Trivia: An all-American boy with an all-American childhood, comedian Harold Lloyd became entranced with amateur dramatic productions through odd jobs as a theatre usher, call boy, and stage hand. After working in a stock company where he specialized in intricate character make-up, Lloyd moved from Nebraska to California, where there was more theatrical work. While assisting at a San Diego dramatic school, Lloyd took extra work in several of the silent film companies operating up the coast in Los Angeles. One of his fellow extras was Hal Roach, who had plans to become a film producer. One small inheritance later, Roach set up his own movie company and hired Lloyd as his comedy star. Lloyd's first film character, Willie Work, didn't work, though it enabled him to teach himself the skills of film comedy from the ground up. Leaving Roach briefly for bit work at Mack Sennett's Keystone studios, Lloyd returned to Roach and developed a new characterization, Lonesome Luke -- which frankly wasn't new at all but a direct steal of Charlie Chaplin's "tramp." Be that as it may, Roach and Lloyd's "Lonesome Luke" two-reelers, which co-starred Bebe Daniels, were very popular, but Lloyd got sick of the imitation and set about creating a more original character. In later years, both Lloyd and Roach took separate credit for coming up with the "glasses" character -- a handsome, normal looking youth who wore horned-rimmed glasses. Whoever thought it up, it was manna from heaven for Lloyd, whose star ascended once he got away from heavy character make-up and silly costumes and concentrated on playing a comic variation on the "average guy". Determining to be funny at all times on screen, Lloyd surrounded himself with a crack team of gagmen, who came up with endless comic bits of business for his new character. With their two-reelers doing terrific business, Lloyd and Roach began working their way towards feature films, which would bring in even more revenue. Lloyd's first feature, Grandma's Boy (1922), set the tone for his subsequent films: he played a character who "grew" either in strength or integrity as the film progressed. The film itself had a strong plotline to support his character, and the gags flowed freely and naturally from the action, instead of being inserted for their own sake, as often happened in silent film comedy. Though Lloyd would vary his "glasses" character from film to film -- a spoiled rich lad in one picture, a humble clerk in the next -- he never strayed far from the likeable boy-next-door that he'd established in his short subjects. Lloyd left Hal Roach to form his own production company in 1924, and the annual feature releases which followed -- most especially The Freshman (1925) -- established Harold as the top moneymaking comedian in the movies. "As rich as Croesus," to quote film critic Andrew Sarris, Lloyd invested his savings in a huge Beverly Hills estate, Greenacres, where he would live the rest of his life with his wife (and former co-star) Mildred Davis and their children. Uniquely attuned to the optimistic 1920s, Harold's go-getting screen character had trouble surviving the Depression-era 1930s; though he made a successful transition to sound with 1929's Welcome Danger, each of Lloyd's subsequent talking features grossed less than the previous one at the box office. He took up to two years to produce a film, and was more careful than ever to maintain his high standards, but despite excellent films like Movie Crazy (1932) and The Milky Way (1936), Lloyd's jazz-age character seemed out of step and anachronistic in more desperate times. He left films as an actor in 1938, dabbling briefly as a producer for RKO in the early 1940s and working on occasion in radio. When time seemed ripe for a screen comeback in 1946, it was with The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, which might have been a better film had not Lloyd clashed so vehemently with his director, eccentric genius Preston Sturges. A still fabulously wealthy Beverly Hills resident whose activities in charity and municipal work brought him universal respect, Lloyd devoted the 1950s to his favorite hobbies, painting and stereoscopic photography. Feeling somewhat forgotten in the early 1960s, Lloyd began releasing his old films theatrically with modest success, and just before his death agreed to their long-awaited TV distribution; still the creative dynamo, Lloyd insisted upon personally re-editing his old films so that they would play better on TV. To many around the world, Lloyd was one of the richest, nicest, and most accessible film stars in Hollywood.

