October 16 was the birthday of a future B movie star whose birth name was Gordon Nance (1904-1965).
Nance grew up on a cattle Missouri ranch. He grew up riding, roping, and participating in rodeo events, so it seems odd to me that Ben Johnson has been quoted as saying that he taught Nance how to ride. Maybe he gave him some pointers? Maybe he taught him how to ride in a way that looked better on camera? At any rate, the 6′ 3″ Nance came out to Hollywood when he was around 20 to break into the movies. He started out with some stage experience at Pasadena Playhouse, then became an extra and bit player in silent pictures beginning in 1925. Most of his work in Hollywood for about a dozen years was in uncredited stints in crowd scenes, sometimes in such major movies as Ben Hur (1925) and Scarface (1932).
From time to time, he would land a proper role playing a named supporting character, and on those occasions in the early years he used the screen name “Gordon Elliott” — surely because “nance” was slang for “sissy” (though that didn’t seem to bother Jack Nance any, several decades later!) His first decent part was in the Tom Mix western The Arizona Wildcat (1927). One of the last before he attained his own B movie stardom was Gene Autry’s Boots and Saddles (1937).
In 1938, Columbia cast him as the title character in the serial The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, and this is when he adapted the famous Law Man’s first name as his own. He didn’t yet go so far as to call himself “Wild” offscreen at first, though his movie characters usually applied the colorful adjective. After five years at Columbia, he switched horses and moved over to Republic, which is when he began using the full handle Wild Bill Elliott on and off screen.
Already one of the industry’s top ten western stars, in 1944 Elliot became the second actor (after Red Barry) to play the popular comic strip and radio character Red Ryder in films, which he did through 1946, after which Rocky Lane took over. From 1946 through 1954 he continued starring in low budget westerns, briefly experimenting with the billing of “William Elliott” before returned to the “Wild Bill” monker. From 1955 to 1957 he shifted gears completely when westerns of his sort had worn out their welcome at the box office, playing a detective named Andy Doyle in a B movie series.
Though he attempted a couple of pilots for western TV series, the market was saturated there too, and he never worked in westerns for the small screen as many of his contemporaries did. Instead, he hosted a local show in Las Vegas, where he often screened his old films. He was also a spokesman for Viceroy Cigarettes in tv commericals. And cigarettes were what killed him with lung cancer at age 61.
Strange but true: Wild Bill Elliott shares a birthday with Rex Bell, a good day for B movie western stars!