Trivia: Entertainer Eddie Cantor, he of the "banjo eyes" and boundless hyperkinetic energy, was born on New York's Lower East Side to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Orphaned early on, Eddie was raised by his maternal grandmother Esther, who supported herself and her grandson as a door-to-door peddler. After winning $5 at a Bowery Theatre Amateur Night, the teenaged Cantor knew where his destiny lay. He lived a hand-to-mouth existence as a vaudeville performer, singing waiter, and blackface comedian in Gus Edwards' famous schoolroom ensemble act. Though moderately successful as a comic singer, Cantor didn't truly hit the big time until he was hired for Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolics in 1916. He stayed with the Ziegfeld Follies throughout the 1920s, and also starred in the producer's "book" shows Kid Boots and Whoopee. In addition to his expertly timed comic patter, Cantor achieved fame by introducing such songs as "If You Knew Susie," "Dinah," "Makin' Whoopee," and of course, "Ida," a paean to his wife of 49 years, Ida Tobias. After making his movie debut in a DeForest Phonofilm talking short subject in 1922, Cantor starred in a brace of enjoyable silent films, Kid Boots (1926) and Special Delivery (1927). His best Hollywood years were spent under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, where Eddie turned out one big-budget musical comedy per year between 1930 and 1936: Whoopee (1930), Palmy Days (1931), The Kid From Spain (1932), Roman Scandals (1933), Kid Millions (1934), and Strike Me Pink (1936). Unfortunately, most of his post-Goldwyn films seemed like hokey, outdated rehashes of his earlier films. Though his movie career faltered, Cantor remained popular throughout the 1940s on his long-running radio program, where he clowned with such stooges as announcer Harry Von Zell, violinist Rubinoff, and Bert "Mad Russian" Gordon. The offstage Cantor was not perfect, but most of the man's character flaws have been forgotten in the light of his inexhaustible work on behalf of dozens of charities, most prominently the March of Dimes. He also regularly put his career on the line through his union activities with Actors Equity, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Radio Artists, and flew in the face of bigotry and anti-Semitics through his work with the B'nai Brith and Jewish Relief. Though slowed down by a heart attack in 1953, Cantor kept his hand in whenever possible, even hosting a 38-week syndicated TV variety series, The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theatre. In 1953, Eddie Cantor was the subject of the Warner Bros. biopic The Eddie Cantor Story.

Trivia: Auburn-haired Ziegfeld girl Eleanor Hunt blazed onto the screen in 1930, as Eddie Cantor's leading lady in the phenomenally successful Whoopee. She signed with Fox but was then wasted in a couple of so-so roles in so-so films. By 1934, she was playing John Wayne's leading lady in the Western Blue Steel, but the studio was Monogram and Wayne merely an also-ran cowboy at the time. She made four minor action adventures with the fading Conrad Nagel, produced by Condor Pictures, but it was too little, too late and she retired. Hunt was the wife of B-movie perennial Rex Lease.

Trivia: Burly, puffy-cheeked American actor Spencer Charters entered films in 1923, after decades of stage experience. In his first talkie appearances (Whoopee [1930], The Bat Whispers [1931], etc.), Charters was often seen as an ill-tempered authority figure. Traces of this characterization continued into such mid-'30s efforts as Wheeler and Woolsey's Hips Hips Hooray, but before the decade was over Charters was firmly locked into playing such benign types as rustic sheriffs, bucolic hotel clerks and half-asleep justices of the peace. Advancing age and the attendant infirmities made it difficult for Charters to play anything other than one-scene bits by the early '40s. At the age of 68, he ended his life by downing an overdose of sleeping pills and then inhaling the exhaust fumes of his car.

