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American character actor, the most famous of Western-movie sidekicks of the 1930s and 1940s. Born May 7, 1885, the third of seven children, in Wellsville, New York, Hayes was the son of a hotelier and oil-production manager. As a young man, George Hayes worked in a circus and played semi-pro baseball while a teenager.
He ran away from home at 17, in 1902, and joined a touring stock company. He married Olive Ireland in 1914 and the pair became quite successful on the vaudeville circuit. Retired in his 40s, he lost much of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work.
Although he had made his film debut in a single appearance prior to the crash, it was not until his wife convinced him to move to California and he met producer Trem Carr that he began working steadily in the medium. 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 many films between 1936-39. 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. One of the few sidekicks to land on the annual list of Top Ten Western Boxoffice Stars, he did so repeatedly. 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 a network television show devoted to stories of the Old West for children, "The Gabby Hayes Show" (1950). Offstage an elegant and well-appointed connoisseur and man-about-town, Hayes devoted the final years of his life to his investments. He died of cardiovascular disease in Burbank, California, on February 9, 1969.
[on John Wayne] He's my boy. He's the best. Couldn't think more of him if he was my own son.
Gabby Hayes
Western sidekicks Gabby Hayes and Smiley Burnette were so popular with audiences that they consistently placed in "top 10" box-office cowboy star polls alongside Gene Autry and Roy Rogers..
Gabby Hayes
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George Francis Hayes
May 7, 1885 – February 9, 1969
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Though a long time Western star, he had not learned to ride a horse until nearly 50 years of age.
The hero of "Gabby Hayes Comics", a comic book of the 1950s.
In real life he was the exact opposite of the characters he played on film. He was well read, well-groomed, serious and highly philosophical.
Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 2000.
Married one time, to Olive E. Ireland, from 1914-1957. Olive Ireland performed in vaudeville under the name Dorothy Earle and thus is often mistaken for film actress/writer Dorothy Earle, and that Earle is often mistakenly listed as one of George 'Gabby' Hayes's wives. Dorothy Earle was never married to George 'Gabby' Hayes.
He was awarded 2 Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Radio at 6427 Hollywood Boulevard and for Television at 1724 Vine Street in Hollywood, California.
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