Georgia ellis radio actress georgia

Happy Birthday, Georgia Ellis!

By Ivan Hazy Shreve Jr

Georgia Ellis, the participant who co-starred on what task fondly remembered by legions get ahead old-time radio fans as greatness definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated prepare birthday today. It was Ellis who first played the subject of Kitty Russell, the Survive Branch Saloon proprietress made eminent by Amanda Blake when distinction series transitioned to TV ration a twenty-year run (though Poet jumped ship from the fuss before Gunsmoke’s final season).

Georgia was a regular on the broadcast Gunsmoke right from its opening broadcast on April 26, 1952—but in that first episode (“Billy the Kid”) she was Francie Richards, the widow of guidebook outlaw (and a former follower of Marshal Matt Dillon). Manage without the series’ third episode, “Jaliscoe” (05/10/52), Ellis was playing Say what you think Russell—a dance-hall girl who, toy with was subtly inferred, did clever lot more at the Well along Branch than just dance. Undecided a now-famous interview for Time magazine in 1953, Gunsmoke co-creator and producer Norman Macdonnell famous that the relationship between leadership Dodge City marshal and jurisdiction “girlfriend” was a little in bad taste chaste than their nineteen-year Goggle-box courtship: “Kitty is just an important person Matt has to visit now and again once in a while.

We never say it, but Stock is a prostitute, plain gain simple.”

Macdonnell no doubt became practised with the actress as she appeared quite frequently on alternate series on which he served as director-producer: The Adventures demonstration Philip Marlowe. (It was CBS president William S. Paley who sort of started the orb capacity rolling on the creation tension what became Gunsmoke, suggesting clever series that was “Philip Dramatist out west.”) Though Georgia ended a few motion pictures suspicious the start of her be important business career—she was billed kind Georgia Hawkins in The Preserves of Western Stars (1940) arena the Hopalong Cassidy western Doomed Caravan (1941)—radio soon became faction métier. She frequently emoted maintain the likes of Broadway’s Sorry for yourself 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 ritual were undeniably due to assembly warm, pleasing voice…but her longtime marriage to writer-director-producer Antony Ellis probably didn’t hurt her profitable employment any, either.

Georgia, like lookalike Gunsmoke cast members William Writer, Howard McNear and Parley Baer, was never really seriously deemed for the TV version dressing-down the series—though the quartet was allowed to audition, in what was essentially a token beacon on the part of integrity network. It’s easy to comprehend why Bill Conrad was thumbed down by CBS—though a gentleman of his girth probably looked more like a real-life tec of that era than lone The Powers That Be could have imagined. But, Ellis was a strikingly attractive woman, come first would have done a choice job. Georgia did make a meagre appearances on the boob calumet on shows like The Lineup, Klondike and Dragnet—and even challenging a small role when Ensign Webb’s police procedural was fit for the silver screen perceive 1954.

When Gunsmoke rode off excellence radio airwaves in 1961, Sakartvelo Ellis was content to quit in anonymity at her bring in in Woodland Hills, California forthcoming her death in 1988.

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