Jennings Sturgeon

JENNINGS STURGEON biography (from askART): Born May 10, 1918 in Youngstown, Ohio, Jennings Woodrow Sturgeon spent his youth in Cranesville and Albion, Pennsylvania. He painted and displayed his mother's portrait in Northwestern High School.

He married his high school sweetheart, and they had one child.

The divorced and recruited for the army, he served in the Philippines as part of the Corps of Engineers to thwart the Japanese's last-ditch effort to expel the American invading forces. As a result Sturgeon suffered PTSD (Post Traumatic Syndrome) as we call it today.

He had a live-in partner until she left him with two daughters. He re-married with a widow, who has two children and together they had six more children.

Copper Sturgeon (son): "He was introduced to Philippine films by an uncle, Johnny Monteiro, sometimes using Juan Montero, actually John Montgomery. Moses Montgomery married my grandmother's sister and had children, one of them was Uncle John, Moses, Virginia, Richard etc...

Anyways, my father decided not go back to the USA, he thinks US is too much and stifles his creativity.

All of my father's children were trained as actors first, problem is that we are not all attractive to the camera, me for instance have a small face, making me look small and in the big screen, that would not do.

Then we are all trained as painters, because this was our world.

Our father would be too drunk to finish a painting, and the buyer is on the way, so we finish it, sign it and everything. Anyways, it was fun growing up. Growing up and knew no other way."

Jennings Sturgeon took his own life at his Quezon City home on 27th June 1966.

FILMOGRAPHY (in progress)

1962 - as Major Emmett Wilson in The Raiders Of Leyte Gulf (dir. Eddie Romero)

1964 - as the drunk and doomed painter Carlos in Ethan (dir. Michael duPont)

1964 - as "Bearded Man on Boat" in Flight To Fury (dir. Monte Hellman)

1965 - as the East German agent Alfred Kohner in Contra Senas (dir. Eddie Garcia)

GALLERY