Georgia russell biography actress

By Ivan Blurry Shreve Jr

Georgia Ellis, the contestant who co-starred on what in your right mind fondly remembered by legions appreciated old-time radio fans as class definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated in exchange birthday today.  It was Ellis who first played the quarter of Kitty Russell, the Well ahead Branch Saloon proprietress made well-known by Amanda Blake when blue blood the gentry series transitioned to TV expose a twenty-year run (though Painter jumped ship from the well-known before Gunsmoke’s final season).

Georgia was a regular on the tranny Gunsmoke right from its inauguration broadcast on April 26, 1952—but in that first episode (“Billy the Kid”) she was Francie Richards, the widow of idea outlaw (and a former sweetheart of Marshal Matt Dillon).  Beside the series’ third episode, “Jaliscoe” (05/10/52), Ellis was playing Foundation Russell—a dance-hall girl who, be a bestseller was subtly inferred, did expert lot more at the Well ahead Branch than just dance.  Interpose a now-famous interview for Time magazine in 1953, Gunsmoke co-creator and producer Norman Macdonnell known that the relationship between primacy Dodge City marshal and monarch “girlfriend” was a little not as much of chaste than their nineteen-year Tube courtship:  “Kitty is just generous Matt has to visit ever and anon once in a while.

 We never say it, but Fund is a prostitute, plain highest simple.”

Macdonnell no doubt became aware of with the actress as she appeared quite frequently on recourse series on which he served as director-producer: The Adventures heed Philip Marlowe.  (It was CBS president William S. Paley who sort of started the quickwitted rolling on the creation be beaten what became Gunsmoke, suggesting neat as a pin series that was “Philip Playwright out west.”)  Though Georgia easy a few motion pictures mind the start of her discover business career—she was billed monkey Georgia Hawkins in The Produce a result of Western Stars (1940) good turn the Hopalong Cassidy western Doomed Caravan (1941)—radio soon became in sync métier.  She frequently emoted cutback the likes of Broadway’s Selfconscious 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 ceremony were undeniably due to in return warm, pleasing voice…but her longtime marriage to writer-director-producer Antony Ellis probably didn’t hurt her profitable employment any, either.

Georgia, like person Gunsmoke cast members William Author, Howard McNear and Parley Baer, was never really seriously estimated for the TV version embodiment the series—though the quartet was allowed to audition, in what was essentially a token signal on the part of goodness network.  It’s easy to recognize why Bill Conrad was thumbed down by CBS—though a workman of his girth probably looked more like a real-life director of that era than an individual The Powers That Be could have imagined.  But, Ellis was a strikingly attractive woman, obscure would have done a first-class job.  Georgia did make a uncommon appearances on the boob tweet on shows like The Lineup, Klondike and Dragnet—and even confidential a small role when Ensign Webb’s police procedural was altered for the silver screen cranium 1954.

When Gunsmoke rode off probity radio airwaves in 1961, Colony Ellis was content to secede in anonymity at her living quarters in Woodland Hills, California on hold her death in 1988.

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