Trivia: American comedian Bud Abbott was the tall, bullying member of the popular comedy team Abbott and Costello. The son of circus employees, Abbott entered show business as a burlesque show producer, then took to the stage himself as straight man for a number of comedians, finally teaming with fledgling comic Lou Costello in 1936. After working in burlesque, in radio, and on Broadway, Abbott and Costello made their movie debut in One Night in the Tropics (1940). Their first starring picture was Buck Privates (1941), a box-office bonanza which catapulted the team to "top moneymaker" status for the next 15 years; in all, Abbott and Costello made 36 feature films. In 1951, they made their TV debut on Colgate Comedy Hour, and later that year starred in a widely distributed 52-week, half-hour situation comedy series, The Abbott and Costello Show. After the team broke up in 1957, Abbott retired, but was compelled to revive his career due to income tax problems. He appeared solo in a supporting role on a 1961 G.E. Theatre TV drama, then made an unsuccessful comeback attempt as straight man for comedian Candy Candido. Abbott's last performing job was providing the voice of "himself" in a series of 156 Abbott and Costello animated cartoons produced for television by Hanna-Barbera in 1966.

Trivia: American comedian Lou Costello wasn't the most scholarly of lads growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, although he excelled in baseball and basketball. He won an athletic scholarship to Cornwall-on-Hudson Military School, but left before graduation to try a performing career. Reasoning that there'd be a lot of work for a top athlete in Hollywood, Lou travelled westward, but was only able to secure stunt-man work, specializing in the sort of spectacular falls that he'd still be staging during his later starring career. Tired of working anonymously in Hollywood, Costello decided to give stage work a try, and by the mid '30s he'd achieved minor prominence as a burlesque comedian. What he needed was the right straight man, and that man was Bud Abbott, with whom Lou teamed in 1936. Abbott was satisfied in burlesque, but Costello had bigger ambitions; it was he who actively promoted the team into radio and Broadway. In 1940, Lou finally realized his life's ambition to be a movie star when he and Abbott were signed by Universal Pictures. The team's second feature, Buck Privates, launched an amazingly durable film career; for the next ten years, Abbott and Costello were Hollywood's biggest moneymaking team. Though no pushover in real life, Lou became world famous for his portrayal of the hapless, trodden-upon patsy of the conniving, bullying Abbott; his plaintive "I'm a ba-a-ad boy" became a national catchphrase. A serious 1942 bout with rheumatic fever kept Lou out of radio and films for a full year. On the day of his professional return in 1943, an appalling tragedy struck Costello; his infant son drowned in the family's backyard swimming pool. Waving off mourners, Lou performed his comeback radio show that evening on schedule, as funny as ever, and broke down the minute the show signed off, while a visibly shaken Bud Abbott explained the situation to the studio audience. Lou was never quite the same after that, though his career flourished, surviving the occasional falling out with Bud Abbott and unprofitable attempts to change his screen image in such films as Little Giant and The Time of Their Lives (1946). Seldom making a professional misstep -- he moved from films to TV and back again with enormous success. Costello broke up permanently with Bud Abbott in 1956. His solo dates in nightclubs and television were satisfactory, and a starring appearance as a single in The Thirty Foot Bride of Candy Rock (1959) wasn't the disaster it might have been, but Lou Costello was basically unhappy going it alone. Still, he was thriving in show business and seemingly had a rosy future ahead of him in early 1959; sadly, in March of that year Lou Costello lost his lifelong battle with his rheumatic heart and died three days before his 53rd birthday.

Trivia: Armed with extensive radio and stage credits, Arthur Franz made his first film appearance in 1948's Jungle Patrol. Franz has been prominently featured in a number of "fantastic" films: he played one-third of the title role in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), and had leads in Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953), and The Atomic Submarine (1960). He has also thrived in military characterizations in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Submarine Command (1951), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His finest screen portrayal was as the psychopathic "hero" of Stanley Kramer's The Sniper (1952). Arthur Franz flourished as a character actor into the 1980s, retiring from films after appearing in That Championship Season (1982).

Trivia: Blonde, Brooklyn-born model and chorus girl Adele Jergens gained national fame when she was elected "Miss World's Fairest" at the 1939 World's Fair; if one chose to believe her "official" birth date, she was 13 years old at the time. Signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1944, Jergens showed up in that studio's "A" and "B" product in a succession of hard-boiled and "loose" roles. Her most curious assignment at Columbia was 1949's Ladies of The Chorus, wherein 27-year-old Jergens played the mother of 23-year-old Marilyn Monroe. Evidently, Jergens was possessed of a good nature, else she wouldn't have seemed so comfortable playing the foil to such comedians as Red Skelton, Abbott & Costello, Alan Young and even the Bowery Boys. Mostly consigned to programmers in the 1950s, Jergens enjoyed a rare "A" part in MGM's psychological melodrama The Cobweb. Adele Jergens was the widow of actor Glenn Langan, whom she married in 1949.

