Home >

Guy Madison

Guy Madison

Birthday: 1922-01-19 | Place of Birth: Pumpkin Center, California, USA

Handsome American leading man Guy Madison stumbled into a film career and became a television star and hero to the Baby Boom generation. As a young man he worked as a telephone lineman, but entered the Coast Guard at the beginning of the Second World War. While on liberty one weekend in Hollywood, he attended a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast and was spotted in the audience by an assistant to Henry Willson, an executive for David O. Selznick. Selznick wanted an unknown sailor to play a small but prominent part in Since You Went Away (1944), and promptly signed Robert Moseley to a contract. Selznick and Willson concocted the screen name Guy Madison (the "guy" girls would like to meet, and Madison from a passing Dolly Madison cake wagon). Madison filmed his one scene on a weekend pass and returned to duty. The film's release brought thousands of fan letters for Madison's lonely, strikingly handsome young sailor, and at war's end he returned to find himself a star-in-the-making. Despite an initial amateurishness to his acting, Madison grew as a performer, studying and working in theatre. He played leads in a series of programmers before being cast as legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickok in the TV series Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951). He played Hickok on TV and radio for much of the 1950s, and many of the TV episodes were strung together and released as feature films. Madison managed to squeeze in some more adult-oriented roles during his off-time from the series, but much of this work was also in westerns. After the Hickok series ended Madison found work scarce in the U.S. and traveled to Europe, where he became a popular star of Italian westerns and German adventure films. In the 1970s he returned to the U.S., but appeared mainly in cameo roles. Physical ailments limited his work in later years, and he died from emphysema in 1996. His first wife was actress Gail Russell. Date of Birth 19 January 1922, Pumpkin Center, California Date of Death 6 February 1996, Palm Springs, California  (emphysema)

...

Known For

Acting

Year
Title

Role

1978
Where's Willie?

as    Tony Flore

1970
Reverend's Colt

as    Reverend Miller Colt

1969
1968
Hell in Normandy

as    Capt. Jack Murphy

1967
Return of Django

as    Father Fleming

1965
Adventurer of Tortuga

as    Alfonso di Montélimar

1965
Gunmen Of The Rio Grande

as    Wyatt Earp / Laramie

1962
Sword of the Conqueror

as    Amalchi

1961
Slave of Rome

as    Marco Valerio

1959
Jet Over The Atlantic

as    Brett Murphy

1957
The Hard Man

as    Steve Burden

1956
The Beast of Hollow Mountain

as    Jimmy Ryan

1955
5 Against the House

as    Al Mercer

1955
The Last Frontier

as    Captain Glenn Riordan

1954
The Command

as    Capt. Robert MacClaw

1954
Trouble on the Trail

as    Wild Bill Hickok

1953
The Charge at Feather River

as    Miles Archer

1953
Border City Rustlers

as    Wild Bill Hickok

1952
Trail of the Arrow

as    Wild Bill Hickok

1952
The Yellow Haired Kid

as    Wild Bill Hickok

1951
Drums in the Deep South

as    Maj. Will Denning

1951
The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok

as    Wild Bill Hickok

1949
Massacre River

as    Larry Knight

1946
Till the End of Time

as    Cliff W. Harper