- Birth nameThomas Hanley
- Thomas Handley's father, a longshoreman, was blackballed for opposing corrupt union leaders. He disappeared when Handley was 4 months old, and may have been murdered by the gang that controlled the New York docks.
Handley was initially hired to feed the pigeons on the set of On the Waterfront (1954), but Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had him audition for the movie.
He went on to become a longshoreman himself, and in 2002 was elected recording secretary of his union after the leadership was ousted for corruption.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Kevin L.
- Still active on the New Jersey ports and lives in Bayonne, New Jersey.
- His surname was misspelled as "Handley" on the credits of "On the Waterfront".
- Retired in 2009.
- He finally got a second acting gig in 2010, at the age of 70, after the director of an independent drama called "Hunting Season" tracked him down to play an elderly character named "Pops".
- We were able to pay our rent for a year or so and eat normally, buy some clothes. I later learned that if I had joined the actors' union, I would have made more and received residuals for years. But it would have cost $70 we just didn't have.
- My mother wasn't very knowledgeable about show business. She was snowed by a manager who promised to get me all kinds of roles. I appeared on Red Buttons' TV show, and there was a mix-up about my getting paid. After that I never got any acting work at all.
- My father was murdered when I was four months old. We were living in Greenwich Village in 1939, and he just disappeared from the docks. They never found his body, but everybody knew he was killed.
- Marlon Brando was a great guy, a lot of fun, just like a regular guy from the streets who took the PATH train instead of a limousine to the set. It was freezing, and they had these big parkas they passed around. I have pictures of me with those parkas, and a picture of me and Marlon Brando and my mother. I was a 14-year-old kid, and I was in awe of people who I had seen in the movies. Karl Malden was a real sweetheart of a guy. He would tutor me in what I should watch out for in people.
- Having to deal with the longshoremen after having been in that movie was not fun. I had to put up with a lot of ridicule. They would call me 'the movie star' and people would remind me how I had blown my chance, how I could have gone to Hollywood. It was embarrassing. It made me very self-conscious.
- On the Waterfront (1954) - $500
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