
These days the 80-year-old isn’t resting on his laurels; he has movies and TV shows in development, and he tells Town & Country, “I don’t want to just do a movie anymore, I want to create something and tell stories that I care about.” See below for more from that conversation on a recent afternoon in Beverly Hills.
In your movies you play unflappable guys. What’s an example of that in real life?
I remember I had a fistfight one night in Hollywood. It was the only fistfight I ever got into. This guy I knew got drunk and started showing off, got in my face in front of everyone. We stepped outside and he said, “How do you want it? Karate?” Before he finished naming three or four other things, he was on the floor—I had hit him and walked back into the party.
All of us have a moment when we realize who we want to be. When was yours?
I was at the studio one day, and Cary Grant was there doing North by Northwest. And I thought, God, that’s what I’d like to be.
You’re working on a movie about Sean Flynn, the actor and photographer son of Errol.
I want things to give my life gravitas, and that’s the movie about Sean Flynn. We met as teenagers in Palm Beach. One night when we were about 15 and both at boarding school, Errol Flynn showed up in New York and took us to dinner. To El Morocco, which wasn’t even a place to go to dinner, it was a nightclub. Sean and I showed up in our best Brooks Brothers blazers, and there was Errol Flynn with his girlfriend, who was maybe 17, and someone much older he brought as a date for Sean, who I now realize was a hooker.
There’s a passage in your memoir when you recognize, on a stranger in a restaurant, your own pants, which you had left behind in a young lady’s apartment when another fellow unexpectedly came home. Do you really know clothes that well?
Oh yeah. I can look across the room, see someone from behind, and know who it is from their clothes. There’s not much you can do about a suit, once it’s fitted to you. But how you wear it is all the difference in the world. Even when you’re jumping out a window.
Besides yourself, who is the best-dressed American man now?
It’s not done anymore. I don’t see it.
What kind of creative atmosphere do you prefer? Order or chaos?
The writer on Love at First Bite was a guy named Bob Kaufman, who was totally certifiable. He would get under the bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and part of his deal was that his breakfast would be served wherever he wanted it. I would find breakfast sitting right under the skirt of his bed, and he’d be under there. And I’d say, “Bob, you’ve got to get up.” And he’d say, “My life is over.” I’d say, “Bob, your life is not over, you’re going to shoot in an hour.” “No, I know it’s over,” and so on. And I said, “Look, until it’s over can you get this movie finished?” Every day we would start with a crisis like that—and I chose him.
What’s George Hamilton thinking about today?
I’m open for business now, and I want to do the right thing. It’s a weird feeling being 80 years old when you should be saying “Okay, adios, I’ve done it, got to go.” It’s taken me this long to get it together to do the things I really care about.
This story appears in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Town & Country.
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