Trivia: Manhattan-born Albert Hacketts mother was stage star Florence Hackett, and his brother was matinee idol Raymond Hackett. Albert made his own stage bow at age six, studying his trade at New York's Professional Children's School. Though a moderately successful actor, Hackett longed to break into playwrighting, but would not realize this dream until meeting and marrying another performer with writing ambitions, Frances Goodrich. Hackett and his wife collaborated on the 1929 play Up Pops the Devil. The show was a success, and Hackett was invited to Hollywood to work as dialogue director of the film version. But Hackett refused to leave his wife behind in New York; nor did he want Goodrich to be regarded as merely a "writer's wife." When Hackett finally did come to Hollywood, it was as his wife's writing partner, a collaboration that lasted professionally until the team's 1962 retirement--and personally until Goodrich's death in 1984. The projects on which this exceptional duo worked include their adaptation of Eugene O'Neil's only comedy Ah! Wilderness (1935), Frank Capra's classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Stanley Donen's Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Once he'd dedicated himself to writing, Hackett halted his acting career; he returned to the stage just once in the 1940 Broadway play Mr. and Mrs. North -- and then only as a favor to an old friend, playwright Owen Davis Jr.

Trivia: Beginning his long screen career in the early '10s with the Lubin company in Philadelphia, veteran stage actor Walter Law enjoyed his greatest success at Fox in 1916-1917, when he played Friar Laurence to Theda Bara's Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1916), Count de Varville to the great vamp's Camille (1917), and Zuoroff in Her Greatest Love, a 1917 Bara version of Ouida's Moths. There were many other important roles, but Law returned to the stage after playing General Lee in Marion Davies' Janice Meredith (1924) (Ken Maynard made his screen debut as Paul Revere in the same sequence). Returning to play bit parts in the talkie era, often at his former studio Fox, Law is perhaps best remembered as heroine Jean Rogers' father in the 1936 serial The Adventures of Frank Merriwell.

Trivia: An Ohio farm boy, Dean Jagger dropped out of school several times before attending Wabash College. He was a schoolteacher for several years before opting to study acting at Chicago's Lyceum Art Conservatory. By the time he made his first film in 1929, Jagger had worked in stock, vaudeville and radio. At first, Hollywood attempted to turn Jagger into a standard leading man, fitting the prematurely balding actor with a lavish wig and changing his name to Jeffrey Dean. It wasn't long before the studios realized that Jagger's true calling was as a character actor. One of his few starring roles after 1940 was as the title character in Brigham Young, Frontiersman--though top billing went to Tyrone Power, cast as a fictional Mormon follower. Jagger won an Academy Award for his sensitive performance in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) as one of General Gregory Peck's officers (and the film's narrator). Physically and vocally, Jagger would have been ideal for the role of Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he spent his career studiously avoiding that assignment. Having commenced his professional life as a teacher, Dean Jagger came full circle in 1964 when cast as Principal Albert Vane on the TV series Mr. Novak.

Trivia: The celebrated "pin-up girl" of World War II, American actress Betty Grable was the daughter of a stockbroker and an aggressive "stage mother." When her older sister Marjorie balked at a show business career, Grable was taken in hand by her mother and trained to sing, dance, tell jokes and play the ukulele and saxophone. Despite her father's objections, Grable begged her mother to take her to Los Angeles for a movie career, preparing herself with a two-girl musical act while attending Hollywood Professional School. Lying about her age, 13-year-old Grable was hired as a chorus girl for short subjects, getting her first important exposure as the energetic blonde "cowgirl" who sings the first chorus of the first song in the Eddie Cantor film musical Whoopee! (1930). Grable played supporting parts in two-reelers and bits in features for the next couple of years, attaining her first major role in Hold 'Em Jail (1932), a comedy starring the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey. Bert Wheeler had promised Grable's mother several years earlier that he'd get the girl a break in pictures if she came to Hollywood, and with this film, Wheeler kept his word. More bits and indifferent supporting roles followed until Grable was signed by Paramount, who loaned her to 20th Century-Fox for Pigskin Parade (1936), which established her with the public. Grable finally landed top billing in Paramount's Million Dollar Legs (1939)--the title referred not to the star but to a college athletic team--which co-starred her first husband, Jackie Coogan. Grable's career stalled at Paramount, but a Broadway appearance in the Cole Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady led to a contract with 20th Century-Fox, where she remained a number-one box-office attraction from 1940 through 1955. Fox wisely allowed Grable to shed her "college co-ed" image for a more salable screen persona as a wholesomely sexy musical comedy star, emphasizing her greatest attributes: her shapely figure and shapelier legs. After a misfire attempt at heavy dramatics in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Grable insisted that she be required only to sing and dance, not act, and Fox complied with a string of nonsensical but lavish Technicolor musicals. Grable was enormously popular with American GIs during the war, most of this popularity resting on her famous "pin-up" picture in which, dressed in a one-piece bathing suit and with her back to the camera, Grable glanced saucily over one shoulder. This rear-view image was borne not out of a desire to titillate but from necessity: she was several months pregnant when the picture was taken! Grable furthered her acceptance with the overseas troops when she married trumpeter-bandleader Harry James in 1943. Her popularity undimmed by war's end, Grable continued making Technicolor frolics, though her frequent tiffs with the Fox executives led the studio to try out any number of potential replacements, including Vivian Blaine, June Haver, and even Marilyn Monroe. A few miscalculated breakaways from her accepted screen image--Mother Wore Tights (1947), The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949) and The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1949)--hurt Grable's box-office status, even though these films hold up better than some of her wartime hits. Free-lancing after her last film, the lackluster How to Be Very, Very Popular (1955), Grable inadvertently offended producer Sam Goldwyn, thereby losing out on the chance of playing the plum role of Adelaide in Goldwyn's Guys and Dolls (1955); this and a few disappointing TV appearances prompted the actress into semi-retirement, save for a few nightclub appearances. After divorcing Harry James in 1965, Grable made a triumphal return to Broadway as Carol Channing's replacement in Hello, Dolly. Her later foray into musical comedy, Belle Starr, was less satisfying, closing its London run after two weeks. Shortly before her death, Grable appeared in advertisements for a number of low-calorie food products, her alluring figure and beautiful "gams" belying her age.

