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Paul Brinegar (December 19, 1917 – March 27, 1995) was an American character actor best known for his roles in three western series: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Rawhide, and Lancer.
Brinegar's first credited appearance in a feature film was in Larceny (1948).
From there, he launched a steady film career that slowed considerably in the late 1950s, after he began appearing on television but did not end until 1994, when Brinegar made his final screen appearance, as a stagecoach driver, in the 1994 film version of Maverick.
Brinegar appeared more than 100 times between 1946 and 1994 in western films, often specializing in playing "feisty, grizzled cowboy sidekicks".
On television, from 1956 to 1958, he played James H.
"Dog" Kelley, the mayor of Dodge City, Kansas, in the ABC/Desilu western series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp starring Hugh O'Brian.
Brinegar appeared in that series 33 times as Kelley and in one other episode in another role.
In 1959 he played Ludwig, a bartender, in the episode "The Ringer" of the western series The Texan with Rory Calhoun.
Brinegar, however, is best remembered as the cattle-drive cook George Washington Wishbone on the CBS series Rawhide from 1959 to 1966.
Earlier he had played a similar role, one as the character Tom Jefferson Jeffrey, in the 1958 movie Cattle Empire upon which Rawhide was based.
Brinegar also made two guest appearances on CBS's Perry Mason.
His first appearance on that series, prior to Rawhide, was in 1958.
He performed as Tom Sackett in the first-season episode titled "The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary".
His second appearance on Perry Mason was during the series' ninth and final season.
He played Jason Rohan in the 1966 episode "The Case of the Unwelcome Well".
In the 1968-1970 CBS western series Lancer, Brinegar had the role of Jelly Hoskins; and in 1969 he appeared in the western film Charro! starring Elvis Presley.
Then, in 1973, he played the barman in Clint Eastwood's film High Plains Drifter.
From 1982 to 1983, returning to television, Brinegar portrayed a humorous cowboy-like character, Lamar Pettybone, during the first season of the ABC series Matt Houston.
Later he reprised a revised version of his Rawhide Wishbone character for the 1991 TV movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, in which he delivers a brief monologue that includes about a dozen references to old television western series.
Bret Maverick is a gambler who would rather con someone than fight them, and needs an additional $3k in order to enter a winner-takes-all poker game beginning in a few days. He joins forces with a woman with a marvelous Southern accent, and the two try and enter the game.
A small town doctor mistakenly ingests an experimental drug made from the blood of vampire bats which transforms the kindly medic into a bloodthirsty monster.
Charles Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his 1927 New York to Paris flight the first solo trans-Atlantic crossing.
Four astronauts returning from man's first mission to Mars enter a time warp and crash on a 26th Century Earth devastated by atomic war. At first unaware where they are, but finding the atmosphere safe to breathe, they start exploring and find themselves in a divided future where disfigured mutants living like cavemen inhabit the surface, while the normals live comfortably below the surface but are dying as a race from lack of natural water, air and sunlight.
A wealthy business man stuns his wife and town with a televised response to his son's kidnappers.
After aging criminal Roy Earle is released from prison he decides to pull one last heist before retiring — by robbing a resort hotel.
A Greek artisan is commissioned to cast the cup of Christ in silver and sculpt around its rim the faces of the disciples and Jesus himself. He travels to Jerusalem and eventually to Rome to complete the task. Meanwhile, a nefarious interloper is trying to convince the crowds that he is the new Messiah by using nothing more than cheap parlor tricks.
A movie star helps a young singer-actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.
A Korean War vet returns to his job as a railroad engineer and becomes involved in a sordid affair with a co-worker's wife and murder. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, in 1997.
A group of communist spies plan to blow up an essential commercial artery, the Panama Canal. To this end, they have kidnapped a nuclear scientist and are traveling by steamship to the coast of South America. Luckily for western civilization, the hard-nosed ship's captain, played by Barton MacLane, has other ideas.
A Justice of the Peace performed weddings a few days before his license was valid. A few years later five couples learn they have never been legally married.
Pat Pemberton is a brilliant athlete, except when her domineering fiancé is around. The ladies golf championship is in her reach until she gets flustered by his presence at the final holes. He wants them to get married and forget the whole thing, but she cannot give up on herself that easily. She enlists the help of Mike Conovan, a slightly shady sports promoter. Together they face mobsters, a jealous boxer, and a growing mutual attraction.
A fashion model witnesses the brutal assassination of an investigative journalist by the Ku Klux Klan while traveling to a small town to visit her sister.
Taken in by the musical world as a young orphan, Rick Martin grows up with a desire to play pure jazz instead of the commercial gigs he lands, whilst also coping with the problems caused by his tempestuous marriage to an aloof heiress.
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother's house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been "passing" for white while at school in the North. In addition, she has fallen in love with a young white doctor, who knows nothing about her black heritage.