Trivia: Actor William Gargan began his career in 1924, shortly after leaving high school, and made it to Broadway within a year. In 1932 he won great acclaim for his work in the play The Animal Kingdom, leading to an invitation from Hollywood where he made his film debut in 1932. During the '30s he played high-energy, gregarious leads in many "B"-movies and second leads in major films; later he moved into character roles. For his work in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he received a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination. He made few films after 1948, but from 1949 to 1951 he starred in the title role of the TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye then reprised the role in 1957 in The New Adventures of Martin Kane. He was stricken by cancer of the larynx, and in 1960 his voice box was removed in surgery, ending his career. He learned esophageal speech then taught this method for the American Cancer Society; the same group enlisted him as an anti-smoking campaigner. Two years after losing his speech, he gave his final performance, portraying a mute clown on TV in King of Diamonds. He authored an autobiography, Why Me? (1969), recounting his struggle with cancer. His brother was actor Edward Gargan.

Trivia: A graduate of New York's Professional Childrens' School, Helen Mack appeared as a child actress in such Broadway productions as The Dybbuk and such films as Gloria Swanson's Zaza (1923); during this period, she was sometimes billed as Helen Macks. Her first adult role was in D.W. Griffith's last film, 1931's The Struggle. Signed to a Fox contract in 1932, Mack moved to RKO a year later, where she was leading lady in two Merian C. Cooper efforts, Son of Kong (1933) and She (1935). Free-lancing throughout the 1930s, Mack played such roles as Harold Lloyd's pugnacious sister in The Milky Way (1936) and hard-bitten "shady lady" Mollie Malloy in His Girl Friday (1939). In 1941, Mack launched her radio career when she replaced the late Donna Damerel on the popular radio serial Myrt and Marge. Three years later, Mack became a radio producer/director, responsible for such series as A Date with Judy and Beulah. Helen Mack also authored one stage play (under her married name Helen McAvity), the 1965 flop The Mating Dance.

Trivia: While studying for the ministry, George Barbier participated in a seminary pageant, and thereafter worshipped at the altar of acting. He was a stage actor of some 40-years' standing when he made his first film in 1930. Barbier was usually cast as corpulent business executives and flustered fathers. You might remember him as the theatrical agent of Faye Templeton (Irene Manning) in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy; he's the fellow who described George M. Cohan as "the whole United States wrapped up in one pair of pants." Barbier also played the small-town doctor with literary aspirations in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). George Barbier died at age 80, shortly after finishing his last film, Lucky Night.

Trivia: One of the oldest "we're gonna make you a star" clichés actually happened to blue-eyed brownette Dorothy Wilson. While working as a stenographer at RKO Radio studios, Wilson was spotted by a talent scout and signed to an acting contract. It's not certain whether or not the scout fell in love with Wilson once she took off her glasses, but it wouldn't be a bit surprising. Proving to be as talented as she was pretty, Wilson appeared opposite fellow RKO contractees William Boyd in Lucky Devils (1933), Tom Keene in Scarlet River (1933), and Preston Foster in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935). Loaned out to other studios, Wilson co-starred with Loretta Young in The White Parade (1934), Will Rogers in In Old Kentucky (1935), Harold Lloyd in The Milky Way (1936), and Rosalind Russell in Craig's Wife (1936). This last-named film proved to be the cinematic swan song for Dorothy Wilson, who retired from acting to marry Oscar-winning writer/director Lewis R. Foster.

