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Dick Foran

The "Cowboy from Brooklyn" was actually from New Jersey in real life... but close enough. Dick Foran began his career crooning his way through musical Westerns like "Cowboy from Brooklyn," the story of a singer who has to pretend he's a cowboy in order to secure a job, and "Song of the Saddle," in which he plays a son who grows up to avenge his father's death. Warner Bros. was grooming Foran to compete with the already famous singing cowboy Gene Autry. In the early 1940s, Foran took a break from serenading the savannah and moseyed on over to Universal Studios. There he dipped his toes into the horror genre, playing Steve Banning in "The Mummy's Hand" (in which he and a fellow archaeologist accidentally unearth the undead) and its sequel, "The Mummy's Tomb." Foran's flirtation with embalmed corpses was brief, however; he returned to the Old West in "Fort Apache," a John Wayne/Henry Fonda vehicle. "Fort Apache" was a solemn, authentic look at the Old West, in stark contrast to the nostalgic and hagiographic depictions of cowboys seen in Foran's earlier work. The era of the singing cowboy was over, but Dick Foran demonstrated he could adapt with grace to the changing times.