Saddle up for a trip through entertainment history with a weekly highlight from Santa Clarita’s Walk of Western Stars! This week, actor William Boyd.

William Lawrence Boyd was born on June 5, 1895, and became an American film actor best known for portraying the prolific cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy. 

Boyd was born in Hendrysburg, Ohio, and raised in Cambridge, Ohio and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lived from 1909 to 1913.

 Boyd was the son of day laborer Charles William Boyd and his wife Lida. Following his father’s death, Boyd moved to California and worked as an orange picker, surveyor, tool dresser and auto salesman. 

In Hollywood, Boyd found work as an extra in Why Change Your Wife? (1920) and other silent films, according to officials. 

More prominent film roles followed, including his breakout role as Jack Moreland in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Road to Yesterday (1925), which earned critical praise. 

DeMille soon cast him as the leading man in the highly acclaimed silent drama film The Volga Boatman. 

Another critical success, and with Boyd now firmly established as a matinee idol and romantic leading man, he began earning an annual salary of $100,000. 

Boyd acted in DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) and Skyscraper (1928), as well as D.W. Griffiths’ Lady of Pavements (1929). 

Radio Pictures ended Boyd’s contract in 1931 when his photo was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor, William “Stage” Boyd, on gambling and liquor charges. 

Although the newspaper apologized, explaining the mistake in the following day’s newspaper, Boyd said, “the damage was already done,” leaving Boyd virtually destitute and without a job. For several years, he was credited in films as Bill Boyd to prevent being mistaken for the other William Boyd.

In 1935, Boyd was offered the supporting role of Red Connors in the movie Hopalong Cassidy, but he asked to be considered for the title role and won it. 

Boyd went on to star in more than 50 films as Cassidy, before producer Harry “Pop” Sherman wanted to create more ambitious epics and abandoned the Hopalong Cassidy franchise. 

Boyd, determined to keep the series alive, produced the last 12 Cassidy features himself on noticeably lower budgets. 

By this time, interest in the character had waned, and with far fewer theaters still showing the films, the series ended in 1948.

In 1948, Boyd, now regarded as a cowboy star of the past with his fortunes at their lowest, brought a print of one of his older films to the local NBC television station and offered it at a nominal rental, hoping for new exposure. 

The film was received so well that NBC asked for more, and within months Boyd released the entire library. 

The films became very popular and began the long-running genre of Western on television. 

Boyd’s desperate gamble made him one of the first national television stars and restored his fortune.

As later followed by Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Boyd licensed merchandise, including products such as Hopalong Cassidy watches, trash cans, cups, dishes, Topps trading cards, a comic strip, comic books, cowboy outfits, home-movie digests of his Paramount releases via Castle Films and a new Hopalong Cassidy radio show that ran from 1948 to 1952. 

Boyd appeared as Hopalong Cassidy on the cover of numerous national magazines, including Look (August 29, 1950) and Time (November 27, 1950).

For Thanksgiving in 1950, he led the Carolinas Carrousel Parade in Charlotte, North Carolina, which attracted an estimated crowd of 500,000, the largest in the parade’s history.

Boyd had a cameo role as himself in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth. 

DeMille reportedly asked Boyd to take the role of Moses in his remake of The Ten Commandments, but Boyd felt that his identification with the Cassidy character would make it impossible for audiences to accept him as Moses. 

Boyd was married five times, first to wealthy Massachusetts heiress Laura Maynes, then to the actresses Ruth Miller, Elinor Fair, Dorothy Sebastian and Grace Bradley. 

The actor’s only son, William Wallace Boyd, whose mother was Miller, died of pertussis at the age of nine months. 

After he retired from the screen, Boyd invested time and money in real estate and moved to Palm Desert, California. In 1972, Boyd died from complications related to Parkinson’s Disease and congestive heart failure. 

Boyd was survived by his fifth wife, Grace Bradley Boyd, who died in 2010, according to officials. 

Boyd is buried at the Sanctuary of Guiding Love alcove in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale). 

Where is Boyd’s Plaque on the Walk of Western Stars? 

In 2003, William Boyd was honored with a plaque on the Walk of Western Stars. The plaque is on the west side of Main Street in front of the Old Town Junction. 

Click here to view last week’s feature. 

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