Eric Fleming

Eric Fleming was an American actor, known primarily for his role as Gil Favor in the longrunning CBS television series Rawhide.

Fleming was born in Santa Paula, California, an only child with an unhappy childhood. Born with a club foot, he needed crutches to get around and was often severely beaten by his father. At the age of eight, he attempted to kill his father with a gun, which jammed. He ran away from home shortly after, fleeing to Los Angeles and then Chicago, where he lived roughly and associated with gangsters, doing odd jobs for them to make money. At the age of 11, after being wounded in a gunfight between some gangsters and hospitalized, he was returned home to his mother, who had recently divorced. During the years of the Depression, he dropped out of school and worked at various jobs until he joined the Merchant Marine, before joining the United States Navy in 1942 for World War II. He served as a Seabee in a naval construction battalion. He received severe facial injuries during a bet in which he was attempting to lift a 200pound weight and had to undergo extensive plastic surgery to reconstruct

Source: Wikipedia