Trivia: The daughter of a golf-champion mother and insurance broker father, American actress Virginia Bruce entered films as a bit player and chorus dancer; she's easily recognizable as one of Jeanette MacDonald's ladies in waiting in The Love Parade (1929) and as a "Goldwyn Girl" (along with Betty Grable) in Whoopee (1931). The size of her roles increased in the early 1930s while at MGM, and in 1934 she was awarded her first major lead on loan-out to Monogram in the title role of Jane Eyre (1934), which costarred Colin Clive. Though this version of Jane Eyre would be eclipsed by the Joan Fontaine-Orson Welles remake in 1943, Ms. Bruce was charming and efficient as Charlotte Bronte's indomitable heroine. In 1936, Bruce played a character based on Marilyn Miller in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and as such was center of attention in the unforgettable "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" production number. As it often happened with actresses, Ms. Bruce was given fewer good Hollywood opportunities as she got older. She made the most of her title role in The Invisible Woman (1941), carrying virtually her entire part in this sci-fi satire with only her voice, and she gamely withstood third billing to Abbott and Costello in Pardon My Sarong (1942); but it was clear that her starring days were numbered. Bruce enjoyed solid secondary parts in such films as Night Has 1000 Eyes (1948), and was quite effective as Kim Novak's mother in her last film, Strangers When We Meet (1960). Ms. Bruce made a few enjoyable talk-show and stage appearances in the 1960s, but all but disappeared from the scene in the 1970s. Married three times, Virginia Bruce's first husband was silent screen idol John Gilbert, with whom she costarred in Downstairs (1932), an obscure but lively melodrama for which Gilbert had written the screenplay.

Trivia: Blonde leading lady Claire Dodd came to Hollywood by way of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies. In films since 1930, Claire was for several years an employee of Warner Bros., where she played many a scheming seductress. She projected a more likeable, down-to-earth image as Della Street in a brace of Warners' "Perry Mason" movies, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) and The Case of the Lucky Legs (1936)--actually marrying lawyer Mason (Warren William) in the latter film. Claire Dodd's last Hollywood years were spent at Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, where she played pleasant but colorless heroines; in one such assignment, Abbott and Costello's In the Navy (1941), Claire was reunited with her old Warners colleague Dick Powell.

