Western Stars

Great Western Film Actresses

Great Western Film Actresses
Great Western Film Actresses

Amanda Blake

Reno Browne

Jeanne Crain

Gail Davis

Joanne Dru

Maureen O Hara

Ava Gardner

Jennifer Holt

Katy Jurado

Virginia Mayo

Barbara Stanwyck

Sam Elliott : The Sacketts : Tall, thin, wiry Sam Elliott is the classic picture of the American cowboy. Elliott began his acting career on the stage and his film debut was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Although his future wife, Katharine Ross co-starred in the film, the two did not meet until they filmed The Legacy Together. Over the years there would be few opportunities to act in feature westerns
   
James Stewart : Winchester 73, James Maitland “Jimmy” Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor, known for his distinctive voice and his everyman persona. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
   
Robert Duvall : Lonesome Dove, Open Range Robert Selden Duvall (born January 5, 1931) is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards over the course of his career. Duvall has been in some of the most acclaimed and popular films of all time, among them To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, MASH, Network, True Grit, Bullitt, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Tender Mercies, The Natural and the fantastic Television mini series Lonesome Dove.
   
Ben Johnson : Bite the Bullet Johnson was born in Foraker, Oklahoma, on the Osage Indian Reservation, of Cherokee and Irish ancestry, to Ben Sr. and Ollie Susan (Workmon) Johnson. His father was a rancher in Osage County and also a rodeo champion. As a young man, Johnson was a ranch hand and travelled with his father on the rodeo circuit. He was a star in rodeo before becoming involved in the movies. He was the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s Team Roping World Champion in 1953. After winning the title, he discovered that, after travel and expenses, he broke even for the year. Johnson was inducted into the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1973.
   
Walter Brennen : Rio Bravo Walter Brennan (July 25, 1894 – September 21, 1974) was an American actor. Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor three times and is tied with Jack Nicholson for the most Academy Award wins for a male actor.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts less than two miles from his family’s home in Swampscott, to Irish immigrants, he was christened Walter Andrew Brennan. His father was an engineer and inventor. Walter Brennan studied engineering at Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
   
Randolph Scott : Hangsmans Knot. Ride the High Country Randolph Scott (January 23, 1898 – March 2, 1987) was an American film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, including social dramas, crime dramas, comedies, musicals (albeit in non-singing and non-dancing roles), adventure tales, war films, and even a few horror and fantasy films. However, his most enduring image is that of the tall-in-the-saddle Western hero. Out of his more than 100 film appearances more than 60 were in Westerns; thus, “of all the major stars whose name was associated with the Western, Scott most closely identified with it.”
   
Clint Eastwood : The Unforgiven. Pale Rider. Classic Westerns Clinton “Clint” Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Following his breakthrough role on the TV series Rawhide (1959–65), Eastwood starred as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) in the 1960s, and as San Francisco Police Department Inspector Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool) during the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, along with several others in which he plays tough-talking no-nonsense police officers, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
   
Tommy Lee Jones : No Country for Old Men Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive. His notable film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and its sequel U.S. Marshals, the villain “Two-Face” in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, Agent K in the Men in Black films, former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House and rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
   
John Wayne : Rio Bravo, Red River. An icon of Western Films Marion Mitchell Morrison (born Marion Robert Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), better known by his stage name John Wayne, was an American film actor, director and producer. He epitomized rugged masculinity and became an enduring American icon. He is famous for his distinctive voice, walk and height. He was also known for his conservative political views and his support, beginning in the 1950s, for anti-communist positions. A Harris Poll, released January 2011, placed Wayne third among America’s favorite film stars, the only deceased star on the list and the only one who has appeared on the poll every year since it first began in 1994. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne 13th among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time.
   
Joel McCrea : Ride the High Country, Guns in the Afternoon McCrea was born in South Pasadena, California, the son of Thomas McCrea, who was an executive with the L.A. Gas & Electric Company. As a boy, he had a paper route, and delivered the Los Angeles Times to Cecil B. DeMille and other people in the film industry. He also had the opportunity to watch D. W. Griffith filming Intolerance, and was an extra in a serial starring Ruth Roland. McCrea graduated from Hollywood High School and then Pomona College (class of 1928), where he had acted on stage and took courses in drama and public speaking, and appeared regularly at the Pasadena Playhouse, Even as a high school student, he was working as a stunt double[2] and held horses for cowboy stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix.
   
