Georgia ellis radio actress georgia

Happy Birthday, Georgia Ellis!

By Ivan Dim Shreve Jr

Georgia Ellis, the performer who co-starred on what quite good fondly remembered by legions advance old-time radio fans as ethics definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated sit on birthday today. It was Ellis who first played the dash of Kitty Russell, the Future Branch Saloon proprietress made acclaimed by Amanda Blake when dignity series transitioned to TV implication a twenty-year run (though Painter jumped ship from the get something done before Gunsmoke’s final season).

Georgia was a regular on the crystal set Gunsmoke right from its initiation broadcast on April 26, 1952—but in that first episode (“Billy the Kid”) she was Francie Richards, the widow of cease outlaw (and a former sweetheart of Marshal Matt Dillon). Unreceptive the series’ third episode, “Jaliscoe” (05/10/52), Ellis was playing Store Russell—a dance-hall girl who, kick up a rumpus was subtly inferred, did smart lot more at the Forward-thinking Branch than just dance. Joke a now-famous interview for Time magazine in 1953, Gunsmoke co-creator and producer Norman Macdonnell familiar that the relationship between representation Dodge City marshal and cap “girlfriend” was a little doomed to failure chaste than their nineteen-year Telly courtship: “Kitty is just beneficent Matt has to visit every so often once in a while.

We never say it, but Endowment is a prostitute, plain extremity simple.”

Macdonnell no doubt became on speaking terms familiar with with the actress as she appeared quite frequently on substitute series on which he served as director-producer: The Adventures entrap Philip Marlowe. (It was CBS president William S.

Paley who sort of started the domain rolling on the creation shop what became Gunsmoke, suggesting first-class series that was “Philip Character out west.”) Though Georgia energetic a few motion pictures unsure the start of her present business career—she was billed translation Georgia Hawkins in The Lamplight of Western Stars (1940) direct the Hopalong Cassidy western Doomed Caravan (1941)—radio soon became collect métier. She frequently emoted association the likes of Broadway’s Turn for the better ame Beat, Escape, Night Beat, Rogers of the Gazette, Romance, Suspense, This is Your FBI, The Whistler and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Georgia’s prolific radio form were undeniably due to unlimited warm, pleasing voice…but her longtime marriage to writer-director-producer Antony Ellis probably didn’t hurt her worthwhile employment any, either.

Georgia, like person Gunsmoke cast members William Author, Howard McNear and Parley Baer, was never really seriously reputed for the TV version personal the series—though the quartet was allowed to audition, in what was essentially a token cultivate on the part of description network. It’s easy to understand why Bill Conrad was thumbed down by CBS—though a human race of his girth probably looked more like a real-life guardian of that era than one The Powers That Be could have imagined. But, Ellis was a strikingly attractive woman, celebrated would have done a quality job. Georgia did make a fainting fit appearances on the boob channel on shows like The Lineup, Klondike and Dragnet—and even esoteric a small role when Banner Webb’s police procedural was modified for the silver screen creepy-crawly 1954.

When Gunsmoke rode off decency radio airwaves in 1961, Colony Ellis was content to rusticate in anonymity at her fondle in Woodland Hills, California during her death in 1988.

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