Trivia: Hulking (six feet tall), mustachioed American supporting actor Theodore Lorch (or billed more simply Ted Lorch) first gained recognition onscreen as Chingachgook in Maurice Tourneur's handsome production of Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1920). During the following decades, Lorch would become a dependable Hollywood character actor who could play almost any role, from a Turkish merchant (1924's The Sea Hawk) to a Prime Minister (1929's The Royal Rider) or a coroner (1932's The King Murder). No role seemed too small (he was merely billed "Man" in 1934's Jealousy) or outrageous (the hissable Squire Cribbs in a hoary 1935 independent production of The Drunkard). Today, however, Lorch is best remembered for playing the High Priest in the serial Flash Gordon (1936) and for menacing the Three Stooges in countless two-reel comedies for ten years between 1937 and his death in 1947.

Trivia: A rather nondescript B-Western supporting player, Gene Alsace (born Rockford G. Camron) was Tim McCoy's stunt double before being awarded the starring role in 1935's Gun Smoke (aka Gunsmoke on the Guadalupe) a very low-budget oater ostensibly produced by rodeo rider Monte Montana. Alsace, who used the moniker Buck Coburn for the occasion, was supported by such B-Western stalwarts as Marion Shilling, Bud Osborne, Henry Hall, and Ben Corbett, but the little film made almost no money and no further starring roles were forthcoming. Leaving the Buck Coburn tag behind him for good, Alsace instead played scores of minor supporting roles but is easy to pick out in a posse or among the villain's henchmen because of his penchant for wearing old-fashioned chaps and sticking his gun carelessly in his belt. Working mainly at small-scale operations such as Monogram and PRC, Alsace later changed his name once again, this time to Rocky Camron, the character he played in the 1943 trail blazers Western Outlaw Trail. Alsace/Camron was a good guy for a change and continued to use the Rocky Camron moniker when playing law-abiding citizens in such Westerns as Harmony Trail (1947) and Callaway Went Thataway (1951).

Trivia: Balding, long-necked character actor Frank Rice made his earliest screen appearance in 1922. In talkies, Rice often appeared in comic bit roles, many of which -- notably the butler in Laurel and Hardy's Pack up Your Troubles (1932) -- afforded him the opportunity of performing his rolling-eyeballs specialty. From 1931 onward, he successfully pursued a career as a Western comedy sidekick, appearing opposite such sagebrush stars as John Wayne and Buck Jones. Frank Rice died prematurely at age 44 of complications ensuing from nephritis and hepatitis.

Trivia: The grandson of a governor of New Mexico, pioneering screen cowboy Edmund Cobb began his long career toiling in Colorado-produced potboilers such as Hands Across the Border (1914), the filming of which turned tragic when Cobb's leading lady, Grace McHugh, drowned in the Arkansas River. Despite this harrowing experience, Cobb continued to star in scores of cheap Westerns and was making two-reelers at Universal in Hollywood by the 1920s. But unlike other studio cowboys, Cobb didn't do his own stunts -- despite the fact that he later claimed to have invented the infamous "running w" horse stunt -- and that may actually have shortened his starring career. By the late '20s, he was mainly playing villains. The Edmund Cobb remembered today, always a welcome sign whether playing the main henchman or merely a member of the posse, would pop up in about every other B-Western made during the 1930s and 1940s, invariably unsmiling and with a characteristic monotone delivery. When series Westerns bit the dust in the mid-'50s, Cobb simply continued on television. In every sense of the word a true screen pioneer and reportedly one of the kindest members of the Hollywood chuck-wagon fraternity, Edmund Cobb died at the age of 82 at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: One of the silent era's many colorful villains, hatchet-faced Frank Lanning specialized in playing American Indians, mixed-race characters, and even Asians. Among the many highlights of his nearly 20-year screen career, Lanning portrayed Injun Joe in Jack Pickford's version of Huck and Tom (1918) and was Harold Lloyd's hillbilly nemesis in The Kid Brother (1927). He retired from the screen in 1934.

Trivia: German-born stage actor Paul Panzer entered films in 1904 with Vitagraph studios. Panzer appeared in most of Vitagraph's one-reel Shakespearean adaptations of the 1908-1909 season, including Othello (as Cassio), MacBeth (as MacDuff), Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. Refusing to be typecast, he played in everything from romantic dramas to slapstick comedies. All this ended in 1914 when he was cast as the flamboyantly duplicitous Koerner in the landmark serial The Perils of Pauline; thereafter, he was pigeonholed in villainous roles, nearly all of them based on the eye-rolling, lip-smacking Koerner. In the early talkie era, he co-starred in German-language versions of popular Hollywood films, and thereafter was confined to bit roles until his retirement in the early '50s. One of Paul Panzer's last assignments was a cameo role in the 1947 Pearl White musical biopic The Perils of Pauline -- not as a villain, surprisingly enough, but as a tuxedoed silent-flick leading man.

