Ken Curtis, the actor who often portrayed scruffy, backwoods, uneducated, Deep-South hillbilly types, had a surprising origin story. Born in the small town of Las Animas, Colorado, he was the son of the town sheriff. This might come as a shock to many, as his rugged on-screen persona often led people to assume he was a native Southerner.
But that's not all - Curtis had a fascinating early career. Before becoming an actor, he was a singer in the big-band era, and he even had the privilege of being a vocalist in the legendary Tommy Dorsey orchestra. He entered the film industry in the late 1940s, during the tail-end of the singing-cowboy period, appearing in a series of low-budget Westerns for Columbia Pictures.
As the singing-cowboy genre died out, Curtis transitioned to straight dramatic and comedy parts, becoming a regular in the films of director John Ford, who was also his father-in-law. Curtis's career continued to flourish in the 1950s, as he branched out into film production with two extremely low-budget monster films, The Killer Shrews (1959) and The Giant Gila Monster (1959).
However, it's his long-running role as Festus Hagen, the scruffy, cantankerous deputy in the long-running TV series Gunsmoke (1955),that he is best known for.
