"What ever Happened to Randolph Scott? Is the name and line in a very popular Statler Brothers song? The song is actually reminising about the old days when you went to town to see a Saturday Western that likely stared the likes of Randolph Scott or John Wayne. What ever did happend to the famous cowboy who grew up in Charlotte NC?
Tar Heel actor and Western movie star Randolph Scott never forgot his North Carolina and Southern roots. His final trip back to Charlotte came in 1987, when he was buried in historic Elmwood Cemetery, with family friend Reverend Billy Graham conducting the service.
Scott had left Charlotte for Hollywood to try his luck at acting in 1928 yet returned fairly frequently while his mother remained alive. From the 1930s until the early 1960s, he was one of Hollywood's most respected actors, and one of its leading Western stars. A few years after the release of Scott's final film in 1962, he seemed like a distant memory, and the America he had portrayed so well in film seemed relegated to the distant past. For generations of Americans in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Scott's characters had epitomized an older, traditional America of honor and duty, strong family values, and a belief in the triumph of good over evil. But by the mid-1970s, more than a few considered Scott to be "out-of-date." But technological access to Scott's films during the 1980s and 1990s, including via satellite, cablevision, and home videos, and a growing critical re-appreciation of his cinematic oeuvre have helped reestablish his reputation as one of the film industry's finest Western actors.
George Randolph Scott was born January 23, 1898, in Orange County, Virginia, while his parents were visiting family. His mother, Lucy Crane Scott, was from an old and established Charlotte family, and it was in the Queen City that Scott spent most of his childhood. His father, George Scott, was a textile engineer and expected his son to study engineering at Georgia Tech. As a Yellowjacket, Randolph Scott also played football, but a back injury eliminated any hopes of pursuing a sports career. He served honorably in World War I, and still destined to follow in his father's footsteps, he finally finished his university studies at the University of North Carolina.
Fascinated by acting, he persuaded his father to give him a letter of introduction to Howard Hughes, a friend of the family, and shortly afterward, off to "the city of lights" he went. At first struggling to make a go of it, he acted in several stage plays at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, before securing some bit parts, and finally, a contract with Paramount to star in a well-produced series of Zane Grey Westerns in the 1930s. As an actor he adapted to other genres, as well, with starring roles in such fine dramas as She (RKO, 1935) and Roberta (RKO, 1935, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and in historical epics such as So Red the Rose (Paramount, 1935, based on Stark Young's novel of the War Between the States) and The Last of the Mohicans (United Artists, 1936). During World War II, Scott, now in his mid-forties, turned out several well-received patriotic movies, including To the Shores of Tripoli (Fox, 1942), Corvette-K225 (Universal, 1943), and Gung Ho! (Universal, 1943).
But it was in Westerns that Randolph Scott made his mark in American cinematographic history. Twentieth Century Fox studio co-starred him in its immensely successful Jesse James in 1939 (with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda) and followed that with leading roles in director Fritz Lang's block-buster, Western Union (1941), and in another War Between the States epic, Belle Starr (1941).
By 1946 Scott preferred to play Western roles. He enjoyed doing them, he once remarked, because they fit his personality; and he said, there was money to be made. Beginning with Abilene Town (United Artists, 1946), Scott in sixteen years made thirty-nine Westerns, all successful at the box office and several now considered classics. From 1950 to 1952, the Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Poll included Scott as one of the top-ten box office moneymakers. With the advent of television during the 1950s, Scott's persona (along with John Wayne's) not only kept the cinematic Western alive but also defined it.
In 1956 John Wayne's production company, Batjac, offered Scott the starring role in Seven Men from Now, under the direction of Budd Boetticher (Wayne had wanted the role, but commitments with the film The Searchers prevented it.) With a crackerjack screenplay written by Burt Kennedy, Seven Men from Now (Warner Bros., 1956, with Lee Marvin) was a resounding success and began a creative and professional relationship among Scott, Boetticher, and Kennedy that produced six more oaters. In short succession, the team produced such cinematic gems as The Tall T (Columbia, 1957, co-starring Richard Boone), Decision At Sundown (Columbia, 1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (Columbia, 1958), Ride Lonesome (Columbia, 1959, with Lee Van Cleef and James Coburn), and Comanche Station (Columbia, 1960, with Claude Akins). These generally short films presented Scott as a hard-edged but highly principled loner, often driven by unattainable goals.
By 1960, Randolph Scott was ready to hang up his holsters, but he waited long enough to star in a fitting swan song for him and the traditional Western genre. Co-starring with fellow old-time Western actor Joel McCrea, Scott played the good/bad role of Gil Westrum in director Sam Peckinpah's elegiac Ride the High Country (MGM, 1962). Newsweek and Film Quarterly selected it as the best film of 1962, and many film critics now consider it to be one of the greatest Westerns of all time. Years later, he stated that he retired from acting because "the motion picture industry is in a steadily declining state, what with nudity and the like flagrantly displayed in films today."
Happily married to (Marie) Patricia Stillman since 1944 (an earlier marriage had been dissolved), he adopted and helped rear two children, Christopher and Sandra. During retirement, he enjoyed playing golf and reading the financial pages of The Wall Street Journal; Scott's long and successful acting career and his successful investing in land and oil wells made him one of Hollywood's richest men. Scott was also a deeply religious man. According to Christopher, his father "was less an actor and more a man who simply portrayed himself. He lived by and believed in his own convictions." Perhaps director Budd Boetticher best described Scott: "If the Confederate cavalry had had one hundred ‘Randolph Scotts,' the South would have won the Civil War. There never has been such a complete gentleman in the long history of the motion picture industry."
At the age of 89, Randolph Scott died on March 2, 1987. For his contributions to American film, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 1975 he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
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