Happy Birthday, Georgia Ellis

Mar 12, 2017

Georgia Ellis was born one hundred years ago today - March 12, 1917. Though she never found big success on the big or small screens, she's a legend of the Golden Age of Radio. Ellis was heard on dozens of shows from The Adventures of Philip Marlowe to Escape to Night Beat and The Whistler, always displaying her versatility in a variety of roles. But even without all of those performances to her credit, Georgia Ellis would be a radio legend thanks to her years as Kitty Russell on Gunsmoke. From 1952 until 1962, she was a member of the core cast of radio's greatest western and one of its best dramas, and Georgia Ellis' performance as the saloon owner who carried a torch for Marshal Matt Dillon was a major part of the show's success.

Before she was introduced as Kitty, Georgia Ellis appeared in the first episode of Gunsmoke as an old girlfriend of Marshal Dillon - a woman who was also the widow of a recently murdered man. She didn't make her first appearance as Kitty until the May 10, 1952 episode. With the August 16 episode, she started receiving equal billing with the three other series leads - William Conrad, Parley Baer, and Howard McNear. She was tied to Gunsmoke before the show ever aired - Georgia Ellis co-starred with William Conrad in "Pagosa," an August 6, 1951 episode of Romance scripted by future Gunsmoke writer John Meston. The story of a new sheriff's arrival in a western town was a sort of test run by Meston for an "adult western" and both Conrad and Ellis played characters similar to those they would later portray in Dodge City.

The relationship between Kitty and William Conrad's Matt Dillon was a key component of the show. Though her true profession was never explicitly stated on the show, in a 1953 interview, producer/director Norman Madconnell said "Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while. We never say it, but Kitty is a prostitute, plain and simple." But their relationship was more than what it appeared to be. As Ellis herself said "There was no forgiveness to be given because I don't think Kitty was available to anybody but Matt."

Like her radio co-stars, Georgia Ellis was given a token audition to reprise her role in the Gunsmoke TV series, but Amanda Blake was cast as Kitty. Georgia Ellis continued on Gunsmoke until the radio series aired its final episode on June 18, 1961.