Into The Sunset

For all the actors who complain about typecasting there are those who embrace their iconic roles with relish.

Adam West and Clayton Moore spring instantly to mind and in more recent times Mark Hamill pops up from time to time to either play up or play down his Luke Skywalker character.

The one who out did them all was William Boyd - better known to generations of film and TV viewers as Hopalong Cassidy.

Groomed in this studio portrait as a matinee idol in the making (doesn't he look a little like Leonardo di Caprio?) Boyd was cast as the romantic lead in Cecil B De Mille's The Volga Boatman and was earning $100,000 a year.

By the start of the talkies era his film roles dried up and the situation become dire after a newspaper mistakenly identified him instead of stage actor William Stage Boyd as being up on liquor and gambling charges.

He got his return to the big screen break as Hopalong Cassidy whom he transformed from a rough gunslinger into the wholesome family-friendly character which became the model for the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey.

Boyd made 66 films and then turned his hand to television where he made original series as well as cut the feature films into TV length.

After being nearly broke in the late 1920s, early 1930s Boyd ensured that he had the rights to Hopalong Cassidy and on this he made a considerable fortune. Not only in rights and residuals but also on merchandising deals including the first licenced branded lunchbox.

There's an amusing juxtaposition in these two images.

As the non-smoking, teetotal, gunslinging lawman he may not have approved of the cigarette card, today do-gooders would frown on Hoppy's endorsement of a preservative filled, sugar charged, teeth rotting, obesity causing Cola.