Trivia: Dame Anna Neagle was a theatrical and cinematic institution in England, and one of the most popular screen actresses of the mid-20th century. As the wife of producer/director Herbert Wilcox, she was also personally close to the centers of power in 1930s British cinema. Born Florence Marjorie Robertson at Forest Gate (near London) in 1904 to a merchant navy captain and his wife, Neagle took up dancing as a child. As early as age 13, she was getting offers of professional engagements, and made her formal debut when she was 20 as a member of the chorus in two 1925 Charlot revues. She moved up the pecking order of theaters and productions, emerging in London in the work of producer Charles B. Cochran as a Cochran Young Lady, and graduated from dancer to actress in 1929. Using the name Anna Neagle (the surname from her mother's family), she played opposite Jack Buchanan in Stand Up and Sing, which ended up running a then huge 604 performances. Photographing extremely well, Neagle was a natural for the screen, and following two minor film appearances early in the sound era, she won the lead in Goodnight Vienna (1932), produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox. After her starring role in The Flag Lieutenant that same year, directed by (and starring) Henry Edwards, she worked exclusively under Wilcox's direction in film for the remainder of her career. It was a winning and happy partnership, yielding an enviable string of popular dramas -- both contemporary (Bitter Sweet) and period (Nell Gwyn) -- that endeared Neagle to British filmgoers throughout the 1930s and '40s. She also proved her stagecraft in 1934, when she took on the roles of Rosalind in As You Like It and Olivia in Twelfth Night; working under director Robert Atkins, she earned critical accolades in both productions, despite the fact that she had never before done any Shakespeare. Neagle's career during the '30s was concentrated on the screen, however, and she moved from success to success, reaching the pinnacle of her film career portraying Queen Victoria in a pair of historical epics. The first of these, Victoria the Great (1937), shot in color, enjoyed an unprecedented run of nearly a year in London, and, along with its companion film, Sixty Glorious Years (a reference to Victoria's reign that, as it turned out, very nearly could have applied equally well to Neagle's own career), proved unusually popular in America, as well. At the same time that those movies were spreading an image of Neagle (under heavy makeup to portray her character's aging) as the renowned British queen, she was delighting audiences in London with her portrayal of the title role in Peter Pan. The two Queen Victoria biographies were successful enough to get Wilcox and Neagle a contract with RKO Radio Pictures, and they moved to Hollywood at the end of the '30s. There they made a trio of notable screen versions of musicals -- Irene, No, No, Nanette, and Sunny -- as well as the biographical drama Nurse Edith Cavell. Their professional relationship was transposed to the personal in 1943, when Neagle and Wilcox returned to England and were married. They resumed their screen work after World War II, and, over the next five years, enjoyed a string of movie successes that made their money almost exclusively in England: I Live in Grosvenor Square, Piccadilly Incident, The Courtneys of Curzon Street, Spring in Park Lane, Elizabeth of Ladymead, and Maytime in Mayfair, most of which starred Michael Wilding, a promising young leading man who achieved stardom working opposite Neagle. In 1950, she broke with her string of light romantic comedies by playing the title role in Odette, a serious, fact-based drama about a woman who sacrifices her life as a spy for the British during World War II; it, too, was a success and only added to Neagle's professional renown. She played Florence Nightingale in The Lady With a Lamp (1951) and returned to theatrical work in 1953 with The Glorious Days, which had a run of 476 performances, a major success by the standard of the day. Neagle's fortunes declined during the mid-'50s, along with the popularity of her films, although she did enjoy some success as a producer in her own right with a trio of movies starring Frankie Vaughan. Her career in the early '60s was blighted by Wilcox's bankruptcy in 1964, but she made a comeback the following year in the West End musical Charlie Girl, which ran for six years and 2,047 performances. It was casting from life, with Neagle playing the role of a former Cochran Young Lady who marries a peer of the realm. It earned the actress an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for her enduring popularity and was a fitting capstone to the first 40 years of her career, though she continued working for another two decades. During the show's six-year run, Neagle was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1970 in recognition of her work. Two years after Charlie Girl -- which she also brought to Australia and New Zealand -- Neagle was asked to appear in a revival of No, No, Nanette, which she'd done onscreen three decades earlier. Replacing Celia Johnson in The Dame of Sark, she was again on-stage in 1975, and the year after her husband's death in 1977, she was acting in Most Gracious Lady, which was written for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Neagle was still working in 1986, just a few weeks before her death at the age of 81.

