Ken Curtis(1916-1991)
- Actor
- Producer
- Soundtrack
Considering the kind of scruffy, backwoods, uneducated, Deep-South
hillbilly types he played, many people would be surprised to hear that
Ken Curtis wasn't actually born in the south but in the small town of
Las Animas, Colorado, the son of the town sheriff. They would probably
be even more surprised to learn that he began his show business career
as a singer in the big-band era, and was a vocalist in the legendary
Tommy Dorsey orchestra. He entered films in
the late 1940s at the tail-end of the singing-cowboy period in a series
of low-budget Westerns for Columbia Pictures. When that genre died out,
Curtis turned to straight dramatic and comedy parts and became a
regular in the films of director
John Ford (who was his father-in-law).
Curtis branched out into film production in the 1950s with two
extremely low-budget monster films,
The Killer Shrews (1959) and
The Giant Gila Monster (1959),
but he is best known for his long-running role as Festus Hagen, the
scruffy, cantankerous deputy in the long-running TV series
Gunsmoke (1955).