Tom Selleck : Quigley Down Under, The Sacketts Thomas William “Tom” Selleck (born January 29, 1945) is an American actor and film producer, best known for his starring role as Hawaii-based private investigator Thomas Magnum on the 1980s television show Magnum, P.I.. He also plays Jesse Stone in a series of made-for-TV movies based on the Robert B. Parker novels. In 2010, he appears as Commissioner Frank Reagan in the drama Blue Bloods on CBS. He has appeared extensively on television in roles such as Dr. Richard Burke on Friends and A.J. Cooper on Las Vegas. In addition to his series work, Selleck has appeared in more than fifty made for TV and general release movies, including Mr. Baseball, Quigley Down Under, Lassiter and his most successful movie release Three Men and a Baby, which was the highest grossing movie in 1987.
   
Audie Murphy : Gunsmoke, Gunfight at Silver Creek. Audie Leon Murphy (June 20, 1924 – May 28, 1971) was a fifth grade dropout from an extremely poor family who became the most decorated American soldier of all time. After the war he became a celebrated movie star for over two decades, appearing in 44 films. He also found some success as a country music composer. Murphy became known as the most decorated United States soldier of the war during twenty-seven months in action in the European Theatre. He received the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest award for valor, along with 32 additional U.S. and foreign medals and citations, including five from France and one from Belgium. Murphy’s successful movie career included To Hell and Back (1955), based on his book of the same title (1949)  He died in a plane crash in 1971 and was interred, with full military honors, in Arlington National Cemetery.
   
Robert Taylor : The Law and Jake Wade, Return of the Gunfighter Spangler Taylor -for such was the impressive name with which Robert Taylor was born- was already displaying a diversity of talents in his youth on the plains of Nebraska. At Beatrice High School he was a standout track athlete, but also showed a talent for using his voice, winning several oratory awards. He was a musician and played the cello in the school orchestra. After graduating he thought of music as a vocation and started studying music at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, but he was lured westward in the early 1930s – not to Hollywood, as might be thought, but to study medicine at Pomona College. This was not unusual, either, for his remarkable father was a doctor. . Prophetically, it was at Pomona (from which he graduated in 1933) that young Taylor also joined the campus theater group and found himself in many lead roles because of his decidedly handsome features.
   
Gene Hackman : Bite the Bullett, The Unforgiven. The son of Eugene Ezra Hackman and Lydia (nee Gray), Gene Hackman grew up in a broken home, which he left at the age of 16 for a hitch with the US Marines. Moving to New York after being discharged, he worked in a number of menial jobs before studying journalism and television production on the G.I. Bill at the University of Illinois. Hackman would be over 30 years old when he finally decided to take his chance at acting by enrolling at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. Legend says that Hackman and friend Dustin Hoffman were voted “least likely to succeed.”
   
Andy Devine : The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance Rotund comic character actor of American films. Born Andrew Vabre Devine in Flagstaff, Arizona, the later-to-be Rotund comic character actor was raised in nearby Kingman, Arizona, the son of Irish-American hotel operator Thomas Devine and his wife Amy. Devine was an able athlete as a student and actually played semi-pro football under a phony name (Jeremiah Schwartz, often erroneously presumed to be his real name). Devine used the false name in order to remain eligible for college football. A successful football player at St. Mary & St. Benedict College, Arizona State Teacher’s College, and Santa Clara University, Devine went to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actor.
   
Burt Lancaster : Lawman Burt Lancaster was one of five children born to a New York City postal worker. He was a tough street kid who took an early interest in gymnastics. He joined the circus as an acrobat and worked there until he was injured. It was in the Army during WW II that he was introduced to the USO and acting. His first film was The Killers (1946), and that made him a star. He was a self-taught actor who learned the business as he went along. He set up his own production company in 1948 with Harold Hecht and James Hill to direct his career. He played many different roles in pictures as varied as The Crimson Pirate (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), Elmer Gantry(1960) and Atlantic City (1980).
   
Gary Cooper : High Noon, The Virginian “Dad was a true Westerner, and I take after him”, Gary Cooper told people who wanted to know more about his life before Hollywood. Dad was Charles Henry Cooper, who left his native England at 19, became a lawyer and later a Montana State Supreme Court justice. In 1906, when Gary was 5, his dad bought the Seven-Bar-Nine, a 600-acre ranch that had originally been a land grant to the builders of the railroad through that part of Montana.  Gary and his older brother Arthur stayed with their mother and went to school in England for seven years. Too young to go to war, Gary spent the war years working on his father’s ranch. “Getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning in the dead of winter to feed 450 head of cattle and shoveling manure at 40 below ain’t romantic”, said the man who would take the Western to the top of its genre in  High Noon (1952).
   