Trivia: The son of a house painter, American actor/dancer Ray Bolger grew up in a middle-class Boston neighborhood called Dorchester. Bolger knew what he wanted to do in life the moment he saw Broadway entertainer Fred Stone literally bounce on stage in a Boston production of Jack O'Lantern. "That moment opened up a whole new world for me" Bolger would remember; after a relatively aimless childhood, he determined to become a performer himself. Starting out in vaudeville as a dancer, Bolger developed a loose-limbed ad lib style that would win him starring spots in such 1930s Broadway musicals as Life Begins at 8:40 and On Your Toes; in the latter, Bolger introduced Richard Rodgers' "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue". Signed by MGM in 1936 for a featured solo in The Great Ziegfeld, Bolger was given a $3,000 per week contract and was expected to take whatever part was assigned him. But Bolger balked when he was cast as the Tin Man in the studio's Wizard of Oz. He felt the role was too confining for his talents, so Bolger convinced the film's Scarecrow, Buddy Ebsen, to switch parts with him. This move, of course, assured film immortality for Bolger, but wasn't so beneficial for Ebsen, whose allergic reaction to the Tin Man's silver makeup forced him to drop out of the film and be replaced by Jack Haley. Bolger's movie career pretty much took second place to his Broadway work in the 1940s. In 1948, Bolger was awarded the lead in a musical version of Charley's Aunt titled Where's Charley? It was when the daughter of one of the production people began singing his lyrics back to him during out-of-town tryouts that Bolger, in league with composer Frank Loesser, developed the "everybody sing" chorus for the song "Once in Love With Amy". Bolger repeated his role in the 1952 filmization of Where's Charley (1952), then continued his Broadway career with intermittent film appearances into the 1960s. He also starred in a 1953 TV series, alternately titled The Ray Bolger Show and Where's Raymond?, which was so bad that even he was uncharacteristically putting himself down before the inevitable cancellation. Bolger suffered a few career setbacks on stage in the early 1960s, and his villain role in Disney's Babes in Toyland (1961) hardly showed him to best advantage, but the performer prospered as a nightclub performer during the rest of the decade in a nostalgic (if slightly lachrymose) act which recalled his past song hits. Bolger charmed live audiences with his still-athletic hoofing skills into the 1970s. In the twilight of his career, Bolger was allowed to sparkle in guest spots on such TV programs as The Partridge Family, The Love Boat, Baretta, and even PBS's Evening at the Pops.

Trivia: Born Julian LaFaye, John Carroll was a dark, dashingly handsome actor and baritone singer with a mustache, black curly hair, and cocked eyebrows. He was considered by MGM in the early '40s to be a potential rival to Clark Gable. He ran away from home at age 12, supporting himself in several jobs and later made his way to Europe, where he became a cash-winning race-car driver and also studied voice. At first a film stunt man in the early '30s, by 1935 he had worked his way up to leads for RKO, debuting onscreen in Hi Gaucho! (1935). Carroll reached his peak in the early '40s as a leading man (occasionally singing) in light, second-string MGM films and musicals; he also did B-movies and action pictures for Republic and other studios. His wise investments in land and in the shrimping industry left him a wealthy man when he retired from films in the late '50s.

Trivia: A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Helen Westley was a stage star before the turn of the century. In the teen years, she co-founded both the Greenwich Square Players and the Theatre Guild. She began her film career in 1934, spending the next eight years playing the grandest of grande dames. Westley was seen as the indomitable Granny Mingott in the 1934 version of The Age of Innocence, the couturier title character in Roberta (1935), and the shrill, shrewish Parthy Hawkes in Show Boat (1936). She was also effective as a stern authority figure opposite such sunny-dispositioned juveniles as Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables) and Shirley Temple (Heidi, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Helen Westley remained active right up to her death at age 67.

