Harry Carey Jr., Western character actor known for ‘3 Godfathers,’ ‘Wagon Master,’ dies at 91

Washington Post ^ | 12/28/12 | AP

[DFG]

Harry Carey Jr., a character actor who starred in such Westerns as “3 Godfathers” and “Wagon Master,” has died. He was 91.

His daughter, Melinda Carey, said he died Thursday of natural causes surrounded by family at a hospice facility in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“He went out as gracefully as he came in,” she said Friday.

Carey’s career spanned more than 50 years and included such John Ford classics as “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” ‘’The Searchers” and “The Long Gray Line.” Later in life, he appeared in the movies “Gremlins” and “Back to the Future Part III.”

[Shadowstrike]

God bless his Soul. You gave many people much enjoyment, Prayers for your family at this time.

[Calvin Locke]

Back to the Future Part III

That was nice of whomever to include that table of veteran "cowboys".

(However, I thought the filming/editing of the stunt doubles scampering away from the table crash left a lot to be desired.)

[bannie]

There was an earlier version which was filmed, in part, in Bodie, CA (before its last fire). In spite of its early production, it was also a great movie.

[bannie]

Hell's Heroes is the version that was filmed in Bodie, CA. :) I love its ending.

[Inyo-Mono]

Hells Heroes, I'll have to see if I can find that. I live near Bodie and know someone whose grandfather was born there.

[greene66]

That was my favorite version as well... Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler. Craggy faces all. And each with an unnerving sense of real menace, which made that version more powerful, as it played out. Harsh and hard-edged, without a single shred of Hollywood gloss.

Another early-talkie western gem was “Law and Order” with Harry Carey Jr.’s father.

[Conservative4Ever]

Just damn. My favorite John Wayne cavalry/western is She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. I’d like to think Ben Johnson, Wayne and Carey are together again riding the range on the big ranch in the sky.

[headstamp 2]

http://www.sinistercinema.com/Page.asp?NavID=106

[Inyo-Mono]

Thanks!

[Borges]

Most of the WW2 generation served before ever becoming famous or actors. Male actors generally didn’t become famous at a young age till the 1950s when the Montgomery Clift/ Marlon Brando school came in.

[concentric circles]

Dobe came by his horsemanship the easy way, growing up on the family ranch.

There must have been some filming nearby because they never kept this many horses on the ranch.

Harry Carey Jr., known as Dobe because his red hair was the same shade as the red adobe clay on the ranch, and his sister Emma at play with the Navajo kids who lived on the ranch. Emma was a baby when she first went on her Dad's schooner down at Balboa and he repeatedly asked how his little captain was doing. From then on she was known as Cappy.

I meant to post sooner but didn't have the time. Harry Carey's ranch is just a few miles from my home. Its where Dobe and his sister Cappy grew up. The ranch has since been subdivided but the main house has been preserved in San Francisquito Canyon. Its actually the second house as the original burned down when Jr. was a lad. It had survived the flood when the St. Francis Dam ruptured in 1928 only to burn down a few years later.

The following is from Dobe's memoir "Company of Heroes." Apparently Charlie Russel sometimes lived and painted at the ranch and here Dobe recalls the visits. Interestingly, William S. Hart lived a few miles away in Newhall and purchased several nice paintings from Russel which are still displayed at Hart's ranch house, now a museum.

"...In 1926, when I was five years old, the great Western artist and sculptor Charles M. Russell passed away. I have heard that most children cannot remember very much about their lives before five or six years of age, but I remember him. He was a little boy's dream, with his stories of his life as a real cowboy in Montana and his magic artist's hands. he, like my father, always had a roll-your-own Bull Durham cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. Some of his ample grey hair fell on either side of his forehead. i would always sit beside him. In those days, presliced bread was unknown, and a whole loaf would sit on a platter in the middle of the dining room table. He would nudge me with his knee and ask, "What kind of animal shall we make this morning?"

I would usually say, "A horse."

"With that he would reach into the center of the loaf of bread and pull out a hunk from the middle, dip a hand into his glass of water, and knead the bread to make it more pliable. Then he put both hands out of sight under the table, and when he brought them back up, there would be a little white horse that he would place in front of me. He could use up a whole loaf of bread in a short space of time making coyotes, goats - all kinds of little animals."

"Charley and my father would sit at that big dining room table drinking coffee and swapping out-West stories from about six in the morning till lunch. In the afternoon, Charely would go down to paint in the adobe cabin my father had built for him. The next morning, there they both would be once more, talking - talking - talking, until my mother finally ran them out..."