Ken Curtis
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Ken Curtis (July 2, 1916 - April 28, 1991), was an American singer and actor best known for his role as "Festus Haggen" on CBS' long-running western drama, Gunsmoke, which he portrayed from 1964 to 1975.
Curtis also costarred with Larry Pennell in the 1962 syndicated television series Ripcord, a half-hour drama about a skydiving service company. Curtis played the role of "Jim Buckley" and Pennell (born 1928) was "Ted McKeever." This series inspired the first widespread interest in parachuting as a sport.
Curtis was born Curtis Wain Gates and reared in Las Animas near Lamar in southeastern Colorado. His father, Dan Gates, was the sheriff. The family lived above the jail and his mother, Nellie Sneed Gates, cooked for the prisoners.
He was a singer before moving into acting, performing with the popular Sons of the Pioneers in Gene Autry and Roy Rogers films as well as singing with the iconic Tommy Dorsey band. Movie audiences will hear his voice in the introduction of the western standard "Tumbling Tumbleweeds".
The son-in-law of director John Ford, Curtis teamed with Ford and John Wayne in Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Wings of Eagles, The Searchers, The Horse Soldiers, The Alamo and How The West Was Won. Curtis also teamed with Ford, along with Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, and Jack Lemmon in the comedy Navy classic Mister Roberts. In the 1950s, Curtis tried his hand at producing two extremely low-budget monster films, The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster. Curtis also guest starred on an episode of Perry Mason—as a circus clown.
Curtis remains best known for his role as Festus, the scruffy, cantankerous, functionally illiterate deputy in Gunsmoke. While Marshal Matt Dillon had a total of five deputies over two decades, Festus held the badge the longest (eleven years) and was the most colorful. Festus was patterned after "Cedar Jack", a man from Curtis' Las Animas childhood. Cedar Jack, who lived about forty miles out of town made a living cutting cedar fence posts, gave Curtis opportunity to observe him when Jack would come to Las Animas, where he would usually end up drunk and in jail. Carroll O'Connor appeared twice in episodes of Gunsmoke and years later Curtis played a retired police detective in an episode of O'Connor's NBC-TV series In the Heat of the Night.
Besides engaging in the usual personal appearances most television stars undertake to promote their program, Curtis also traveled around the county performing a western-themed stage show at fairs, rodeos and other venues when Gunsmoke wasn't in production, and even for some years after the show was canceled.
In 1981, Curtis was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
His last role was as cattle rancher "Seaborn Tay" in the television production Conagher (1991), by famed western author Louis L'Amour, with Sam Elliott in the lead role.
Curtis died in his sleep of natural causes in Fresno, California.
