ORBITRA
George 'Gabby' Hayes

Acting

George 'Gabby' Hayes

May 6, 1885 – Feb 9, 1969202 titles 197 movies · 5 TV
Explore orbit
IMDb

Biography

George Hayes is an American character actor, the most famous of Western-movie sidekicks of the 1930s and 1940s. He worked in a circus and played semi-pro baseball while a teenager. In 1914, he married Olive Ireland and the pair became successful on the vaudeville circuit. Retired in his forties, he lost much of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work. He played scores of roles in Westerns and non-Westerns alike, finally in the mid-1930s settling in to an almost exclusively Western career. He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick Windy Halliday in films between 1936 and 1939. Leaving the Cassidy films in a salary dispute, he was legally precluded from using the Windy nickname, and so took on the sobriquet Gabby, and was so billed from about 1940. In his early films, he alternated between whiskered comic-relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys, but by the later 1930s, he worked 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 The Gabby Hayes Show. He died on February 9, 1969.

Also known as

George Francis Hayes · George Hayes · George Francis "Gabby" Hayes

Born

May 6, 1885 – Feb 9, 1969

Wellsville, New York, USA

Open in OpenStreetMap

Photos

Profile images from TMDB · click to enlarge

3 images

Roles across career

Titles counted once; a person can act and direct on the same film (roles merged).

202

Acting credits

0

Directing

0

Writing

0

Other crew

Most critically rated

Highest TMDB score (min 100 votes)

Most commercially successful

Highest TMDB vote count (attention / reach proxy; not box office)

Career timeline

By release / first air year · movie & TV merged

Orbit ↑

1919 1 title(s)

1929 3 title(s)

1930 4 title(s)

1931 8 title(s)

1932 17 title(s)

1933 15 title(s)

1934 24 title(s)

1935 22 title(s)

1936 14 title(s)

1937 7 title(s)

1938 6 title(s)

1939 13 title(s)

1940 9 title(s)

1941 7 title(s)

1942 8 title(s)

1943 7 title(s)

1944 7 title(s)

1945 6 title(s)

1946 8 title(s)

1947 2 title(s)

1948 3 title(s)

1949 1 title(s)

1950 3 title(s)

1956 2 title(s)

1958 1 title(s)

1975 1 title(s)

1976 1 title(s)

1978 1 title(s)

1987 1 title(s)