Trivia: "Nancy Guild rhymes with Wild." So proclaimed 20th Century-Fox's publicity hacks when Guild was signed to a contract in 1946. Curiously, in most of her film appearances, Guild wasn't wild at all, but a demure, ladylike screen presence. After starring in three Fox features, she began free-lancing, delivering a worthwhile dramatic performance opposite Orson Welles in Black Magic (1949) before going through the requisite leading-lady motions in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Francis Covers the Big Town (1953). Nancy Guild dropped out of films in 1953 upon marrying Broadway producer Ernest Martin, returning only for a fleeting cameo in Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (1971).

Trivia: The archetypal side-of-the-mouth Runyonesque gangster, Sheldon Leonard's actual mean-streets experience was confined to travelling with a fairly benign teenaged gang in a New York suburb. In fact, if we are to believe his future business partner Danny Thomas, Leonard never met a bonafide gangster until Thomas introduced him to one in the mid-1950s! A graduate of Syracuse University, Leonard began his acting career on radio and the stage, appearing in such Broadway productions as Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Having Wonderful Time. Starting with 1939's Another Thin Man, Leonard made a good living as a movie mob boss, henchman, and all-around tough guy. He played a rare leading role (and a romantic lead, to boot) in PRC's Why Girls Leave Home (1944). Leonard was also a regular on radio's Jack Benny Program, playing a laconic racetrack tout. During the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard became a successful television producer, overseeing such sitcoms as The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Gomer Pyle USMC. He also spearheaded I Spy, the first TV action series with an African American star (Bill Cosby). His television activities extended to the domain of Saturday morning cartoons, as the voice of animated character Linus the Lionhearted. Sheldon Leonard continued producing into the mid-1970s, renaming his production company Deezdemandoze, in honor of his patented gangster patois. Leonard passed away in his home at age 89.

Trivia: American actor William Frawley had hopes of becoming a newspaperman but was sidetracked by a series of meat-and-potatoes jobs. At 21, he found himself in the chorus of a musical comedy in Chicago; his mother forced him to quit, but Frawley had already gotten greasepaint in his veins. Forming a vaudeville act with his brother Paul, Frawley hit the show-business trail; several partners later (including his wife Louise), Frawley was a headliner and in later years laid claim to having introduced the beer-hall chestnut "Melancholy Baby." Entering films in the early 1930s (he'd made a few desultory silent-movie appearances), Frawley became typecast as irascible, pugnacious Irishmen, not much of a stretch from his off-camera personality. Though he worked steadily into the late 1940s, Frawley's drinking got the better of him, and by 1951 most producers found him virtually unemployable. Not so Desi Arnaz, who cast Frawley as neighbor Fred Mertz on the I Love Lucy TV series when Gale Gordon proved unavailable. Frawley promised to stay away from the booze during filming, and in turn Arnaz promised to give Frawley time off whenever the New York Yankees were in the World Series (a rabid baseball fan, Frawley not only appeared in a half dozen baseball films, but also was one of the investors of the minor-league Hollywood Stars ball team). Frawley played Fred Mertz until the last I Love Lucy episode was filmed in 1960, then moved on to a five-year assignment as Bub, chief cook and bottle-washer to son-in-law Fred MacMurray's all male household on My Three Sons.

Trivia: Though he frequently adopted a British accent, actor Gavin Muir was a Chicago boy. After stage work, Muir went to Hollywood for Mary of Scotland (1936), then spent the next quarter century menacing various stars as sly, slow-speaking villains. His indeterminate nationality made him useful in war films like The Master Race (1945), while his tendency to look as though he was hiding some awful secret enabled him to shine in such melodramas as Nightmare (1942). A more benign but still not altogether above-board Muir appeared in the role of a scientist coerced into inflicting invisibility upon Arthur Franz in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). As late as 1959, Muir was throwing roadblocks in the way of sweetness 'n' light as a snooty butler on TV's The Betty Hutton Show. Gavin Muir's last film before slipping into retirement was Night Tide (1963), an appropriately glum ghost story.

Trivia: Scrawny supporting actor Syd Saylor managed to parlay a single comic shtick -- bobbing his adam's apple -- into a four-decade career. He starred in several silent two-reel comedies from 1926 through 1927, then settled into character parts. During the late '30s and early '40s, Saylor frequently found himself in B-Westerns as the comical sidekick for many a six-gun hero, though he seldom lasted very long in any one series. Syd Saylor was still plugging away into the 1950s, playing "old-timer" bits in such films as Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Jackpot (1950), and such TV series as Burns and Allen and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Trivia: American small-part player Billy Wayne was active from 1935 to 1955. Wayne spent most of his film career at Universal, with a few side trips to Fox and Paramount. He was often cast as a chauffeur, usually an all-knowing or sarcastic one. Billy Wayne also played more than his share of cabbies, sailors, reporters, photographers, and assistant directors (vide W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break).

