Trivia: Canadian-born actor Walter Huston enjoyed an early theatrical life of roller-coaster proportions which he doggedly pursued, despite a lifelong suffering of "stage fright." Taking nickel and dime performing jobs, quitting to pursue "real" work -- an engineering job came to an end when his inept attempts to fix a town's reservoir nearly resulted in a flood -- then returning to bit roles were all part of Huston's early days. Before 1910, Huston had toured in vaudeville, worked in stock companies, tried to maintain a normal married life, and fathered a son whose life was twice as tempestuous as Walter's: future director John Huston. The barnstorming days ended when Huston got his first major Broadway role in Mr. Pitt (1924), which led to several successful New York seasons for the actor in a variety of plays. His stage and vaudeville training made him an excellent candidate for talkies; Huston launched his movie career with Gentlemen of the Press (1929), and spent the 1930s playing everything from a Mexican bandit to President Lincoln. Returning to Broadway in 1938 for the musical comedy Knickerbocker Holiday, Huston, in the role of 17th century New Amsterdam governor Peter Minuit, achieved theatrical immortality with his poignant rendition of the show's top tune, "September Song," the recording of which curiously became a fixture of the Hit Parade after Huston's death in 1950. Throughout the 1940s, Huston offered a gallery of memorable screen portrayals, from the diabolical Mr. Scratch in All That Money Can Buy (1941) to George M. Cohan's father in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Still, it was only after removing his expensive false teeth and trading his fancy duds for a dusty bindlestiff's outfit that the actor would win an Academy Award, for his portrayal of the cackling old prospector Howard in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), directed by his son. At the time of his death, Huston was preparing to take on the part of the "world's oldest counterfeiter" in Mister 880, a role ultimately played by fellow Oscar winner Edmund Gwenn.

Trivia: Although she is best known for her later work, Una Merkel actually started in film in 1920 as Lillian Gish's stand-in for Way Down East. After a stage career in the 1920s, she returned to films as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930). The vivacious character actress brightened up dozens of films, playing mostly comic roles interspersed with an occasional dramatic part. Films to watch include Dangerous Female (1931); Private Lives (1931); Red-Headed Woman (1932); 42nd Street (1933), the film in which she memorably says of Ginger Rogers' character Anytime Annie: "The only time she ever said no she didn't hear the question;" The Merry Widow (both 1934 and 1952); Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935); Born to Dance (1936); Destry Rides Again (1939), where she and Marlene Dietrich have a frenzied hair-pulling battle over the hapless Mischa Auer; On Borrowed Time (1939); The Bank Dick (1940); Road to Zanzibar (1941); This Is the Army (1943); With a Song in My Heart (1952); and The Parent Trap (1961), among many others. In 1956, she won a Tony Award for The Ponder Heart and in 1961 was nominated for an Academy Award for Summer and Smoke in the role she had originated on the stage.

Trivia: Kay Hammond played leads in a number of early Hollywood talkies. She was born in London, the daughter of actor Sir Guy Standing. In 1927, Hammond made her debut bow on the London stage. In film, one of her most famous roles was Mary Todd Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln. She returned to England in the mid-'30s and returned to the stage, but periodically, Hammond appeared in films through the mid '50s.

Trivia: Tall, handsome, golden-throated leading man Ian Keith became a Broadway favorite in the 1920s. He also pursued a sporadic silent film career, appearing opposite the illustrious likes of Gloria Swanson and Lon Chaney Sr. A natural for talkies, Keith appeared in such early sound efforts as Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) and D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) (in which he played John Wilkes Booth). A favorite of Cecil B. DeMille, Keith stole the show as the cultured, soft-spoken Saladin in DeMille's The Crusades (1935). A rambunctious night life and an inclination towards elbow-bending reduced Keith's stature in Hollywood, and by the mid-1940s he was occasionally obliged to appear in such cheapies as the 1946 "Bowery Boys" epic Mr. Hex. His final screen appearance was a cameo as Rameses I in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Among Ian Keith's wives was stage luminary Blanche Yurka and silent-film leading lady Ethel Clayton.

Trivia: American actor E. Alyn Warren joined the Essanay film company in 1910. Warren played a variety of roles throughout the teens and '20s, the most famous of which was the title character in The Courtship of Miles Standish (1923). However, he was best known for his Chinese characterizations; most of these were patterned after his performance as Lo Sang Kee in both the 1922 and 1930 versions of East Is West. E. Alyn Warren's credits are often confused with those of another Asian impersonator, Fred Warren.

