Trivia: Richard Greene was a charming, tall, handsome, dimpled, black-haired British leading man. The son of an actor and actress, in his teens he joined a repertory company. When he was 20 he was brought to Hollywood by 20th Century-Fox as a potential rival to MGM's Robert Taylor. Greene debuted onscreen in 1938 and over the next several years he was a busy leading man, becoming a very popular matinee idol in pretty-boy romantic and swashbuckling leads. His career was interrupted by service in World War II, and when he returned he was unable to regain his momentum, but he continued playing leads in international films for the next decade, and then more sporadically after 1955. He became very famous as the title-role star of the long-running British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, which was syndicated world-wide. From 1941-52 Richard Greene was married to actress Patricia Medina.

Trivia: South African-born Basil Rathbone was the son of a British mining engineer working in Johannesburg. After a brief career as an insurance agent, the 19-year-old aspiring actor joined his cousin's repertory group. World War I service as a lieutenant in Liverpool Scottish Regiment followed, then a rapid ascension to leading-man status on the British stage. Rathbone's movie debut was in the London-filmed The Fruitful Vine (1921). Tall, well profiled, and blessed with a commanding stage voice, Rathbone shifted from modern-dress productions to Shakespeare and back again with finesse. Very much in demand in the early talkie era, one of Rathbone's earliest American films was The Bishop Murder Case (1930), in which, as erudite amateur sleuth Philo Vance, he was presciently referred to by one of the characters as "Sherlock Holmes." He was seldom more effective than when cast in costume dramas as a civilized but cold-hearted villain: Murdstone in David Copperfield (1934), Evremonde in Tale of Two Cities (1935), and Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (Rathbone was a good friend of Robin Hood star Errol Flynn -- and a far better swordsman). Never content with shallow, one-note performances, Rathbone often brought a touch of humanity and pathos to such stock "heavies" as Karenin in Anna Karenina (1936) and Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Pompeii (1936). He was Oscar-nominated for his portrayals of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and the crotchety Louis XVI in If I Were King (1938). In 1939, Rathbone was cast as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first of 14 screen appearances as Conan Doyle's master detective. He also played Holmes on radio from 1939 through 1946, and in 1952 returned to the character (despite his despairing comments that Holmes had hopelessly "typed" him in films) in the Broadway flop The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was written by his wife, Ouida Bergere. Famous for giving some of Hollywood's most elegant and elaborate parties, Rathbone left the West Coast in 1947 to return to Broadway in Washington Square. He made a movie comeback in 1954, essaying saturnine character roles in such films as We're No Angels (1955), The Court Jester (1956), and The Last Hurrah (1958). Alas, like many Hollywood veterans, Rathbone often found the pickings lean in the 1960s, compelling him to accept roles in such inconsequential quickies as The Comedy of Terrors (1964) and Hillbillies in the Haunted House (1967). He could take consolation in the fact that these negligible films enabled him to finance projects that he truly cared about, such as his college lecture tours and his Caedmon Record transcriptions of the works of Shakespeare. Basil Rathbone's autobiography, In and Out of Character, was published in 1962.

Trivia: Born Wendy Jenkins, Wendy Barrie was the daughter of an attorney and was educated in England and Switzerland. A skinny, breezy, light-hearted, English-accented blonde, she debuted on the British stage in 1930, then went on to make three U.K. films in 1932, including Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII, in which she played the loose Jane Seymour; that role put her in demand in Hollywood, a status she attained for over a decade. However, her considerable charm and good looks were squandered in "B"-movies, such as a series of "The Saint" action-mysteries. After 1943 she was given few film roles. A talkative and gregarious woman, she went on to do radio and TV, including work in New York City as the host of The Wendy Barrie Show, one of TV's first talk shows. In 1954 she appeared in It Should Happen to You (1954) and went on to do another film or two in later years. A stroke while she was in her 60s left her mentally incapacitated.