Trivia: Although she later professed to have preferred her stay with Columbia Pictures, Marian Marsh did her best work at Warner Bros., not only in her star-making turn opposite John Barrymore inSvengali (1931), but also with Warren William in the wry, unfairly neglected Beauty and the Boss (1932). A beauty contest winner of German descent, Marsh (born Violet Krauth) began her film career in 1930 through her sister Jeanne Morgan, a former Ziegfeld girl turned movie starlet. Howard Hughes gave her the moniker "Marilyn Morgan" and assigned her a brief but attention-grabbing turn in the aviation melodrama Hell's Angels (1930). Although little more than a walk-on role, it led to her being voted a 1931 Wampas Baby Star and securing the contract with Warner Bros.The studio changed her name to Marian Marsh, in honor, it was said at the time, of silent-era actress Mae Marsh, and launched her as Trilby in Svengali , Warner Bros.' screen version of Gerald du Maurier's Victorian novel about a villainous mesmerist and his innocent victim. (Despite updated versions of the story years later, Marsh remained the quintessential screen Trilby in the wonderfully florid melodrama.) Although not quite as powerful, Warners' follow-up, The Mad Genius (1931) -- again opposite Barrymore at the zenith of his powers -- also proved quite popular. Marsh was perfectly cast as the once-timid stenographer who proves eminently capable of taking care of herself in Beauty and the Boss (1932), a typical pre-Production Code comedy drama. The pace at Warner Bros. was hectic and Marsh happily left in favor of the smaller Columbia Pictures, where, she later explained, she was treated with all the trappings of stardom. Some of her films there were, indeed, worth the effort, including The Black Room (1935) opposite Boris Karloff and Crime and Punishment (1935) as Sonya opposite Peter Lorre's Raskolnikov. She may have been slightly miscast in the latter, but Josef von Sternberg's direction easily overcame this minor flaw and she emerged unscathed. The actress was not so lucky with such subsequent fare as Republic's Prison Nurse (1938), directed by that old hack James Cruze; Monogram's Murder by Invitation (1941); and, her final film in 1942, PRC's House of Errors, all low-rent programmers and hardly worth her while. Twice elected honorary mayor of her small San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth, Marsh left Hollywood behind with hardly a backward glance, retiring at the age of 30. She was widowed in 1984 by her second husband, Clifford Henderson (an aviation pioneer and the founder of Palm Desert) but remained the energetic president of Desert Beautiful, a Coachella Valley preservation society. Retaining only good memories of her past screen career, the former actress spoke with admiration of the legendary Barrymore, who, in Marsh's eyes, could do no wrong. "He was always so helpful and so inspiring to me," she stated in a later interview.

Trivia: Born Harriet Lake, the name under which she was billed until 1933, Sothern debuted onscreen in 1929 in a bit part, and went on to play small roles in several other films before leaving Hollywood for Broadway. She soon began landing leads, bringing another invitation from Hollywood. She signed a screen contract and changed her name, then began a very busy film career as the light-hearted heroine of B-movies. In 1939, Sothern switched studios and achieved greater popularity as the star of the "Maisie" comedy-adventure series; she appeared as the energetic, scatterbrained Maisie in ten films during the next eight years. She also appeared in musicals, in which her good voice and comedic talents were displayed. Never a major screen star, she became most popular after switching to TV; she starred in the TV series Private Secretary and The Ann Sothern Show. She went on to tour with stage musicals, then returned to the screen in occasional character roles after 1964. For her work in The Whales of August (1987), her most recent film to date, she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. From 1936-42 she was married to actor Roger Pryor and from 1943-49 she was married to actor Robert Sterling. Her daughter is actress Tisha Sterling, with whom she appeared in Crazy Mama (1975) and The Whales of August (1987); in the latter, Sterling played Sothern's character as a young woman.