Trivia: Starting out in musicals and comedies, leather-lunged character actor Henry Jones had developed into a versatile dramatic actor by the 1950s, though he never abandoned his willingness to make people laugh. Jones scored his first cinematic bullseye when he re-created his Broadway role as the malevolent handyman Leroy in the 1956 cinemadaptation of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed (1956). Refusing to be typed, Jones followed this triumph with a brace of quietly comic roles in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. He returned to Broadway in 1958, winning the Tony and New York Drama Critics' awards for his performance in Sunrise at Campobello. Since that time, Jones has flourished in films, often making big impressions in the tiniest of roles: the coroner in Vertigo (1958), the bicycle salesman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the hotel night clerk in Dick Tracy (1990) and so on. From 1963's Channing onward, Jones has been a regular on several weekly TV series, most notably as Judge Jonathan Dexter in Phyllis (1975-76) and B. Riley Wicker on the nighttime serial Falcon Crest (1985-86). Henry Jones is the father of actress Jocelyn Jones.

Trivia: Educated at Goucher College and at Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, American actress Mildred Dunnock was introduced to films in her stage role as Miss Ronsberry in The Corn Is Green (1945). Her next major assignment was as Willy Loman's long-suffering wife Linda in Arthur Miller's 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Death of a Salesman, a part that she also essayed in the 1952 film version. Dunnock preferred stage work and college lecture tours to the movies, but returned before the cameras occasionally in such films as 1952's Viva Zapata (directed by the director of Salesman, Elia Kazan), Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). One of Dunnock's most spectacular film appearances was her unbilled role in the gangster melodrama Kiss of Death (1948); she was the wheelchair-bound old lady pushed down a flight of stairs by giggling psychopath Richard Widmark!

Trivia: Rotund, moon-faced character actor Charles Watts made a mini-career out of portraying glad-handing politicians, voluble businessmen and salesmen, crafty bankers, and cheerful or cynical parents, uncles, family friends, and other supporting players. He never had a starring role, or even a co-starring role, in a motion picture, but his physical presence and voice made for some memorable moments. Born in Clarksville, TN, in 1912, Watts was a high-school teacher -- handling both business law and drama -- for a time during his mid-twenties, working in Chattanooga. He worked in local theater and tent shows early in his career, and after World War II was also in demand for industrial shows. Watts didn't start doing movie or television appearances until 1950, and in that first year he played small, uncredited roles in such serious dramas as The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), as a mailman, and Storm Warning (1951), as a lunch-counter proprietor -- and somewhat larger parts, as a sheriff, in three episodes of The Lone Ranger. Over the next 16 years, he was seen in nearly 100 movies and television shows. His most prominent big-screen role was that of Judge (and later United States Senator) Oliver Whiteside in George Stevens' Giant (1956), where his rich, melodious voice and cheerful demeanor were put to extensive use. Watts was also an uncredited man in the crowd in Stuart Heisler's I Died a Thousand Times, a police sergeant in Philip Dunne's The View From Pompey's Head (both 1955), and Mr. Schultz, the salesman from the suspender company, in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Watts even found his way into two big-scale musicals -- Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Jumbo (1962) -- a decade apart. When he had a role with dialogue of any length, he was often used -- or so it seemed -- for his tendency to speechify, and to make even ordinary words stand out in relief. As active on television as he was in movies, Watts was familiar to several generations of young viewers for his role as Bill Green, the skeptical anti-superstition league leader in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Lucky Cat" (1955). He also played a small but key role in the Father Knows Best episode "24 Hours in Tyrantland," done on behalf of the Treasury Department to sell U.S. Savings Bonds, as the Andersons' skeptical neighbor, whose brief, cynical talk to son Bud finally pushes Jim Anderson (Robert Young) to straighten his kids out about the importance of savings bonds. Watts remained busy into the mid-'60s, and died of cancer in 1966.

Trivia: Handsome, leading actor James Philbrook began his film career with important roles in two Susan Hayward vehicles, I Want to Live (1958) and A Woman Obsessed (1959). He went on to co-star in the weekly TVers The Islanders (1960, as pilot Zack Malloy) and The New Loretta Young Show (1962, as magazine editor Paul Belzer, who married Ms. Loretta Young's character in the final episode). Relocating to Europe in the mid-1960s, James Philbrook enjoyed considerable success as a spaghetti- western star.

