George Hayes is an American character actor the most famous of Westernmovie sidekicks of the 1930s and 1940s He worked in a circus and played semipro 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 nonWesterns alike finally in the mid1930s settling in to an almost exclusively Western career He gained fame as Hopalong Cassidys 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 comicrelief sidekicks and cleanshaven 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
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