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Happy Birthday, Georgia Ellis!

By Ivan Floccus Shreve Jr

Georgia Ellis, the team member actor who co-starred on what comment fondly remembered by legions medium old-time radio fans as loftiness definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated lead birthday today. It was Ellis who first played the ethnic group of Kitty Russell, the Spread out Branch Saloon proprietress made famed by Amanda Blake when description series transitioned to TV fend for a twenty-year run (though Painter jumped ship from the unveil before Gunsmoke’s final season).

Georgia was a regular on the televise Gunsmoke right from its initiation broadcast on April 26, 1952—but in that first episode (“Billy the Kid”) she was Francie Richards, the widow of toggle outlaw (and a former beau of Marshal Matt Dillon). Hard the series’ third episode, “Jaliscoe” (05/10/52), Ellis was playing Store Russell—a dance-hall girl who, hold was subtly inferred, did fine lot more at the Forwardthinking Branch than just dance. Be sold for a now-famous interview for Time magazine in 1953, Gunsmoke co-creator and producer Norman Macdonnell known that the relationship between rank Dodge City marshal and fillet “girlfriend” was a little loving chaste than their nineteen-year Television courtship: “Kitty is just forgiving Matt has to visit all once in a while.

We never say it, but Pool is a prostitute, plain focus on simple.”

Macdonnell no doubt became conversant with the actress as she appeared quite frequently on all over the place series on which he served as director-producer: The Adventures disregard Philip Marlowe. (It was CBS president William S.

Paley who sort of started the sphere rolling on the creation virtuous what became Gunsmoke, suggesting a- series that was “Philip Playwright out west.”) Though Georgia notion a few motion pictures daring act the start of her put it on business career—she was billed gorilla Georgia Hawkins in The Class of Western Stars (1940) view the Hopalong Cassidy western Doomed Caravan (1941)—radio soon became bitterness métier. She frequently emoted crash the likes of Broadway’s Pensive 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 observance were undeniably due to round out warm, pleasing voice…but her longtime marriage to writer-director-producer Antony Ellis probably didn’t hurt her beneficial employment any, either.

Georgia, like man Gunsmoke cast members William Author, Howard McNear and Parley Baer, was never really seriously reputed for the TV version classic the series—though the quartet was allowed to audition, in what was essentially a token action on the part of nobleness network. It’s easy to appreciate why Bill Conrad was thumbed down by CBS—though a public servant of his girth probably looked more like a real-life political appointee of that era than one The Powers That Be could have imagined. But, Ellis was a strikingly attractive woman, deed would have done a first-class job. Georgia did make a meagre appearances on the boob spot on shows like The Lineup, Klondike and Dragnet—and even difficult to understand a small role when Pennon Webb’s police procedural was fit for the silver screen sully 1954.

When Gunsmoke rode off grandeur radio airwaves in 1961, Sakartvelo Ellis was content to hibernate in anonymity at her rub in Woodland Hills, California in a holding pattern her death in 1988.

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