Lifeguard recruited to portray the creature in ‘Black Lagoon’
Ricou Browning never planned to become a monster. But in 1953, while he was working as a lifeguard at Florida’s Wakulla Springs, the 23-year-old was enlisted to help a group of filmmakers scout locations for an upcoming movie, “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”
As a favor, he jumped into the spring’s sapphire-hued waters for a test shot, showing off a graceful swimming stroke that he had developed since childhood, while diving for coins at the beach and performing stunts in underwater shows.
Two weeks later, he got a call from director Jack Arnold. “We like the way you swim,” Arnold told him. “You want to be the creature?”
Mr. Browning, who died Feb. 27 at 93, saw no reason to pass up a $600-a-week paycheck. Diving headfirst into show business, he donned a cumbersome full-body suit to play the scaly, fleshy-lipped Gill-man, the amphibious humanoid who terrorizes actress Julie Adams in “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).
Over the next three decades, he made a career out directing and acting in aquatic sequences, working with seals, dolphins, sharks and many waterlogged celebrities. He swam with Esther Williams for the musical romance “Jupiter’s Darling” (1955), doubled for actor Jerry Lewis in the Navy comedy “Don’t Give Up the Ship” (1959) and guided Sean Connery through an undersea fight scene for the James Bond movie “Thunderball” (1965), overseeing a similar sequence when the movie was remade as “Never Say Never Again” (1983).
He also directed underwater scenes for the hit adventure series “Sea Hunt” (195861), starring Lloyd Bridges as a former Navy diver, and came up with the idea for the family film “Flipper” (1963), about a boy who befriends an injured wild dolphin. Even the golf comedy “Caddyshack” (1980) featured a contribution from Mr. Browning, who directed a countryclub pool sequence in which a Baby Ruth candy bar, misidentified as “doody,” sparks as much panic as the shark in “Jaws.”
Mr. Browning eventually started directing movies of his own, including the unlikely action film “Mr. No Legs” (1978), which involved a double amputee with twin shotguns built into his wheelchair.
But he remained best known for “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” which was scorned by critics initially but entered the monster-movie canon alongside Universal movies about Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s monster.
“It’s funny how it works out,” Mr. Browning told the Miami Herald in 1993. “It’s kind of a cult thing, I guess. I probably earned less money on that than anything I ever did.”
“Creature From the Black Lagoon” was filmed in 3-D and set in the Amazon, where Adams’ character, Kay Lawrence, accompanies two scientists (Richard Carlson and Richard Denning) on an expedition, only to dive into a lagoon and fall into the webbed hands of the Gill-man.
The character was played on land by another, more physically imposing actor, Ben Chapman, while Mr. Browning appeared in all the water sequences. Many featured his friend Ginger Stanley Hallowell, who played Adams’ underwater double and appeared with Mr. Browning in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, in which the Gill-man stalks Kay through the water, swimming under her before reaching out to graze her leg.
By today’s Hollywood standards, Mr. Browning’s costume was fairly primitive, made of foam rubber and latex via a mold of his body.
“It was kind of like swimming in your overcoat,” he told Tom Weaver, a horror film scholar.