George Reeves

During the time he spent at Pasadena Playhouse, he met Ellanora Needles, also an actress, and married her on 21 September 1940, however, the childless couple divorced a decade later on 16 October 1950.

He had a serious romantic relationship with Toni Mannix, a former showgirl eight, years his senior and the wife of Eddie Mannix, a senior ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’ executive. In 1958, he split with Toni and became engaged to Leonore Lemmon, a New York socialite.

Reeves worked tirelessly to raise funds to fight myasthenia gravis and even served as the ‘Myasthenia Gravis Foundation’ national chairman in 1955. He also supported the Los Angeles chapter of ‘United Cerebral Palsy’ and ‘The City of Hope’, a cancer research hospital, appearing in telethons and parades.

George Reeves was born on January 5, 1914, as George Keefer Brewer in Woodstock, a small farming community in Iowa to Donald Carl Brewer and Helen Lescher. However, the couple split soon after George was born.

After the divorce, Helen moved to her home in Galesburg, Illinois with infant George, and then to Pasadena, California to stay with her sister. There, Helen married Frank Joseph Bessolo, who adopted George in 1927, and George Brewer became George Bessolo. While his biological father, Donald, also remarried, George never met him again.

George Reeves spent his childhood in Pasadena; he studied at Polytechnic School after which, he enrolled at the Pasadena Junior College. In college, he played the guitar, joined the acapella choir and actively performed in college dramatics.

In 1935, at the age of 21, George joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse, one of the nation’s most famed and prestigious theaters. During the next four years, George acted in numerous Playhouse productions.

One day after returning from a vacation, his mother told him that his father had committed suicide. In reality, the couple had divorced after being married for 15 years. It was only many years later that he learned that not only was Frank Bessolo very much alive but also that he was not his biological father.

George Bessolo made his debut in films when he was cast in the 1939 epic ‘Gone with the Wind’ as Stuart Tarleton, one of the two suitors of Scarlett O'Hara. Soon after being chosen for the role, he entered into a contract with ‘Warner Brothers’, who promptly changed his screen name to George Reeves.

Even though ‘Gone with the Wind’ was the first film he signed up for, ‘Warner Bros.’ made and released four films with him in the year it took for ‘Gone with the Wind’ to be completed and released.

Warner Bros.’ also loaned him to Alexander Korda for the 1941 film, ‘Lydia’ in which, he was paired with Merle Oberon. The film bombed at the box office.

After he was released by ‘Warner Bros.’, George Reeves signed up with ‘Twentieth Century-Fox’, however the association did not last long as only a few films got made, one being ‘Dead Men Tell’, a Charlie Chan movie.

After parting ways with ‘Twentieth Century-Fox’, he became a freelancer and was cast in as many as five ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ westerns before he got a minor role in the Mark Sandrich 1943 war drama, ‘So Proudly We Hail!’ that proved to be a big hit.

‘Adventures of Superman’; which aired from 1952 to 1958 across various TV networks made George Reeves a celebrity especially popular with young audiences throughout America.