20 Old Hollywood Stars With Hobbies You’d Never Expect

Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr, star of Algiers and Samson and Delilah, did not spend much time at her dressing table at night. Concerned about the sinking of ships during World War II, Lamarr partnered with an American composer named George Antheil to build a radio set that sent its signal up and down 88 different frequencies so enemy forces could not easily block it. In 1942, Lamarr and Antheil got a patent for it. The Navy never used the invention during the war, but the concept eventually laid the groundwork for the kind of frequency-hopping technology that helped bring us Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

In 1949, Walt Disney, the animator whose company shared his name, was told by his physicians that he needed an outlet for his stress. So Disney constructed a rideable, steam-powered railway on his five-acre property, running more than 2,600 feet of track over a trestle and through a tunnel beneath his wife’s flowers. Disney built the railway himself and drove the train for invited guests until 1953, when a minor accident caused rides to cease. The line eventually became the nucleus of Disneyland.

Marlon Brando, best known for winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront, liked to play congas, but did not like having to retune each rim bolt one by one. With Grammy-winning percussionist Poncho Sanchez, he created several working prototypes in his home workshop for a device that could tune a complete drumhead using just one lever. He was awarded four U.S. patents for his invention between 2002 and 2004, but never saw the product go into commercial production due to high costs and his subsequent death.

Frankenstein’s monster himself, Boris Karloff, used to play cricket instead of scaring kids during his off-hours. In 1932, he formed the Hollywood Cricket Club, based in Burbank, with Sir C. Aubrey Smith, a former English Test cricket captain who had become an actor. Karloff was wicketkeeper and batsman for the team for many years, and helped administer the club. The Hollywood Cricket Club attracted such celebrities as Cary Grant and Errol Flynn. It also helped establish organized cricket in Southern California, a tradition that continues today.

Sammy Davis Jr., Rat Pack singer and star of Ocean’s 11, took lessons from Hollywood quick-draw coach Arvo Ojala, practicing with single-action revolvers loaded with wax bullets and blanks. He practiced until he could draw, cock, and fire in under a quarter of a second. Davis went on to enter and win fast-draw competitions and even did pistol-spinning tricks on TV, including on The Tonight Show. It wasn’t an act. It was a real skill.

Humphrey Bogart, the future star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, learned to play chess as a kid from his father and made dimes off tourists by hustling them in Central Park long before acting was paying his rent. He developed into a strong club player, with a rating estimated between 1900 and 2000, and demanded that Casablanca include a scene showing him at the board. Bogart played correspondence games during World War II with soldiers stationed abroad, but his mail was reportedly intercepted by the FBI, which suspected the chess moves might be a code of some sort. In 1955, he drew a game against grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky.

Harpo Marx, the silent harp player from Duck Soup, took croquet very seriously, engaging in pitched battles with Algonquin Round Table writers and other Hollywood stars, frequently wagering large sums on the matches. To keep his balls at the exact density and bounce he wanted, he built a special refrigerated room right in his house just to store them. After his death, Harpo Marx was inducted into the U.S. Croquet Association Hall of Fame in 1979.

Vincent Price was primarily famous for playing roles in horror films like House of Wax and The Fly, but he had studied art history at Yale before becoming an actor. In 1957, he and his wife, Mary, donated 90 works of art to East Los Angeles College, reasoning that fine art should be accessible not only to wealthy museum-goers, but to working-class students as well. By the time their donations ended, they had given over 2,000 works to E.L.A.C., establishing the first public art collection at an American community college. Today, the collection includes more than 7,000 items.

Sterling Hayden was not a studio guy. A noir star of The Asphalt Jungle and a master mariner himself, Hayden had served in the OSS during World War II. In 1959, during the middle of a custody dispute, he rebelled against Hollywood by taking off with his four small kids on a 98-foot schooner, sailing from San Francisco to Tahiti against the orders of the court. He later wrote about the trip in Wanderer (1963), which has gone on to become an important part of the canon of American sea literature.