Trivia: Hatchet-faced character actor Charles Lane has been one of the most instantly recognizable non-stars in Hollywood for more than half a century. Lane has been a familiar figure in movies (and, subsequently, on television) for 60 years, portraying crotchety, usually miserly, bad-tempered bankers and bureaucrats. Lane was born Charles Levison in San Francisco in 1899 (some sources give his year of birth as 1905). He learned the ropes of acting at the Pasadena Playhouse during the middle/late '20s, appearing in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Noel Coward before going to Hollywood in 1930, just as sound was fully taking hold. He was a good choice for character roles, usually playing annoying types with his high-pitched voice and fidgety persona, encompassing everything from skinflint accountants to sly, fast-talking confidence men -- think of an abrasive version of Bud Abbott. His major early roles included the stage manager Max Jacobs in Twentieth Century and the tax assessor in You Can't Take It With You. One of the busier character men in Hollywood, Lane was a particular favorite of Frank Capra's, and he appeared in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, It's a Wonderful Life -- with a particularly important supporting part in the latter -- and State of the Union. He played in every kind of movie from screwball comedy like Ball of Fire to primordial film noir, such as I Wake Up Screaming. As Lane grew older, he tended toward more outrageously miserly parts, in movies and then on television, where he turned up Burns & Allen, I Love Lucy, and Dear Phoebe, among other series. Having successfully played a tight-fisted business manager hired by Ricky Ricardo to keep Lucy's spending in line in one episode of I Love Lucy (and, later, the U.S. border guard who nearly arrests the whole Ricardo clan and actor Charles Boyer at the Mexican border in an episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), Lane was a natural choice to play Lucille Ball's nemesis on The Lucy Show. Her first choice for the money-grubbing banker would have been Gale Gordon, but as he was already contractually committed to the series Dennis the Menace, she hired Lane to play Mr. Barnsdahl, the tight-fisted administrator of her late-husband's estate during the first season of the show. Lane left the series after Gordon became available to play the part of Mr. Mooney, but in short order he moved right into the part that came very close to making him a star. The CBS country comedy series Petticoat Junction needed a semi-regular villain and Lane just fit the bill as Homer Bedloe, the greedy, bad-tempered railroad executive whose career goal was to shut down the Cannonball railroad that served the town of Hooterville. He became so well-known in the role, which he only played once or twice a season, that at one point Lane found himself in demand for personal appearance tours. In later years, he also turned up in roles on The Beverly Hillbillies, playing Jane Hathaway's unscrupulous landlord, and did an excruciatingly funny appearance on The Odd Couple in the mid-'70s, playing a manic, greedy patron at the apartment sale being run by Felix and Oscar. Lane also did his share of straight dramatic roles, portraying such parts as Tony Randall's nastily officious IRS boss in the comedy The Mating Game (1959), the crusty River City town constable in The Music Man (1962) (which put Lane into the middle of a huge musical production number), the wryly cynical, impatient judge in the James Garner comedy film The Wheeler-Dealers (1963), and portraying Admiral William Standley in The Winds of War (1983), based on Herman Wouk's novel. He was still working right up until the late '80s, and David Letterman booked the actor to appear on his NBC late-night show during the middle of that decade, though his appearance on the program was somewhat disappointing and sad; the actor, who was instantly recognized by the studio audience, was then in his early nineties and had apparently not done live television in many years (if ever), and apparently hadn't been adequately prepped. He seemed confused and unable to say much about his work, which was understandable -- the nature of his character parts involved hundreds of roles that were usually each completed in a matter or two or three days shooting, across almost 60 years. Lane died at 102, in July 2007 - about 20 years after his last major film appearance.

Trivia: Though she remained single throughout her life, actress Marjorie Gateson was the perfect screen "wife" to many a stuffed-shirt aristocrat, blustering businessman or windbag politician. A product of the New York stage, Gateson came to Hollywood when movies learned to talk; of her many matronly roles, she is probably best remembered as the party hostess whom prizefighter Harold Lloyd teaches how to "duck" in The Milky Way (1936). She returned to New York in the early 1940s, where she co-starred in one of the pioneering TV serials, One Man's Family. Marjorie Gateson returned to soap operas near the end of her career in the role of Grace Tyrrell on The Secret Storm, a part she played until illness struck her down in 1969.

Trivia: In films from 1928, heavy-set character actor Henry Roquemore essayed small-to-medium roles as politicians, storekeepers, judges, and "sugar daddies." A typical Roquemore characterization was "the Match King," one of Mae West's many over-the-hill suitors in Goin' to Town (1935). His more memorable roles include the Justice of the Peace who marries Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (1941). Henry Roquemore was the husband of actress Fern Emmett.

Trivia: In the '30s, tall, sandy-haired, deep-voiced American actor Eddie Dunn was frequently cast as a laconic police officer in the 2-reelers of comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. The actor's feature-film roles consisted mainly of small-town bullies, prison guards, bartenders, military policemen and private detectives. Eddie Dunn was last seen in a fleeting role as a sheriff in the 1950 MGM musical Summer Stock.

