Joel Albert McCrea

(November 5, 1905 - October 20, 1990)

Even though McCrea acted in many different genres during his film career, he appeared in Western films exclusively from 1946 until his retirement in 1976. His most notable Westerns are Ride the High Country (1962), in which he starred with Randolph Scott, and the Western classic The Virginian (1946). Frances Dee, his wife, played his wife in Wells Fargo (1937). Joel and Frances remained married until his death; having three sons and spending 57 years together. In 1969 he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame in Oklahoma. McCrea, who was an outdoorsman who had once listed his occupation as "rancher" and his hobby as "acting", had begun buying property as early as 1933, when he purchased his first 1,000 acres in a then unincorporated area of eastern Ventura County, California, which later became Thousand Oaks, California. This was the beginning of what became a 3,000-acre spread on which McCrea and Frances lived, raised their sons, and rode their horses. By the end of the 1940s, McCrea was a multi-millionaire, as much from his real-estate dealings as from his movie stardom. In the late 1960s, he sold 1,200 acres of land to an oil company, on the condition that they would not drill within sight of his home.

Although he rode numerous horses in his western career, Joel favored a dark horse with white blaze called -Outlaw-.