Charles Herbert - Career

Career

What followed included roles in such popular and cult films as The View from Pompey's Head (1955); The Night Holds Terror (1956); These Wilder Years (1956), with James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); The Colossus of New York (1958); The Fly (1958); Houseboat (1958); The Man in the Net (1959), with Alan Ladd; The Five Pennies; Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960) and 13 Ghosts (1960), in which producer/director William Castle gave him top billing at the age of 12 in order to secure his services.

Herbert's final feature film and starring role was in The Boy and the Pirates (1960), produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon (Mr. B.I.G.), the master of giant monster films, co-starring his daughter Susan. Herbert and Susan Gordon had previously worked together in The Man in the Net (1959), the hospital scene in The Five Pennies (1959) and a TV pilot episode entitled The Secret Life of John Monroe (aka The Secret Life of James Thurber). The 30-minute unsold pilot aired as the "Christabel" episode of Alcoa/Goodyear Playhouse, June 8, 1959. Very rarely seen, The Boy and the Pirates was released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as a Midnite Movies double DVD set with the more recent Crystalstone (1988), on June 27, 2006. An interest in pirate films was generated by Walt Disney Company's theatrical release of Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, on July 7, 2006.

During his peak, he was performing non-stop with multiple projects completed each year. By 1959, Herbert had achieved a lofty place among the most desired and highest paid child actors of his time, making nearly $1650 per week. He had established for himself both the reputation and the nickname of "One-Take Charlie." Of his acting style, one reviewer described Herbert as, "Sincere, accurate, ever over-annunciated at times, like a storybook character come to life. An extraordinary child actor by any standard. Herbert’s intense emotive quality is very much of the method acting school, highly unusual in such a young performer."

Herbert's work had him opposite Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, David Niven, Vincent Price, Johnny Carson, Donna Reed, Doris Day and Ross Martin, for all of whom he has high praise for their treatment of him. "Anybody who is in that category (a well-known actor) who is nice to the children is a nice person. 'Cause I worked with some who were not. Children and animals are not big favorites with movie stars."

Starring screen roles in the 1950s soon evaporated and Herbert was relegated to TV appearances in the 1960s. Growing into that typically awkward teen period, he was forced to subsist on whatever episodic roles he could muster, including bits on Wagon Train (1957), Rawhide (1959), The Twilight Zone (1962), The Fugitive (1963), Hazel (1963), Family Affair (1966) and My Three Sons (1966).

Herbert's career amassed twenty feature films, over fifty TV shows and a number of commercials during his youthful 14-year span.