Sterling Hayden (March 26, 1916 - May 23, 1986)
Sterling Hayden the 6' 5" actor with a brilliant mind and a distinctive "rapid-fire" baritone voice who starred in The Asphalt Jungle and played General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, switched from alcohol to marijuana and spoke about it late in his life.
As an OSS agent in WWII, Hayden received a Silver Star and a commendation from Marshal Tito. An early member of the Communist party, Hayden named names to the HUAC committee, a move he deeply regretted later. In 1963, he released his autobiography, Wanderer, which was praised as “beautiful” and “superb.”
Other memorable roles included Irish-American policeman Captain McCluskey in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), alcoholic novelist Roger Wade in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), and elderly peasant Leo Dalcò in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976).
“The main thing right now is to bring the booze under control,” Hayden told a Toronto Sun reporter in 1980. “Grass is all I do now. Grass and hash. Grass came into me and said take it easy. That’s why I love it so much.” Eight months after that interview, on April 16, 1981, Hayden was arrested at the Toronto International Airport after 30 grams of hashish was found in his pockets by RCMP officials. Charges were quickly dismissed. “The result here will be exceptional, but then the defendant is an exceptional man,” Judge Kenneth Langdon told the court.
In an appearance on The Tomorrow Show late in his life, he talked about starting to smoke grass and subsequently writing "for the joy of it." He said, "I used it quite diligently and beautifully for a long time" and found it enabled him to "keep the booze at bay." While he said he had tapered off from enjoying "the excitement, the glory, the beauty of the weed," he said, "To take something as benign as the weed and outlaw it is preposterous." When host Tom Snyder tried to say that alcohol and marijuana were mere distractions, Hayden begged to differ, quoting Baudelaire, who said "some of us have a taste for the infinite," and adding he didn't know if there was "a line of demarcation between distraction and just hard-driving, creative living.""
Hayden spent half of each year with his wife and children in Connecticut, and the other half living alone on a Dutch canal barge in France, called the Who Knows. In 1982, he was the subject of an acclaimed documentary, Pharos of Chaos, which showed his life aboard the Who Knows. The film on the actor’s life was his last appearance on screen. On May 1986, Hayden died following a lengthy battle with cancer.