Trivia: Bobby Clark was a comedy star three times over (four, if you count his stint as a clown with the Ringling Bros. circus) in vaudeville and in movies in partnership with Paul McCullough, and finally on Broadway. Clark was born in Springfield, OH, in 1888, and as a boy he befriended the slightly older McCullough. The two learned to play music together -- especially the bugle -- and later took a tumbling class at the YMCA and got their first engagement as an acrobatic act at a local Elks Club-sponsored circus. They began hiring themselves out as entertainers and worked in minstrel shows as tumblers, buglers, and general handymen. Clark also had aspirations to act that he never gave up -- and which would serve him well four decades later -- and made his debut in a legitimate play called Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks in 1902. He was soon partnered again with McCullough, working a minstrel show touring the southern and midwestern states. In 1906, they were hired by the Ringling Brothers as clowns, and in 1912 they made the leap to vaudeville. For the next ten years, their reputations as comics grew, and in 1922 they made their European debut in London in Chuckles of 1922. They worked in the Music Box Revue on Broadway that same year and, after two more Music Box Revues, the duo, billed as "Clark & McCullough," got star billing in The Ramblers on Broadway in 1926. The year 1928 brought them to the big screen in a series of excruciating funny short films for Fox, which were so successful that the studio signed them to make a series of full-sound featurettes, some running to three and four reels each. They followed these up in the early '30s with a series of shorts for RKO, which proved to be their most enduring legacy. One of the reasons for their success was that Clark & McCullough defied the expectations of audiences -- though they were billed as "Clark & McCullough," which would have led audiences to expect Clark to be the straightman and McCullough the comic, originally both of these guys were funny in complimentary ways. Clark was a ridiculous-looking dialogue comedian with painted-on glasses, spouting rapid-fire verbal shots, and was also given to spontaneous improvisation on the soundstage -- for that reason, the producers of their films liked to keep at least two cameras running at all times, to follow him in his moments of inspiration; the heavier, more physically imposing McCullough usually sported a racoon coat and a toothbrush mustache, and gradually moved into Clark's shadow as the '30s wore on. By the mid '30s, Clark was identified as the more creatively engaged half of the team, working with the director and the crew to lay out the stunts and comic bits, and doing the rehearsals while McCullough only showed up for the actual shooting. Overall, Clark & McCullough were like a two-man answer to the early Marx Brothers, although they never graduated to feature-length movies or got writers of the caliber of George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, et al. Eventually, Clark became the dominant member of the team while McCullough became the straight man feeding him lines and setting up his humor, but when asked, the older man professed not to mind the change in the dynamic between them. The duo never entirely abandoned the stage, had another success in 1935 with Thumb's Up, both on Broadway and on tour. The following year, they spent a season in 1936 with Earl Carroll's Vanities, doing an abbreviated version of the same show -- it was to be the last time they would work together. In March of 1936, following the end of the production, McCullough entered a sanitarium suffering from what was thought to be exhaustion. According to one source, later that month, Clark was driving McCullough home after leaving the sanitarium when his partner remarked that he needed a shave -- stopping at a barber shop, he went in and sat down in a barber chair, talking to the barber, and suddenly slashed his own throat with the razor; McCullough died two days later. Clark was so grief stricken over the sudden loss of his partner that he never went back to movie work or went forward with the duo comedy act again. In effect, he remade himself and was reborn -- keeping some of the same trademark attributes, including the painted-on glasses -- as a comic actor and star on the legitimate stage. Clark appeared in a string of stage successes over the next decade and a half, including Streets of Paris, Love for Sale, Star and Garter, Mexican Hayride, Sweethearts, and As the Girls Go. He also directed some of the scenes in the 1950 production of Peep Show, and made his last stage appearance in a touring company of Damn Yankees in 1958. He passed away of a heart attack in 1960 at the age of 71, after three successful runs at stardom in a career of nearly 60 years. Because his work after 1936 was confined almost entirely to the stage (apart from an appearance in The Goldwyn Follies and some television work in the early '50s), the visual record of his work is confined to the earlier phase of his career, the RKO shorts that he made with McCullough. The latter were revived in the late '60s and syndicated to television along with similar short subjects by Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol under the title "Reel Camp."