Paul Brinegar

Paul Brinegar was an American character actor whose career was closely tied to Westerns. He was born in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and first took to acting in Santa Fe before studying drama at Pasadena Junior College. After serving in the Navy, he worked in radio repair while taking small movie parts; his first credited feature was Larceny (1948). Over the next decades he appeared in more than 100 Western films, usually as grizzled cowboy sidekicks. Television brought him wider notice: he played Mayor Kelley on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp from 1956 to 1958 and the cattle-drive cook Wishbone on Rawhide from 1959 to 1966. He also played Jelly Hoskins on Lancer, and his later films included Charro! (1969), High Plains Drifter (1973), and Maverick (1994), in which he was a stagecoach driver. He died in 1995.