George Francis Hayes (Gabby Hayes) was an American actor. He was born in 1885 at Wellsville, New York, and died in 1969 of heart failure. As a young man, he worked in a circus and played semi- pro baseball before appearing in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage, primarily in stock companies. He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick Windy Halliday in many films between 1936 and 1939. Leaving the Cassidy films, he was legally precluded from using the 'Windy' nickname, and so took on the name 'Gabby', and was so billed from about 1940. One of the few sidekicks to land on the annual list of Top Ten Western Box-office 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 thirties played 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'.
Offstage he was an elegant and well-appointed connoisseur and man-about-town devoting his time to financial investments. Research Gabby Hayes
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