Bill Elliott

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Wild Bill Elliott October 16 1904 November 26 1965 was an American film actor He specialized in playing the rugged heroes of B Westerns particularly the Red Ryder series of films By 1925 he was getting occasional extra work in films He took classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and appeared in a few stage roles there By 1927 he had made his first Western The Arizona Wildcat playing his first featured role Several costarring roles followed and he renamed himself Gordon Elliott But as the studios made the transition to sound films he slipped back into roles as an extra and bit parts as in Broadway Scandals in 1929 For the next eight years he appeared in over a hundred films for various studios but almost always in unbilled parts as an extra Elliott began to be noticed in some minor B Westerns enough so that Columbia Pictures offered him the title role in a serial The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok 1938 The serial was so successful and Elliott so personable that Columbia promoted him to starring in his own series of Western features replacing Columbias numbertwo cowboy star Robert Tex Allen Henceforth Gordon Elliott would be known as Bill Elliott Within two years he was among the Motion Picture Heralds Top Ten Western Stars where he would remain for the next 15 years In 1943 Elliott signed with Republic Pictures which cast him in a series of Westerns alongside George Gabby Hayes The first of these Calling Wild Bill Elliott gave Elliott the name by which he would be best known and by which he would be billed almost exclusively for the rest of his career Following several films in which both actor and character shared the name Wild Bill Elliott he took the role for which he would be best remembered that of Red Ryder in a series of sixteen movies about the famous comic strip cowboy and his young Indian companion Little Beaver played in Elliotts films by Bobby Blake Elliott played the role for only two years but would forever be associated with it Elliotts trademark was a pair of six guns worn buttforward in their holsters Elliotts career thrived during and after the Red Ryder films and he continued making B Westerns into the early 1950s He also had his own radio show during the late 1940s His final contract as a Western star was with Monogram Pictures where budgets declined as the B Western lost its audience to television When Monogram became Allied Artists Pictures Corporation in 1953 it phased out its Western productions and Elliott finished out his contract playing a homicide detective in a series of five modern police dramas his first nonWesterns since 1938 Elliott retired from films except for a couple of TV Western pilots which were not picked up He worked for a time as a spokesman for Viceroy cigarettes and hosted a local TV program in Las Vegas Nevada which featured many of his Western films