Randolph Scott

Randolph Scott was born Randolph Crane Scott in Orange County, Virginia, in 1898, and became, after decades of Western and adventure pictures, the defining star of the postwar American Western and one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood, having invested his earnings shrewdly in real estate and oil. Scott and Grant shared a Santa Monica beach house, on and off, for roughly a decade beginning around 1932, at various points while both were young contract actors establishing themselves in Hollywood. The arrangement is the most extensively examined domestic detail of Grant's private life, generating decades of speculation in later biographies and popular writing. The documented record itself is comparatively thin: contemporary fan-magazine photography treated the arrangement as an amusing bachelor household, and no verified first-person account from either man settles the question of its nature. This archive records that the two men shared a home for an extended period; it does not assert what has not been documented. Professionally, Scott and Grant appeared together in the screwball comedy My Favorite Wife (1940), in which Scott's character complicates the marital farce built around Grant and Irene Dunne. Scott's own later career moved decisively toward the Western, culminating in the seven films he made with director Budd Boetticher between 1956 and 1960 — lean, morally spare pictures now regarded among the finest of the genre — and in his final film, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962), made opposite Joel McCrea. Scott retired from acting after that film and died in 1987.