Trivia: A major influence on the establishment of Southern California as the film capital of the world, veteran stage actor Hobart Bosworth was often called the "Dean of Hollywood." A star on Broadway in the late 19th century (Hedda Gabler, opposite Mrs. Fiske, Martha of the Lowlands, with Emily Wakeman), Bosworth entered the silent drama with the Selig Polyscope Company after losing his voice in 1908. He led the Selig company to Los Angeles the following years and was credited with starring in the first film to be shot on the West Coast, the 1,000-feet-long In the Sultan's Power (1909). With the goal of filming a series of Jack London melodramas, Hobart Bosworth founded his own company, Bosworth, Inc., in 1913. He both directed and starred in the company's initial production, a seven-reel version of The Sea Wolf (1913) filmed at Truckee, CA, and went on to produce and star in John Barleycorn (1913), The Valley of the Moon (1914), and Martin Eden (1914). By then actress/screenwriter/director Lois Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley had joined the company roster, which also included leading ladies Myrtle Stedman, Fritzi Scheff, and Elsie Janis. Distributing through newcomer Paramount, Bosworth became associated with the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, whose facility on 201 North Occidental Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles became his headquarters. Morosco and Bosworth both became part of Paramount in 1916 and Hobart Bosworth drifted into supporting roles.Making his sound film debut in the Vitaphone short subject A Man of Peace in 1928, Hobart Bosworth went on to enjoy a long career as a character actor in B-Westerns and serials, usually playing the kind, fatherly type but once in a while cast against type as a dyed-in-the-wool Boss Villain. He could still demand prominent billing but the films themselves were usually Poverty Row quickies and few moviegoers were aware of his erstwhile fame. Almost indefatigable, the veteran actor remained in films until shortly before his death from pneumonia in December of 1943.

Trivia: Frail-looking but iron-willed American actor Henry B. Walthall set out to become a lawyer, but was drawn to the stage instead. After several seasons appearing opposite such luminaries as Henry Miller and Margaret Anglin, Walthall was firmly established in New York's theatrical circles by the time he entered films in 1909 at the invitation of director D.W. Griffith. Clearly, both men benefited from the association: Griffith was able to exploit Walthall's expertise and versatility, while Walthall learned to harness his tendency to overact. The best of the Griffith/Walthall collaborations was Birth of a Nation (1915), in which Walthall portrayed the sensitive Little Colonel. Walthall left Griffith in 1915, a move that did little to advance his career. A string of mediocre productions spelled finis to Walthall's stardom, though he continued to prosper in character parts into the 1930s. One of his best showings in the talkie era was a virtual replay of his Little Colonel characterization in the closing scenes of the 1934 Will Rogers vehicle Judge Priest. Henry B. Walthall died while filming the 1936 Warner Bros. film China Clipper; ironically, he passed away just before he was scheduled to film his character's death scene.

Trivia: American character actor Frank Campeau was the perfect skulking villain, whether dressed as a millionaire or a Bowery henchman. Short, wiry, and with a face like a dyspeptic weasel, Campeau was "Runyonesque" before there was a Damon Runyon. Actor/producer Douglas Fairbanks capitalized on Campeau's untrustworthy demeanor by casting the actor in several bad-guy roles. In Fairbanks' first United Artists release, 1919's His Majesty the American, Campeau is on hand as an outwardly respectable but shifty-eyed diplomat, while in Fairbank's second UA picture Til the Clouds Roll By (1919) he is identified only as "The Jilted Villain". Two decades later, a seedier-looking Campeau was sneaking through alleys in such talkies as A Soldier's Plaything (1930) and Everything's Rosie (1931). Frank Campeau retired from films at age 74, after completing a starving-peasant bit in the lavish MGM costumer Marie Antoinette.

Trivia: Mainly remembered for offering younger brother John Ford his first opportunities in the movie business, Francis Ford (born Feeney) was a touring company actor before entering films with Thomas Edison in 1907. In the early 1910s, he served a tumultuous apprenticeship as a director/star for producer Thomas Ince -- who in typical Ince fashion presented many of Ford's accomplishments as his own -- before moving over to Carl Laemmle's Universal in 1913. A true auteur, Ford would direct, write, and star in his own Westerns and serials, often opposite Grace Cunard, the studio's top action heroine. Contrary to popular belief they never married, but their onscreen partnership resulted in such popular action serials as Lucille Love -- Girl of Mystery (1914), The Broken Coin (1915), and The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (1916). Both Ford's and Cunard's careers declined in the 1920s, with Ford directing mostly poverty row productions. He kept working in films as a supporting actor through the early '50s, mainly due to the influence of John, who often made Francis Ford and Victor McLaglen supply the corny Irish humor for which he exhibited a lifelong fondness. Francis Ford's son, Philip Ford, also became a director of Westerns, and also like his father, mainly of the poverty row variety.

