George 'Gabby' Hayes

George 'Gabby' Hayes

Date of Birth:

May 06, 1885

Place of Birth:

Wellsville, New York, USA

George Hayes is an American character actor, the most famous of Western-movie sidekicks of the 1930s and 1940s. He worked in a circus and played semi-pro baseball while a teenager. In 1914, he married Olive Ireland and the pair became successful on the vaudeville circuit. Retired in his forties, he lost much of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work. He played scores of roles in Westerns and non-Westerns alike, finally in the mid-1930s settling in to an almost exclusively Western career. He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick Windy Halliday in films between 1936 and 1939. Leaving the Cassidy films in a salary dispute, he was legally precluded from using the Windy nickname, and so took on the sobriquet Gabby, and was so billed from about 1940. In his early films, he alternated between whiskered comic-relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys, but by the later 1930s, he worked almost exclusively as a Western sidekick to stars such as John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott. After his last film in 1950, he starred as the host of The Gabby Hayes Show. He died on February 9, 1969.

filmography:

Big News Big News

1929

Top Speed Top Speed

1930

Swifty Swifty

1935

Dirigible Dirigible

1931

Skyway Skyway

1933

El Paso El Paso

1949

Play Girl Play Girl

1932

Wyoming Wyoming

1947

The Sphinx The Sphinx

1933

Trail Dust Trail Dust

1936

Borderland Borderland

1937

Colorado Colorado

1940

Klondike Klondike

1932

Utah Utah

1945

Blue Steel Blue Steel

1934

Heldorado Heldorado

1946

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