Trivia: A former boxer from Italy and the second husband of notorious socialite/actress Evelyn Nesbit, Jack Clifford (born Jack Montani) appeared opposite his wife in Threads of Destiny (1914). Much busier in the talkie era, Clifford played innumerable bit roles from 1931 to 1949, including the nasty dogcatcher in Jackie Cooper's Skippy (1931), Uncle Tom in Shirley Temple's Dimples (1936), and assorted lawmen in B-Westerns. Clifford's final role was that of a henchman in several episodes of television's The Lone Ranger series.

Trivia: Alternately billed as Phil Tead and Philips Tead, this slight, jug-eared character actor could easily have been taken for a young Walter Brennan (indeed, he has been in some film histories). After playing newspaperman Wilson in the 1931 version of The Front Page, he was thereafter typecast as a nosy reporter. He also portrayed several fast-talking radio commentators, most memorably in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932) and Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way (1936). Adopting a doddering comic quaintness in the 1950s, Phil Tead was occasionally seen as the absent-minded Professor Pepperwinkle on TV's Superman series.

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: The son of actor Lewis Short and brother of comediennes Gertrude Short and Florence Short, Antrim Short was a juvenile actor fully living up to his name. On stage from the age of six, Antrim made his screen debut with the old Biograph company in New York in 1912. A major attraction by the late 1910s (The Yellow Dog [1918], Please Get Married [1919]), Short's career petered out in the 1920s, and he was playing unbilled bits by the 1930s. A founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, and from 1937, the head of the organization's claims department, Short later became a casting director for Samuel Goldwyn, Republic Pictures, and Universal, founding his own talent agency in 1947.

Trivia: Brawny character actor James Farley made his entree into films in 1918. Best-served in roles calling for authority backed by muscle, Farley can be seen as Southern General Thatcher in Buster Keaton's The General (1926) and as the executioner in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). He spent most of the talkie era in small roles as detectives, patrolmen and night watchman. James Farley's credits are sometimes confused with those of another actor by the same name who acted in "regional" productions of the 1960s.

Trivia: Gertrude Astor did so much work in Hollywood in so many different acting capacities that it's not simple or easy to characterize her career. Born in Lakewood, OH, she joined a stock company at age 13, in the year 1900, and worked on showboats during that era. She played in vaudeville as well, and made her movie debut in 1914 as a contract player at Universal. She was an accomplished rider, which got her a lot of work as a stuntwoman, sometimes in conjunction with a young Maine-born actor named John Ford in pictures directed by the latter's brother, Francis Ford. But Astor soon moved into serious acting roles; a tall, statuesque, angular woman, she frequently towered over the leading men of the era, and was, thus, ideal as a foil in comedies of the 1910s and '20s, playing aristocrats, gold diggers, and the heroine's best friend (had the character of Brenda Starr existed that far back, she'd have been perfect playing Hank O'Hair, her crusty female editor). Astor was the vamp who plants stolen money on Harry Langdon in The Strong Man (1926), Laura La Plante's wisecracking traveling companion in The Cat and the Canary (1927), and the gold digger who got her hooks into Otis Harlan (as well as attracting the attention of fellow sailor Eddie Gribbon) in Dames Ahoy. When talkies came in, Astor's deep, throaty voice assured her steady work in character parts, still mostly in comedy. Her roles weren't huge, but she worked prolifically at Hal Roach studios with such headliners as Laurel and Hardy, in the Our Gang shorts, and especially with Charley Chase, and also worked at Columbia Pictures' short subjects unit. Astor's specialty at this time was outraged dignity; she was forever declaring, "I've never been so embarrassed in all my life!" and stalking out of a slapstick situation, usually with a comedy prop (a balloon, a folding chairs, a cream puff) affixed to her posterior. Astor worked regularly into the early '60s; she was briefly glimpsed as the first murder victim in the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Scarlet Claw (1944) and was among the ranks of dress extras in Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Her longtime friend John Ford also gave her roles in his feature films right into the early '60s, culminating with her appearance in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Gertrude Astor remained alert and quick-witted into her eighties, cheerfully sharing her memories of the glory days of comedy short subjects with fans and film historians. And in a town that can scarcely remember last year's studio presidents, in 1975, when she was 87 years old, Astor was given a party at Universal, where she was honored by a gathering of old friends, including the directors George Cukor, Allan Dwan, and Henry Hathaway. She passed away suddenly and peacefully on the day of her 90th birthday in 1977.

