For the Emmerdale actor, see Andy Devine (actor).
Andrew Vabre "Andy" Devine (October 7, 1905 - February 18, 1977) was a rotund, raspy-voiced American character actor and comic cowboy sidekick.
Born in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1905, Andy Devine grew up in nearby Kingman, where his family moved when he was a year old.
He was a star football player at Ball State University. He also played semi-professional football under the pseudonym "Jeremiah Schwartz" -- it was not his birth name as has been erroneously reported elsewhere. His football experience led to his first film role in the silent film The Fighting Football Cardinals.
Although it was at first thought that his peculiar voice would prevent him from moving to the talkies, it became his trademark and strongest selling point. Devine told people that his speech was the result of a childhood accident. (His story is that he had been running with a curtain rod in his mouth and fell, the instrument piercing the roof of his mouth, and when he was finally able to speak, he had the wheezing, duo-tone voice that would make him famous as an actor.) However, a biographer explains that this wasn't true but was one of several stories about his voice fabricated by Devine. Devine's son Tad told an Encore Westerns Channel interviewer (Jim Beaver, reporting from 2007 Newport Beach Film Festival)that the accident had indeed happened but that Andy Devine himself was uncertain whether it was the actual cause of his unique vocal quality.
He appeared in more than 400 films and shared with Walter Brennan, another character actor, the rare ability to move with ease from "B" Westerns to "A" pictures. His notable roles included ten films as sidekick "Cookie" to Roy Rogers, a role in Romeo and Juliet (1937), and "Danny" in A Star Is Born (1937). He made several appearances in films with John Wayne, including Stagecoach (1939), Island in the Sky (1953), and as the frightened marshal in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He also played "The Cheerful Soldier" in The Red Badge of Courage and the First Mate of the S.S. Henrietta in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). While most of his characters were reluctant to get involved in the action, he played the hero in Island in the Sky, as an expert pilot who leads his fellow aviators through the arduous search for a missing airplane.
His film appearances in his later years included movies such as The Over-the-Hill Gang, and "Coyote Bill" in Myra Breckinridge.
Devine also worked in radio. He is well-remembered for his role as "Jingles", Guy Madison's sidekick in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, which Devine and Madison reprised on television. He often appeared on Jack Benny's radio show, sometimes appearing in Benny's semi-regular western series of sketches "Buck Benny Rides Again".
And Devine worked in television. He played "Hap" on the TV series Flipper and hosted a children's TV show, Andy's Gang. He starred in a Twilight Zone episode as "Frisby", a talkative fibster faced with an alien invasion called "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby". He was also a frequent guest star in many television shows throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Finally, Devine performed voice parts in animated films, including "Friar Tuck" in Disney's Robin Hood. He provided the voice of Cornelius the Rooster in several Kellogg's Corn Flakes TV commercials.
In 1973, Devine came to Monroe, Louisiana at the request of George C. Brian, an actor and filmmaker who headed the theater department at a Louisiana university, to perform in Edna Ferber's Show Boat.
Devine died of leukemia on February 18, 1977, at the age of 71, in Orange, California. The main street of his home town of Kingman was renamed "Andy Devine Avenue" in his honor. His career is also highlighted in the Kingman museum and there is a star in his honor in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