Trivia: Coming to films from the stage in 1914, actress Lucille LaVerne had a career which endured for over twenty years. She seemed to dote on playing tattered old hags, staggering tosspots, time- and care-worn slum mothers and indomitable frontierswomen. She was delightful in her own nasty way as the old harridan who forces blind Dorothy Gish to sing in the streets in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1922). Successfully making the transition to sound, she was seen as petty-crook James Cagney's overprotective mother in Sinner's Holiday (1930), a slatternly underworld fence in Little Caesar (1930) and "The Vengeance," the toothless, cackling insurrectionist in Tale of Two Cities (1935). A more benign LaVerne was seen as a hillbilly matriarch who's set her cap for old blowhard Noah Beery Sr. in Wheeler & Woolsey's Kentucky Kernels (1934). Lucille LaVerne's most famous screen role, was one in which her face was never seen: she served as voice and model of the Wicked Queen in the 1937 Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Trivia: American stage actress Helen Freeman made one silent film in 1915 then returned to the theater until the dawn of the talkie era. One of Freeman's earliest talking-picture roles was also one of her best: she played Nancy Hanks in the prologue of D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930). Thereafter, she was seen in maternal roles, both rustic and regal. In 1946, Helen Freeman was given several good scenes as Widow Bridelle in So Dark the Night and as the Queen of Spain in Bob Hope's Monsieur Beaucaire.

Trivia: Before becoming a notable early director and actor on the silver screen, Oscar Apfel was a veteran opera producer and director. His career in cinema began in 1911 when became a director for Edison. Apfel also directed films for other studios including Selig. His work became popular in 1914 when he began co-directing feature-length films with the legendary Cecil B. De Mille for Lasky-Paramount Studios. In 1916, he moved to Fox and later continued director for smaller studios until his career began to wane in the 1920s. At the end of his directorial career, Apfel had been reduced to churning out low-grade melodramas for cut-rate studios. He directed his final film in 1927. One year later, Apfel appeared again as an actor known for playing distinguished characters in films such as Romance of the Underworld (1928), and the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon.

Trivia: Gangly, bald-pated stage actor Otto Hoffman inaugurated his screen career with producer Thomas Ince in 1916. After directing Ince's Secret of Black Mountain (1917), Hoffman concentrating on acting. He was seen as cadaverous, crafty, menacing, and sometimes near-moronic types in such silents as Human Wreckage (1918), The Eagle (1925), The Terror (1928) and Noah's Ark (1929). His ethnic range in talkies embraced the Riffian Hasse in Desert Song (1929), frontiersman Murch Rankin in Cimarron (1931), and Gandhi parody "Khook" in Eddie Cantor's Kid Millions (1934). Otto Hoffman spent his last film years in bit roles, most often cast as pawnbrokers or caretakers.

Trivia: Edgar Dearing was a full-time Los Angeles motorcycle cop in the '20s when he began accepting small roles in the 2-reel comedies of Hal Roach. These roles hardly constituted a stretch, since he was often cast as a motorcycle cop, principally because he supplied his own uniform and cycle; the best-remembered of these "performances" was in Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars (1928). Hal Roach cameraman George Stevens liked Dearing's work, and saw to it that the policeman-cum-actor was prominently featured in Stevens' RKO Wheeler & Woolsey features Kentucky Kernels (1934) and The Nitwits (1935). When he moved into acting full-time in the '30s, Dearing was still primarily confined to law-enforcement bit roles, though he achieved fourth billing as a tough drill sergeant in the Spencer Tracy/Franchot Tone feature They Gave Him a Gun (1937). Dearing's performing weight was most effectively felt in the Abbott and Costello features of the '40s, where he provided a formidable authority-figure foe for the simpering antics of Lou Costello (notably in the "Go Ahead and Sing" routine in 1944's In Society). Dearing also showed up in a number of '40s 2-reelers; he was particularly amusing as strong man Hercules Jones (a "Charles Atlas" takeoff) in the 1948 Sterling Holloway short Man or Mouse? Edgar Dearing's last screen assignment was a prominent role as townsman Mr. Gorman in Walt Disney's Pollyanna (1960).