Trivia: Bobby Barber was in at least 160-odd movies and television shows that we know about; there's no telling the actual number of films that this bit player -- who was almost more recognizable for his round face (topped with a bald head) and large, round, bulging eyes than for his voice -- actually showed up in. And for all of those dozens upon dozens of appearances, his only regular, prominent screen credits derived from his work in connection with a pair of comedians for whom he played a much more important role offscreen. Barber was a character actor and bit player, born in New York in 1894, who had some experience on-stage before coming to movies in the 1920s. His earliest known screen credit dates from 1926, in the Lloyd Hamilton feature Nobody's Business, directed by Norman Taurog; Taurog was also the director of the next movie in which Barber is known to have appeared, The Medicine Men (1929), starring the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough (which also included a young Sylvia Field and Symona Boniface). By the 1930s, Barber had moved up to bit parts in major films, including the Marx Brothers features Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Virtually all of Barber's work was uncredited, as he bounced between feature-film roles that involved perhaps a single scene and shorts -- the latter starring such popular funnymen of the time as Andy Clyde and Harry Langdon -- that gave him somewhat more to do. Sometimes Barber was little more than a face, albeit a funny, highly expressive face, in a crowd, as in his jail-cell scene in Pot o' Gold (1941). He played innumerable waiters and shopkeepers, sometimes with accents such as his thick Italian dialect in his one scene (albeit an important one) in Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor. In 1941, Barber began working with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, a pair of burlesque comics who had just burst to stardom on the screen. He shows up as one of the sailors in the finale of their movie In the Navy, and the radio engineer who gets a comical electric shock from Costello's antics in Who Done It? In later movies with the duo, Barber would even get a line or two, as in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which he plays a waiter in a scene with Lon Chaney Jr. But his work for the pair involved far more than these bit parts -- Barber was basically kept on the Abbott and Costello payroll to be their resident "stooge," to hang around and help them work out gags, and also to work gags on them and on anyone else working with and for them, so that the performances on film would never seem stale. Barber is highly visible in a pair of outtakes from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, playing gags on Costello and also on Bela Lugosi. Barber and Costello (who was the more outgoing of the pair) had an especially close backstage friendship, whether playing cards or playing practical jokes on each other. This relationship eventually came to be reflected onscreen when The Abbott & Costello Show went into production in 1952. Barber was in most of the episodes, sometimes playing as many as three different roles in a single 25-minute show; he can also be spotted, from the back, no less -- his physique and walk being that distinctive -- in one episode ("Hillary's Birthday") in the establishing shot of the supermarket. Barber kept working in feature films during the later part of his career, again portraying countless waiters, bellhops, and even a cart driver in the high-profile MGM production Kim (1950). He could play sinister, as in The Adventures of Superman episode "Crime Wave," or just surly as in the underrated Western A Day of Fury. He moved on to working with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as well, in Pardners (1956) (directed by Norman Taurog), and also showed up in serious dramas such as Career (1959) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as Elvis Presley's pictures (Blue Hawaii). But it was Barber's interactions with Lou Costello, right up to the latter's final film (The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock), with which he is most immortalized, especially on the two seasons of The Abbott & Costello Show (where his real name was even once used, in a comedic variant -- "Booby Barber" -- in a sketch that didn't involve him).

Trivia: Corpulent, booming-voiced actor Paul Maxey, in films from 1941, was given sizeable roles (in every sense of the word) in such "B" pictures as Sky Dragon (1949) and The Narrow Margin (1952), often cast as an obstreperous villain. After appearing as composer Victor Herbert in MGM's Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), he was kept "on call" at MGM for uncredited character parts in such major productions as An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and It's Always Fair Weather (1955). Active until 1962, Paul Maxey is best-remembered by 1950s TV addicts as the irascible Mayor Peoples on the Jackie Cooper sit-com The People's Choice (1955-58).

Trivia: An alumnus of the Indiana University Law School, Herbert Vigran gave up the legal world to become an actor. Making his 1935 film debut in Vagabond Lady, Vigran had a few lean months after his first flurry of Hollywood activity, but began getting stage work in New York on the basis of a portfolio of photos showing him sharing scenes with several well-known movie actors (never mentioning that most of his film roles were bit parts). After his first Broadway success in Having Wonderful Time, Vigran returned to L.A., accepting small parts in movies while keeping busy with plenty of lucrative radio work; among his hundreds of radio assignments was the title character on the wartime sitcom "The Sad Sack." In films, the harsh-voiced, heavily eyebrowed Vigran could usually be seen as brash reporters and Runyon-esque hoodlums; his favorite role was the rumpled private eye in the 1954 Dick Powell/Debbie Reynolds comedy Susan Slept Here. During the 1950s, Vigran was most active in TV, essaying half a dozen bad guy roles on the Superman series and appearing regularly as Monte the Bartender on the Dante's Inferno episodes of the anthology series Four Star Playhouse. In the early '70s, Herb Vigran found time during his hectic movie and voice-over schedule to play the recurring role of Judge Brooker on Gunsmoke.

