Audie Murphy

Audie Murphy grew up on a sharecropper's farm in Hunt County, Texas, in a family of eleven children who were deserted by their father. He was sixteen when his mother died and his brothers and sisters were sent to an orphanage or t relatives. When World War II broke out, he joined the infantry. By the war's end, Murphy had become the nation's most decorated soldier with twenty-eight medals, including three from France and one from Belgium. After he returned to a hero's welcome in the United States, he was persuaded by actor James Cagney to embark on an acting career, and he made more than forty films. In 1971, at the age of 46, he died in the crash of a private plane near Roanoke, Virginia. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.