Trivia: Few actors were more beloved of audiences across multiple generations -- and from more different fields of entertainment -- than Edward Everett Horton. For almost 70 years, his work delighted theatergoers on two coasts (and a lot of the real estate in between) and movie audiences, first in the silents and then in the talkies, where he quickly became a familiar supporting player and then a second lead, often essaying comically nervous "fuddy-duddy" parts, and transcended the seeming limitations of character acting to rival most of the leading men around him in popularity; he subsequently moved into television, both as an actor and narrator, and gained a whole new fandom for his work as the storyteller in the animated series "Fractured Fairy Tales." Edward Everett Horton was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1886 -- when it was a separate city from New York City -- the son of Edward Everett Horton and Isabella Diack Horton. His grandfather was Edward Everett Hale, the author of the story The Man Without a Country. He attended Boys High School and later studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Columbia University in Manhattan. His path to graduation was thwarted when he joined the university's drama club -- despite his 6'2" build, his first role had him cast as a woman. He never did graduate from Columbia, but he embarked on a performing career that was to keep him busy for more than six decades. In those days, he also sang -- in a baritone -- and joined the Staten Island-based Dempsey Light Opera Company for productions of Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. His singing brought him to the Broadway stage as a chorus member, and he subsequently spent three years with the Louis Mann company honing his acting skills while playing in stock -- Horton made his professional acting debut in 1908 with a walk-on role in The Man Who Stood Still. By 1911, he was working steadily and regularly, and often delighting audiences with his comedic talents, and remained with the Mann company for another two years. He was a leading man in the Crescent Theatre stock company, based in Brooklyn, and spent the remainder of the teens playing leading roles in theater companies across the United States, eventually basing himself in Los Angeles. Horton entered movies in 1918, and became well known to screen audiences with his performance in the 1923 version of Ruggles of Red Gap. He was identified almost entirely with comedic work after that, and by the end of the '20s had starring roles in a string of comedic shorts. It was after the advent of sound, however, that he fully hit his stride on the big screen. Horton's first talking feature was The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, in which he played fidgety reporter Roy Bensinger. Starting in the early '20s, Horton based most of his stage work on the West Coast, producing as well as acting. He leased the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles and found success with works such as The Nervous Wreck, in which he worked with Franklin Pangborn, a character actor who would also -- like Horton -- specialize in nervous, fidgety roles (though Pangborn, unlike Horton, never rose beyond character actor and supporting player status in features). In 1932, he leased the Hollywood Playhouse, which he subsequently operated for a season starring in Benn Wolfe Levy's Springtime for Henry, in which he performed more than 3000 times, making enough money from that play alone to buy his summer home in the Adirondacks. Horton fit in his movie work in between productions of Springtime for Henry (which was filmed in 1934, without Horton), and was always in demand. Amid his many roles over the ensuing decade, Horton worked in a half-dozen of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO. His other notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, and a neurotic paleontologist (who first appears disguised as a woman) in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). He worked in at least six movies a year from the early '30s through the end of the 1940s, and there were occasional serious variations in his roles -- Horton played an unusually forceful part in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), and he delivered a comedic tour de force (highlighted by a delightful scene with Carmen Miranda) in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943). Horton kept busy for more than 60 years, and not just in acting -- along with his brother George he bought up property in the San Fernando Valley from the 1920s onward, eventually assembling Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his mother (who passed away at age 102). His hobbies included antiques, and at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection with an estimated value of a half million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s and '60s, not only in onscreen work but also voice-overs for commercials, and he even hosted the Westminster Kennel Club dog show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was a regular cast member on the comedy Western series F Troop, playing Roaring Chicken (also referred to as Running Chicken), the Hekawi indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales," the Jay Ward-produced co-feature to Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. That engagement endeared him to millions of baby boomers and their parents, and his work in those cartoons continues to gain Horton new fans four decades after his death. He grew frail in appearance during the 1960s, and was not averse to playing off of that reality on series such as Dennis the Menace, where he did a guest-star spot in one episode as Uncle Ned, a health-food and physical-culture fanatic. Horton never married, and shared a home later in life with his sister, Hannabelle Grant. He was hospitalized weeks before his death from cancer in September 1970, and was so busy that during that hospitalization he showed up as a guest star in two episodes of the sitcom The Governor and J.J., His final big-screen appearance was in the Bud Yorkin/Norman Lear comedy Cold Turkey, which wasn't released until the following year.

Trivia: American hoofer Paul Hartman and his wife Grace frequently appeared on stage and in vaudeville. In the late 1930s, he played character roles in films.

Trivia: The daughter of an actress (Elaine Inescort) and a British journalist, Frieda Inescort learned the intricacies of High Society on a first-hand basis as the personal secretary of Lady Astor. Thus it was hardly surprising that Inescort would specialize in playing haughty grande dames when she went into acting. She made her first Broadway appearance in the 1922 production The Truth About Blayds, then went on to appear in a number of Shaw plays. In films from 1935 to 1960, she was at her imperious best as Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. Multiple sclerosis forced Frieda Inescort into an all-too-early retirement.

