Nicholas Hammond (born May 15, 1950) is an American actor best known for his roles as Friedrich von Trapp in the film The Sound of Music, and as Peter Parker/Spider-Man on the CBS television series The Amazing Spider-Man. He also appeared on the TV show The Brady Bunch as Doug Simpson, who breaks a date with Marcia after a football hits her nose causing it to swell.
The son of actress Eileen Bennett, Hammond was 10 when he made his first movie appearance in Lord of the Flies.
Besides his subsequent work as Spider-Man, Hammond's most visible screen role was as Friedrich von Trapp in the 1965 megahit The Sound of Music. During the filming of The Sound of Music he grew six inches, from 5 ft 3in to 5 ft 9in. In 1972 he starred as Peter Linder in Skyjacked alongside Walter Pidgeon and Charlton Heston. In 1973, he made a memorable guest appearance on The Brady Bunch as the high school BMOC Doug Simpson, who loses interest in Marcia after her tragic football accident (when she said, "Oh, my nose!"). After making the transition from juvenile to young leading man, he spent several seasons in daytime soaps such as General Hospital. He has also appeared on many television shows of the 1970s including Hawaii Five-O.
He remains close friends with all six of his Sound of Music siblings; in fact, during their reunion on the 40th anniversary DVD, he went so far as to say, "You're my best friends in the world". In late 1970s, Hammond re-joined fellow The Sound of Music alumna Heather Menzies (who played Louisa von Trapp) for one episode of the TV adaptation of Logan's Run.
Nicholas Hammond is a graduate of Princeton University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the "Great Odes of John Keats" at the same time that he was appearing eight times a week as the lead in a play on Broadway.
Spider-Man
Hammond starred in the The Amazing Spider-Man TV series from 1977 to mid 1979. The series aired sporadically on CBS with 13 episodes airing over two seasons. A pilot movie appeared in the fall of 1977, with the series returning as a mid season replacement for five episodes in the spring of 1978. While the show did well in the ratings, CBS was unwilling to commit to a regular timeslot. The second season aired six hour long episodes in the fall of 1978 and winter of 1979, with a final two-hour episode concluding in the summer of that year. Hammond was the first actor to portray Peter Parker and Spider-Man in live-action. (The Electric Company aired "Spidey Super Stories" starting in 1974, the first live-action portrayal of Spider-Man, but the serials did not feature Peter Parker.) Even though Hammond played Peter Parker in the television series, in all of the scenes in which Spider-Man is seen performing stunts or without dialogue, a stunt double was filmed by a second camera unit.
Later career
Hammond moved to Australia in the mid-1980s, after being cast as yachtsman Denis Connor in an Australian TV miniseries of the time, and decided to stay. Since then, he has appeared in several television miniseries that have been filmed in Australia, including Moby-Dick, On the Beach and Salem's Lot. Hammond had a starring role, as "Sir Ivor Creevy-Thorne", in Mirror, Mirror, an Australia/New Zealand extended miniseries (a complete story of 20 serialised episodes, with cliffhangers between each of the episodes). Hammond also guest-starred in various Australian television series, including satirical television programs such as BackBerner and CNNNN, and the science fiction program Farscape, and also dramatic series such as The Flying Doctors, MDA and the Australian / United States co-production Impossible (which was filmed in Australia).
In 2005 Hammond portrayed television producer Aaron Spelling in The Making of a Guilty Pleasure, a fictionalized television movie based on the creation and behind the scenes production of the 1980s prime time soap opera Dynasty.
Hammond is also a writer for Australian television, having written both the critically acclaimed mini-series A Difficult Woman and the TV movie, Secret Men's Business, to this day the highest rated show ever aired on television by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2009 he made his directing debut with the highly successful "Lying Cheating Bastard" a play he co-wrote with magician James Galea. He lives in Sydney with his girlfriend, Robyn Nevin.
