All Topics  
William Boyd (actor)

 
William Boyd (actor)

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

William Boyd (actor)
 
 
  Topics William Boyd (actor) Topic Home

William Boyd (June 5, –September 12, ) was an American
Cinema of the United States

United States cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period ....
 actor.

William Lawrence Boyd in Hendrysburg, Ohio, located 26 miles east of Cambridge, Ohio
Cambridge, Ohio

Cambridge is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Guernsey County, Ohio. The municipality is located in southeastern Ohio and is in the Appalachian Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains....
, he was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and List of United States cities by population in the United States. With an estimated population of 384,037 in 2007, it is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Statistical Area, a region of 905,755 residents projected to reach one million between 2010 and 2012....
. In 1918 he went to Hollywood where he became famous as a leading man
Leading man

Leading man or leading gentleman is an informal term for the actor who plays a love interest to the leading actress in a film or play. A leading man is usually an all rounder; capable of singing, dancing, and acting at a professional level, but never outshining his female co-star....
 in silent film
Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made possible in the late 1920s with the introduction of the Vitaphone system....
 romances with a yearly salary of $100,000. By the end of the 1920s, Boyd's career had begun to deteriorate, and he was without a contract and going broke.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'William Boyd (actor)'
Start a new discussion about 'William Boyd (actor)'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


William Boyd (June 5, –September 12, ) was an American
Cinema of the United States

United States cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period ....
 actor.

Biography

Born William Lawrence Boyd in Hendrysburg, Ohio, located 26 miles east of Cambridge, Ohio
Cambridge, Ohio

Cambridge is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Guernsey County, Ohio. The municipality is located in southeastern Ohio and is in the Appalachian Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains....
, he was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and List of United States cities by population in the United States. With an estimated population of 384,037 in 2007, it is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Statistical Area, a region of 905,755 residents projected to reach one million between 2010 and 2012....
. In 1918 he went to Hollywood where he became famous as a leading man
Leading man

Leading man or leading gentleman is an informal term for the actor who plays a love interest to the leading actress in a film or play. A leading man is usually an all rounder; capable of singing, dancing, and acting at a professional level, but never outshining his female co-star....
 in silent film
Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made possible in the late 1920s with the introduction of the Vitaphone system....
 romances with a yearly salary of $100,000. By the end of the 1920s, Boyd's career had begun to deteriorate, and he was without a contract and going broke. Then Boyd's picture was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor with a similar name (William Stage Boyd) on gambling and liquor charges, which further hurt his career.

Hopalong Cassidy

In 1935, he was offered the lead role in the movie Hopalong Cassidy
Hopalong Cassidy

Hopalong Cassidy is a cowboy-hero, created in 1904 by Clarence E. Mulford and appearing in a series of popular stories and novels. In print, the character appears as a rude, rough-talking 'galoot'....
. He changed the original pulp-fiction character, written by Clarence E. Mulford, from a whisky guzzling wrangler to a cowboy hero who did not smoke, drink, or swear and he always let the bad guy start the fight. Boyd would be indelibly associated with the Hopalong Cassidy character, and he gained lasting fame in the Western film genre because of it. Boyd purchased the rights to the character of Hopalong, as well as the rights to the 66 Hopalong Cassidy movies. In the early 1950s, he released the movies to television, where they became extremely popular. Hopalong Cassidy is, in fact, credited with helping reinvigorate the time-worn Western genre. Along with other cowboy
Cowboy

A cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America, traditionally on horseback, and often performs a multitude of other ranch-related tasks....
 figures, such as Roy Rogers
Roy Rogers

Roy Rogers , was a singer and cowboy actor, as well as the founder of the famous Roy Rogers Restaurants chain. He and his third wife Dale Evans, his golden palomino Trigger , and his German Shepherd Dog, Bullet, were featured in over one hundred movies and The Roy Rogers Show....
 and Gene Autry
Gene Autry

Orvon Gene Autry was an United States performing arts who gained fame as "Singing cowboy" on the Radio in the United States, in Cinema of the United States and on Television in the United States for more than three decades beginning in the 1930s....
, Boyd licensed merchandise, including such products as Hopalong Cassidy watches, cups and dishes, comic books and cowboy outfits. Boyd used his fame and his fortune to meet with children around the world, and underscore for them the fine qualities of the Hopalong Cassidy figure he portrayed. As a private individual and an actor, he was a hero to a generation of American children. The Hopalong Cassidy films remain available for broadcast and are on DVD in restored form.

Boyd appeared as Hopalong Cassidy on the cover of numerous national magazines, such as the August 29, 1950 issue of Look
Look (American magazine)

Look was a biweekly, general-interest magazine published in Des Moines, Iowa from 1937 to 1971, with more of an emphasis on photographs than articles....
 , and the November 27, 1950 issue of Time
Time (magazine)

Time is a weekly United States newsmagazine, similar to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. A European edition is published from London....
.

Oddly, both Clark Gable
Clark Gable

Clark Gable was an Cinema of the United States, nicknamed "The King of Hollywood" in his heyday. In , the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the AFI's 100 Years......
 and Robert Mitchum
Robert Mitchum

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an Academy Award-nominated United States film actor, author, composer and singer. Mitchum is largely remembered for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s....
 experienced their first big breaks in movies playing bearded villains in westerns starring Boyd.

William Boyd died in 1972 in Laguna Beach, California
Laguna Beach, California

Laguna Beach is a seaside resort and artist community located in southern Orange County, California, approximately southeast of the county seat of Santa Ana, California....
 and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California
Glendale, California

Glendale is a city in Los Angeles County, California, California, United States. It lies at the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley, is bisected by the Verdugo Mountains, and is a suburb in the Greater Los Angeles Area....
. He is survived by his wife, actress Grace Bradley Boyd.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, William Boyd has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Hollywood Walk of Fame

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, that serves as an entertainment hall of fame....
 at 1734 Vine Street. In 1995, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oklahoma. It houses more than 28,000 American West and Native Americans in the United States art works and Artifact ....
 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Oklahoma City is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, the city ranks List of United States cities by population among United States cities in population....
. Since 1991, the Friends of Hoppy fan club has held the Hopalong Cassidy Festival in Boyd's hometown of Cambridge, Ohio.

Filmography

See: Hopalong Cassidy films
Hopalong Cassidy films

This is a chronological filmography of all films featuring the character Hopalong Cassidy, always played by actor William Boyd , annotated with film producer / film distributor....


See also

  • Other notable figures in Western films
    Western (genre)

    The Western is a fiction genre seen in film, television, radio, literature, painting and other visual arts. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in what became the Western United States , but also in Western Canada, Mexico , Alaska and even Australia ....


External links