Hall of Fame of Western Film & TV Stars
Allan (Rocky) Lane

Born: Harry Leonard Albershart, Mishawaka, Indiana on September 22, 1904.  Died: October 27 1973, Woodland Hills, CA bone cancer.

While attending Notre Dame University, he became proficient in sports and earned himself an offer to play professional football after college.  In off-season periods, he worked as a photographic illustrator, learning the techniques of camera work and reproduction.  One day, a friend suggested that he should try acting as a career and arranged for Allan to join a stock company of performers.  After a short while, he took part in several stage theatricals, until 1929, when he entered motion pictures as a bit player.

Beginning at Fox Studios, Allan appeared in minor roles and rose gradually to more important parts.  His work was extended to include several films for Paramount and Columbia, usually playing secondary leading men in pictures of relatively little importance.  Finally, after ten years of getting nowhere, he was given the chance to star in a serial for Republic entitled The King of the Royal Mounted in 1939.  The role gave his career the necessary shot in the arm that it needed and Allan was on his way. 

 He made a number of exciting features and chapter-plays for Republic, which brought his name into prominence as one of the screen's top action stars.  When Bill Elliott vacated the popular "Red Ryder" Westerns in 1945, Allan was given the opportunity to show what he could do in the role.  In an entirely new series, he brought revitalized interest from fans that had finally grown weary of the "Red Ryder" character.  Having first been brought to the screen by Don Barry in 1941 and extended into another series with Bill Elliott, the cowboy character had grown monotonous and was in bad need of new blood.

For over three years, Allan became closely identified with the “Red Ryder” series, starring in no less than twenty-one features until he grew tired of the role.  In 1948, he began a new string of Westerns for Republic and succeeded in being named to the list of top ten cowboy stars of 1951 and 1953.  Sharing the spotlight with him were his wonder horse, "Blackjack" and veteran character actor Eddy Waller.  As a whole, these features were well done and had plenty of action, but the rising costs of production and the arrival of television were to take their toll on all B-Western.  

After 1954, Republic Pictures ceased to make any more series like those that had made the company famous.  Allan Lane found himself to be one of the last remaining cowboy stars to appear in the type of features, which had been the backbone of the Western genre.

With the ending of his contract at Republic, Allan undertook some personal appearance tours with rodeos and a circus before finally retiring in 1956.  He left the screen contented that he had achieved at least seventeen years as a prominent cowboy star and had made over 125 films.  With that in mind, he was certainly deserving of the dignified exit he made at the closing of a chapter in moving picture history. 

Provided the off-camera voice of the talking horse “Mister Ed” on 60s TV. 

Like most cowboy stars of the screen, his private life had been comparatively uneventful except that he had been divorced from his first wife, the former Gladys Leslie, and later married to actress Sheila Ryan and divorced in 1946.