page_title: William Boyd (actor)
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: William Boyd (actor) / Biography / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: William Boyd and Dorothy Sebastian in publicity still of the film His First Command (1929).
context_page_description: William Lawrence Boyd was an American film actor who is best known for portraying the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.
context_section_description: Boyd was married five times, first to wealthy heiress Laura Maynard, then to the actresses Ruth Miller, Elinor Fair, Dorothy Sebastian and Grace Bradley. His only son, William Wallace Boyd, whose mother was Boyd's second wife, Ruth Miller, died of pneumonia at age 9 months. After his retirement from the screen, Boyd invested both time and money in real estate and moved to Palm Desert, California. He refused interviews and photographs in later years, preferring not to disillusion his millions of fans who remembered him as a screen idol.
  Boyd was a lifelong Republican and supported the campaign of Dwight Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential election.
  For his contributions to the film industry, Boyd has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1734 Vine Street. In 1995, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
  The inner sleeve of the original American Pie album by Don McLean featured a free verse poem written by McLean about Boyd, with a picture of Boyd in full Hopalong regalia. This sleeve was removed within a year of the album's release. The words to this poem appear on a plaque at the hospital where Boyd died.
  In 1972, Boyd died from complications related to Parkinson's disease and congestive heart failure. He was graced by his fifth wife, the actress Grace Bradley Boyd, who died on September 21, 2010 on her 97th birthday. He is buried in the Sanctuary of Guiding Love alcove in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale).
caption: Boyd and Dorothy Sebastian in the film His First Command (1929)
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