Trivia of Guy Madison

 Trivia of Guy Madison (19 January 1922 - 6 February 1996)

*As a young man he worked as a telephone lineman, but entered the Coast Guard at the beginning of the Second World War. While on liberty one weekend in Hollywood, he attended a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast and was spotted in the audience by an assistant to Henry Willson, an executive for David O. Selznick. Selznick casted him as an unknown sailor to play small role in Since You Went Away (1944) with Jennifer Jones.Selznick promptly signed Robert Moseley to a contract. Selznick and Willson concocted the screen name Guy Madison (the "guy" girls would like to meet, and Madison from a passing Dolly Madison cake wagon).

* Although Madison was on the screen for only three minutes in Since You Went Away (1944), the studio received thousands of letters from fans wanting to know more about him.He received extensive coverage in the influential fan magazines of the time, including Photoplay where his agent Henry Willson had once worked.

*Madison was also cast in starring roles with Dorothy McGuire in "Till the End of Time" (1946) and Shirley Temple in "Honeymoon" (1947). Good looks could not disguise a wooden acting style, however, and his career evaporated by the end of the 1940's.

*His best friend in Hollywood was Rory Calhoun.

The two men often went on fishing and hunting trips.Guy and his (second) wife Sheila Connolly named him godfather to their first born Bridget.

*He played leads in a series of programmers before being cast as legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickok in the TV series Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951). He played Hickok on TV and radio for much of the 1950s, and many of the TV episodes were strung together and released as feature films.

*His popularity as Hickok led to a starring role in the 3-D film "The Charge at Feather River" (1953), whose success gave him a new lease on life in Hollywood as a tight-lipped action hero, usually in Westerns.His films included "The Command" (1954), "Five Against the House" (1955), "The Beast of Hollow Mountain" (1956), "On the Threshold of Space" (1956), "The Hard Man" (1957) and "Bullwhip" (1958).He made a dozen or so films in America between 1956 and 1959 but without a great deal of box office.

*In 1959, Madison left Hollywood for a lucrative film career in Europe, where he starred in a number of war films and spaghetti westerns.He enjoyed a ten-year run as a popular actor in German and Italian films.