William Boyd (actor)

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William Boyd on "Topper"

William Boyd (June 5, 1895 - September 12, 1972) was an American actor.

Born William Lawrence Boyd in Cambridge, Ohio, he was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He became famous as a Hollywood leading man in silent film romances with a yearly salary of $100,000, but by the end of the 1920s his career had begun to deteriorate, Boyd was without a contract and going broke. Boyd's picture was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor with a similar name William Stage Boyd on gambling and liquor charges, which further hurt his career. In 1935 he was offered the lead role in the movie Hopalong Cassidy. He changed the original pulp-fiction character, written by Clarence E. Mulford, from a whisky guzzling wrangler to a cowboy hero who didn't smoke, drink, or swear, and let the bad guy start the fight. Boyd gained lasting fame in the Western film genre beginning in 1935, when he first played Hopalong Cassidy, a role with which he would be indelibly associated. Boyd shrewdly purchased the rights to the character of Hopalong, as well as the rights to the movies (66 in all). In the early 1950s he released the movies to television, where they were extremely popular. He was one of the first actors to license merchandise. There were many products including, Hopalong Cassidy watches, cups and dishes, comic books and cowboy outfits. Boyd became a hero to a generation of American children and a multi-millionaire. The films remain available for broadcast, and are on DVD in physically restored form.

Boyd appeared as Hopalong Cassidy on the cover of numerous national magazines, such as the August 29, 1950 issue of Look Magazine [1], and the November 27, 1950 issue of Time Magazine.

Oddly, both Clark Gable and Robert Mitchum experienced their first big breaks in movies playing bearded villains in westerns starring Boyd.

William Boyd died in 1972 in Laguna Beach, California and was buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. He is survived by his wife, actress Grace Bradley Boyd.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, William Boyd has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1734 Vine Street. In 1995, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Since 1991, the Friends of Hoppy fan club has held the Hopalong Cassidy Festival in Boyd's hometown of Cambridge, Ohio.