While regular Gunsmoke fans may have been hopeful for a potential romantic relationship between Marshal Matt Dillon and Kitty Russell, it turns out that Russell’s actress, Amanda Blake, had a somewhat different view of relationships and marriage, specifically. In an interview with The Montreal Star, Blake’s mother said that she and Blake’s father had previously tried to get Blake to give up her dreams of becoming an actress early on in her career and “find a nice young man and settle down and make us grandparents.”
However, Blake refused. Blake’s mother continued, “She said acting was in her blood, that acting was her whole life. It still is. She’s dedicated to her career with a kind of fantasticism which is difficult for us to understand. But that’s the fact, and we recognize it. Marriage just has no place in her present plan of progress.”
At the time of the article’s publishing, Blake had already been married twice and would go on to marry three more times. But she confessed, “I think that I used marriage as an escape mechanism, an escape from frustration, born of the fact that I wasn’t working as an actress.” She stressed, “I know now that I cannot mix marriage with a career, because to me the career comes first. And that’s not fair to any husband. So I live alone.”
She also said, “It may sound unfeminine, but I don’t need a man to whisper sweet nothings into my ear. When a little girl recognizes me on the street and asks for my autograph, even today after six years of being on the show, I get a bigger thrill out of that than when a man says, ‘Darling, you look lovely.'”