Gaylord Ravenal is the leading male character in Edna Ferber's 1926 novel Show Boat, in the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical of the same name based on the novel, and in the films and other adaptations of the story.
[1] In the novel, this happens several years after the illegally married mulatto Julie Dozier (Magnolia's good friend) and her white husband Steve Baker have left the show on the boat.
Because of the incessant nagging of Magnolia's mother, Parthy, they leave the boat with their baby daughter and move to Chicago, where they live off Gaylord's gambling earnings.
Years later, upon hearing that Parthy is coming to visit, and finding himself broke, he borrows money from the local whorehouse madam and returns, completely drunk, to the boarding house at which they are living.
In 1929, Joseph Schildkraut, complete with Viennese accent, was rather incongruously cast as a non-singing Gaylord in the first, part-talkie film version of Show Boat.
The 1946 biopic of Kern's life, Till the Clouds Roll By, featured a re-enactment of some of the first act of Show Boat, with Tony Martin as Gaylord.