Trivia: Born John Lowe, this tall, aristocratic British leading man often wore tweeds and smoked a pipe in his roles. He served in Gallipoli in World War One, ending up a prisoner of war. First onscreen as an extra (in a dance-party scene) in the German-made Madame Wants No Children (1926), he played leads and second leads in numerous early Hollywood talkies (he was in Paramount's first talkie, The Doctor's Secret [1929]), then became a popular star in '30s British films. When World War Two came to England he returned to Hollywood; there for seven years, he played leads in B-movies and supporting roles in major productions, but never attained the star status he'd enjoyed in Britain. Appeared on Broadway in 1947 and 1950, Loder then returned to England; after several more films he retired to his wife's ranch in Argentina, coming back to the big screen for a film in 1965 and another in 1970. His five wives included actresses Micheline Cheirel (a star in France) and Hedy Lamarr, with whom he costarred in Dishonored Lady (1947), which Lamarr produced. He authored an autobiography, Hollywood Hussar (1977).

Trivia: June Duprez (pronounced "Du-Pray") seemed to live a charmed life for her first 22 years. Born in London in 1918 (some sources said 1921), she was the daughter of Fred Duprez, an American comedian who made his career in England's music halls. She was a natural musician, with a proficiency at the piano that seemed to make her destined for a career in the concert hall. But at 17, she decided to aim for a theatrical career instead; she joined the Coventry Repertory Company and spent eight months on the stage. In 1938, she reportedly paid for her own screen test and arranged for producer Alexander Korda, the founder and head of London Films, to see it. As a result, she was cast in two movies: a small but important role in Michael Powell's The Spy in Black (1939) and as Ethne, the romantic lead, in The Four Feathers (1939). The latter -- shot in Technicolor -- was among the largest-scale adventure films of the 1930s. Those roles led to Duprez's being cast as the Princess in Korda's grandest production of the decade, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which proved a defining role for the actress. Her haunting beauty and understated elegance, coupled with the exotic setting of the Arabian Nights fantasy epic, made her one of the more memorable elements in a movie that was brimming over with visual splendors. As a result of the outbreak of the Second World War and Korda's financial situation, the production was moved from London to Hollywood in the spring of 1940, and when shooting was finished in September of that year, Duprez remained in Hollywood. Although she was under contract to Korda, the producer was unable to sustain a full-time independent production company in the United States, and Duprez soon found herself stranded in the film capital. Duprez was unable to get work in films initially because of her contract with Korda, and his demands (echoed by her own agent) for a very high price for her work (reportedly 50,000 dollars a picture). Once he released her, it was no less difficult for her -- The Thief of Bagdad had made such an impact that she found herself typecast in exotic Oriental roles. She couldn't find anything more than bit parts and roles in decidedly lower-ranking productions such as the serial Don Winslow of the Coast Guard. Additionally, she had lost her father just before shooting on The Thief of Bagdad had started, and all of the family's money was frozen in England, a situation that only became worse when her mother passed away soon after a voyage to Australia. (According to some contemporary accounts, her family situation was further complicated by the plight of her brother Charles, a pilot who, after being turned down by the Royal Air Force because of a vision problem, joined the Finnish Air Force. That led to his flying missions against the Soviets, but when the Germans became allied with Finland, Charles Duprez was arrested as an enemy alien and imprisoned; he managed to escape and make his way to Iceland before returning to England.) Stranded and impoverished -- and divorced, having parted with her first husband -- June Duprez would periodically hock pieces of jewelry to sustain herself, and was working at a sales job to earn enough to eat, when she crossed paths with the wife of actor Nigel Bruce. The Bruces took matters into their hands by giving the actress the couple's daughter's room to live in. She became a part of the family's extended circle, and through them she chanced to meet Cary Grant, who was a guest for dinner one night in their home. He was in the process of putting together a movie that he hoped would redefine his image on a more serious level, None But the Lonely Heart, based on a novel by Richard Llewellyn (How Green Was My Valley), and arranged for her to take a screen test. That led not only to her being cast as the female lead, but to a contract with RKO. Duprez followed that up with the starring role in And Then There Were None (1945), but she was never really comfortable with Hollywood or its demands, or its tendency to type actors, and in 1946 she joined the American Repertory Theater. She spent a major part of her career working on-stage, including a stint with Margaret Webster's drama company, and appeared in three Broadway productions, Henry VIII, What Every Woman Knows, and Androcles and the Lion. She married a second time in the late '40s and had two daughters. In later life, she lived in Rome and later in London.

Trivia: The son of an English manufacturer, Miles Mander had dabbled in several careers before making his screen bow as an extra in 1918. He'd been a farmer, a novelist, a playwright, a stage director and a cinema exhibitor -- and, if all the stories can be believed, a fight promoter, horse and auto racer, and aviator. He was billed as Luther Miles in his earliest film appearances, reserving his real name for his screenwriting credits. In Hollywood from 1935 on, the weedy, mustachioed Mander made a specialty of portraying old-school-tie Britishers who, for various reasons, had fallen into disgrace. He was never more unsavory than when he portrayed master criminal Giles Conover in the 1945 "Sherlock Holmes" entry The Pearl of Death. Mander also showed up in two separate versions of The Three Musketeers, playing Louis XIII in the 1935 version and Richelieu in the 1939 edition (he also played Aramis in the Musketeers sequel The Man in the Iron Mask [1939]). Shortly after wrapping up his scenes in Imperfect Lady (1947), 57-year-old Miles Mander died of a sudden heart attack.

