Grace Bradley

A petite and extremely lovely blonde B film actress who eventually deserted her career in favor of standing by her man cowboy icon William Boyd aka Hopalong Cassidy Grace Bradley spent the rest of her life in his shadow and devoting herself to her husbands career Bills Hoppy was the longest span of any fictional character played by the same actor Following his death in 1972 she spent a good deal of her time keeping his good name and image in tact Grace initially studied to be a concert pianist playing Carngie Hall at age 15 She also took advantage of her budding loveliness by modeling full time and taking singingdancing lessons on the sly She went on to act sing and dance on the Broadway stage in the musicals Strike Me Pink and The Little Show While performing at the Paradise nightclub in Manhattan in 1933 the dancer was discovered and signed by a Paramount Pictures director Heading west she often came off as an assertive bad girl or femmefatale at Paramount with such fun partygirl names as Goldie Trixie Flossie Lily and Sadie Her first fulllength movie was as a second lead in the Bing CrosbyJack Oakie musical comedy Too Much Harmony 1933 in which she sang and danced to the feisty tune Cradle Me With a Hotcha Lullaby She subsequently appeared in the WC Fields classic Six of a Kind 1934 the Richard Arlen pictures Come On Marines 1934 and She Made Her Bed 1934 the Claudette ColbertFred MacMurray comedy The Gilded Lily 1935 and had the female lead opposite Bruce Cabot in Redhead 1934 Appearing secondary in the Bing CrosbyEthel Merman version of Anything Goes 1936 her musical talents were tapped into with the films The CatsPaw 1934 Stolen Harmony 1935 Old Man Rhythm 1935 Sitting on the Moon 1936 and Wake Up and Live 1937 Elsewhere various B male costars would include Wallace Ford Lee Tracy Jack Haley John Boles Robert Livingston Jack Holt and Robert Armstrong In 1937 Grace happened to cross paths with Bill Boyd who became her Prince Charming on a big white horse She had a longtime schoolgirl crush on Boyd and was instantly smitten upon their first meeting He was 42 and she 23 He asked her to marry him within a few days and they were married three weeks later on June 5th Boyd had already been married four times none lasting longer than six years Grace would become the fifth and last Mrs William Boyd in a marriage that lasted 35 years The couple had no children together Bill had one child from his third marriage William Lawrence Boyd retired from show business in 1953 quite wealthy Suffering from Parkinsons disease he died of heart failure in Laguna Beach in 1972 at age 77 Grace went on to spend the last decades of her life devoting herself to volunteer work at the Laguna Beach hospital where her husband lived out his final days She later withstood legal battles that stemmed from copyright infringements but enjoyed appearing occasionally at Hopalong Cassidy tributes The definitive biography Hopalong Cassidy An American Legend was coauthored by Grace and Michael Cochran in 2008 Grace Bradley Boyd died  21 September 2010 Dana Point California of complications from old age at age 97 on her birthday and she was interred next to her husband at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Clendale California