Trivia: Gawky, comic actor Victor Potel started out in one- and two-reel comedies, starring in Universal's Snakeville series. Potel went on to essay supporting parts in feature films of the 1920s, then played bits and walk-ons in such talkies as Three Godfathers (1936) and The Big Store (1941). He was a member of filmmaker Preston Sturges' unofficial stock company from 1940's Christmas in July until his death in 1947. One of Victor Potel's final film roles was diminutive Indian peddler Crowbar in The Egg and I (1947), a character played by Chief Yowlachie, Teddy Hart, Zachary Charles, and Stan Ross in the subsequent Ma and Pa Kettle series.

Trivia: An important screen director in the 1910s, Illinois-born Lloyd Ingraham had been a stock manager for California entrepreneur Oliver Morosco prior to entering films directing Broncho Billy Westerns for Essanay in the early 1910s. He went on to direct some of the silent era's biggest stars, including Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and would specialize in robust outdoor adventures and Westerns. An equally busy supporting player who appeared in scores of silent films ranging from Intolerance (1916) to Scaramouche (1923), the white-haired, ascetic-looking veteran became an actor for hire after the advent of sound, appearing mostly in low-budget Westerns and almost always playing the heroine's father or a lawman. Spending his final years as a resident of the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, Ingraham's death was attributed to pneumonia.

Trivia: The nephew of legendary playwright/producer David Belasco, American silent-screen leading man Jay Belasco starred in the 1917 two-reel series The Perils of the Secret Service and opposite comedienne Dorothy Devore in Christie comedies. Sadly, a drug habit derailed what might have become an important career. Along with starlet Mildred Moore, Belasco was arrested and later convicted of drug possession in 1920. That and an easily identifiable mention in a scurrilous tell-all book, The Sins of Hollywood (1922), did much to quell any hopes of true stardom. Dorothy Devore gave her old co-star a bit part in the comedy Hold Your Breath (1924), but Belasco found himself essentially blacklisted. Former colleagues continued to come to his aid well into the '30s, and Belasco can be glimpsed as an officer in the Laurel & Hardy farce Bonnie Scotland (1935) and as "man in car" in Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way (1936).

Trivia: Supporting actor Murray Alper's earliest screen credit was 1930's The Royal Family of Broadway. For the next 35 years, Alper was an inescapable movie presence, playing dozens of cab drivers, bookies, cops and GIs. One of his few credited appearances in an "A" picture was in The Maltese Falcon; he plays the friendly cabbie who drives Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) on a mid-film wild goose chase. Frequently seen in comedies, Alper showed up in eight Bowery Boys farces of the 1940s and 1950s, and was prominently featured in the Three Stooges' Trick Dicks (1953) and The Outlaws is Coming (1965, as Chief Crazy Horse!). One of Murray Alper's least characteristic roles was the judo instructor in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor (1963).

Trivia: American leading man Harry Myers appeared in many Hollywood silent and early sound films. He is best remembered as the strange, boozy tycoon who alternately befriends and rejects Chaplin's tramp in City Lights (1931). Toward the beginning of his career, Myers also directed a few films.

Trivia: An imposing stage actor from Ohio and a true screen pioneer, Charles K. French (born Strauss) appeared with the famed Biograph stock company before organizing his own production entity, The Navajo Film Co. That venture lasted only a year, 1914-1915, and French returned to the ranks of actors for hire. Sporting a formidable beard, French was often cast in historical settings, notably Thomas Ince's Civilization (1916) as the prime minister, D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1924) as Enlow, and Raymond Griffith's Hands-Up (1926) as Brigham Young. In between, he played countless fathers, military officers, and the like, often opposite such stars as Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, and continued in films until his retirement in 1944. French was the father of B-Western regular Ted French (1899-1978) and grandfather of Little House on the Prairie star Victor French (1934-1989).

