Trivia: Sidney Sommers Toler was born in Warrensburg, MO, the son of a renowned horse-breeder, Col. H.G. Toler, in 1874; three weeks later, the family moved to a stock farm near Wichita, KS, where he grew up. From an early age, he showed an interest in acting, and got his start at seven when he played Tom Sawyer in an adaptation written by his mother (this in a period in which the author Samuel Clemens was very much alive and the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a popular contemporary work). Toler enrolled in the University of Kansas but abandoned his studies in favor of pursuing a career as an actor after receiving some words of encouragement during a brief encounter with actress Julia Marlowe. At 18, he headed to New York. He did a stint in the Corse Payton stock company, based in Brooklyn, where he became a leading man specializing in romantic parts over a period of four years.Toler later had his own stock company, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for five years, and became a successful playwright, authoring The Dancing Masters, The Belle of Richmond, The House on the Sands, Ritzy, and The Golden Age, among many other plays. One of his works, The Man They Left Behind, was a major hit regionally and was being performed simultaneously by 18 different companies, and Toler himself once had a dozen different acting companies on the road performing his work. Two of his plays, Golden Days and The Exile, were also produced on Broadway. But it was during his 14 years with producer David Belasco that Toler became a Broadway star, culminating with his portrayal of Kelly the iceman in A Wise Child. Following a run of the play in Boston, Hollywood beckoned; with the full arrival of sound, the film mecca was suddenly desperate for experienced stage actors -- and in 1929 he made the move into films. Over the next nine years, he worked in 50 movies, in everything from comedies to Westerns, including Madame X, White Shoulders, Tom Brown of Culver, Our Relations (playing the belligerent ship's captain in the Laurel and Hardy comedy), and The Phantom President. In 1938, fate took a hand when Warner Oland, the Swedish actor who had portrayed Honolulu-based police detective Charlie Chan in 16 movies for Fox, passed away. Toler was selected by the studio to succeed him in the role, and he immediately began receiving the largest amount of mail he had ever gotten in connection with his screen career, from fans of the Chan movies offering him encouragement and advice, which mostly consisted of urgings to mimic Oland was much as possible. Instead, with the support of the director, he went back to the six Chan novels written by Biggers (who had died in 1933) and reconstructed the character based on what he took out of those pages. Toler, who stood six feet and was a solid 190 pounds, created the illusion of being smaller and heavier in the role. The first two of his Chan movies, Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) and Charlie Chan in Reno (1939), proved so popular at the box office that Toler was signed to a long-term contract in August of 1939. Toler brought a good deal of warmth and wry humor to the role of the police detective, and had excellent interaction with Victor Sen Yung, who played the detective's number-two son, Jimmy. The Chan pictures, which usually clocked in at under 80 minutes and occasionally under 70 by the mid-'30s, were studio programmers, essentially classy B-pictures made on reasonable but fixed budgets; they were also bread-and-butter revenue pictures, guaranteed money-makers and perennially popular. When Toler took over the role, they remained in this category, and if they were never opulent, they were good-looking productions whose mysteries and twists were ever-teasing and enticing to audiences. The revenue stream that they generated helped pay the bills for such large-scale productions as Suez. The Charlie Chan movies remained popular right into 1941, but the entry of the United States into the Second World War at the end of the year, coupled with the uncertainty of international distribution -- and the Chan movies were enormously popular overseas -- caused Fox to drop the series. The last of the Fox Chan movies was Castle in the Desert, released in early 1942, which holds up very well as a representative of the series. Over the next year, Toler worked in other roles, including portraying one of the villains in Edgar G. Ulmer's two-fisted adventure yarn Isle of Forgotten Sins. The years 1942-1943 were not good for Toler, however. In addition to seemingly losing the Chan role in early 1942, his wife of 18 years, Vivian, passed away in 1943; he also underwent surgery that year from which, it was revealed after his death, he never fully recovered. According to his second wife, Viva Tattersall (who had worked with him on-stage in his play Ritzy), whom he married in 1943, Toler was never told that he had intestinal cancer or that he was terminally ill. Accounts vary somewhat as to what happened next. According to most historians, it was Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row studio with a special interest in film series (they had the East Side Kids, and would soon have the Bowery Boys), that picked up the screen rights to the Chan character from the Biggers estate, and then selected Toler to star in a new round of movies. But others maintain that it was Toler himself, recognizing that there was still an audience for the movies, who bought the screen rights and then sold them to Monogram, with the provision that he star in the movies. Given his previously demonstrated business acumen on the stage, one can see where the second scenario was not only possible but likely, especially as onlookers (including Toler) would have recognized that Fox had handed away a gold mine with the screen character of Sherlock Holmes, which Universal grabbed up and with which they were making a small fortune by late 1942 -- the whole truth is buried somewhere in the Monogram business records.In any case, Toler was back in the lead role in the revived series when it commenced in 1944 with Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, in which the renowned sleuth joins the war effort in Washington, turning his skills to the hunting down of spies, saboteurs, and other enemies of freedom. This new twist to the character -- possibly inspired by Universal's success in bringing the character of Sherlock Holmes (as portrayed by Basil Rathbone) into stories built on World War II's events -- gave Charlie Chan a new lease on life and added a fresh, contemporary edge to the movies. That new element in the plotting also helped to compensate for the threadbare production values of the Monogram Chan films, which looked nowhere near as good as the Fox films in terms of casting, sets, or costuming. Toler's acting was more important than ever and although he was in an ever-weakening physical state, he kept up the portrayal convincingly and also engaged in some surprisingly strenuous scenes in some of the 1944-1945 Monogram pictures. Though neither the actor himself, nor anyone around him (except his wife and physician), nor any of the audience knew it, those movies were the last testament of a dying man. Looked at in the decades since, whatever their production flaws, they're a powerful statement of fortitude, professionalism, and dedication to the acting profession in the face of horrendous physical toll. By the summer of 1946, Toler was almost too weak to work, and it was clear in his final two movies -- Dangerous Money and The Trap, shot simultaneously in August of that year -- that he could barely walk. He retired to his home in Beverly Hills and spent the next seven months bedridden, before he passed away in February of 1947.

