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Blonde Iris Meredith (née Shunn), a former Goldwyn Girl, was beautiful and talented enough to have risen to the top at her studio, Columbia Pictures. Instead, she became typecast as a B-Western heroine, albeit one of the best and busiest in history. Meredith would appear in no less than 31 sagebrush operas, from The Cowboy Star (1936) to The Kid Rides Again (1943), 20 of them opposite the studio's leading cowboy star Charles Starrett. Add to that a handful of serials and Iris had a busy seven years or so. Leaving Columbia in late 1940, Meredith landed at Poverty Row's infamous PRC, a ramshackle studio that quickly earned the nickname of "Pretty Rotten Crud." She did a couple of non-Westerns and a Buster Crabbe Billy the Kid before calling it quits to marry Columbia director Abby Berlin (1907-1965). Rather more brave than any of her screen heroines, a cancer-stricken and horribly disfigured Iris Meredith accepted an award at the 1976 Nashville Western Film Festival, her final public appearance. Appropriately, the veteran Western star received a standing ovation.