As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in dramas, comedies, musicals, adventures, war, horror and fantasy films, and Westerns.

His father was George Grant Scott, born in Franklin, Virginia, the first person licensed as a certified public accountant (CPA) in North Carolina.

[9] With his military career over Scott continued his education at Georgia Tech, where he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order and set his sights on becoming an all-American football player.

In 1931 Scott played his first leading role (with Sally Blane) in Women Men Marry (1931), a film, now apparently lost, made by a Poverty Row studio called Headline Pictures.

Scott's first role under his new Paramount contract was a small supporting part in a comedy called Sky Bride (1932) starring Richard Arlen and Jack Oakie.

In an effort to save on production costs, Paramount utilized stock footage from the silent version and even hired some of the same actors, such as Raymond Hatton and Noah Beery, to repeat their roles, meaning that sometimes their ages would vary eight or more years during the same scene.

For the 1933 films The Thundering Herd and Man of the Forest, Scott's hair was darkened and he sported a trim moustache so that he could easily be matched to footage of Jack Holt, the star of the silent versions.

In between his work in the Zane Grey Western series, Paramount cast Scott in several non-Western roles, such as "the other man" in Hot Saturday (1932), with Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant.

The Thundering Herd (1933) was another Zane Grey Western with Hathaway, then he was in two horror movies, Murders in the Zoo (1933) with Lionel Atwill and Supernatural (1933) with Carole Lombard.

After the Western Sunset Pass (1933), Paramount loaned Scott to Columbia, to play Bebe Daniels's love interest in a minor romantic comedy called Cocktail Hour (1933).

[17] Paramount loaned Scott to RKO Radio Pictures to support Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne in Roberta (1935), a hugely popular adaptation of the Broadway musical.

[19] Scott was in a car drama at Paramount, And Sudden Death (1936), directed by Barton, then was loaned to independent producer Edward Small, to play Hawkeye in another adventure classic, The Last of the Mohicans, adapted from the 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper.

They put him in Jesse James (1939), a lavish highly romanticized account of the famous outlaw (Tyrone Power) and his brother Frank (Henry Fonda).

The studio gave him the lead in Frontier Marshal (1939), playing Wyatt Earp, after which he went to Columbia to star in a medium budget action film, Coast Guard (1939).

Back at Fox, Scott returned to Zane Grey country by co-starring with Robert Young in the Technicolor production Western Union, directed by Fritz Lang.

Scott's only role as a truly evil villain was in Universal's The Spoilers (1942), an adaptation of Rex Beach's 1905 tale of the Alaskan gold rush also starring Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II, Scott attempted to obtain an officer's commission in the Marines, but because of a back injury years earlier he was rejected.

[10] However, he did his part for the war effort by touring in a comedy act with Joe DeRita (who later became a member of the Three Stooges) for the Victory Committee showcases, and he also raised food for the government on a ranch that he owned.

[24] In 1942 and 1943 Scott appeared in several war films, notably To the Shores of Tripoli (1942) at Fox, Bombardier (1943) at RKO, the Canadian warship drama Corvette K-225 (1943) (produced by Howard Hawks), Gung Ho!

Scott performed on two radio shows in 1945: "Belle of the Yukon" on Screen Guild Players[26] and "A Lady Takes a Chance" for Old Gold Comedy Theatre.

[1]Scott's last non-Westerns were a mystery with Peggy Ann Garner at Fox, Home Sweet Homicide (1947), and a family drama for Bogeaus, Christmas Eve (1947).

He followed it with another pair for Holt at that studio, Return of the Bad Men (1948) at RKO and Canadian Pacific (1949), then they did Fighting Man of the Plains (1950) and The Cariboo Trail (1950) at Fox.

Their collaboration resulted in the film Coroner Creek (1948) with Scott as a vengeance-driven cowpoke who "predates the Budd Boetticher/Burt Kennedy heroes by nearly a decade,"[30] and The Walking Hills (1949), a modern-day tale of gold hunters directed by John Sturges.

They followed it with The Doolins of Oklahoma (1949), The Nevadan (1950), Santa Fe (1951), Man in the Saddle (1951), Hangman's Knot (1952), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953) (shot in 3-D), Ten Wanted Men (1955), and A Lawless Street (1955) (with Angela Lansbury.)

In these films ... Boetticher achieved works of great beauty, formally precise in structure and visually elegant, notably for their use of the distinctive landscape of the California Sierras.

As the hero of these "floating poker games" (as Andrew Sarris calls them), Scott tempers their innately pessimistic view with quiet, stoical humour, as he pits his wits against such charming villains as Richard Boone in The Tall T and Claude Akins in Comanche Station.

It was directed by Sam Peckinpah and co-starred Joel McCrea, an actor who had a screen image similar to Scott's and who also from the mid-1940s on devoted his career almost exclusively to Westerns.

[35] A wealthy man, Scott had managed shrewd investments throughout his life, eventually accumulating a fortune worth a reputed $100 million, with holdings in real estate, gas, oil wells and securities.

[52] The Randolph Scott papers (which included photos, scrapbooks, notes, letters, articles and house plans) were left to the UCLA Library Special Collections.

[57] In 1944, he attended the massive rally organized by David O. Selznick in the Los Angeles Coliseum in support of the Dewey-Bricker ticket as well as Governor Earl Warren of California, who would become Dewey's running mate in 1948.