Gail Davis - Life and Career

Life and Career

The daughter of a small town physician, she was born as Betty Jeanne Grayson in a hospital at Little Rock, but was raised in McGehee, Arkansas, until her family moved to Little Rock. She had been singing and dancing since childhood. After graduating from high school, she studied at the Harcum Junior College for Girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, before completing her education at the University of Texas at Austin. At Austin she met and married her first husband, Bob Davis, with whom she had a daughter, Terrie.

She and her husband moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in motion pictures. Mrs. Davis told an interviewer how she acquired her professional acting name. "I went under contract to MGM around 1946. They told me 'we can't have a Betty Davis, because of Bette Davis, and we can't have a Betty Grayson because of Kathryn Grayson'.... Then a guy in the casting department said 'how about Gail Davis?' So that's where it came from."

In 1947 she made her motion picture debut in a comedy film short. She then appeared in minor roles in another four films until landing a supporting role under star Roy Rogers in a 1948 Western film, The Far Frontier. Between 1948 and 1953, Davis appeared in more than three dozen films, all but three of which were in the Western genre, including twenty films with or for the production company of the singing cowboy star, Gene Autry.

In 1950, she began to guest star in television Westerns, notably in The Cisco Kid, in which she appeared six times in two roles, including that of a niece whose uncle is trying to stop her pending marriage to a gangster. She also guest starred in The Lone Ranger and The Adventures of Kit Carson (twice in the role of Rose Banning). She appeared more than a dozen times on The Gene Autry Show.

Between 1954 and 1956, Davis starred in the syndicated Annie Oakley series, later rebroadcast on ABC. Her costars were Brad Johnson as Deputy Lofty Craig, and Jimmy Hawkins as her younger brother, Tagg Oakley. An adroit horseback rider, Davis also toured North America in Gene Autry's traveling rodeo. She went on to manage other celebrities. In 1961, she made a guest appearance on The Andy Griffith Show as Thelma Lou's cousin.

Davis and her second husband, Carl Edward Guerriero, retired to the San Fernando Valley. During her retirement Davis made guest appearances at western memorabilia shows and film festivals. Her last public appearance was in 1994, when she received the Golden Boot Award from the Motion Picture and Television Fund.