Trivia: Though a British subject through and through, actor Nigel Bruce was born in Mexico while his parents were on vacation there. His education was interrupted by service in World War I, during which he suffered a leg injury and was confined to a wheelchair for the duration. At the end of the war, Bruce pursued an acting career, making his stage debut in The Creaking Door (1920). A stint in British silent pictures began in 1928, after which Bruce divided his time between stage and screen, finally settling in Hollywood in 1934 (though he continued to make sporadic appearances in such British films as The Scarlet Pimpernel). Nigel's first Hollywood picture was Springtime for Henry (1934), and soon he'd carved a niche for himself in roles as bumbling, befuddled middle-aged English gentlemen. It was this quality which led Bruce to being cast as Sherlock Holmes' companion Dr. Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), a pleasurable assignment in that the film's Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was one of Bruce's oldest and closest friends. While Bruce's interpretation of Watson is out of favor with some Holmes purists (who prefer the more intelligent Watson of the original Conan Doyle stories), the actor played the role in 14 feature films, successfully cementing the cinema image of Sherlock's somewhat slower, older compatriot - even though he was in fact three years younger than Rathbone. Bruce continued to play Dr. Watson on a popular Sherlock Holmes radio series, even after Rathbone had deserted the role of Holmes in 1946. Bruce's last film role was in the pioneering 3-D feature, Bwana Devil (1952). He fell ill and died in 1953, missing the opportunity to be reunited with Basil Rathbone in a Sherlock Holmes theatrical production.

Trivia: British actor Lionel Atwill was born into wealth and educated at London's prestigious Mercer School, where he planned to pursue a career as an architect; instead, he became a stage actor, working steadily from his debut at age 20, most often in the plays of Ibsen and Shaw. Establishing himself in America, Atwill continued his stage work, supplementing his income with silent film appearances, the first being Eve's Daughter(1918). Atwill's rich rolling voice made him a natural for talking pictures. Following a pair of Vitaphone short subjects in 1928, the actor made his talkie bow in The Verdict (1932). Most effective in roles as an aristocratic villain, Atwill found himself appearing in numerous melodramas and horror films, including the classic Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Atwill's career was threatened in 1940, when it was revealed that he'd thrown an "orgy" at his home, complete with naked guests and pornographic films. Atwill "lied like a gentleman" to protect his party guests at the subsequent trial, and was convicted of perjury. The ensuing scandal made Atwill virtually unemployable at most studios, but he found a semi-permanent home at Universal Pictures, which at the time was grinding out low budget horror films. Lionel Atwill died in harness in the middle of production of the 1946 Universal serial Lost City of the Jungle; viewers watching this serial today will no doubt notice how often Atwill's character turns his back to the camera, allowing the producers to cover his absence with a stand-in.

Trivia: Though best known to modern filmgoers as a horror star, cadaverous John Carradine was, in his prime, one of the most versatile character actors on the silver screen. The son of a journalist father and physician mother, Carradine was given an expensive education in Philadelphia and New York. Upon graduating from the Graphic Arts School, he intended to make his living as a painter and sculptor, but in 1923 he was sidetracked into acting. Working for a series of low-paying stock companies throughout the 1920s, he made ends meet as a quick-sketch portrait painter and scenic designer. He came to Hollywood in 1930, where his extensive talents and eccentric behavior almost immediately brought him to the attention of casting directors. He played a dizzying variety of distinctive bit parts -- a huntsman in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a crowd agitator in Les Miserables (1935) -- before he was signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936. His first major role was the sadistic prison guard in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which launched a long and fruitful association with Ford, culminating in such memorable screen characterizations as the gentleman gambler in Stagecoach (1939) and Preacher Casy ("I lost the callin'!") in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Usually typecast as a villain, Carradine occasionally surprised his followers with non-villainous roles like the philosophical cab driver in Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) and Abraham Lincoln in Of Human Hearts (1938). Throughout his Hollywood years, Carradine's first love remained the theater; to fund his various stage projects (which included his own Shakespearean troupe), he had no qualms about accepting film work in the lowest of low-budget productions. Ironically, it was in one of these Poverty Row cheapies, PRC's Bluebeard (1944), that the actor delivered what many consider his finest performance. Though he occasionally appeared in an A-picture in the 1950s and 1960s (The Ten Commandments, Cheyenne Autumn), Carradine was pretty much consigned to cheapies during those decades, including such horror epics as The Black Sleep (1956), The Unearthly (1957), and the notorious Billy the Kid Meets Dracula (1966). He also appeared in innumerable television programs, among them Twilight Zone, The Munsters, Thriller, and The Red Skelton Show, and from 1962 to 1964 enjoyed a long Broadway run as courtesan-procurer Lycus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Though painfully crippled by arthritis in his last years, Carradine never stopped working, showing up in films ranging from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) to Peggy Sue Got Married (1984). Married four times, John Carradine was the father of actors David, Keith, Robert, and Bruce Carradine.

Trivia: Born in Spain to British parents, actress Beryl Mercer was on-stage from early childhood. Too short and matronly for leading lady roles, Beryl thrived for four decades as a character actress. In films from 1922, she specialized in frail, motherly roles in talkies, e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Broken Lullaby (1932). She was also supremely capable of conveying feistiness and determination; in the last year of her life, she played a snappish spiritualist in Hound of the Baskervilles and Queen Victoria in The Little Princess. Beryl Mercer was the wife of British leading man Holmes Herbert.

