## The Film Career: 1948-1969
Murphy’s acting career spanned twenty years and more than forty feature films, with a consistent presence in the Western genre that matched both his Texas origins and the expectations the American film market had for him.
His first leading role came in *Bad Boy* (1949). He signed with Universal-International in 1950, the studio that would become Universal, and worked steadily through the 1950s. The range of his roles was wider than the Western domination might suggest: he appeared in John Huston’s *The Red Badge of Courage* (1951), an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel, and in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s *The Quiet American* (1958), based on Graham Greene’s novel set in Vietnam.
The film that defined his public identity was *To Hell and Back* (1955), the adaptation of his memoir in which he played himself. The film became Universal’s highest-grossing production until *Jaws* in 1975 — a measure of how large Murphy’s story was in the American cultural imagination of the 1950s. The experience of watching Audie Murphy play Audie Murphy, re-enacting his own wartime service for a theater audience that knew he was really the man in the story, created a specific kind of celebrity that merged the person with the narrative.
His television work included *Whispering Smith*, a Western series that aired on NBC in 1961, with 26 episodes filmed but only 20 aired before the network canceled it. He also wrote songs with collaborator Scott Turner, including “Shutters and Boards,” which became a country music hit. He bred and raced quarter horses at Del Mar.