Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
Electric Grandmother other shorts from Ray Bradbury	unknown	1962	14
13 Ghosts	Buck Zorba	1960	12
The Boy and the Pirates	Jimmy Warren	1960	12
Please Don't Eat the Daisies	David Mackay	1960	12
Houseboat	Robert Winters	1958	10
Ransom (1956)	Butchie Ritter	1956	8

Charles Herbert was a mildly popular 1950s child actor with a trademark sulky puss and thick, furrowed eyebrows, who was known for his inquisitive kid besieged by alien beings, including a robot, human fly and several house-haunting ghosts. He racked up over 20 films, 50 TV shows and a number of commercials during his youthful rein. He was born in the Los Angeles area. Noticed by a Hollywood talent agent while riding a bus with his mother, Charles began his career at age 4 on a 1952 TV show entitled Half Pint Panel.

This was followed by a series of amazingly high-profiled performances such as his blind child on an episode of Science Fiction Theater (1955). On the feature film front, Charles made an inauspicious debut in the Lucille Ball / Desi Arnaz comedy The Long, Long Trailer (1954). Although director Vincente Minnelli had handpicked him for the role, his part was completely deleted from the movie. Other tyke roles turned out more positively and in a variety of genres, including the film noir pieces The Night Holds Terror (1955) and The Tattered Dress (1957), the dramas Ransom! (1956) and No Down Payment (1957), and the comedies Houseboat (1958) (he and Paul Petersen played brothers oposite Cary Grant and Sophia Loren) and Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960).

His most recognized genre, however, was sci-fi, and he appeared in a number of films that are now considered classics of that genre. He started off in a bit part as a boy playing tug-of-war with a dead sailor's cap in The Monster That Challenged the World (1957). Up front and center, he came into his own playing the young son of dead scientific genius Ross Martin, whose brilliant brain is transplanted into what becomes the robot-like The Colossus of New York (1958). He loses another dad (David Hedison) to a botched experiment in The Fly (1958), also starring iconic master of macabre Vincent Price.

Lastly, Charles headed up the cast in the somewhat eerie but rather dull and tame William Castle spookfest 13 Ghosts (1960). Castle handpicked Charles for the child role and even offered the busy young actor top-billing over the likes of Donald Woods, Rosemary DeCamp, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner and Margaret Hamilton if he would appear in his movie. In this haunted house setting, Castle's trademark gimmick had audiences using 3-D glasses in order to see the ghostly apparitions.

He had another leading role in the fantasy adventure The Boy and the Pirates (1960), then film offers for Charles completely stopped. Growing into that typically awkward teen period, he was forced to subsist on whatever episodic roles he could muster up, including bits on Wagon Train (1957), Rawhide (1959), The Fugitive (1963) and My Three Sons" (1960). By the end of the 1960s, however, Charles was completely finished in Hollywood, having lost the essential adorableness that most tyke stars originally possessed.

Charles was the bread winner of his family since the age of 5. His father had a heart condition and could not work and his mother was her husband's caregiver. A sad Jackie Coogan-like chain of events happened to him. The only money put away for him until age 21 from his TV and film earnings was $1,700. It seems that if you signed a long-term contract (i.e., a TV show), they would put away part (approximately 5%) of your savings. Charles, however, never had a long-term contract so all his money went directly to his guardians/parents.

Unable to transition into adult roles, his personal life went downhill as well. With no formal education or training to do anything else and with no career earnings saved, he led a reckless, wanderlust life and turned to drugs. He has appeared from time to time at sci-fi film festivals.