Trivia: American actor Russell Simpson is another of those character players who seemed to have been born in middle age. From his first screen appearance in 1910 to his last in 1959, Simpson personified the grizzled, taciturn mountain man who held strangers at bay with his shotgun and vowed that his daughter would never marry into that family he'd been feudin' with fer nigh on to forty years. It was not always thus. After prospecting in the 1898 Alaska gold rush, Simpson returned to the States and launched a career as a touring actor in stock -- most frequently cast in romantic leads. This led to a long association with Broadway impresario David Belasco. Briefly flirting with New York-based films in 1910, Simpson returned to the stage, then chose movies on a permanent basis in 1917. Of his hundreds of motion picture and TV appearances, Russell Simpson is best known for his participation in the films of director John Ford, most memorably as Pa Joad in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath.

Trivia: One of the silent era's busiest character actresses, both on and offscreen, Helen Ware specialized in playing grande dames. A veteran stage performer, Ware entered films in 1934 along with her husband, character actor Frederick Burt. In between screen assignments, she became a noted acting coach and was twice elected to the board of Actors Equity, a forerunner of the Screen Actors Guild.

Trivia: He studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After establishing himself prominently on the American stage, he began appearing in silents beginning with The Gilded Lily (1921). He appeared in more than 100 films, the last of which was the Elvis Presley vehicle Wild in the Country (1961). He starred in a number of silents, often as a clean-living rural hero; in the sound era he began playing character roles, almost always as an arch villain. Due to a serious eye infection, he was absent from the big screen in the '50s. He was the father of actor Jason Robards, with whom he appeared on Broadway in 1958 in The Disenchanted.

Trivia: From his first film, Don Quickshot of the Rio Grande (1923), to his last, Fancy Pants (1950) American supporting player Hank Bell specialized in westerns. While still relatively young, Bell adopted the "grizzled old desert rat" characterization, that sustained him throughout his career, simply by removing his teeth and growing a thick, inverted handlebar mustache. Though occasionally given lines to speak, he was usually consigned to "atmosphere roles:" if you'll look closely at the jury in the Three Stooges 2-reeler Disorder in the Court, you'll see Bell in the top row on the left, making swimming motions when Curly douses the jurors with a fire hose. A fixture of "B"-pictures, Hank Bell occasionally surfaced in "A" films like Abraham Lincoln (1930), Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), The Plainsman (1936), Geronimo (1939) and My Little Chickadee (1940).

Trivia: Like his fellow character actors Donald Meek, John Qualen, and Maudie Prickett, Carl Stockdale looked like someone who'd be named Carl Stockdale. The gangly, cadaverous Stockdale entered films in 1914 as an Essanay Studios stock player, in support of such stars as Broncho Billy Anderson and Charlie Chaplin. He moved into features, where until his retirement in 1942 he played such baleful character roles as backwoods patriarchy undertakers and "machine" politicians. Of his many silent film parts, several stand out, including the role of Monks in both the 1916 and 1922 versions of Oliver Twist and Mabel Normand's misanthropic screen-test director in The Extra Girl (1923). In talkies, Carl Stockdale played bits in features and supporting roles in serials and short subjects; his later work included several entries in the Charley Chase and "Crime Does Not Pay" two-reelers.

Trivia: With the pioneering Edison Company from the beginning, this ascetic-looking stage veteran played Captain de Treville in a 1911 version of The Three Musketeers. Over the years, Brower specialized in portraying stern aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, and others in a wide variety of films ranging from Vanity Fair (1915; as Mr. Osborne) to William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928; as the hobo Blind Sims). The seemingly indefatigable but by then quite elderly actor continued in films until the year of his death.

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: Heavy-set, heavy-eyebrowed, heavily-mustached and icily forbidding, actor Henry Kolker was a reliable screen menace for over 30 years. After nearly a quarter century on stage, Kolker made his first film, The Bigger Man, in 1915. He harrumphed and glowered his way through dozens of talkies, most often as unpleasant corporate types; sometimes, as in his portrayal of Friar Laurence in MGM's Romeo and Juliet, he could rechannel his negative authoritativeness into a more positive vein. One of Henry Kolker's largest and most representative roles was Edward Seton, the "old money" father of Katharine Hepburn, in Holiday (1938).

Trivia: Actor Robert Emmett Homans seemingly had the map of Ireland stamped on his craggy face. As a result, Homans spent the better part of his film career playing law enforcement officers of all varieties, from humble patrolmen to detective chiefs. After a lengthy stage career, Homans entered films in 1923. A break from his usual microscopic film assignments occured in Public Enemy (1931), where Homans is given an opportunity to deliver reams of exposition (with a pronounced brogue) during a funeral sequence. And in the 1942 Universal horror programmer Night Monster, Robert Emmett Homans is alotted a sizeable role as the ulcerated detective investigating the supernatural goings-on at the home of seemingly helpless invalid Ralph Morgan.