Gail Davis (born October 5, 1925; died March 15, 1997) was an American actress. The daughter of a small town medical doctor, she was born Betty Jeanne Grayson in a hospital at Little Rock, Arkansas. Her family lived in McGehee, Arkansas where she was raised until they moved to Little Rock. She had been singing and dancing since childhood and after graduating from high school in Little Rock, she went to study drama at girl's college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania before completing her education at the University of Texas at Austin. While at university she met and married Bob Davis with whom she had a daughter.
She and her husband moved to Hollywood, California to pursue a career in motion pictures and in 1947, as "Gail Davis," she made her motion picture debut in a comedy film short. She then appeared in minor roles in another four films until landing a supporting role under star Roy Rogers in a 1948 Western film called The Far Frontier. Between then and 1953, Davis appeared in more than three dozen films, of which all but three were in the Western genre and that included fourteen films with the singing cowboy star, Gene Autry. In 1950, she began to guest star in television Westerns, notably in the Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid series plus more than a dozen appearances on the Gene Autry Show.
Between 1954 and 1956, Gail Davis starred as the Western sharpshooter, Annie Oakley in the Annie Oakley television series on the ABC network. An adroit horseback rider, Davis also toured North America in Gene Autry's travelling rodeo. After her retirement from the entertainment business, she made guest appearances at western memorabilia shows and film festivals.
Gail Davis died from cancer in 1997 in Los Angeles, California and was interred there in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery.
For her contribution to the television industry, Gail Davis has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Blvd. In 2004, she was posthumously inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.