Trivia: Blonde, wide-eyed film ingénue Jean Rogers came to Hollywood on the strength of a beauty contest. She rose to stardom as the fetchingly underdressed, ever-imperiled Dale Arden in the popular Universal serial Flash Gordon (1936). She also co-starred in the second Gordon serial, as well as such chapter plays as Ace Drummond (1935) and The Adventures of Frank Merriwell (1936). From Universal, Rogers moved on to 20th Century Fox, where she starred in a series of enjoyable B-pictures, the best of which (though not her personal favorite) was Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). She appeared in supporting parts in several MGM films of the 1940s, then freelanced in independent productions. Jean Rogers retired from show business in 1951 upon her marriage to a successful actors' agent.

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: Chinese/American actor Victor Sen Yung would always be limited by stereotype in his selection of film roles, but it cannot be denied that he did rather well for himself within those limitations. Billed simply as Sen Yung in his earliest films, the actor was elevated to semi-stardom as Jimmy Chan, number two son of screen sleuth Charlie Chan. He first essayed Jimmy in 1938's Charlie Chan in Honolulu, replacing number one son Keye Luke (both Luke and Yung would co-star in the 1948 Chan adventure The Feathered Serpent). Not much of an actor at the outset, Yung received on-the-job training in the Chan films, and by 1941 was much in demand for solid character roles. With the absence of genuine Japanese actors during World War II (most were in relocation camps), Yung specialized in assimilated, sophisticated, but nearly always villainous Japanese in such films as Across the Pacific (1942). Remaining busy into the '50s, Yung co-starred in both the stage and screen versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. His longest-lasting assignment in the '60s was as temperamental cook Hop Sing on the TV series Bonanza. Victor Sen Yung died in his North Hollywood home of accidental asphyxiation at the age of 65.

