William Boyd

Appears as Hopalong Cassidy, with Topper the Horse, on a 44¢ USA commemorative postage stamp in the Early TV Memories issue honoring Hopalong Cassidy (1952), issued 11 August 2009.

Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1995.

Television talk-show host Johnny Carson told a story of how, in the mid-1960s, he met Boyd on a plane while flying cross-country. He asked Boyd, who hadn't made any public appearances in many years, if he would like to come on Carson's show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962). Boyd politely declined, and when Carson asked why, Boyd replied that he thought it would be too much of a jolt for kids--even though they were now adults--who had grown up seeing Hoppy as a tall, strong young cowboy hero to see him as the old man that Boyd now was.

Boyd was Cecil B. DeMille's first choice for Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956). Boyd turned the role down, fearing the Hopalong Cassidy identification would hurt the movie.

He retired to Palm Desert, California, in 1953.

Star of the syndicated radio show "Hopalong Cassidy" (1950-1952). The shows were actually recorded between 1948 and 1950.

In 1948 Boyd, in a savvy and precedent-setting move, bought the rights to all his pictures (he had to sell his ranch to raise the money) just as TV was looking for Saturday morning Western fare. He marketed all sorts of "Hoppy" products (lunch boxes, toy guns, cowboy hats, etc. ) and received royalties from comic books, radio and records.

By 1943 he had made 54 "Hoppies" for his original producer, Harry Sherman; after Sherman dropped the series, Boyd produced and starred in 12 more on his own. The series was wildly popular, and all recouped at least double their production costs.

In 1938, an America-wide poll conducted by The Showmen's Trade Review revealed Hopalong Cassidy as the screen's favorite outdoor action hero.

In 1935 he was offered the lead role in Hopalong Cassidy Enters (1935) (named because of a limp caused by an earlier bullet wound). He changed the original pulp-fiction character to its opposite, made sure that "Hoppy" didn't smoke, drink, chew tobacco or swear, rarely kissed a girl and let the bad guy draw first.

During the production of Suicide Fleet (1931), William Boyd and several other actors performed an unscheduled rescue at sea when a launch exploded off the Coronado Islands in the Pacific. Nine men, members of the film expedition, were in the launch when its gas tanks blew up, throwing all into the water. Two of the men were slightly burned, but William Boyd, James Gleason, and Robert Armstrong quickly took action and plunged into the ocean to rescue their assistants.

His career was derailed in the early 1930s when he was mistakenly identified as having been arrested for public drunkenness after his picture was mistakenly used in articles about the arrest. In fact, the culprit was William 'Stage' Boyd, an actor who later portrayed the villain in the serial The Lost City (1935).

He bought some fancy clothes, caught DeMille's eye and got the romantic lead in The Volga Boatman (1926), quickly becoming a matinée idol and earning upwards of $100,000 a year. However, with the end of silent movies, Boyd was without a contract, couldn't find work and was going broke. By mistake his picture was run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor with a similar name (William 'Stage' Boyd) on gambling, liquor and morals charges, and that hurt his career even more.

DeMille's Why Change Your Wife? (1920).

The son of a day laborer, William Boyd moved with his family to Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he was seven. His parents died while he was in his early teens, forcing him to quit school and take such jobs as a grocery clerk, surveyor and oil field worker. He went to Hollywood in 1919, already gray-haired. His first role was as an extra in Cecil B.