Appearances

Title	Role	Year	Approx. Age
Tension at Table Rock	Jody Burrows	1956	13
Night of the Hunter 1955	John Harper	1955	12
Fury	Louis Baxter Jr.	1955	12
My Friend Flicka TV	Billy Rawlins	1955	12
Tobor the Great	Brian 'Gadge' Robertson	1954	11
The Kid From Left Field	Christie Cooper	1953	10

Every actor longs for an iconic role that will define his career, and Billy Chapin received that role in 1955 in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter.

By the time he made his first film in 1953, Billy was a veteran Broadway actor in the musical Three Wishes for Jamie (1951) where he earned the N.Y. Drama Critics Award as the most promising young actor of the year.

His first real screen role was as the "Diaper Manager" Christie Cooper, in The Kid from Left Field (1953), starring Dan Dailey, Anne Bancroft and Lloyd Bridges.

When Charles Laughton personally cast Billy Chapin for the role of young John Harper in his 1955 The Night of the Hunter, the boy was already considered an "acting technician" among the child performers of his time. After a private meeting with Billy in his Hollywood home, Laughton told Davis Grubb, the author of the original story: "What I want is a flexible child, and the boy is exactly that." Later, Laughton publicly offered praise especially for "...the strength of Chapin's innate ability to understand the construction of a scene, its impact and its importance."

Other roles included There's No Business Like Show Business (1955) along side Marilyn Monroe, My Friend Flicka 1955, and three appearances on Dragnet (1953-1955).

Billy was to do one final movie role in 1956, Tension at Table Rock. After a few more years in televison (Fury (1956-1959)) he called it quits.

In her own biography, his sister Lauren Chapin (Father Knows Best (1954-1960)) mentions Billy's alcohol and drug problems in his twenties and thirties.