Trivia: Stalwart, granite-jawed Kane Richmond was gainfully employed as a States' Rights film booker when he was invited to appear in films. Richmond's first acting assignment was Universal's The Leather Pushers, a long-running series of boxing two-reelers. Leather Pushers had made a major star out of Reginald Denny in the 1920s, but Richmond was not so lucky. He spent the first half of the 1930s playing bits in big studio films and heroes in basement-budgeted serials like Krellberg's The Lost Jungle (1935). In the latter part of the decade, he co-starred with juvenile actor Frankie Darro in a series of peppy action films produced variously at Ambassador and Monogram. By the 1940s, Richmond was firmly established as a serial leading man at Republic -- one of the very few of that breed who could act as well as take punches. Most fans of the chapter-play genre consider Richmond's dual role in Spy Smasher (1942) as his best work. Kane Richmond retired from films in 1948, then went on to make a fortune in the fashion business.

Trivia: Born in the Arizona Territory to Mexican parents, Chris-Pin Martin developed a reputation as a laughgetter at an early age. He made his earliest film appearance in 1911, playing an Indian. During his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, Martin earned his salary perpetuating a stereotype that nowadays would be the ultimate in political incorrectness: the lazy, dull-witted Hispanic comic foil. Chris-Pin Martin appeared in several Cisco Kid programmers, playing sidekick Pancho (sometimes named Gorditor) to such screen Ciscos as Warner Baxter, Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland and Duncan Renaldo.

Trivia: Polish-born actor Lionel Royce made his American screen bow in 1937. A Teutonic-villain assignment in 1939's Confessions of a Nazi Spy typecast Royce for the rest of his Hollywood career. Among many other assignments, the actor proved to be a memorable menace for Bob Hope in Road to Zanzibar (1941) and My Favorite Blonde (1942). Fans of Republic serials will remember Royce for his dual characterization of a kindly Sultan and the despicable Baron Von Rommer in Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1943). Lionel Royce died while on a U.S.O. tour of the Philippines in 1946.

Trivia: American actor Jack LaRue is frequently mistaken for Humphrey Bogart by casual fans. In both his facial features and his choice of roles, LaRue did indeed resemble Bogart, in every respect but one; Bogart became a star, while LaRue remained in the supporting ranks. After stage work in his native New York, LaRue came to Hollywood for his first film, The Mouthpiece, in 1932. For the next few years he played secondary hoodlums (for example, the hot-head hit man in the closing sequences of Night World [1932]) and unsavory lead villains -- never more unsavory than as the sex-obsessed kidnapper in The Story of Temple Drake (1933). LaRue decided to shift gears and try romantic leading roles, but this "new" LaRue disappeared after the Mayfair Studios cheapie, The Fighting Rookie (1934). He was at his most benign as "himself", trading gentle quips with Alice Faye at an outdoor carnival in the MGM all-star short Cinema Circus (1935). Otherwise, it was back to gangsters and thugs, with a few exceptions like his sympathetic role in A Gentleman from Dixie (1941). By the 1940s, LaRue had spent most of his movie savings and was compelled to seek out any work available. Awaiting his cue to appear in a small role on one movie set, LaRue was pointed out to up-and-coming Anne Shirley on a movie set as an example of what happens when a Hollywood luminary doesn't provide for possible future career reverses. Things improved a bit when LaRue moved to England in the late 1940s to play American villains in British pictures. His most memorable appearance during this period was as Slim Grissom in the notorious No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) -- a virtual reprisal of his part in The Story of Temple Drake. LaRue worked often in television during the last two decades of his career; in the early 1950s, he was the eerily-lit host of the spooky TV anthology Lights Out.

