Trivia: Jane Frazee began in show business in childhood as one-half of a singing sister act. The girls split up amicably in the late 1930s when Jane's sister Ruth gave up performing to marry screenwriter Norman Krasna. Jane went on to a contract with Universal pictures in 1940, supporting such comedians as Abbott and Costello (Buck Privates), Olsen and Johnson (Hellzapoppin') and the Ritz Brothers (Hi'ya Chum), and headlining several "B" musicals. In the late 1940s she began appearing in Republic westerns, where she was one of Roy Rogers' favorite leading ladies. After making her last feature film in 1951, Frazee co-starred with George O'Hanlon in the "Behind the Eight-Ball" (aka "Joe McDoakes") short-subject series at Warner Bros, and also appeared regularly on the 1952 TV sitcom Beulah. Long inactive in show business, Frazee began selling California real estate in the early 1970s. Married four times, Jane Frazee was at one time the wife of actor/director/studio executive Glenn Tryon.

Trivia: A nightclub singer in the early 1930s, Baker was a regular on Jack Benny's radio show and appeared in numerous musicals in the '30s and '40s, including George Marshall's The Goldwyn Follies, the Gilbert and Sullivan adaptation The Mikado, the Marx Brothers comedy At The Circus, and George Sidney's The Harvey Girls.

Trivia: Reversing the usual procedure, Irene Rich was a successful real estate agent who became an actress. In 1918, she entered films as an extra, and soon was starring opposite the likes of Will Rogers, Wallace Beery, and John Barrymore. Already a mature woman when she began her film career, Ms. Rich specialized in playing languid ladies who'd "been there, done that." Surviving the talkie revolution, Rich worked in sound films as a character actress, reuniting with her silent-film colleague Will Rogers in such films as They Had to See Paris (1929) and Down to Earth (1932). Her career in brief doldrums in 1933, Rich turned to radio, hosting the anthology series Irene Rich Dramas from 1933 through 1944; this was an unusual project made up of serialized mini-dramas, some running for several months at time. After her radio comeback, Irene Rich continued accepting roles in Broadway productions and films until her retirement in 1948.

Trivia: Slim, sloe-eyed, dark-haired actress Gail Patrick was once the 21-year-old Dean of women students at her alma mater of Howard College, and briefly studied law at University of Alabama. She was brought to Paramount during that studio's nationwide contest to find an actress to play "the Panther Woman" in Island of Lost Souls (1932). Patrick lost this role to Kathleen Burke, but won a Paramount contract, and co-starred in the studio's horror film follow-up to Island of Lost Souls, 1933's Murders in the Zoo. She played several leading roles -- including a lady lawyer in Disbarred (1939) -- but was more effective as a villainess or "other woman"; her elegant truculence was one of the highlights of the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. Patrick's third husband was Thomas Cornwall Jackson, literary agent of Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. Retired from acting since 1948, Patrick and her husband co-produced the popular Perry Mason TV series, which ran from 1957 through 1966. She made a brief return to acting as a judge in the final Mason episode, which also featured Erle Stanley Gardner himself in a bit role. After her 1969 divorce from Jackson, Patrick attempted to revive Paul Mason for television in 1973, but Monte Markham proved an inadequate substitute for Raymond Burr. Gail Patrick Jackson died of leukemia in 1980.

Trivia: A boy soldier during the Boer War, British actor Victor McLaglen later worked as a prizefighter (once losing to Jack Johnson in six rounds) and a vaudeville and circus performer. He served in World War I as a captain with the Irish Fusiliers and as provost marshal of Baghdad. In the early '20s he broke into British films. He soon moved to Hollywood, where he got lead and supporting roles; his basic screen persona was that of a large, brutish, but soft-hearted man of action. He appeared in many John Ford films, often as a military man. McLaglen made the transition to sound successfully, and for his work in Ford's The Informer (1935), he won the Best Actor Oscar. He remained a busy screen actor until the late '50s. Five of his brothers were also film actors: Arthur, Clifford, Cyril, Kenneth, and Leopold. He was the father of director Andrew V. McLaglen.

Trivia: American light leading man James Ellison was recruited from a stock company to appear in the forgotten 1932 film Play Girl. His biggest movie break was DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), in which he played Buffalo Bill Cody opposite Gary Cooper's Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur's Calamity Jane. This sagebrush endeavor led to two seasons' work as "Johnny Nelson" in Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy western programmers. Ellison was one of the stalwarts of the "B" units at 20th Century-Fox and RKO during the 1940s; thereafter he free-lanced in such cost-conscious second features as Dead Man's Trail (1952) and Ghost Town (1956). After starring in the negligible 1963 Castro spoof When The Girls Take Over, James Ellison decided that the time was ripe to leave show business in favor of the lucrative world of real estate.

