George 'Gabby' Hayes

Known for ActingBorn 1885-05-06Died 1969-02-09Wellsville, 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.Read more

Movies & web series

Silverspurs

Thunder Mountain

Ranger's Code

Wild Horse Mesa

Self Defense

Rainbow Man

The House Without Children

Bordertown Gun Fighters

Wagon Tracks West

Overland Mail Robbery

The Sons of the Pioneers

Justice of the Range

The Outlaw Tamer

The Gallant Fool

Fighting Texans

Oklahoma Jim

Smiling Irish Eyes

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Western von gestern

Marshal of Reno

Tucson Raiders

Hidden Valley Outlaws

Man from Cheyenne

Swifty

Galloping Romeo

The Fugitive

The Devil's Mate

The Night Rider

Sally of the Subway

The Nevada Buckaroo

God's Country and the Man

She Who Gets Slapped

Hitch Hike Lady

The Gabby Hayes Show

Under Nevada Skies

Along the Navajo Trail

Death Valley Manhunt

The Man from Thunder River

Ridin' Down the Canyon

Red River Valley

Borderland

It's Howdy Doody Time: A 40-Year Celebration

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Valley of the Lawless

Tumbling Tumbleweeds

The Return of Casey Jones

Trailing North

Hidden Valley