STANWYCK, Barbara

(1907–1990)

   Born Ruby Stevens in New York, Barbara Stanwyck played a variety of strong, independent female roles in Westerns and non-Westerns from the 1930s through the early 1960s and then developed a second career in television Westerns. She rarely played weak-willed women or women who could not handle a horse as well as anyone else in the picture. From the start she played strong women in such films as Annie Oakley (1935) and Union Pacific (1939). She played pants roles to perfection. Her best work in Westerns, however, came in the 1950s. Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) is often seen as her best Western and she played opposite Ronald Reagan, who very much played a secondary role to Stanwyck. She did her own stuntsfor the film and so impressed the Blackfeet tribal members hired as extras that they made her a blood sister and gave her the Indian name of Princess Many Victories. She followed the film with The Violent Men (1955), opposite Glenn Ford; The Maverick Queen (1956) and Forty Guns (1957), both opposite Barry Sullivan; and Trooper Hook (1957), opposite Joel McCrea.