Biography

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)