Long before scuba became common knowledge, Errol Flynn, the dashing swashbuckler of films like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, was already an accomplished skin-diver and spearfisherman. He used his own 118-foot schooner, the Zaca, to hunt on the reefs around Jamaica, Mexico, and the Bahamas, plunging to more than 100 feet. In 1946, Flynn led a real scientific expedition in the Zaca down Mexico’s Pacific Coast, bringing aboard researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to gather samples of sea life.

Mildred Pierce Oscar-winner Joan Crawford was one of Hollywood’s busiest knitters, knitting between shots to calm her nerves and making blankets for the babies born to film crew members. While rehearsing The Women in 1939, Crawford reportedly banged together huge metal knitting needles in the dressing room to annoy Norma Shearer, a rival co-star in the picture. When Shearer complained about the noise to director George Cukor, Crawford dryly offered to send a telegram instead of stopping.

Gary Cooper, the two-time Oscar winner of Sergeant York and High Noon, was raised on his family’s Montana ranch and became a true marksman and hunter. He had a famous trophy room in his Hollywood home full of sporting rifles fitted by the top gunsmith firm, Griffin & Howe, but the mounted animals were the work of professional taxidermists like Earle Erik Heikka, not his own.

Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was actually Elda Furry by birth, but she had been in over 120 movies long before she turned her pen into the most feared weapon in Hollywood. She wore some 150 custom hats per year, spending thousands of dollars on elaborate headgear that included miniature razors, birdcages, and working radio parts, designed by avant-garde milliner Benjamin Green-Field. Her hats were so recognizable that one piece of fan mail was sent to The Hat, Hollywood.

Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian-born American actor most famous for his portrayal of Count Dracula, collected stamps as an escape from the role that defined him. Lugosi was a member of the American Philatelic Society in the 1930s and ’40s, where he collected rare European and international stamps and occasionally showed off his album during breaks with co-star Anne Nagel. Lugosi was eventually immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp in 1997.

Claude Rains, the four-time Academy Award nominee known to moviegoers for his role as Captain Renault in Casablanca, owned and operated a 300-acre farm, Stock Grange Farm in Chester County, Pa., for almost two decades between 1941 and 1958. When not filming movies, he would rise early to check on crops, apple trees, and livestock, as the farm had award-winning hogs and cattle. He described himself as a farmer first and an actor second, and he never gave up either job.

Buster Keaton, who directed and starred in Sherlock Jr. and The General, was such an ardent fan of baseball that he would shut down production for pickup games with his actors and crew. When applying for jobs at the studios, reports say applicants were asked not only if they could act, but if they could play ball. Keaton was a left-handed hitter and arranged several charitable games with major league players, including one in 1932 that attracted 8,500 spectators in Los Angeles. He even filmed a one-man show of baseball pantomimes inside an empty Yankee Stadium.

North by Northwest and Lolita’s handsome baddie James Mason also had his share of fur babies. He and his wife Pamela took in as many as nine stray felines at once, and brought them along on overseas trips by train and ocean liner. In 1949, the Masons released The Cats in Our Lives, which chronicled their years living with their feline friends. And Mason drew the illustrations himself.

Roddy McDowall, the former child star of How Green Was My Valley who went on to play an ape in the first three Planet of the Apes films, took up a camera as a teenager and never relinquished it. His celebrity acquaintances trusted him, allowing him to snap candid shots of Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, and Judy Garland. He published Double Exposure in 1966, combining his own photographs with words from fellow stars. Three more books came out over the following three decades.

Fred Astaire’s Top Hat dancing partner, Ginger Rogers, an Oscar winner, had a fondness for sundaes that began in her native Texas. In the late 1930s, she built a commercial-grade soda fountain into her Beverly Hills house, with working chrome pumps, taps, and tubs of ice cream. Not being a drinker, she enjoyed acting as a soda jerk for visiting A-listers. The entire operation was captured on camera by Life magazine in 1942.

Harold Lloyd, whose best-known role was as the man who hung precariously off the side of a skyscraper’s clock tower in Safety Last!, made 3D images for decades as founding president of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society. He photographed places he visited, people he met, and his friends, including a very famous picture of Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death, he had taken roughly 300,000 3D stereo slides.

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