Rand Brooks

Arlington Rand Brooks Jr. (September 21, 1918 – September 1, 2003) was an American film and television actor. Brooks was born in Wright City, Missouri. He was the son of Arlington Rand Brooks, a farmer. His mother and he moved to Los Angeles when he was four, though he continued to spend summers in Wright City. Brooks continued to make visits to his hometown of Wright City into the 1950s, up to and following the death of his father in 1950. His mother and his grandfather were actors. After leaving school, Brooks got a screen test at MGM and was given a bit part in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). His big fame came with his part as Charles Hamilton in Gone with the Wind (1939), a role which he later admitted he despised; he wanted to play more macho parts. He made $100 per week under contract at MGM, but when he was on loan to Selznick International Pictures for Gone with the Wind, he made $500 per week. After Gone With the Wind, he had relatively small parts in other movies including Babes in Arms, then a regular role as Lucky in the Hopalong Cassidy series of Westerns in the mid-1940s; Brooks succeeded Russell Hayden in the role. Among the films, which starred William Boyd as Hopalong, were Hoppy's Holiday, The Dead Don't Dream, and Borrowed Trouble. He received positive notice for his work in Fool's Gold, with Variety reporting that he did "an excellent job." In edited, half-hour versions of some of the films, he appeared in 12 of the 52 episodes of the Hopalong Cassidy tel…