Trivia: Gus Leonard was a character actor who specialized in comedy. Like most performers at his level of the acting profession, he usually played small roles in major films and large roles in small films. But the fact that three of those "small films," Mush and Milk (1933), Teacher's Beau (1935), and The Lucky Corner (1936), happened to be installments of Hal Roach's Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts has assured that generations of viewers recognize Leonard's face, if not his name, which changed considerably across his life. He was born Amedee Theodore Gaston Lerond in Marseilles, France, in 1859, which puts him in the running (if not at the head of the pack) for being the oldest actor to have made a career in talking pictures. Leonard came into the world 68 years before the advent of talking pictures, a year earlier than British character actor Morton Selten, four years before C. Aubrey Smith, and 10 years earlier than D.W. Griffith stock company player Spottiswood Aitken, and 14 years before Guy Standing, all of whom were known for playing old man roles in the silent or early sound eras. Leonard's parents moved to the United States and settled in California when he was a boy, and he made his stage debut in San Francisco with producer Tony Pastor when the latter's road show company performed there. He worked in vaudeville for a time and made the move into motion pictures in 1915, at the age of 56, under the aegis of Harold Lloyd. Leonard's earliest surviving credited screen appearance was in the 1916 William Beaudine-directed short The Missing Mummy, and he was seen in almost two-dozen short films that year, and even more in 1917 and 1918. It was with Lloyd, in shorts and then in features, however, that Leonard got more notice and better parts, and he was busy across the teens and into the 1920s in a multitude of roles and films. He was still working with Lloyd in Speedy (1928), and appeared in movies made at MGM and other major studios, sometimes in small character roles and mostly in minor, uncredited parts. In the mid-'30s, however, Roach and his directors recognized a kindly, comically avuncular quality in Leonard -- sort of like a humorous equivalent to Lionel Barrymore -- that they realized played well opposite the natural charm of the Our Gang cast. And so Leonard found himself immortalized on-screen first in Mush and Milk (1933), playing Cap, the aging, sweet-tempered teacher to the Our Gang orphans, who tries to educate them and protect them from his mean, scowling, whip-wielding wife (Louise Emmons); as the kind-hearted adult tries to help Spanky McFarland at the dinner table in Teacher's Beau; and Gus, Scotty Beckett's grandfather, trying to run his little lemonade stand, in The Lucky Corner (1936). His last screen appearance was in the Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy vehicle Maytime (1937). He passed away in 1939 at the age of 80.

Trivia: Earthy and at times exuberant, Anthony Quinn was one of Hollywood's more colorful personalities. Though he played many important roles over the course of his 60-year career, Quinn's signature character was Zorba, a zesty Greek peasant who teaches a stuffy British writer to find joy in the subtle intricacies of everyday life in Zorba the Greek (1964), which Quinn also produced. The role won him an Oscar nomination and he reprised variations of Zorba in several subsequent roles. Although he made a convincing Greek, Quinn was actually of Irish-Mexican extraction. He was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua, Mexico, on April 21, 1915, but raised in the U.S. Before becoming an actor, Quinn had been a prizefighter and a painter. He launched his film career playing character roles in several 1936 films, including Parole (his debut) and The Milky Way, after a brief stint in the theater. In 1937, he married director Cecil B. DeMille's daughter Katherine De Mille, but this did nothing to further his career and Quinn remained relegated to playing "ethnic" villains in Paramount films through the 1940s. By 1947, he was a veteran of over 50 films and had played everything from Indians, Mafia dons, Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerrillas, and comical Arab sheiks, but he was still not a major star. So he returned to the theater, where for three years he found success on Broadway in such roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Upon his return to the screen in the early '50s, Quinn was cast in a series of B-adventures like Mask of the Avenger (1951). He got one of his big breaks playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). His supporting role as Zapata's brother won Quinn his first Oscar and after that, Quinn was given larger roles in a variety of features. He went to Italy in 1953 and appeared in several films, turning in one of his best performances as a dim-witted, thuggish, and volatile strongman in Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954). Quinn won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying the painter Gaugin in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956). The following year, he received another Oscar nomination for George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind. During the '50s, Quinn specialized in tough, macho roles, but as the decade ended, he allowed his age to show. His formerly trim physique filled out, his hair grayed, and his once smooth, swarthy face weathered into an appealing series of crags and crinkles. His careworn demeanor made him an ideal ex-boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight and a natural for the villainous Bedouin he played in Lawrence of Arabia (both 1962). The success of Zorba the Greek in 1964 was the highwater mark of Quinn's career during the '60s -- it offered him another Oscar nomination -- and as the decade progressed, the quality of his film work noticeably diminished. The 1970s offered little change and Quinn became known as a ham, albeit a well-respected one. In 1971, he starred in the short-lived television drama Man in the City. His subsequent television appearances were sporadic, though in 1994, he became a semi-regular guest (playing Zeus) on the syndicated Hercules series. Though his film career slowed considerably during the 1990s, Quinn continued to work steadily, appearing in films as diverse as Jungle Fever (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995). In his personal life, Quinn proved as volatile and passionate as his screen persona. He divorced his wife Katherine, with whom he had three children, in 1956. The following year he embarked on a tempestuous 31-year marriage to costume designer Iolanda Quinn. The union crumbled in 1993 when Quinn had an affair with his secretary that resulted in a baby; the two shared a second child in 1996. In total, Quinn has fathered 13 children and has had three known mistresses. He and Iolanda engaged in a public and very bitter divorce in 1997 in which she and one of Quinn's sons, Danny Quinn, alleged that the actor had severely beaten and abused Iolanda for many years. Quinn denied the allegations, claiming that his ex-wife was lying in order to win a larger settlement and part of Quinn's priceless art collection. When not acting or engaging in well-publicized court battles, Quinn continued to paint and became a well-known artist. He also wrote and co-wrote two memoirs, The Original Sin (1972) and One Man Tango (1997). In the latter, Quinn is candid and apologetic about some of his past's darker moments. Shortly after completing his final film role in Avenging Angelo (2001), Anthony Quinn died of respiratory failure in Boston, MA. He was 86.