Trivia: Benny Rubin inaugurated his career as a 14-year-old tap dancer in his hometown of Boston. He worked in stock and on showboats during the WWI years, breaking into burlesque as a dialect comedian in 1918. A vaudeville headliner throughout the 1920s, Rubin seemed a sure bet for movie stardom when he was signed by MGM in 1927. According to one source, however, the powers-that-be decided that Rubin looked "too Jewish" for movies. Nonetheless, he entered films during the talking era, starring in a brace of Tiffany Studios musicals -- Sunny Skies and Hot Curves, both filmed in 1930 -- before freelancing as a character actor. Though he was top-billed in a handful of two-reelers and was given prominent screen credit as one the scenarists for the Wheeler and Woolsey films Off Again -- On Again (1937) and High Flyers (1937), Rubin had to settle for bits and minor roles as a feature-film actor. He would later claim that his fall from grace was due to his bad temper and his chronic gambling. Far more successful on radio, Rubin became one of the most prominent members of Jack Benny's "stock company," usually playing an obnoxious information desk attendant ("I dunno! I dunno! I dunno!). During the 1950s and 1960s, Rubin worked steadily in TV programs, feature films, and two-reel comedies; he also worked in animated cartoons and TV commercials as a voice-over artist, truthfully proclaiming that he could convincingly convey any foreign accent -- "except Arabian." In 1973, Rubin produced a self-published, self-serving autobiography, Come Backstage With Me, in which he made innumerable specious claims about his show biz accomplishments; for example, he stated that it was he who advised fledging film director Orson Welles to hire cameraman Gregg Toland for the 1941 classic Citizen Kane (in truth, Rubin's contribution to the film was confined to a one-scene bit as a typesetter, which was cut from the final release print). Benny Rubin's final appearance was in the TV miniseries Glitter.

Trivia: A repertory actor since childhood, Wisconsin-born Richard Lane was singing and dancing in vaudeville by the time he reached his thirteenth birthday. Lane toured europe with a circus "iron jaw" act, then bluffed his way into a dance band job. After more vaudeville work, Lane began securing "legit" gigs on Broadway. He appeared with Al Jolson in the late-'20s musical Big Boy, and was a headliner with George White's Scandals when he was signed to an RKO movie contract in 1937. While at RKO, Lane developed his standard characterization of a fast-talking sharpster, which secured him a recurring role on Al Pearce's popular radio program. He played a variety of detectives, con artists and travelling salesmen throughout the '40s, most often at 20th Century-Fox, Universal and Columbia. He was featured in several Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy comedies during the decade, and costarred as Inspector Farraday in Columbia's Boston Blackie B-series; he also appeared in 11 Columbia 2-reel comedies, teamed with comic actor Gus Schilling. Though most closely associated with breezy, urban characters, Lane was also effective in slow-and-steady dramatic roles, notably the father in the 1940 sleeper The Biscuit Eater and baseball manager Clay Hopper in 1950's The Jackie Robinson Story. A television pioneer, Lane worked at Los Angeles' KTLA-TV as a newsman, sportscaster and used-car pitchman. For over twenty years, he was the mile-a-minute commentator on KTLA's nationally syndicated wrestling and roller derby matches. Significantly, Richard Lane's last screen appearances were in Raquel Welch's roller-derby epic Kansas City Bomber (1978) and Henry Winkler's pro-wrestling spoof The One and Only (1982).

Trivia: Sour-visaged Danish actor Torben Meyer entered films as early as 1913, when he was prominently featured in the Danish super-production Atlantis. Despite his Scandinavian heritage, Meyer was usually typecast in Germanic roles after making his American screen debut in 1933. Many of his parts were fleeting, such as the Amsterdam banker who is offended because "Mister Rick" won't join him for a drink in Casablanca (1942). He was shown to excellent advantage in the films of producer/director Preston Sturges, beginning with Christmas in July (1940) and ending with The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Evidently as a private joke, Sturges nearly always cast Meyer as a character named Schultz, with such conspicuous exceptions as "Dr. Kluck" in The Palm Beach Story (1942). Torben Meyer made his last movie appearance in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), playing one of the German judges on trial for war crimes; Meyer's guilt-ridden inability to explain his actions was one of the film's most powerful moments.

Trivia: Made his acting debut in Betaab (1983), which earned him a nomination for the Filmfare Best Actor Award. Winner of two National Film Awards: The Special Jury Award for Ghayal (1990) and the Best Supporting Actor award for Damini (1993). Five-time nominee for the Filmfare Best Actor Award, winning it in 1991 for Gayal (1990). Debuted as director/producer with Dillagi (1999), where he also starred alongside his brother Bobby Deol. Appeared in The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003), the most expensive Bollywood film at the time of its release.