Partner Ray Stricklyn, John Carlyle
Craighill Fowler, aka Craig Hill (March 5, 1926 – April 21, 2014) played P.T. Moore, the co-owner of a helicopter chartering company, in the 1950s syndicated TV adventure series Whirlybirds.
Hill also appeared as the prison-bound first-time offender at the beginning of
the Kirk Douglas cop classic Detective Story (1951).
Craighill Fowler was the son of Freeman Fowler and Charlotte H. Craghill (1903-1995). She remarried after Freeman's death to Lane Sayer. Actor Ray Stricklyn says that he met Hill about Christmas 1955, and the two spent a year together in a homosexual relationship. Sticklyn says he broke up with Hill after he discovered Hill was seeing another man. John Carlyle worked regularly on television, on stage in and around Los Angeles, and toured in summer stock. In one production, he appeared with Tom Drake, to whom Judy Garland sang "The Boy Next Door" in Meet Me In St. Louis. He and Drake would have a one-night-stand, which is ironic, given his later relationship with Garland. Through Henry Willson, he met Craig Hill, with whom Marlene Dietrich once had a fling. Over Willson's objections, the two began an affair and moved in together. Willson lost interest in them, and their careers suffered.
Whirlybirds, from Desilu Productions, aired for three seasons and 111 half-hour episodes, from February 1957 to January 1960. Moore and his partner, Chuck Martin (Kenneth Tobey), flew Bell 47 light helicopters out of the fictional Longwood Field in Southern California to aid in search-and-rescue operations or to fly rich clients around. The idea for making a helicopter the star of a TV series was spawned by a January 1956 episode of the Desilu sitcom I Love Lucy in which Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) commandeers a Bell 47 to fly her to a trans-Atlantic ocean liner that had sailed without her. Robert Altman, in his first regular gig, directed 19 episodes of Whirlybirds.
Later, Hill moved to Spain and starred in a series of Westerns filmed in that country and throughout Europe, including Hands of a Gunfighter (1965), Fifteen Scaffolds for the Killer (1967), Seven Pistols for a Massacre (1967), Bury Them Deep (1968), And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave (1972) and My Horse, My Gun, Your Widow (1972). A native of Los Angeles, Hill began as a contract player at Fox. He had roles in such films as All About Eve (1950), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and, as one of Marine captain James Cagney's lieutenants, in John Ford's What Price Glory (1952). Hill's résumé also includes the films The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), Siege at Red River (1954), Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), You Have to Run Fast (1961) and The Swinger (1966) with Ann-Margret, and the TV series My Little Margie, The Great Gildersleeve, Death Valley Days, Hawaiian Eye and The F.B.I.
In 1990, Hill married Spanish fashion model and actress Teresa Gimpera (born 1936), his co-star in the 1966 Spanish film Black Box Affair.
Craig Hill died on April 21, 2014, the Spanish newspaper Ara reported. He was 88. He died in Barcelona, family members told the newspaper. He had lived in Spain for decades.
My published books:
