Stroud returns
home to isles

Don Stroud has lived most of his nearly 62 years large, fast and bad, both on and off camera in his 30-year career as a villain in more than 100 motion pictures, 160 television shows and five TV series.

If his name doesn't grab your attention, his smooth, angular face will. After playing cocky, chip-on-the-shoulder characters in roles that embrace confrontation and physicality, the 6-foot-2 actor, perhaps the most successful from Hawaii, has returned home to nest with Teri, his wife of 23 years.

"It's a dream come true for me, for us," says the tanned and toned Stroud in his two-bedroom, ocean-view Hawaii Kai home. "I went away for a lot of years to make some money. And I did and I had a great time doing it, but I never forgot about Hawaii and coming home one day."

The couple has been here two months and is in the process of decorating. Dozens of framed photographs and film and TV memorabilia that will decorate Stroud's "Hawaii room" sit on the floor, ready to be put into place.

Stroud, who graduated from Kaimuki Intermediate and High schools, began his career in 1967 in "Games," starring Simone Signoret, James Caan and Katherine Ross. He immediately followed that with "Madigan" with Richard Widmark. A few of his other films include "Coogan's Bluff" (1968), "Bloody Mama" (1970), "Joe Kidd" (1972), "The Buddy Holly Story" (1978), "The Amityville Horror" (1979) and the James Bond feature "License to Kill" (1989).

"It all started one day in 1960 when I was sitting at Huddles restaurant in Waikiki and the producer for (Hawaii's first series) 'Hawaiian Eye' stopped to ask if I knew how to surf," said Stroud, who had won the Makaha Surfing Championships' junior division title that year. "I told him, 'Uh, yeah, I surf real good.'"

That was enough to win him a role as a stunt double for Troy Donahue in the TV series, which also starred Robert Conrad and Connie Stevens. Stroud even looked like the teen idol Donahue. (Singer/songwriter Kui Lee was the stand-in for Conrad.)

"I was one of the only haole kids working on Waikiki Beach," said Stroud, recalling his famed beachboy buddies Mud Warner, Steamboat, Blue Makua, Blackout and Rabbit Kekai. "I taught canoeing and surfing and worked on a catamaran. I had the blond hair and the tan, so I fit what they needed pretty good."

After the pilot was completed, Donahue and Conrad encouraged the high school junior from the Waialae-Kahala area to move to Hollywood.

"Troy said he'd help me out, and he did," Stroud said.

SHOW BUSINESS was already part of Stroud's heritage. He's the son of vaudeville great Clarence Stroud of the Stroud Twins and singer Ann McCormack, who toured the world with Frank Sinatra. Stroud's mother and stepfather Paul Livermore owned and operated the popular Embers Steak House and nightclub in Waikiki where Ann performed nightly.

In Los Angeles, Stroud got a valet job at the Whiskey A Go Go on Hollywood's Sunset Strip. A student of martial arts, he graduated to bouncer, then the club's assistant manager.

"I never had so much fun in my life," Stroud said. "I was tan and strong, and everyone was smoking the best pakalolo or was on LSD -- hey, this was the '60s. I can talk about it now because I've been clean and sober for 15 years."

Stroud became friends with actor Sidney Poitier, who helped him get an agent, Dick Clayton. Clayton's clients included James Dean, Michael Douglas, Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds. Clayton got him the "Games" part.

For 30 years, acting roles never stopped coming for Stroud. His TV appearances included parts in five "Hawaii Five-O" episodes and diverse series in genres like westerns ("Gunsmoke," "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman"), police/detective ("Adam-12," "The Rookies," "Barnaby Jones"), sci-fi ("Babylon 5," "Quantum Leap"), medical ("Marcus Welby, M.D."), courtroom ("Ironside") and "beach blanket bimbo" ("Charlie's Angels," "Baywatch," "The Dukes of Hazzard").

He starred in four TV series, notably "Mickey Spillanes' Mike Hammer" with Stacy Keach, and "New Gidget," in which he played the Kahuna.

Stroud flourished in second-lead and character roles, often cast as a short-fused detective or "just a good-looking bad guy," he says, laughing.

"I had to kidnap a girl to get her to kiss me," he says. "But this bad-guy thing really worked for me, and the bad guy always works with the stars."

He remembers sharing screen time with Cheryl Ladd on an episode of "The Streets of San Francisco."

"She's sitting in this convertible, and I go to the window and knock on it," Stroud says. "Then I take a knife, cut the top of the convertible and forcibly kiss her. God, this was Cheryl Ladd, and long before she was a star."

Stroud leans back in his deck chair staring at Diamond Head while reminiscing about the beachboys who cared for him when his parents weren't around. He also recalled uncrowded surf spots, from Makaha, Sunset Beach, Canoes, Publics and Ala Moana Bowls to the destroyed Garbage Hole, where Magic Island now stands.

"So many guys are all gone," says the one-time Waikiki Surf Club paddler. "It seems like I've been gone a million years, yet it was just like yesterday."

SO HOW DID an untrained, cocky young man make a career in Hollywood?

In addition to possessing natural good looks, Stroud had a relaxed on-camera presence.

"I sort of instinctively knew that you had to be natural on camera, yourself, to be totally in the moment of the scene and not feel the camera presence," he said. "See, I really knew how to concentrate, and I think surfing did that for me.

"I was always relaxed acting. It was so easy I started drinking."

And smoking marijuana and drinking volumes of vodka, a half-gallon a day.

"I started enjoying working loaded, but I was getting away with it. I was playing guys who were loaded, drunks and drug addicts, so who could guess I wasn't acting?"

Stroud was arrested more than a dozen times for drunken driving. His annual insurance premium peaked at $8,000.

Stroud doesn't make excuses for his lifestyle, saying "party was the call" in 1960s and '70s Hollywood. "I was surrounded by all of it," he said. "If you didn't have any cocaine, I didn't want anything to do with you."

He almost married Shelly Winters, with whom he co-starred in "Bloody Mama."

"I was a lot younger, and she introduced me to limousines, Lear jets and her penthouse near the Dakota (in New York), where John Lennon was her neighbor," Stroud says.

He posed nude for Playgirl in 1973. "I got paid $10,000 for that. ... Burt Reynolds and I were two of the few people that got paid," he said.

REALITY CAUGHT UP with Stroud while he was visiting a friend in a West L.A. hospital. Flirting with a nurse in the room, Stroud jokingly asked her to take his blood pressure.

"She said, 'You should go see your doctor because you're going to have a stroke,'" he recalled. "'Your blood pressure is almost off the chart.'"

Denial didn't work this time.

"Want to hear about denial?" he says. "How about wrapping your car around a telephone pole and saying that's nothing? I couldn't see myself a stroke victim."

Stroud quit smoking, drinking and drugging that day.

"I miss the old days, but they made me an offer I couldn't refuse: life," he says, admitting that he had started to dislike his drug- and alcohol-fueled personality: mean, belligerent and "always itching for a fight."

"The booze really brought me to my knees," he says. "Success is the hardest thing in the world to obtain; failure is the easiest."

These days, Stroud is all about cheerfulness, enthusiasm and gratefulness. He exercises daily, alternating between tai chi in Kapiolani Park with Master Ho -- an expert in the Wu style -- yoga, swimming and surfing. Stroud had studied kempo in the '60s in Palolo Valley with Adriano Emperado, who established the fabled Kajukenbo Emperado Institute, and in 2004 was inducted into the Black Belt Hall of Fame in Las Vegas for his 45 years of kempo training.

Stroud boasts that he's "basically retired" and enjoying "a great pension" from the Screen Actors Guild and weekly residuals. But the acting bug hasn't been completely squashed.

"There's this great part in 'Lost' as the head pirate, the head bad guy, and let me tell you, I know bad guys," Stroud says. "I think I should let them know I'm in Hawaii.

"I'd love that role."