George G. Fraser Studio, San Francisco. · Public domain

Born Maxwell Henry Aronson, he reinvented himself as Broncho Billy Anderson and became the first movie star of the Western, the genre's original hero before Tom Mix or John Wayne. A co-founder of Essanay Studios, he wrote, directed, and starred in hundreds of short Westerns in the 1900s and 1910s, and in 1958 received a special Academy Award recognizing him as a pioneer of the film industry.