George Hayes, a renowned American character actor, was born on May 7, 1885, in the Hayes Hotel, which was owned by his father, in Stannards, New York. He was the third of seven children and grew up in the small town of Stannards on the outskirts of Wellsville, New York.
As a young man, George Hayes worked in a circus and played semi-professional baseball while still a teenager. However, he ran away from home at the age of 17 in 1902 and joined a touring stock company. He later married Olive Ireland in 1914 and the couple became successful performers on the vaudeville circuit.
After retiring in his 40s, George Hayes lost a significant amount of money in the 1929 stock market crash and was forced to return to work. Although he had made a few film appearances prior to the crash, it wasn't until his wife convinced him to move to California and he met producer Trem Carr that he began working steadily in the film industry.
George Hayes gained fame as the sidekick Windy Halliday in many films alongside Hopalong Cassidy between 1936 and 1939. However, he left the Cassidy films due to a salary dispute and was legally prohibited from using the nickname "Windy." Instead, he adopted the sobriquet "Gabby" and began using it from around 1940.
One of the few sidekicks to make it to the annual list of Top Ten Western Boxoffice Stars, George Hayes did so repeatedly throughout his career. In his early films, he alternated between playing whiskered comic-relief sidekicks and clean-shaven bad guys. However, by the later 1930s, he primarily worked as a Western sidekick to stars such as John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott.
After his last film in 1950, George Hayes hosted a network television show called The Gabby Hayes Show, which was dedicated to telling stories of the Old West for children. Offstage, he was known for being an elegant and well-appointed connoisseur and man-about-town. He spent the final years of his life focusing on his investments and died of cardiovascular disease on February 9, 1969, in Burbank, California.