Trivia: Following his film debut in the 1916 adaptation of King Lear, actor Edwin Stanley returned to his first love, the stage. Stanley's next appearance was a featured role in the 1932 Columbia "special" Virtue. He spent the next 14 years playing military officers, theatrical producers, and other dignified take-charge characters. A familiar figure on the serial scene, Edwin Stanley played such chapter-play roles as Odette in Dick Tracy (1937), General Rankin in Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), Dr. Mallory in The Phantom Creeps (1939), and Colonel Bevans in The Mysterious Dr. Satan (1940).

Trivia: Sicilian actor Frank Puglia started his career with a travelling operetta company at age 13. He and his family moved to the US in 1907, where he worked in a laundry until he hooked up with an Italian-language theatrical troupe based in New York. In 1921, Puglia was appearing as Pierre Frochard in a revival of the old theatrical warhorse The Two Orphans when he was spotted by film director D.W. Griffith. Puglia was hired to repeat his role for Griffith's film version of the play, retitled Orphans of the Storm; while Pierre Frochard was slated to die at the end of the film, preview-audience reaction to the death was so negative that Griffith called Puglia back to reshoot his final scenes, allowing him to survive for the fade-out. For the rest of his long film career, Puglia essayed a wide variety of ethnic supporting parts, portraying priests, musicians, diplomats and street peddlers. In 1942's Casablanca, Puglia has a memorable bit as a Morroccan rug merchant who automatically marks down his prices to any friends of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Frank Puglia played a larger and less likable role as a treacherous minion to sultan Kurt Katch in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944); when the film was remade as Sword of Ali Baba in 1965, so much stock footage from the 1944 film was utilized that Puglia was hired to replay his original part.

Trivia: Actor Donald Douglas came to Hollywood in 1934 to play the small role of "Mac" in the film version of Sidney Kingsley's Men in White (1934). Though occasionally a villain, the Scottish-born Douglas was usually cast in bland good-guy roles (e.g. his portrayal of the dull detective at odds with Dick Powell's Philip Marlowe in 1944's Murder My Sweet). One of his few leading roles in film was the title character in the Columbia serial Deadwood Dick (1940). Douglas was given more of a chance to shine on radio; in the 1943 Mutual network mystery anthology Black Castle, Douglas played all the parts, including the announcer. Donald Douglas died suddenly at the age of 40, not long after completing work on Gilda (1946), in which he played Thomas Langford.

Trivia: American actor Edward Keane was eminently suitable for roles requiring tuxedos and military uniforms. From his first screen appearance in 1921 to his last in 1952, Keane exuded the dignity and assurance of a self-made man of wealth or a briskly authoritative Armed Services officer. Fortunately his acting fee was modest, enabling Keane to add class to even the cheapest of poverty-row "B"s. Generations of Marx Bros. fans will remember Edward Keane as the ship's captain (he's the one who heaps praise upon the three bearded Russian aviators) in A Night at the Opera (1935).

Trivia: A genuine westerner, Lane Chandler, upon leaving Montana Wesleyan College, moved to LA and worked as a garage mechanic while seeking out film roles. After several years in bit parts, Chandler was signed by Paramount in 1927 as a potential western star. For a brief period, both Chandler and Gary Cooper vied for the best cowboy roles, but in the end Paramount went with Cooper. Chandler made several attempts to establish himself as a "B" western star in the 1930s, but his harsh voice and sneering demeanor made him a better candidate for villainous roles. He mostly played bits in the 1940s, often as a utility actor for director Cecil B. DeMille. The weather-beaten face and stubbly chin of Lane Chandler popped up in many a TV and movie western of the 1950s, his roles gradually increasing in size and substance towards the end of his career.