Trivia: American actor Franklin Pangborn spent most of his theatrical days playing straight dramatic roles, but Hollywood saw things differently. From his debut film Exit Smiling (1926) to his final appearance in The Story of Mankind (1957), Pangborn was relegated to almost nothing but comedy roles. With his prissy voice and floor-walker demeanor, Pangborn was the perfect desk clerk, hotel manager, dressmaker, society secretary, or all-around busybody in well over 100 films. Except for a few supporting appearances in features and a series of Mack Sennett short subjects in the early 1930s, most of Pangborn's pre-1936 appearances were in bits or minor roles, but a brief turn as a snotty society scavenger-hunt scorekeeper in My Man Godfrey (1936) cemented his reputation as a surefire laugh-getter. The actor was a particular favorite of W.C. Fields, who saw to it that Pangborn was prominently cast in Fields' The Bank Dick (1940) (as hapless bank examiner J. Pinkerton Snoopington) and Never Give a Sucker An Even Break (1941). Occasionally, Pangborn longed for more dramatic roles, so to satisfy himself artistically he'd play non-comic parts for Edward Everett Horton's Los Angeles-based Majestic Theatre; Pangborn's appearance in Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero (1942) likewise permitted him a few straight, serious moments. When jobs became scarce in films for highly specialized character actors in the 1950s, Pangborn thrived on television, guesting on a number of comedy shows, including an appearance as a giggling serial-killer in a "Red Skelton Show" comedy sketch. One year before his death, Pangborn eased quietly into TV-trivia books by appearing as guest star (and guest announcer) on Jack Paar's very first "Tonight Show."

Trivia: A product of vaudeville and burlesque, gerbil-faced comic actor Gus Schilling hit the big time when he joined the Earl Carroll Vanities in the 1930s. He moved on to Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe, appearing in several Mercury radio shows and in the Welles-directed films Citizen Kane (1940), Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady From Shanghai (1947), and MacBeth (1948). He also showed up in such comedy characterizations as the harried orchestra leader in Hellzapoppin' (1941) and the nervous TV repairman in Our Very Own (1950). From 1945 through 1950, Schilling teamed with Dick Lane in a lively series of 11 Columbia Pictures two-reelers; appearing in nearly all of these shorts was Schilling's burlesque partner, Judy Malcolm, who'd invariably pop up out of nowhere, slap Schilling's face, and shout, "How dare you look like someone I hate?" A heavy smoker, Schilling looked terribly drawn and haggard in his last film appearances. Gus Schilling died at the age of 49 of a reported heart attack, though many of those close to him were of the opinion that he killed himself.

Trivia: Indiana native Charles Arnt attended Princeton University, where he was president of the Triangle Club and where he earned a geological engineering degree. Short, balding and with an air of perpetual suspicion concerning his fellow man, Arnt seemed far older than his 30 years when he was featured in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday. In the movies, Arnt was often cast as snoopy clerks, inquisitive next-door neighbors or curious bystanders. Charles Arnt was seen in such films as The Falcon's Brother (1942), The Great Gildersleeve (1943) and That Wonderful Urge (1948); he also played one top-billed lead, as an obsessive art dealer in PRC's Dangerous Intruder (1946).

Trivia: Trained at Iowa's Morningside College for a career as a musician, American actor Emory Parnell spent his earliest performing years as a concert violinist. He worked the Chautauqua and Lyceum tent circuits for a decade before leaving the road in 1930. For the next few seasons, Parnell acted and narrated in commercial and industrial films produced in Detroit. Determining that the oppurtunities and renumeration were better in Hollywood, Emory and his actress wife Effie boarded the Super Chief and headed for California. Endowed with a ruddy Irish countenance and perpetual air of frustration, Parnell immediately landed a string of character roles as cops, small town business owners, fathers-in-law and landlords (though his very first film part in Bing Crosby's Dr. Rhythm [1938] was cut out before release). In roles both large and small, Parnell became an inescapable presence in B-films of the '40s; one of his better showings was in the A-picture Louisiana Purchase, in which, as a Paramount movie executive, he sings an opening song about avoiding libel suits! Parnell was a regular in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle film series (1949-55), playing small town entrepreneur Billy Reed; on TV, the actor appeared as William Bendix' factory foreman The Life of Riley (1952-58). Emory Parnell's last public appearance was in 1974, when he, his wife Effie, and several other hale-and-hearty residents of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital were interviewed by Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Dynamic African American leading man and character actor William Marshall trained in both grand opera and Shakespeare. In films from 1952, the NYU-educated Marshall didn't really hit it big until the "blaxploitation" era of the 1970s. He starred in the better-than-you'd-think contemporary vampire melodrama Blacula (1972) and its just-as-bad-as-it-sounds sequel, Scream Blacula Scream (1973). From 1987 to 1989, William Marshall was seen as the King of Cartoons on the Saturday morning TV kiddie show Pee-wee's Playhouse, a job he accepted on behalf of his grandchildren, who weren't yet permitted to see the Blacula flicks.