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Cowboys, Creatures and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures
For more than nineteen years, Amanda Blake’s character on Gunsmoke, Miss Kitty, gave strength and succor to the parched patrons who visited Dodge City’s Longbranch Saloon. Kitty Russell was extremely softhearted, beneath what could be a very businesslike exterior, and would have willingly become romantically involved with Marshal Matt Dillon.
The few Westerns seen on television during the early 1950s starred old-style move heroes such as the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy, and had little to do with the real West. Two shows, Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, changed all that. Gunsmoke was set in Dodge City, Kansas, around 1880. It first began as a radio program starring William Conrad as Marshal Dillon and Georgia Ellis as Miss Kitty.
When Amanda Blake heard that the successful radio show was going to be made into a television pilot she knew she wanted to audition. Blake was born Beverly Louise Neill on February 20, 1929, in Buffalo, New York. She was educated in Buffalo, Gainesville, Georgia, and Claremont, Los Angeles County, where she moved with her parents in 1943.
Blake made her dramatic debut as a ten-year-old in a school pageant in Buffalo, and later studied acting at Buffalo’s Studio Club. She signed a contract with MGM while still in her teens, and her first film role was in the 1950 film Stars in My Crown.
“I knew I had to have the part of Kitty,” she told reporters in a 1971 interview. “So, I hounded the producer until I got it.” In order to do the long-running Gunsmoke series, Miss Blake commuted by private plane from her home near Phoenix. She left the show in 1974. “I was tired and it was time to go,” she recalled years later. “It was the end of the trail.”
Gunsmoke ran from September 10, 1955, to September 1, 1975. The show lasted only one year without Blake.
In 1968, Amanda Blake was selected as the first female inductee into the Hall of Fame of Great Western Actors and Actresses in Oklahoma City. She died of cancer in Sacramento, California, on August 16, 1989.
Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics 3
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