Tris Coffin; Acting Career Long, Varied

Tris Coffin, a character actor and sometimes leading man who appeared in literally hundreds of low budget Westerns, movie serials and television shows, died Monday, his wife, Vera, said.

He was 80 and had retired from acting about eight years ago. He died in a Santa Monica hospital of lung cancer, she said.

Coffin’s best-known sustaining role probably came more than 30 years ago, when he played Capt. Tom Rynning, in “26 Men,” a true tale of a handful of Texas-style rangers trying to maintain law and order in Arizona at the turn of the century. In fact, there were only 26 of them because the Arizona Territory couldn’t afford any more. The TV series ran 78 episodes in 1957-59.

Born in Mammoth, Utah, as Tristram Coffin to an old American family, he studied drama there and then became a radio newscaster in Boston where first his voice and then his rugged good looks attracted the attention of Universal Studios.

The first of his nearly 400 films was “Queen of the Yukon” in 1939. For the next 30 years he was seen in “Lady in the Dark,” “Flamingo Road,” “The Fountainhead,” “Baron of Arizona,” “The Eddie Cantor Story,” “Good Neighbor Sam,” “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and dozens of Westerns with such titles as “Prairie Gunsmoke” and “Last Stagecoach West.”

He was featured in the film serials “Jungle Girl,” “Jesse James Rides Again,” “The Green Hornet” and “Dick Tracy.”

Coffin normally played villains but in 1949 became “King of the Rocketmen,” a crime-fighter who attained flight because of a rocket-propelled jacket.