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The artist...
Although he has been in show business since childhood, Dwayne Hickman has been studying art for many years and has painted extensively since the late 1980s.
Dwayne may best be remembered as Dobie Gillis, one of the most endearing television characters of the 1960s, but these days he is a critically acclaimed artist whose original oil paintings and limited edition prints are featured in galleries throughout the USA.
His romantic paintings of houses and cottages, with their bold use of light and colour, reflect his passion for art and architecture. In fact, they have become his trademark, and can be found in many private and corporate art collections in America.
Dwayne Hickman's art exhibitions are always a resounding success, helped in no small part by the enthusiastic coverage they receive in the print and electronic media.
The actor...
Dwayne Hickman began his acting career in 1940 at the age of six in The Grapes of Wrath and went on to appear in some of the best known movies of Hollywood's 'Golden Years'.
For five years during the 1950s he co-starred on television as Robert Cummings' teenage nephew in The Bob Cummings Show, and then returned to movies in Rally Round the Flag, Boys with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
But it was the early 1960s cult television classic, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, that made Dwayne Hickman a household name.
Working alongside Bob Denver (beatnik Maynard G. Krebs), Tuesday Weld (money-grubbing Thalia Meninger), and Warren Beatty (hauty rich-kid Milton Armitage), Dwayne's angst-ridden girl-obsessed Dobie became a spokesperson and hero for teens in every country where the series played.
In both the USA and Australia, the groundbreaking show was a smash hit, and today the name Dobie Gillis still evokes happy memories of youth among a generation of baby boomers who grew up with Dwayne in the '60s.
Following his enormous success as Dobie, Dwayne Hickman went on to star in a number of the 1960s' most popular movies, including the Academy Award winning comedy-western, Cat Ballou, with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin.
Then, in the 1970s, after a brief stint working for Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, he became a senior network executive at CBS Television.
He spent ten years in the corporate ranks supervising such hits as Maude, M*A*S*H and Designing Women, before leaving CBS to produce and direct his own projects, and to return to acting.
But his love of painting eventually won out and, these days, Dwayne Hickman's focus is almost entirely on art.
"Art has been a passion of mine since I was a small child. I had no heart for show business and spent most of my time off camera sketching houses, cars and landscapes," he reveals.
"Throughout my adult life I continued to sketch and discovered a love for painting in oils. Fifteen years ago my wife encouraged me to follow the dream of becoming an artist and to devote my talents and energy to my art work. It is through my painting that I have finally realised true joy and fulfillment."
Dwayne Hickman has his own 'celebrity website' at dwaynehickman.com.
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