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Billy Halop served as the original leader of the "Dead End Kids". Also appeared in the 'Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys" films of Universal. He later appeared on All in the Family in a recurring role. Leo Gorcey was the only original Dead End Kid to only appear in the Dead End Kids films, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys. He was known for his ...
Leo Bernard Gorcey (June 3, 1917 [1] – June 2, 1969) was an American stage and film actor, famous for portraying the leader of a group of hooligans known variously as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids, and as adults, The Bowery Boys.
The Dead End Kids originally appeared in the 1935 play Dead End, dramatized by Sidney Kingsley.When Samuel Goldwyn turned the play into a 1937 film, he recruited the original "kids" from the play—Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop, and Bernard Punsly—to appear in the same roles in the film.
Now, with five of the original six Dead End Kids on the payroll, Universal revised the billing to read The Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys. In total, the Little Tough Guys made 12 feature films, and three 12-chapter serials.
While studying at the Professional Children's School [2] in New York, he was cast as Tommy Gordon in the 1935 Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End [6] and traveled to Hollywood with the rest of the Dead End Kids when Samuel Goldwyn produced a film version of the play in 1937.
The 1935 Sidney Kingsley Broadway play Dead End was a portrait of life in the New York tenements, featuring six tough-talking juvenile delinquents. When film producer Samuel Goldwyn made a film out of the play, he recruited the original kids from the play: Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop, and Bernard Punsly.
Though he was the youngest, Jordan was the first of the boys who made up the Dead End Kids to work in films with a role in a 1933 Universal short. In 1935, he became one of the original Dead End Kids by winning the role of Angel in Sydney Kingsley's Broadway drama Dead End about life in the slums of the east side of New York City.
He appeared on Broadway in the 1935 production of Dead End, a play written and directed by Sidney Kingsley. [8] [9] Hall was then cast along with the other Dead End Kids in the 1937 film Dead End, directed by William Wyler and starring Humphrey Bogart. [10] Hall served in the United States Army during World War II.