Entry Category: Actors and Filmmakers - Starting with H

A Golden Globe and Academy Award nominee, Tess Harper has become a consummate actress known for portraying Southern women of grace and dignity. She is best known for roles in Tender Mercies and Silkwood. Tess Harper was born Tessie Jean Washam on August 15, 1950, in Mammoth Spring (Fulton County). She attended Arkansas State University–Beebe (ASU–Beebe), where she performed in several plays, as well as Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) in Springfield, where she graduated with a degree in education. She married Ken Harper in 1971; the couple divorced in 1976. In the late 1960s, Harper began acting in theater productions and made appearances in theme parks, dinner theater, children’s theater, and commercials. Her first feature film …

Ena Hartman is an unsung trailblazer of Hollywood whose smaller roles in 1960s media productions helped create a path for African Americans in film and television. African-American actresses working in the 1970s benefited from the trail Hartman helped blaze. Ena Hartman was born on April 1, 1935, in Moscow (Jefferson County). The daughter of sharecroppers, she was raised by her grandparents. At age thirteen, she moved to Buffalo, New York, to live with her mother. She dropped out of high school to open a restaurant, handling the duties of cook and waitress as she tried to earn money to go to New York City to become a model. She was discovered by a photographer in the lobby of a modeling …

Mark Lavon (Levon) Helm was best known as the drummer and singer for the Canadian rock group the Band. Following the demise of the Band, he continued to have a successful music career leading his own band, as well as acting in numerous motion pictures. Levon Helm was born on May 26, 1940, outside Elaine (Phillips County) to Nell and Diamond Helm. He had two sisters and one brother. He grew up in Marvell (Phillips County) working on the family cotton farm but was always encouraged to play and sing music at home and in church. Helm knew that he wanted to become a musician at age six, after seeing bluegrass musician Bill Monroe perform. He began playing guitar at …

Dick Hogan was a singer and actor whose entertainment career began in the mid-1930s and ended in the late 1940s. He is remembered mainly for his many film appearances during the 1940s, which included notable supporting roles in several popular war-themed motion pictures. Dixon Howard Hogan was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on November 27, 1917. His parents were Dixon Henry Hogan and Agnes Smith Hogan, and he had an older sister, Margaret. His father and an uncle, Ben M. Hogan, owned construction businesses that contracted for numerous Arkansas road construction projects. After graduating from Little Rock’s Central High School, he attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1934–35 before moving to California to further …

Personifying the rustic but savvy characterizations of his home state, Arthur Hunnicutt became one of the most sought-after character actors in Hollywood, being nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1952’s The Big Sky. Arthur Hunnicutt was born on February 17, 1910, in Gravelly (Yell County) and attended school in the Yell County area. He attended Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway (Faulkner County), now the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). The Depression forced him to drop out of college when he ran out of funds. Even so, Hunnicutt was already perfecting the ability to project his Arkansas drawl and persona into a character he played in many plays and movies. He began his motion picture career …