Pat Brady on AllMovie

Best known as cowboy Roy Rogers' comical sidekick, Pat Brady was the son of traveling performers, and first set foot on-stage at the age of four. From the moment he was featured in a road-show production of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, he was hooked on showbiz for life. While appearing as a bass guitarist in California in 1935, Pat struck up a friendship with a young country & western singer named Leonard Slye, a member of the popular Sons of the Pioneers. When Len Slye was elevated to screen stardom as Roy Rogers, he recommended Brady as his replacement in the Sons aggregation. Making the transition to films himself in 1937, Brady played comedy relief in several of the Charles Starrett Westerns at Columbia. In the early '40s, he moved to Republic, where he played zany camp cook Sparrow Biffle in the Roy Rogers vehicles. When Rogers moved to television in 1951, he took Brady with him. Now billed as "himself," Brady enlivened well over 100 episodes of The Roy Rogers Show, happily (and anachronistically) tooling about the sagebrush at the wheel of his faithful jeep "Nellie-Belle." Long after the cancellation of the weekly series, Brady continued his association with Rogers on TV and in personal appearances; he also rejoined the Sons of the Pioneers in 1959, as a replacement for the defecting Shug Fisher. By the mid-'60s, Brady's acting career began to decline. His last professional engagement was as advance man for a Colorado retail furniture store. In February of 1972, Pat Brady checked himself into the Ark, an alcoholic rehabilitation center in Green Mountain Falls, CO; one day later, Brady was dead at the age of 58.