Stuntman and Actor
Like many Columbia contract players, Mahoney worked in the studio's two-reel comedies. Beginning in 1947, writer-director Edward Bernds cast Mahoney in slapstick comedies starring The Three Stooges. Mahoney had large speaking roles in these films, and often played his scenes for laughs. Striking a dauntless, heroic pose, Mahoney would suddenly get clumsy, tripping over something or taking sprawling pratfalls. Columbia management noticed Mahoney's acting skills and gave him starring roles in adventure serials, beginning in 1950.
Cowboy star Gene Autry, then working at Columbia, hired Mahoney to star in a television series. Autry's Flying A Productions filmed seventy-nine half-hour episodes of the syndicated The Range Rider from 1951 to 1953 and 1959, a lost episode shown six years after the series ended. He was billed as Jack Mahoney. The character had no name other than Range Rider. His series co-star was Dick Jones, playing the role of Dick West
In the 1958 western Money, Women and Guns, Mahoney played the starring role. The film also starred Kim Hunter.
For the 1958 television season, he starred in the popular cult semi-western Yancy Derringer series for thirty-four episodes, which aired on CBS. Yancy Derringer was a gentleman adventurer living in New Orleans, Louisiana, after the Civil War. He had a Pawnee Indian companion named Pahoo Katchewa ('pa-who-kaht'-chee-wah') ("Wolf Who Stands in Water") who did not speak, played by X Brands. Derringer had saved the life of Pahoo, who thereafter remained devoted to Derringer.
Read more about this topic: Jock Mahoney
Famous quotes containing the word actor:
“An actor rides in a bus or railroad train; he sees a movement and applies it to a new role. A woman in agony of spirit might turn her head just so; a man in deep humiliation probably would wring his hands in such a way. From straws like these, drawn from completely different sources, the fabric of a character may be built. The whole garment in which the actor hides himself is made of small externals of observation fitted to his conception of a role.”
—Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878–1979)