Trivia: The daughter of a cellist with the New York Symphony, Rose Hobart's first brush with the arts was a model for several Woodstock-based artists like George Bellows. Splitting her time with her divorced parents, Hobart was educated in boarding schools all over the country. At 15, she began her stage career as a performer in the Chautaqua tent-show circuit. During the 1920s, she appeared on stage with such notables as Eva Le Gallienne, Noel Coward and Ina Claire; in 1929, she replaced Katharine Hepburn in the first Broadway staging of Death Takes a Holiday. She came to films in 1930, once again as a replacement, this time for Janet Gaynor in Frank Borzage's production of Liliom. Many of her leading lady roles were decorative but colorless (e.g. the "good" girl in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); she became a much more fascinating screen presence when she began portraying spiteful other women, castrating wives and subtle villainesses. After 1949's Bride of Vengeance, Rose Hobart was involuntarily retired from films, the victim of the Hollywood blacklist; she spent the rest of her professional life as an acting counselor, and in 1995 -- at the age of 88 -- published her memoirs, A Steady Digression to a Fixed Point.

Trivia: Born in New York and raised in England, character actor Gilbert Emery thrived as a stage actor, director and playwright on both sides of the Atlantic in the teens and twenties. In British films from 1929, Emery made his American movie debut (and his talkie debut as well) in Behind That Curtain (1929). Briefly parting company with Hollywood in 1932 and 1933 to concentrate on stage work, he returned to films on a permanent basis in 1934. His better-known roles include the pipe-smoking police inspector in Dracula's Daughter (1936), Mae West's business manager in Goin' to Town (1937), Thomas Jefferson in The Remarkable Andrew (1942) and the self-effacing Mr. Cliveden-Banks in Between Two Worlds (1944). As a screenwriter, he worked on such films as Cuban Love Song (1931), Mata Hari (1932) and Gallant Lady (1934). Gilbert Emery's credits are sometimes combined with those of American bit player Gilbert C. Emery, who died in 1934.

Trivia: Portly British character actor Rex Evans made a name for himself in the mid-1920s as a comic performer in London cabarets and music halls. Evans came to Broadway the following decade, where he would appear opposite the likes of Cornelia Otis Skinner (in Lady Windemere's Fan) and Carol Channing (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Concurrent with his New York stage career, he found time to appear in Hollywood films, where at first he was cast as corpulent "sugar daddies" and millionaires. After making a strong impression as the family butler in The Philadelphia Story (1940), he found himself typecast as dignified menservants. Occasionally he broke this stereotype by adopting a handlebar mustache and playing such unsavory roles as the grumpy innkeeper in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) and the principal villain in the 1946 "Sherlock Holmes" opus Pursuit to Algiers. After his retirement from films in the early 1960s, Rex Evans devoted his energies to the thriving art gallery that he'd been running for years on Hollywood's La Cienega Boulevard.

Trivia: A bald British supporting actor who played Superintendent Talbot in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), Matthew Boulton came to Hollywood in 1937 and almost exclusively played English or colonial authority figures, often members of Scotland Yard. Among his best-remembered roles were Inspector Cressney, who trailed jewel thief Clark Gable in They Met in Bombay (1941), and Inspector Graham in The Brighton Strangler (1945). Boulton retired in 1953.

Trivia: Piping-voice, hamster-faced Scottish character actor Olaf Hytten left the British stage for films in 1921. By the time the talkie era rolled around, Hytten was firmly established in Hollywood, playing an abundance of butlers and high-society gentlemen. The actor was primarily confined to one or two-line bits in such films as Platinum Blonde (1931), The Sphinx (1933), Bonnie Scotland (1935), Beloved Rebel (1936), The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Bride Came COD (1941). He was a semi-regular of the Universal B-unit in the '40s, appearing in substantial roles as military men and police official in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and as burgomeisters and innkeepers in the studio's many horror films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, etc.) Olaf Hytten was active until at least 1956; one of his more memorable assignments of the '50s was as the larcenous butler who participates in a scheme to drive Daily Planet editor Perry White crazy in the "Great Caesar's Ghost" episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman.

Trivia: Ian Wolfe was determined to become an actor even as a youth in his hometown of Canton, IL. His Broadway debut was in the warhorse Lionel Barrymore vehicle The Claw. While acting with Katherine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Wolfe was spotted by MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who brought the actor to Hollywood to re-create his Barretts role. Though not yet 40, Wolfe had the receding hairline and lined features necessary for aged character roles. By his own count, Wolfe appeared in over 200 films, often uncredited assignments in the roles of judges, attorneys, butlers, and shopkeepers. Some of his best screen moments occurred in producer Val Lewton's Bedlam (1946), wherein Wolfe played an 18th century scientist confined to a mental asylum for proposing the invention of motion pictures. Because his actual age was difficult to pinpoint, Wolfe kept working into the 1990s (and his nineties); he was a particular favorite of TV's MTM productions, appearing on such sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Rhoda. Co-workers during this period noted affectionately that, despite his many years as a professional, Wolfe was always seized with "stage fright" just before walking on the set. Though often cast in timid roles, Ian Wolfe was quite outspoken and fiercely defensive of his craft; when asked what he thought of certain method actors who insist upon playing extensions of "themselves," Wolfe snapped that he became an actor to pretend to be other people.