Nicholas Hammond is an American-Australian actor, writer and director. He was born on May 15, 1950, in Washington, D.C., to an American father and an English mother. He moved to Australia in the mid-1980s. He later became an Australian citizen and now lives in Sydney.
Hammond was 11 years old when he made his acting debut as Robin Rhodes in the Broadway play The Complaisant Lover in 1961. At the same time, he began to shoot for the 1963 film Lord of the Flies, which marked his film debut. After this, Hammond played what was to be his most notable screen role: Friedrich von Trapp (the elder of the two boys) in the 1965 hit The Sound of Music. After making the transition from juvenile to young leading man, Hammond spent several seasons in daytime soaps such as General Hospital. He also appeared on many television shows of the 1970s including Hawaii Five-O.
From 1977 to 1979, Hammond played the role for which he is perhaps best known, as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the television series The Amazing Spider-Man. After the Spider-Man series ended, Hammond guest-starred on a number TV shows of the early 1980s, including The Love Boat, Magnum, P.I., Murder, She Wrote, and he played recurring roles on Falcon Crest and Dallas. Later he had an important role as an American WWII officer based in Far North Queensland, in the major miniseries Fields of Fire, set in the cane fields of tropical Australia. Hammond also guest-starred in various Australian television series, including satirical television programs such as BackBerner and CNNNN, the science fiction program Farscape, and dramatic series such as The Flying Doctors, MDA and the Australian/USA co-production Mission: Impossible (which was filmed in Australia).
In 2005, Hammond portrayed television producer Aaron Spelling in Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure, a fictionalized television movie based on the creation and behind the scenes production of Dynasty. Hammond is a writer for Australian television, having written both the miniseries A Difficult Woman and the TV movie Secret Men's Business. In 2009, he made his directing debut with Lying Cheating Bastard, a play he co-wrote with magician James Galea. In 2019, he portrayed director Sam Wanamaker in the Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