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

Trivia: American actor Harold Goodwin started performing as a child in Los Angeles community theatre. In 1915 he appeared in his first film, The Little Orphan. Though initially cast as under-fed waifs, Goodwin matured into a strapping, athletic leading man, working in roles of varying sizes and importance at Fox, Universal and other studios during the 1920s. He became a close pal and baseball buddy of comedian Buster Keaton while playing the B.M.O.C. villain in Keaton's College (27). Even when Goodwin descended into small character roles in the 1930s, Keaton saw to it that Goodwin was cast in substantial secondary parts in Buster's Educational Studios two-reelers of the 1930s. By 1955, Goodwin had been around Hollywood so long that he was among the film "pioneers" given prominent billing in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops. In between acting assignments, Goodwin functioned as a dialogue director. When a British actor named Harold Goodwin rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, the American Harold Goodwin changed the spelling of his first name to Herold to avoid confusion.

Trivia: A busy Hollywood studio musician, Perc Launders eased into acting in 1941, when he played the brakeman in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels. Until his retirement in 1952, Launders worked at Paramount, Universal and RKO as a general-purpose actor. With such rare exceptions as "Zolton" in RKO's The Falcon in Hollywood (1945), the actor's screen characters were nameless, and often lineless. One of the unsung legion of Tinseltown bit players, Perc Launders played countless bartenders, clerks, cops, onlookers and pedestrians.

Trivia: Milt Bronson wasn't a terribly familiar face in movie and television comedy, but as a voice he was unmistakable, and as a fixture in the comedy of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, he was only slightly less important than such players as Sidney Fields. With his clear announcer's diction, working-class New York accent, and a split-second sense of timing, he could switch gears from machine-gun-like outbursts of gag lines to straight narrative and make it all memorable and comic. Bronson had a long association with Abbott & Costello, and when they came to movies, so did he. His first credited onscreen appearance was in In Society (1944), in what is probably the funniest scene in the entire movie, as Costello tries to find the Susquehanna Hat Company -- this sketch, usually referred to as "Floogle Street" (and often credited to Joey Faye for authorship), features Bronson as the first passerby that Costello stops; with his clipped delivery and over-the-top nervous voice, Bronson batters the exasperated, roly-poly comic verbally, with some of the funniest invective ever heard in a comedy film of the 1940s. The following year, Bronson appeared (playing a character named "Milton Bronson") in A Wave, a WAC, and a Marine at Monogram -- not coincidentally, the movie was a co-production of Abbott & Costello's agent Eddie Sherman and Costello's father, in a short-lived effort to spin off the comic team's success. In Abbott & Costello's Here Come the Coeds, made the same year, Bronson played a ring announcer in a comic fight between Costello and a very bad-tempered villain (played by Lon Chaney Jr.); he performed a similar role in Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man, and was a radio newscaster in Abbott & Costello Go to Mars, announcing that a rocket ship has just flown through the Lincoln Tunnel. Bronson was the team's resident dialogue coach through most of this period, a role that he also assumed (with an onscreen credit) when they did The Abbott & Costello Show from 1952 through 1954, which also gave him some time onscreen -- he played a multitude of bit parts on the show, but his most visible contributions included a repeat of the Floogle Street routine on one show; playing the nervous, put-upon Mr. Bronson, butt of Costello's mishaps and husband to Renie Riano's Mrs. Bronson, in the episode in which they go to Las Vegas; in "The Retired Actors Home" episode, he's one of the two rest home denizens playing baseball with an invisible ball (which breaks a window when Costello hits it with an invisible bat), and is the audience member who requests "Who's on First"; and in the show where Costello runs for city council, and Abbott introduces him as "a combination of a Democrat and a Republican," Bronson is the heckler who yells out, "I'll say -- he eats like an elephant and thinks like a jackass." Such is greatness.

Trivia: Character actor Donald Kerr showed up whenever a gumchewing Runyonesque type (often a reporter or process server) was called for. A bit actor even in two-reelers and "B" pictures, Kerr was one of those vaguely familiar faces whom audiences would immediately recognize, ask each other "Who is that?", then return to the film, by which time Kerr had scooted the scene. The actor's first recorded film appearance was in 1933's Carnival Lady. Twenty-two years later, Donald Kerr concluded his career in the same anonymity with which he began it in 1956's Yaqui Drums.