I ran the above photo during December 98 through early January 99, asking for help on identifying who this mystery lady is/was. There was a suggestion that this picture might be from RIDIN' THE TRAIL, a Fred Scott / Spectrum film ... and that wound up being correct.
Boyd Magers had the RIDIN' THE TRAIL epic, and he ran it for me to confirm or deny the identity of this range heroine. Boyd's e-mail reads: "A match. It is Iris Lancaster. Same girl, same outfit. Awful movie."
As to Iris Lancaster, she appears to have made less than a dozen films over a ten year period from 1933-1944, and then disappeared. She and Jack Ingram (pictured above) appeared with Fred Scott in RIDIN' THE TRAIL, one of the Spectrum films that Scott made in the late 1930s. It wound up being released by independent distributor Arthur Ziehm in 1940, which was a year or so after Spectrum folded. Lancaster is a very pretty lady ... and I wonder why she didn't make any more films ... and what happened to her. That mystery we probably won't be able to solve.
Although some of the data is incomplete or inaccurate, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has information on Iris Lancaster. Click HERE.
 Above from L-to-R are John Elliott, John 'Dusty' King, Sheila Darcy and Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in a scene from TUMBLEDOWN RANCH IN ARIZONA (Monogram, 1941), one of the Range Busters' series. |
For fans of serials and westerns, Sheila Darcy (1914-2004) is best remembered because of her work in two cliffhangers: she was "Volita" the female lead in ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION (Republic, 1939) and she portrayed the "Dragon Lady" in TERRY AND THE PIRATES (Columbia, 1940). Darcy, whose real name was Rebecca Benedict Heffener, did about thirty films from the mid 1930s to the early 1940s. In her early film work, she was known as Rebecca Wassem. She married movie star Preston Foster (1900-1970) in 1946, and they were together until his death in 1970.
Les Adams has Darcy identified in 31 sound films --- that includes 6 westerns and 2 cliffhangers.
Although some of the data is incomplete or inaccurate, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has information on Sheila Darcy/Rebecca Wassem. Click HERE.
Jim Tipton's Find A Grave website has a photo of Darcy/Wassem, but no information on her internment location: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8485548
