Broncho Billy Anderson
Broncho Billy Anderson (March 21, 1880 – January 20, 1971) was an American actor, writer, director, and producer, who is best-known as the first star of the Western film genre.
He was born Max H. Aronson to a Jewish family in Little Rock, Arkansas (some sources say Pine Bluff). Raised in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Anderson worked as a photographer's model and newspaper vendor before drifting into acting. He performed in vaudeville before joining forces with Edwin S. Porter as an actor and occasional script collaborator.
In Porter's early motion picture The Great Train Robbery (1903), Anderson played several roles. Afterwards, he began to write, direct, and act in his own Westerns. Using the stage name Gilbert Anderson, he became the first cowboy star of movies through a large collection of silent shorts in which he was known as "Broncho Billy."
In 1907, he and George K. Spoor founded Essanay Studios, one of the predominant early movie studios. Anderson gained enormous popularity in a series of hundreds of Western shorts, playing the first real cowboy hero, "Broncho Billy."
Writing and directing most of these movies, Anderson also found time to direct a series of "Alkali Ike" comedy Westerns starring Augustus Carney. In 1916, Anderson sold his ownership in Essanay and retired from acting. He returned to New York, bought the Longacre Theatre and produced plays, but without permanent success. He then made a brief comeback as a producer with a series of shorts with Stan Laurel, but conflicts with the studio, Metro, led him to retire again after 1920.
He resumed producing movies, as owner of Progressive Pictures, into the 1950s, then retired again. In 1958, he received an Honorary Academy Award as a "motion picture pioneer," for his "contributions to the development of motion pictures as entertainment."
In his seventies, Anderson came out of retirement for a cameo role in The Bounty Killer (1965).
He died in 1971 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He was cremated and his ashes are stored in the vault at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.
Anderson was honored posthumously in 1998 with his image on a U.S. postage stamp. In 2002, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1651 Vine Street in Hollywood.