Trivia: Though no one in his family had ever pursued a theatrical career (one of his more illustrious relatives was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), Alan Napier was stagestruck from childhood. After graduating from Clifton College, the tall, booming-voiced Napier studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then was engaged by the Oxford Players, where he worked with such raw young talent as John Gielgud and Robert Morley. He continued working with the cream of Britain's acting crop during his ten years (1929-1939) on the West End stages. Napier came to New York in 1940 to co-star with Gladys George in Lady in Waiting. Though his film career had begun in England in the 1930s, Napier had very little success before the cameras until he arrived in Hollywood in 1941. He essayed dignified, sometimes waspish roles of all sizes in such films as Cat People (1942), The Uninvited (1943), and House of Horror (1946); among his off-the-beaten-track assignments were the bizarre High Priest in Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948) and a most elegant Captain Kidd in the 1950 Donald O'Connor vehicle Double Crossbones. In 1966, Alan Napier was cast as Bruce Wayne's faithful butler, Alfred, on the smash-hit TV series Batman, a role he played until the series' cancellation in 1968. Alan Napier's career extended into the 1980s, with TV roles in such miniseries as QB VII and such weeklies as The Paper Chase.

Trivia: French character actor Maurice Marsac, in films since 1944's To Have and Have Not, has played dozens of maitre d's and concierges; he plays the waiter in The Jerk (1978) who must deflect Steve Martin's complaint that his plate of escargot is covered with snails. Less typical Maurice Marsac roles include Nicodemus in 1961's The King of Kings and Charles DeGaulle in the 1982 TV biopic Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Marsac's catchphrase was "how you say," as in "Monsieur, I have a gun. I am going to--how you say?--'scram' with zee loot." Marsac died of cardiac arrest on May 6, 2007 in Santa Rosa, California. He was 92.

Trivia: Born on New Year's Day in 1883 (some sources say 1880), British actress Mary Forbes was well into her stage career when she appeared in her first film, 1916's Ultus and the Secret of the Night. By the time she made her first Hollywood film in 1919, the thirtysomething Forbes was already matronly enough for mother and grande-dame roles. Her most prolific movie years were 1931 through 1941, during which time she appeared in two Oscar-winning films. In Cavalcade (1933), she had the small role of the Duchess of Churt, while in You Can't Take It With You (1938) she was assigned the more substantial (and funnier) part of James Stewart's society dowager mother. Mary Forbes continued in films on a sporadic basis into the '40s, making her screen farewell in another Jimmy Stewart picture, You Gotta Stay Happy (1948).

Trivia: Belgian actress Ann Codee toured American vaudeville in the 'teens and twenties in a comedy act with her husband, American-born Frank Orth. The team made its film debut in 1929, appearing in a series of multilingual movie shorts. Thereafter, both Codee and Orth flourished as Hollywood character actors. Codee was seen in dozens of films as florists, music teachers, landladies, governesses and grandmothers. She played a variety of ethnic types, from the very French Mme. Poullard in Jezebel (1938) to the Teutonic Tante Berthe in The Mummy's Curse (1961). Ann Codee's last film appearance was as a tight-corseted committeewoman in Can-Can (1960).

Trivia: A distinguished stage and screen actor from Austria (born Johan Mylong-Münz), John Mylong was one in a score of European actors cast as Middle European types in Hollywood wartime melodramas. In the U.S. from 1941, when he starred in the New York Theatre Guild's production of Somewhere in France, Mylong later played Colonel Duval in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), the duplicitous General Halder in The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943), Von Bülow in Hotel Berlin (1945), and Kaiser Wilhelm in Annie Get Your Gun (1950). Equally busy on television, Mylong played the casino manager in the "Lucy Goes to Monte Carlo" episode of I Love Lucy and also appeared on Black Saddle and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Trivia: A mustachioed supporting player from Russia, Jack Chefe (sometimes credited as Chefé) played exactly what he looked and sounded like: headwaiters. That was also his occupation when not appearing in films, of which he did literally hundreds between 1932 and 1959, serving such stars as Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey, 1936), Jeanette MacDonald (Bitter Sweet, 1940), Bob Hope (My Favorite Brunette, 1947), and even Dick Tracy (in the 1945 RKO feature film). Once in a while, Chefe managed to escape typecasting, playing one of the legionnaires in Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces (1939) and a croupier in The Big Sleep (1946).