Trivia: An alumnus of both Washington State University and Pomona College, Addison Richards began acting on an amateur basis in California's Pilgrimage Play, then became associate director of the Pasadena Playhouse. In films from 1933, Richards was one of those dependable, distinguished types, a character player of the Samuel S. Hinds/Charles Trowbridge/John Litel school. Like those other gentlemen, Richards was perfectly capable of alternating between respectable authority figures and dark-purposed villains. He was busiest at such major studios as MGM, Warners, and Fox, though he was willing to show up at Monogram and PRC if the part was worth playing. During the TV era, Addison Richards was a regular on four series: He was narrator/star of 1953's Pentagon USA, wealthy Westerner Martin Kingsley on 1958's Cimarron City, Doc Gamble in the 1959 video version of radio's Fibber McGee and Molly, and elderly attorney John Abbott on the short-lived 1963 soap opera Ben Jerrod.

Trivia: The brother of country/western singer Roy Acuff, actor Eddie Acuff drifted to Hollywood in the early 1930s, where he almost immediately secured day-player work at Warner Bros. studios. From his 1934 debut in Here Comes the Navy onward, Acuff showed up in film after film as reporters, photographers, delivery men, sailors, shop clerks, and the occasional western comical sidekick. Acuff's most memorable acting stint occured after actor Irving Bacon left Columbia's Blondie series. From 1946 through 1949, Eddie Acuff made nine Blondie appearances as the hapless postman who was forever being knocked down by the eternally late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake).

Trivia: Diminutive British knockabout comedian Jimmy Aubrey got his start with the legendary Fred Karno troupe, working alongside such budding stars as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. Like Charley and Stan, Aubrey flourished as a silent screen comic. He headlined a series of Vitagraph two-reelers in 1919 and 1920, with a young Oliver Hardy lending support. In the mid-1920s, he starred in another comedy series for producer Joe Rock. By 1927, Aubrey's stardom was a thing of the past, and he found himself virtually unemployable. His old colleagues Laurel and Hardy cast Aubrey in supporting roles in three of their starring vehicles, most memorably as the flirtatious drunk in the 1929 2-reeler That's My Wife. Jimmy Aubrey continued taking movie jobs until his retirement in 1952, playing bits and featured roles as drunken sailors, hoboes, store clerks and cowboy sidekicks.

Trivia: Born in Puerto Rico, actor Alberto Morin received his education in France. While in that country he worked briefly for Pathe Freres, a major film distribution firm, then studied theatre at the Escuela de Mimica in Mexico. Upon the advent of talking pictures, Morin was signed by Fox Pictures to make Spanish-language films for the South American market. He remained in Hollywood as a character actor, seldom getting much of a part but nearly always making an impression in his few seconds of screen time. Morin also worked steadily in radio and on such TV weeklies as Dobie Gillis and Mr. Roberts, sometimes billed as Albert Morin. During his five decades in Hollywood, Alberto Morin contributed uncredited performances in several of Tinseltown's most laudable achievements: he played Rene Picard in the Bazaar sequence in Gone With the Wind (1939), was a French military officer at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca (1942), and showed up as a boat skipper in Key Largo (1947).

Trivia: A grandson of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo, Charles Stevens (often billed as Charles "Injun" Stevens because of his ethnic background) made his film bow as an extra in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The close friend and "mascot" of cinema idol Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Stevens appeared in all but one of Fairbanks' starring films, beginning with 1915's The Lamb. He was often seen in multiple roles, never more obviously than in Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926). His largest role during his Fairbanks years was Planchet in The Three Musketeers (1921) and its sequel The Iron Mask (1929). In talkies, Stevens was generally cast as a villain, usually an Indian, Mexican, or Arab. Outside of major roles in early sound efforts like The Big Trail and Tom Sawyer (both 1930), he could be found playing menacing tribal chiefs and bandits in serials and B-pictures, and seedy, drunken "redskin" stereotypes (invariably named Injun Joe or Injun Charlie or some such) in big-budget films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). He was also much in demand as a technical adviser on Native American lore and customs. Charles Stevens remained active until 1956, 17 years after the death of his pal and mentor Doug Fairbanks.