Trivia: The son of British actress Mary Forbes, Ralph Forbes followed in his mother's footsteps, appearing in stage productions as a juvenile and in films from the age of 19. His most successful British starring film was the 1922 version of that old chestnut Comin' Thro' the Rye. He came to Hollywood in 1926 to co-star in the Paramount big-budgeter Beau Geste, then settled into a series of dinner-jacketed leading roles. During his long American film career, Forbes found time to marry two of his leading ladies, Ruth Chatterton and Heather Angel. Ralph Forbes' last years before the camera were spent in such supporting roles as Sir Hugo Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Henry Tudor in Tower of London (1939).

Trivia: Born in Wales, E. E. Clive studied for a medical career before switching his field of endeavor to acting at age 22. Touring the provinces for a decade, Clive became an expert at virtually every sort of regional dialect in the British Isles. He moved to the U.S. in 1912, where after working in the Orpheum vaudeville circuit he set up his own stock company in Boston. By the 1920s, his company was operating in Hollywood; among his repertory players were such up-and-comers as Rosalind Russell. He made his film debut as a rural police officer in 1933's The Invisible Man, then spent the next seven years showing up in wry bit roles as burgomeisters, butlers, reporters, aristocrats, shopkeepers and cabbies. Though he seldom settled down too long in any one characterization, E. E. Clive was a semi-regular as Tenny the Butler in Paramount's Bulldog Drummond "B" series.

Trivia: British actress Eily Malyon enjoyed a lucrative Hollywood screen career playing scores of no-nonsense schoolteachers, maids, governesses and maiden aunts. Ideally suited for costume pieces, she was seen in two major Dickens adaptations of the 1930s, playing Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations (1934) and Mrs. Cruncher in Tale of Two Cities (1935). She was also appropriately sinister as Mrs. Barryman in Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Mrs. Sketcher in Jane Eyre (1943). Eily Malyon's most hissable screen role was maiden Aunt Demetria Riffle in 1939's On Borrowed Time; Aunt Demetria's onerous Victorianism proved so distasteful to Julian Northrup(Lionel Barrymore) and his grandson Pud (Bob Watson) that they literally chose to die rather than submit to her whims.

Trivia: Cadaverous British actor Nigel De Brulier is most closely associated with classical roles. His first film (after decades of stage work) was a 1915 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts; six years later he was in another Ibsen adaptation, A Doll's House. In Douglas Fairbanks' 1921 version of The Three Musketeers De Brulier played the cunning Cardinal Richelieu, a role he repeated briefly in the 1929 sequel The Iron Mask. He was also prominently featured in the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame as Dom Claude, the head priest. Possessed of a rich theatrical voice, Nigel de Brulier made the transition to sound with ease, but most of his '30s roles were mere character bits; an exception was the 1935 Three Musketeers, in which he played Richelieu again. Towards the end of his career, and without complaint or regret, the venerable actor accepted one-day parts in "B" pictures, short subjects, westerns and serials. The best of Nigel De Brulier's latter-day assignments was as the robed, white-bearded Shazam, the ancient mystic who gives young Billy Batson (Frank Coghlan Jr.) superhuman powers in the Republic serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941).

Trivia: Diminutive Scottish stage and screen actress Mary Gordon was seemingly placed on this earth to play care-worn mothers, charwomen and housekeepers. In films from the silent area (watch for her towards the end of the 1928 Joan Crawford feature Our Dancing Daughters), Gordon played roles ranging from silent one-scene bits to full-featured support. She frequently acted with Laurel and Hardy, most prominently as the stern Scots innkeeper Mrs. Bickerdyke in 1935's Bonnie Scotland. Gordon was also a favorite of director John Ford, portraying Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Englishwomen with equal aplomb (and sometimes with the same accent). She was the screen mother of actors as diverse as Jimmy Cagney, Leo Gorcey and Lou Costello; she parodied this grey-haired matriarch image in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer (1945), wherein her tearful court testimony on behalf of her son (Ed Brophy) is accompanied by a live violinist. Mary Gordon is most fondly remembered by film buffs for her recurring role as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films of 1939-46 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a role she carried over to the Holmes radio series of the '40s.

