Ms. Hale is the granddaughter of silver screen cowboy hero Johnny Mack Brown who starred in 168 films over a 40-year career. Pictured here with her mother, Cynthia Brown Hale.
His images graced one of the earliest Wheaties “Breakfast of Champions” cereal boxes, a decade of his own branded Dell comic books, movie magazines and his home town’s marquees for The Johnny Mack Brown Western Fest.
After scoring two touchdowns for the University of Alabama in the 1926 Rose Bowl, winning over top-seeded Washington Huskies, and being awarded most valuable player, he signed a contract with MGM and played the love interest to Mary Pickford in her first talking movie, Coquette (1929), for which she won an OSCAR. He was the leading man to 
Joan Crawford, (Our Dancing Daughters and
Montana Moon), Greta Garbo, Mae West and others, before making the classic Billy the Kid, 
MGM’s first talking Western and one of the first films shot in wide-screen 70mm (what Star Wars was filmed in years later) as well as serials for Universal and B-Westerns for Monogram.
He learned to do his own stunts, horseback riding, gunslinging and roping. He costarred alongside John Wayne in Born to the West aka Helltown (1937) and Clark Gable in The Secret Six (1931).
Johnny Mack received many honors along the way. Some of the more important ones in football were his being inducted into the Collegiate Football Hall of Fame in 1957, The State of Alabama’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1969 and The Rose Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000.
He was one of the first stars to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. For ten years running (from 1940-1950), he was ranked in the top ten most popular Western cowboy actors by the Motion Picture Herald and Box Office Poles. He was inducted into the State of Alabama’s Stage and Screen Hall of Fame in 2004, awarded the Golden Boot in 2004 by the Motion Picture and TV Foundation. Considered one of the finest trick gun handlers in the country, he was the first inductee to the Gunspinners Hall of Fame in 2003. In 2008, he was inducted into Oklahoma’s Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum’s Hall of Great Western Performers.