Tim Holt

Tim Holt was an American film actor perhaps best known for co-starring in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Born Charles John Holt III in Beverly Hills, California, he was the son of actor Jack Holt and his wife, Margaret Woods. Holt was sent to study at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, from which he graduated in 1936. Immediately afterward, he went to work in the Hollywood film business.

In 1938 at the age of 19, Holt, after five minor roles, landed a major role under star Harry Carey in The Law West of Tombstone. It was the first of the many Western films he made during the 1940s. During this time his sister, Jennifer Holt, also became a leading star in the western film genre.

After playing young Lieutenant Blanchard in the 1939 classic Stagecoach, Tim Holt had one of the leading roles in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He also starred as a Nazi in Hitler's Children (1943). After making this film, he became a decorated combat veteran of World War II, flying in the Pacific Theatre with the United States Army Air Force as a B-29 bombardier. He returned to films after the war, appearing as Virgil Earp to Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in the John Ford western My Darling Clementine.

Holt was next cast in the role that he is probably most remembered for (in a film in which his father also appeared in a small part)—that of Bob Curtin to Humphrey Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Before the film was released, Holt did another four westerns and afterward made two dozen more up until 1952. He was then absent from the screen for five years until he starred in a less-than-successful horror film, The Monster That Challenged the World, in 1957. Over the next 16 years, he appeared in only two more motion pictures.

In 1973, at the age of 54, Tim Holt died from bone cancer in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he had been managing a radio station. He was interred in the Memory Lane Cemetery in Harrah, Oklahoma.