Actor Clayton Moore, who galloped to fame on 1950s television as the Lone Ranger, the "daring and resourceful masked rider of the Plains',' has died at the age of 85 of a heart attack. A spokesman for West Hills Hospital in suburban Los Angeles said that Moore, a former trapeze artist, had been rushed to the emergency room of the hospital where he died on Tuesday.
Moore, long identified with the mythic former Texas Ranger who rode a white horse and fired silver bullets, was the latest in a series of Western stars to die in the late 1990s, including Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Tex Ritter.
Born Jack Carlton Moore in Chicago on September 14th, 1914, he changed his name to Clayton Moore after moving to Hollywood to become a stunt man and movie extra in the late 1930s.
He played in dozens of B movies with such titles as Intentional Lady and The Gay Amigo until 1949, when he beat 75 other actors to star in the television version of The Lone Ranger. The series had become a hit on radio soon after Detroit station WXYZ created it in 1933.
By 1949, The Lone Ranger - always introduced with the words "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty `Hi-yo, Silver!' The Lone Ranger" and a few bars of Rossini's William Tell Overture - was a national institution in America. It was so popular that a San Francisco couple were spared a speeding fine when they told a judge they had been rushing home to hear the show.
Moore had already played a masked man in the film Ghost of Zorro. His autobiography was titled I Was That Masked Man.
Moore starred in the television series from 1949 to 1951, when he was forced out in a salary dispute, and then from 1954, when he returned at higher pay, to 1957. In the end, he appeared in most of the series' 169 episodes.
Moore also starred in two movie adaptations, The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958). He also twice played Zorro, in the 1949 film Ghost of Zorro and a 1959 remake with the same title.
Once the Lone Ranger television series was finished, Moore continued to embody the character in commercials and in public appearances, at which he would greet fans, talk to his horse, Silver, shoot a Colt .45, and lecture about "truth, justice and the American way". But in the late 1970s the Wrather Corp., which owned the rights to the character, went to court to stop Moore from making public appearances because it did not want him to interfere with a film it was making called The Legend of the Lone Ranger.