Trivia: Discovered by screen star Corinne Griffith, tall, handsome James Ford had been a chorus boy prior to making his screen debut opposite Vera Reynolds in the low-budget Divine Sinner (1928). Ford spent the next couple of years playing the "other man" at a number of minor studios but never found a permanent berth and was reduced to extra work after the changeover to sound.

Trivia: No relation to stage actor Frank Mills (1870-1921), character actor Frank Mills made his film debut in 1928. Though usually unbilled, Mills was instantly recognizable in such films as Golddiggers of 1933, King Kong (1933) and Way Out West (1937), to mention but a few. He played reporters, photographers, barkers, bartenders, bums, cabbies, kibitzers, soldiers, sailors...in short, he played just about everything. In addition to his feature-film appearances, he showed up with frequency in short subjects, especially those produced by the Columbia comedy unit between 1935 and 1943. As late as 1959, Frank Mills was popping up in bits and extra roles in such TV series as Burns and Allen and Lassie.

Trivia: American actress Veree Teasdale, the second cousin of noted author Edith Wharton, studied for a stage career at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn and several subsequent dramatic schools. After a handful of smaller Broadway roles, Teasdale was costarred with Ethel Barrymore in the stage play The Constant Wife (1927) which led to a film contract. Always more mature-looking than her actual age, Teasdale built up a screen reputation by playing bored society wives, scheming "other women," and comedy second leads; she managed to be both amusing and menacing in such roles as the homicidal Roman empress in Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933). She married noted actor Adolphe Menjou in 1935, and though the union was a happy one, things weren't so rosy professionally; Menjou's periodic illnesses and Teasdale's loss of several important roles to other actresses put a damper on their careers. Both Menjou and Teasdale were on a professional downswing in the late '40s when radio producer Fredric Ziv offered them their own syndicated interview program. After a few years' distribution of this popular series, Veree Teasdale retired (Adolphe Menjou died in 1963), keeping herself active with her ongoing hobby of costume design.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

Trivia: American vaudevillian Eddie Fetherstone (sometimes spelled Fetherston) started popping up in films around 1925. A perfect "working-stiff" type (he usually wore cap and overalls on screen), Fetherstone became a favorite of star comedian Harold Lloyd, appearing in the Lloyd talkies Movie Crazy (1932), Cat's Paw (1934) and The Milky Way (1936). Elsewhere, Fetherston played dozens of bit roles as reporters, cabbies and crooks. Larger roles came his way in such "B"'s as Republic's Sky Bandits and in the two-reel efforts of The Three Stooges, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon at Columbia. Eddie Fetherstone can currently be seen on TV on an annual basis, playing a bank teller in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946).