Nicholas Hammond

Hammond was born on May 15, 1950, in Washington, D.C., the son of Colonel Thomas West Hammond, Jr. and Eileen Hammond (née Bennett). Thomas was an American of English descent and an officer in the US Army while Eileen was English and an actress of stage and screen; she starred opposite George Formby in the feature film Much Too Shy (1942). They met and married in London during World War II as his father was posted in the UK. Hammond has an elder brother, David (b. 1946 in Paris). After the war, they moved to the United States permanently. Because the colonel had an army job, the Hammond family moved many times to various army stations across the US before he attended college. Hammond began acting at age six. In 1971, Nicholas graduated from the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland, then from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he performed in the Triangle Club's A Different Kick (1968–1969). Col. Hammond died of heart attack in 1970.

Hammond was 11 years old when he made his acting debut as Robin Rhodes in the Broadway play The Complaisant Lover in 1961, playing alongside Michael Redgrave and Googie Withers. At the same time, Hammond began to shoot for the film Lord of the Flies (not released until 1963) which marked his film debut. After this, Hammond played what was to be his most notable big screen role: Friedrich von Trapp (the elder of the two boys) in the 1965 hit The Sound of Music. Hammond's first acting role as an adult was in Conduct Unbecoming (1970). In 1972, Hammond appeared as Peter Linder in Skyjacked. The following year, he made a guest appearance playing a teenager on The Brady Bunch in season 4, episode 90, "The Subject Was Noses", as the high school hunk Doug Simpson, who loses interest in Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick) after her temporary disfigurement from an injury by a football. Also in 1973, Hammond appeared in The Waltons episode "The Townie", playing Theodore Claypool Jr. Having transitioned to young leading man roles, Hammond spent several seasons in daytime soap operas such as General Hospital. He also appeared on many television shows of the 1970s including Hawaii Five-O. In the late 1970s, Hammond and fellow The Sound of Music alumnus Heather Menzies (who played Louisa von Trapp) performed in "The Judas Goat", an episode of the TV adaptation of Logan's Run. He also contributed to The Sound of Music Family Scrapbook.

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, being the first actor to play a live-action Peter Parker and the second live-action Spider-Man after Danny Seagren in the Spidey Super Stories segments on The Electric Company. Hammond described his approach to the character: "I liked the idea of taking a fantasy hero and making him believable as a person. I made it clear going into it that I wasn't interested in doing something that was just a camp joke." 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 due to its relatively weak showing in the lucrative adult demographic. The second season aired six episodes, each an hour long, in the fall of 1978 and winter of 1979, with a final two-hour episode in the summer of that year. Although Hammond played Peter Parker in the television series, in all of the scenes in which Spider-Man is seen performing stunts or without dialogue, stunt double Fred Waugh was filmed by a second camera unit.

After the Spider-Man series ended, Hammond guest-starred on a number of TV shows of the early 1980s—including The Love Boat, Magnum, P.I. and Murder, She Wrote—and played recurring roles on Falcon Crest and Dallas. After being cast as yachtsman Dennis Conner in the 1986 Australian TV miniseries The Challenge, about the 1983 America's Cup challenge, Hammond liked the country so much that he decided to stay. He later became an Australian citizen and then appeared in several television miniseries filmed in Australia. Among these was an important role as Burgess, an American World War II officer based in Far North Queensland in the major miniseries Fields of Fire, series I and II, set in the cane fields of tropical Australia. His character represented the gentler side of the culture clash between Australians and Americans. 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, 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 television film 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, Hammond portrayed director Sam Wanamaker in the Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Hammond married Laura Soli in 1980, and they divorced in 1984. He moved to Australia in the mid-1980s and now lives in Sydney, with the Australian actress Robyn Nevin. Hammond has remained close friends with his Sound of Music siblings, several of whom joined a multitude of other actors and co-stars for the 'Save the Rose Theatre' campaign's street event, amid talent from many international productions.