Alan Ladd : Shane Alan Ladd’s mother emigrated from England age 19. His accountant father died when he was four.   His size and coloring were regarded as not right for movies, so he worked hard at radio, where talent scout and former actress Sue Carol discovered him early in 1939. After a string of bit parts in “B” pictures–and an unbilled part in Orson Welles’ classic Citizen Kane (1941) In the 1950s he was performing in lucrative but unrewarding films (an exception being what many regard as his greatest role, Shane (1953)). By the end of the 1950s liquor and a string of so-so films had taken their toll. In November 1962 he was found unconscious lying in a pool of blood with a bullet wound near his heart. In January 1964 he was found dead, apparently due to an accidental combination of alcohol and sedatives.
   
Kevin Costner : Open Rance, Dancing With Wolves Kevin was born in Lynwood, California, on January 18, 1955, the third child of Bill Costner, a ditch digger and ultimately an electric line servicer for Southern California Edison, and Sharon Costner. His older brother, Dan, was born in 1950. A middle brother died at birth in 1953. His Dad’s job required him to move regularly, which caused Kevin to feel like an Army kid, always the new kid at school, which led to him being a daydreamer. As a teen, he sang in the Baptist church choir, wrote poetry, and took writing classes. At 18, he built his own canoe and paddled his way down the rivers that Lewis & Clark followed to the Pacific. Despite his present height, he was only 5’2″ when he graduated high school.
   
Kirk Douglas : The Last Sunset, Man Without a Star Cleft-chinned, steely-eyed and virile star of international cinema who rose from being “the ragman’s son” (the name give to his best-selling 1988 autobiography) of Russian-Jewish ancestry to become a bona fide superstar, Kirk Douglas, also known as Issur Danielovitch Demsky, was born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1916. Although growing up in a poor ghetto, Douglas was a fine student and a keen athlete and wrestled competitively during his time at St. Lawrence University.  His performance received rave reviews and further work quickly followed, including an appearance in the low-key drama I Walk Alone (1948), the first time he worked alongside fellow future screen legend Burt Lancaster. Such was The strong chemistry between Burt lancaster saw them appear in seven films together, including the dynamic western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
   
Lee Marvin : The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, Monte Walsh Prematurely white-haired character star who began as a supporting player of generally vicious demeanor, then metamorphosed into a star of both action and drama projects, Lee Marvin was born in New York City to Lamont Waltman Marvin, an advertising executive, and his wife Courtenay Washington Davidge, a fashion writer. The young Marvin was thrown out of dozens of schools for incorrigibility. His parents took him to Florida, where he attended St. Leo’s Preparatory School near Dade City. Dismissed there as well, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II. In the battle of Saipan in June 1944, he was wounded in the buttocks by Japanese fire which severed his sciatic nerve.  While repairing a toilet at the local community theater, he was asked to replace an ailing actor in a rehearsal. He was immediately stricken with a love for the theater and went to New York City, where he studied and played small roles in stock and Off-Broadway.
   
Paul Newman -Sm Paul Leonard Newman was born in January of 1925, the second son of Arthur and Theresa (nee’ Fetsko) Newman in Cleveland, Ohio. The Newmans were a well-to-do family and Paul grew up in a nice home in Shaker Heights. Newman’s father, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Hungary, was the owner of a highly successful sporting goods store. Paul’s mother, a practicing Christian Scientist of Slovakian decent, and his uncle Joe had an interest in creative arts and it rubbed off on him. By 1950, the 25 year old Newman had graduated high school, been kicked out of Ohio University for unruly behavior, served three years in the Navy during World War II as a radio operator, graduated from Ohio’s Kenyon College, married his first wife, Jackie, and had his first child, Scott. 1950 was also the year that Paul’s father died. When he became successful in later years, Newman said if he had any regrets it would be that his father wasn’t around to see it. He brought Jackie back to Shaker Heights and he ran his father’s sporting goods store for a short period. Then, knowing that wasn’t the career path he wanted to take, he moved Jackie and Scott to New Haven, Connecticut where he would attend Yale University’s School of Drama. While doing a play there, Paul was spotted by two agents who invited him to come to New York City to pursue a career as a professional actor.