In 1964 he married the socialite Frances Cookman and they became residents of the sophisticated town of Oyster Bay, New York.Tom VallanceIrving Theodore Baehr (Robert Allen), actor: born New York 28 March 1906; married 1934 Evelyn Pierce (died 1960; one son, one daughter), 1964 Frances Cookman; died Oyster Bay, New York 9 October 1998.. He starred in a television movie for Walt Disney, Brimstone, The Amish Horse, and in several soap-operas, but preferred live theatre and spent most of his later career on stage. By 1956, when he took over the role of the villainous lawyer Babcock in Auntie Mame on Broadway, starring his old friend Rosalind Russell, his name was familiar to a new generation of youngsters who were watching the “Bob Allen, Ranger” series of old movies on television. He persevered, though, and during the Second World War starred in a USO production of Ruth Gordon’s comedy Over 21, which toured North Africa and Italy. After the war he appeared on Broadway in Luther Davis’s comedy Kiss Them For Me (1945), as one of three naval officers on shore leave, and a hit revival of Show Boat (1946), playing Steve, the riverboat performer married to the tragic half-caste Julie (Carol Bruce).During the next decade he worked steadily in off-Broadway shows, television, movies and commercials. As you don’t play the guitar we’ve decided to go with a kid from Ohio we have under contract at $75 a week, a boy named Roy Rogers.’ That was the end of Bob `Tex’ Allen.”He made one more film for Columbia, the Leo McCarey comedy classic The Awful Truth (1937), in which he had a small role as Cary Grant’s chum, then accepted a contract with Fox, though the roles he was given were not important ones – by 1940 he was getting 11th billing in a B movie, City of Change.

Being the low man on the totem pole, my series was dropped.” He then negotiated with Republic Pictures, who were looking for a new western star. “The studio’s casting director called me for an interview and said, `Bob, we want to build up someone to compete with Gene Autry. “I thought, `Boy I’m on my way’,” said Allen some years later. “But Columbia had signed Buck Hones to produce his own pictures and that gave them three western stars – Jones, Charlie Starrett and me.

The best were The Reckless Ranger (1937), about the cattleman-sheepman conflict, which showed a rare sympathy for the sheepman, and Ranger Courage (1937).In 1937 a box-office poll of western stars placed Allen second only to the long-time favourite Tim McCoy. But in the same year he made the first of his Texas Ranger series, The Unknown Ranger, billed as Bob “Tex” Allen Directed by the action specialist Spencer G. the prophecy has been fulfilled.”Despite sympathetic performances, Allen found himself overshadowed in these two films by the powerful presences of Lorre (a morphine addict at the time of his mesmerising Raskolnikov) and Karloff, while Craig’s Wife (1936), in which he was the boyfriend of Rosalind Russell’s niece, was dominated by Russell’s star-making performance. After the villain, played by Boris Karloff, disposes of his good twin brother by hurling him to impalement in a pit of stakes, then falls into the same pit and becomes impaled on the stake protruding through his brother, Allen has the film’s final words: “The older brother killed by the younger brother’s knife. Signed to a contract by Columbia, he was involved in more serial-like situations in his first film, Air Hawks (1935), which had spectacular stunts by the real-life aviator Wiley Post .Allen then played the romantic lead to Grace Moore in Love Me Forever (1935), was Dmitri, the upright best friend of the murderer Raskolnikov (Peter Lorre) in Josef von Sternberg’s powerfully moody version of Crime and Punishment (1935), and played the dashing lieutenant who loves the heroine of Roy William Neill’s stylishly gothic horror film The Black Room (1935).