Addison Randall

Addison Byron Owen Randall (May 12, 1906 in San Fernando, California – July 16, 1945 in Canoga Park, California) was an American film actor, chiefly in Westerns. He often used a pseudonym for his film work, chiefly "Jack Randall", though he also played roles as "Allen Byron" and "Byron Vance".

Film career

Randall began his career as a supporting actor and foil at RKO, but he left when Monogram Pictures promised him the chance to star in films. They were true to their word, and he appeared in a series of Western films through the 1930s and 1940s. (In 1935, he actually played a star of Westerns in RKO's Another Face, released in 1935.) Many of Randall's early B-movies with Monogram feature him as a singing cowboy, but his later roles were generally straight Western stories, and all were hampered by the low budgets typical of that studio.

Randall adopted his new "Allen Byron" identity in the 1940s in an effort to boost his fading professional fortunes, but the roles he received with new studio Producers Releasing Corporation were not up to the task.

He died unexpectedly in 1945 while filming a serial called The Royal Mounted Rides Again for Universal Studios, after a fall from a horse. Some sources attribute his death to injuries sustained during the fall, which in those versions resulted from an attempt to recover a hat he had dropped, while others state that he suffered a fatal heart attack before falling.

Personal life

Addison Randall was born May 12, 1906 in San Fernando, California, and attended Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. Randall's older brother Robert Livingston (born Robert Edward Randall) was also an actor in Western films of the time. Addison Randall twice married and divorced actress Louise Stanley, and he carried on a notorious affair with silent film actress Louise Brooks. At the time of his death he was married to a second wife, actress Barbara Bennett. Bennett was the lesser-known sister of actresses Constance Bennett and Joan Bennett, as well as the daughter of actor Richard Bennett and actress Adrienne Morrison.