Hoot Gibson (1892-1962)

This day in 1962 marks the death of onetime star Hoot Gibson. Born Edmund Richard Gibson in Tekamah, Nebraska, he joined the circus at age thirteen before working as a cowboy in Wyoming and Colorado. After working in the rodeo he got into the movies as a stuntman in 1910, earning $2.50 a stunt. As he said later on: “I hired out to be an Indian in the morning then turned cowboy and chased myself all afternoon. They paid five dollars a day and two-fifty extra to fall off a horse.” For most of that decade he alternated between the rodeo and the movies, until he found regular with a young director named Jack Ford (who for a time was also Gibson’s roommate). Beginning with Straight Shooting in 1917 as a supporting actor, Gibson worked his way up to leading man. He wasn’t a handsome man and he rarely carried a gun onscreen, but by the mid-1920’s he was making $16,000 a week, and was one of the decade’s leading cowboy stars. His likeable personality and light comedic touch worked at the time, but by the 1930’s his career suffered as decline with the advent of the singing cowboy. By the end of the thirties he left the movie business and went back to the circus. He made a final appearance in Westerns with a small role in John Ford’s 1959 The Horse Soldiers.
(Adapted from IMDB.com)