Grace Bradley

Biography

A petite and extremely lovely blonde "B" film actress who eventually deserted her career in favor of standing by her man (cowboy icon William Boyd, aka, "Hopalong Cassidy"), Grace Bradley spent the rest of her life in his shadow and devoting herself to her husband's career. Bill's Hoppy was the longest span of any fictional character played by the same actor. Following his death in 1972, she spent a good deal of her time keeping his good name and image intact. The former film lead and second lead was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 21, 1913, and initially studied to be a concert pianist. At age 15 she played Carnegie Hall, representing the state of New York in one of its annual competitions for up-and-coming pianists. She took advantage of all her assets by modeling full time and taking singing/dancing lessons on the sly. She went on to act, sing, and dance on the Broadway stage in the musicals "Strike Me Pink" and "The Little Show". While performing at the Paradise nightclub in Manhattan in 1933, she was "discovered" by a Paramount Pictures director and signed for films. Out west, Bradley often was cast as an assertive "bad girl" or femme-fatale at Paramount with names like Goldie, Trixie, Flossie, Lily and Sadie. Her first full-length movie was as a second lead in the Bing Crosby/Jack Oakie musical comedy Too Much Harmony (1933), in which she sang and danced to the feisty tune "Cradle Me With a Hotcha Lullaby". She subsequently appeared in the W.C. Fields classic Six of a Kind (1934); the Richard Arlen pictures Come On, Marines! (1934) and She Made Her Bed (1934); the Claudette Colbert/Fred MacMurray comedy The Gilded Lily (1935), and had the female lead opposite Bruce Cabot in Redhead (1934). Appearing secondary in the Bing Crosby/Ethel Merman version of Anything Goes (1936), her musical talents were tapped into with the films The Cat's-Paw (1934), Stolen Harmony (1935), Old Man Rhythm (1935), Sitting on the Moon (1936), and Wake Up and Live (1937). Elsewhere, various "B" male co-stars would include Wallace Ford, Lee Tracy, Jack Haley, John Boles, Robert Livingston, Jack Holt and Robert Armstrong. In 1937, she happened to cross paths with William Lawrence Boyd, who became her literal "Prince Charming on a big white horse". She had harbored a long-time school-girl crush on the man and she was instantly smitten upon their first meeting. He was 42 and she 23. Their courtship was fast and furious. He asked her to marry him within a few days and they were married three weeks later on June 5th. Boyd had already been married four times, none of which lasted any longer than six years. She would become the fifth (and last) Mrs. William Boyd in a marriage lasting 35 years. The couple had no children together; Bill had one child from his third marriage. Grace continued on with her cinematic career for a time. She appeared in the mystery Romance on the Run (1938) with Donald Woods; enjoyed top billing in the "B" crime drama The Invisible Killer (1939); supported heavy-duty singers Allan Jones and Susanna Foster in the musical romance There's Magic in Music (1941); and provided decorative diversion in the Jack London adventure Sign of the Wolf (1941) opposite Michael Whalen. Her last three pictures had the actress co-starring as Sadie McGuerin and mingling with cab company owners William Bendix and Joe Sawyer in the Hal Roach full-length comedies Brooklyn Orchid (1942), The McGuerins from Brooklyn (1942), and Taxi, Mister (1943). She then retired completely. By 1944, Boyd's movie career had faltered and the couple sought the purchasing rights to his old movies and the identifiable Hoppy character. Selling their Malibu ranch home and moving to a Hollywood apartment, the risk paid off. By 1946 he had formed his own production company and began churning out new Hopalong Cassidy films and serials. They took the character to episodic television in 1948 and he became a hit all over again. "Hoppymania" burst onto the American scene with hundreds of products bearing his name and likeness becoming instant collectible items (lunch boxes, tee shirts, cowboy hats, cowboy boots, toy guns, etc). Boyd retired from show business in 1953 now quite wealthy. He and his wife then moved to Palm Desert, California. In 1968, Boyd had surgery to remove a tumor from a lymph gland. From that point on, he refused all requests for interviews and photographs. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, he died as the result of heart failure in Laguna Beach, California, on September 12, 1972, at age 77. Bradley went on to spend the last decades of her life devoting herself to volunteer work at the same hospital where her husband had died. She later withstood legal battles stemming from copyright infringements, although enjoyed appearing occasionally at Hopalong Cassidy tributes. The definitive biography Hopalong Cassidy, "An American Legend", was co-authored by Bradley and Michael Cochran in 2008. Grace Bradley Boyd died of natural causes on her 97th birthday. She was interred next to her husband at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.