Trivia: Scottish stage actor Ivan Simpson made the first of his many film appearances in 1915. A favorite of theatrical luminary George Arliss, Simpson appeared in nine of Arliss' Hollywood vehicles, beginning with 1922's The Man Who Played God. His most memorable roles during this period included the Jewish business adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1929's Disraeli, and the smarmy cockney general factotum to the Rajah of Rukh in 1930's The Green Goddess. Outside of his association with Arliss, Simpson's other noteworthy roles included Lord Faulkner in the 1932 Clive Brook version of Sherlock Holmes. Ivan Simpson remained active until 1948, playing scores of minor parts as magistrates, pubkeepers, clerks, butlers, and professors.

Trivia: A debonair British-born supporting player in Hollywood films from 1936, John Burton usually played men of wealth and prestige, such as Lord Nelson in Lloyds of London, Lafayette in Marie Antoinette (1938), and a Scotland Yard inspector in Phantom Raiders (1940), the latter an entry in MGM's brief "Nick Carter" series. During World War II, he was often cast as RAF officers and also did quite a bit of narration work for wartime short subjects. Burton's final film seems to have been Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1963), a Jerry Warren atrocity filmed in Mexico.

Trivia: The very picture of an English gentleman officer, monocle and all, Lionel Pape came to Hollywood in 1935 after a distinguished career on stage and screen in his home country. Usually seen as a member of the horsy set, Pape played Major Allardyce in Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Lord Harry Droopy in The Big Broadcast of 1938, Lord Melrose in Raffles (1940), and Babberly in Charlie's Aunt (1941). Pape died at the then newly founded Motion Picture Country House and Hospital.

Trivia: From his talking picture debut in Laughter (1930), British actor Leonard Carey nearly always played butlers. His more notable family-retainer assignments included The Awful Truth (1937), Heaven Can Wait (1943, a rare billed role) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). In an earlier Hitchcock effort, the Oscar-winning Rebecca, Carey was seen as feeble-minded beach hermit Ben, whose very presence gives heroine Joan Fontaine (and most of the audience) a good case of the creeps. In the latter stages of his career (he retired in the mid-1950s and lived to be ninety), Leonard Carey was typed in "doctor" roles in such films as Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and Thunder in the East (1953).

Trivia: A debonair stage actor from South Africa who often sported an impressively florid mustache, Kenneth Hunter played the "other man" in several melodramas of the early 1910s, including The Ransom (1916) opposite Broadway star Julia Dean and Daredevil Kate (1916) opposite femme fatale Virginia Pearson (both produced in New York City). After more than a decade of stage work, Hunter returned to the screen in the late '30s, mainly playing ramrod-straight military officers: the commandant in Lancer Spy (1937), a general in The Little Princess (1939), and a brigadier general in The Red Danube (1949). He was also Sir Mortimer in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Lord Tyrmanell in The Earl of Chicago (1940), and a mounted police inspector in The Lodger (1944).

Trivia: Born in Ireland, actor Vesey O'Davoren started out with Dublin's Abbey Theatre. During WWI, he was caught in a mustard gas attack and lost his voice. To help himself heal, he moved to Hollywood and began appearing in silent films. By the time talkies were invented, he had recovered his voice and O'Davoren appeared in over two dozen films before retiring in the late '50s.

Trivia: Actress Ruth Terry was 17 when she inked her first movie contract at 20th Century Fox. After a few nondescript roles at Fox and Columbia, Terry settled at Republic Studios, where she thrived as an all-purpose leading lady, playing roles both friendly and unsympathetic. Her more famous Republic credits include The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine (1943), My Buddy (1944), Steppin' in Society (1945), and The Cheaters (1945). Ruth Terry retired in the mid-'40s, making a brief comeback in 1962.

Trivia: Short, stout Scottish actor David Thursby came to Hollywood at the dawn of the talkie era. Thursby was indispensable to American films with British settings like Werewolf of London and Mutiny on the Bounty (both 1935). He spent much of his career at 20th Century Fox, generally in unbilled cameos. Often as not, he was cast as a London bobby (vide the 1951 Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, in which he was briefly permitted to sing). David Thursby remained active until the mid-60s.

Trivia: There's a bit of a cloud surrounding the origins of character actor Harry Cording. The 1970 biographical volume The Versatiles lists his birthplace as New York City, while the exhaustive encyclopedia Who Was Who in Hollywood states that Cording was born in England. Whatever the case, Cording made his mark from 1925 through 1955 in distinctly American roles, usually portraying sadistic western bad guys. A break from his domestic villainy occurred in the 1934 Universal horror film The Black Cat, in which a heavily-made-up Harry Cording played the foreboding, zombie-like servant to Satan-worshipping Boris Karloff.