How did Festus from Gunsmoke die? Ken Curtis spent his last day at a rodeo

He outlived Gunsmoke by sixteen years, finished one more Western with Sam Elliott, and went to a rodeo on a Saturday. Nothing about the weekend suggested it was the last one.

Ken Curtis died on Sunday, April 28, 1991, at his home in Fresno, California. He was 74. His wife Torrie found him in bed that morning; he had suffered a heart attack in his sleep. UPI, reporting the death two days later, noted that the cause had not yet been determined and that Curtis had appeared to be in good health — he had been at a rodeo the previous afternoon. His ashes were later scattered over the Colorado flatlands he grew up on.

He had been working right up to it. His final role was cattle rancher Seaborn Tay in Conagher, the 1991 TV movie starring Sam Elliott and Katharine Ross, which also featured his old Gunsmoke castmate Buck Taylor.

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The voice came from a man in his father's jail

Curtis was born Curtis Wain Gates on July 2, 1916, in Lamar, Colorado. His father, Dan Sullivan Gates, was sheriff of Bent County from 1926 to 1931, and the family lived in the jailhouse.

"Our living quarters were on the ground floor and the cells were upstairs," Curtis told UPI. "Mother used to cook the meals for the prisoners. "

One of the regulars upstairs was a cedar fence-post cutter named Frederick Munden, known locally as Cedar Jack. Curtis built Festus out of him — the speech, the stubbornness, the general disinclination to be hurried. The nasal twang was manufactured for the part and had nothing to do with how Curtis actually spoke, which is why people who met him in person tended to be thrown.

He was a band singer first, and a Ford in-law second

Festus was the third act of a long career. Curtis started as a professional vocalist:

• Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, 1941 — he came in as a featured vocalist, temporarily filling the slot Frank Sinatra had been occupying.
• The Sons of the Pioneers, 1949–1953 — the group Roy Rogers came out of, with a Carnegie Hall date on the résumé, plus more recording with them from 1955 to 1957.
• Columbia Pictures, from 1945 — singing-cowboy leads in low-budget musical Westerns alongside the Hoosier Hot Shots.
• The Shep Fields band and the Pied Pipers — earlier stops on the same circuit.

"I started my career as a pop singer... I've sung a lot of nights, and there were [times] I sung all night long, but I don't remember none of them," Curtis said in a 1969 interview.

Then came the marriage that changed his filmography. From 1952 to 1964 he was married to Barbara Ford, which made him John Ford's son-in-law, and Ford put him in The Quiet Man, The Searchers, Rio Grande, and The Alamo. On the side, he produced two of the strangest credits on any Gunsmoke résumé: The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster, both 1959.

Eleven years in Dodge

Curtis first turned up on Gunsmoke in 1959 as a cowhand named Phil Jakes. He joined the regular cast in 1964 as Festus Haggen, taking over the deputy slot Dennis Weaver had vacated as Chester Goode. He stayed until the show ended in 1975 — 304 episodes, more than any of the five deputies who worked for Matt Dillon across twenty years.

After Dodge he voiced Nutsy the vulture in Disney 's Robin Hood in 1973 and spent 1983 and 1984 on the Western series The Yellow Rose.

For the record: he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame in 1981, and there is a bronze of him as Festus on Pollasky Avenue in Clovis, California, the town he spent his last years in. The man in the statue is the character. The man who died in Fresno sang for Tommy Dorsey.

Earlier we wrote: What happened to Val Kilmer? His final film was the one he'd waited 36 years to make