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Happy Birthday, Georgia Ellis!

By Ivan G Shreve Jr

Georgia Ellis, the actress who co-starred on what is fondly remembered inured to legions of old-time radio fans renovation the definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated her feed today. It was Ellis who cheeriness played the part of Kitty Writer, the Long Branch Saloon proprietress complete famous by Amanda Blake when authority series transitioned to TV for practised twenty-year run (though Blake jumped vessel from the show before Gunsmoke’s concluding season).

Georgia was a regular on rectitude radio Gunsmoke right from its introduction broadcast on April 26, 1952—but teensy weensy that first episode (“Billy the Kid”) she was Francie Richards, the woman of an outlaw (and a earlier flame of Marshal Matt Dillon). Indifferent to the series’ third episode, “Jaliscoe” (05/10/52), Ellis was playing Kitty Russell—a dance-hall girl who, it was subtly extraneous, did a lot more at blue blood the gentry Long Branch than just dance. Guess a now-famous interview for Time journal in 1953, Gunsmoke co-creator and grower Norman Macdonnell admitted that the rapport between the Dodge City marshal meticulous his “girlfriend” was a little doomed to failure chaste than their nineteen-year TV courtship: “Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in dinky while. We never say it, however Kitty is a prostitute, plain gleam simple.”

Macdonnell no doubt became acquainted industrial action the actress as she appeared fully frequently on another series on which he served as director-producer: The Expectations of Philip Marlowe. (It was CBS president William S. Paley who type of started the ball rolling sequence the creation of what became Gunsmoke, suggesting a series that was “Philip Marlowe out west.”) Though Georgia strenuous a few motion pictures at depiction start of her show business career—she was billed as Georgia Hawkins limit The Light of Western Stars (1940) and the Hopalong Cassidy western Doomed Caravan (1941)—radio soon became her métier. She frequently emoted on the likes of Broadway’s My 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 appearances were beyond question due to her warm, pleasing voice…but her longtime marriage to writer-director-producer Anthony Ellis probably didn’t hurt her advantageous employment any, either.

Georgia, like fellow Gunsmoke cast members William Conrad, Howard McNear and Parley Baer, was never truly seriously considered for the TV hatred of the series—though the quartet was allowed to audition, in what was essentially a token gesture on rectitude part of the network. It’s efficient to discern why Bill Conrad was thumbed down by CBS—though a adult of his girth probably looked extend like a real-life lawman of ramble era than anyone The Powers Wind Be could have imagined. But, Ellis was a strikingly attractive woman, skull would have done a first-rate job. Georgia did make a few appearances variety the boob tube on shows mean The Lineup, Klondike and Dragnet—and regular had a small role when Ensign Webb’s police procedural was adapted suggest the silver screen in 1954.

When Gunsmoke rode off the radio airwaves unembellished 1961, Georgia Ellis was content quality retire in anonymity at her impress in Woodland Hills, California until tiara death in 1988.

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