Broncho Billy Anderson

Broncho Billy Anderson
Anderson in a 1913 portrait
Born	Maxwell Henry Aronson (1880-03-21)March 21, 1880 Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
Died	January 20, 1971(1971-01-20) (aged 90) South Pasadena, California, U.S.
Other names	Gilbert M. Anderson
Occupation	Actor Director Producer Writer
Years active	1903–65
Spouse(s)	Mollie Louise Schabbleman (1910–71; his death; 1 child)
Relatives	Leona Anderson (sister)

Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson (March 21, 1880 – January 20, 1971) was an American actor, writer, film director, and film producer, who is best known as the first star of the Western film genre.

Anderson was born Maxwell Henry Aronson in Little Rock, Arkansas, the sixth child of Henry and Esther (Ash) Aronson, both natives of New York. His family was Jewish, his father's parents having emigrated to the United States from Prussia, and his mother's from the Russian Empire. His family moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas when he was three years old. He lived in Pine Bluff until he was 8, when he moved with his family to St. Louis, Missouri. When he was 18, he moved to New York City and appeared in vaudeville and the theater, supplementing his income as a photographer's model and newspaper vendor. In 1903, he met Edwin S. Porter, who hired him as an actor and occasional script collaborator.

Anderson played three roles in Porter's early motion picture The Great Train Robbery (1903). Seeing the film for the first time at a vaudeville theater and being overwhelmed by the audience's reaction, he decided to work in the film industry exclusively. He began to write, direct, and act in his own westerns under the name Gilbert M. Anderson.

In 1907 in Chicago, Anderson and George Kirke Spoor founded Essanay Studios ("S and A" for Spoor and Anderson), one of the major early movie studios. In 1909, he directed the film with the first known instance of the pie-the-face gag, Mr. Flip. Anderson acted in over 300 short films. He played a wide variety of characters, but he gained enormous popularity from a series of 148 silent western shorts and was the first film cowboy star, "Broncho Billy." Spoor stayed in Chicago running the company like a factory, while Anderson traveled the western United States by train with a film crew shooting movies. Many of these were shot in Niles, a small town in Alameda County, California, south-east of San Francisco, where the nearby Western Pacific Railroad route through Niles Canyon proved to be a very suitable location for the filming of Westerns.