Trivia: When Carole Lombard died at the age of 34 in a plane crash following a World War II war bond drive, the American film industry lost one of its most talented and intelligent actresses. Starting out in silent films as a Mack Sennett bathing beauty, she later epitomized screwball comedy in Twentieth Century (1934); My Man Godfrey (1936), for which she was Oscar nominated as Irene Bullock, with ex-husband William Powell as Godfrey; and Nothing Sacred (1937), playing the not-so-doomed Hazel Flagg. But Lombard was also a capable dramatic actress whose talents can be seen in her subdued performance as a nurse in one of her final roles, in Vigil in the Night (1940), as well as in The Eagle and the Hawk (1933), In Name Only (1939) and They Knew What They Wanted (1940). Other fine appearances include teaming with Fred MacMurray in several films, the best of which are Hands Across the Table (1935) and The Princess Comes Across (1936), in which Lombard does a humorously accurate Greta Garbo takeoff. Her two final films contain two of her best performances: Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1940) and the Ernst Lubitsch war satire, To Be or Not To Be (1942). She was married to William Powell from 1931-33 and to Clark Gable from 1939 til her death.

Trivia: Given that Fred MacMurray built a successful film career as the quintessential nice guy, it's rather ironic that some of his strongest and best-remembered performances cast him against type. While remaining known as a fixture of light comedies and live-action Disney productions, his definitive roles nonetheless were those which found him contemplating murder, adultery, and other villainous pursuits. Born August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, IL, MacMurray, the son of a concert violinist, was educated at a military academy and later studied at the Chicago Art Institute. His original goal was to become a professional saxophonist, and toward that aim he worked with a variety of bands and even recorded with Gus Arnheim. MacMurray's musical aspirations eventually led him to Hollywood, where he frequently worked as an extra. He later joined the California Collegians and with them played Broadway in the 1930 revue Three's a Crowd, where he joined Libby Holman on a duet of "Something to Remember Me By." He subsequently appeared in productions of The Third Little Show and Roberta. The story behind MacMurray's return to Hollywood remains uncertain -- either a Paramount casting scout saw him on-stage, or he simply signed up with Central Casting -- but either way, he was under contract by 1934. At Paramount, he rose to fame in 1935's The Gilded Lily, a romantic comedy which pit him against Claudette Colbert. Seemingly overnight he was among the hottest young actors in town, and he quickly emerged as a favorite romantic sparring partner with many of Hollywood's leading actresses. After Katherine Hepburn requested his services for Alice Adams, MacMurray joined Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table before reuniting with Colbert in The Bride Comes Home, his seventh film in 12 months. He kept up the frenetic pace, appearing in 1936's The Trail of the Lonesome Pine alongside Henry Fonda, reteaming with Lombard in The Princess Comes Across. After settling a contract dispute with Paramount, MacMurray again starred with Colbert in the 1937 swashbuckler Maid of Salem, one of the first films to move him away from the laid-back, genial performances on which he'd risen to success.Along with Colbert, Lombard remained the actress with whom MacMurray was most frequently paired. They reunited in 1937's Swing High, Swing Low and again that same year in True Confession. After starring with Bing Crosby in Sing You Sinners, he also began another onscreen partnership with Madeleine Carroll in 1939's Cafe Society, quickly followed by a reunion in Invitation to Bali. While not the superstar that many predicted he would become, by the 1940s MacMurray had settled comfortably into his leading man duties, developing an amiable comic style perfectly suited to his pictures' sunny tone. While occasionally appearing in a more dramatic capacity, as in the Barbara Stanwyck drama Remember the Night, the majority of his pictures remained light, breezy affairs. However, in 1944 he and Stanwyck reunited in Billy Wilder's superb Double Indemnity, which cast MacMurray as a murderous insurance salesman. The result was perhaps the most acclaimed performance of his career, earning him new respect as a serious actor.However, MacMurray soon returned to more comedic fare, appearing with Colbert in 1944's Practically Yours. After the following year's farcical Murder He Says, his contract with Paramount ended and he moved to 20th Century Fox, where he starred in the historical musical Where Do We Go From Here? His co-star, June Haver, became his wife in 1954. MacMurray then produced and starred in Pardon My Past, but after announcing his displeasure with Fox he jumped to Universal to star in the 1947 hit The Egg and I. During the 1940s and early '50s, he settled into a string of easygoing comedies, few of them successful either financially or artistically. His star began to wane, a situation not helped by a number of poor career choices; in 1950, he even turned down Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard. In 1954, however, MacMurray returned to form in The Caine Mutiny, where he appeared as a duplicitous naval officer. As before, cast against type he garnered some of the best notices of his career, but this time he continued the trend by starring as a dirty cop in The Pushover. Despite recent critical acclaim, MacMurray's box-office clout remained diminished, and throughout the mid-'50s he appeared primarily in low-budget action pictures, most of them Westerns. In 1959, however, he was tapped by Walt Disney to star in the live-action comedy The Shaggy Dog, which became one of the year's biggest hits. MacMurray appeared as a callous adulterer in Wilder's Oscar-winning 1960 smash The Apartment before moving to television to star in the family sitcom My Three Sons; a tremendous success, it ran until 1972. He then returned to the Disney stable to essay the title role in 1961's The Absent-Minded Professor and remained there for the following year's Bon Voyage and 1963's Son of Flubber. However, after two more Disney features -- 1966's Follow Me Boys and 1967's The Happiest Millionaire -- both flopped, MacMurray remained absent from the big screen for the rest of the decade, and only resurfaced in 1973 in Disney's Charley and the Angel. After a pair of TV movies, MacMurray made one last feature, 1978's The Swarm, before retiring. He died in Santa Monica, CA, on November 5, 1991.

Trivia: Formidable British comic actress Alison Skipworth became an actress in her early twenties to help support her starving-artist husband. A classic beauty in her youth, Ms. Skipworth served as decoration in such London stage productions as The Gaiety Girl and An Artist's Model. Her acting improved with each performance, and by 1908 she was co-starring with James K. Hackett in the prestige production The Prisoner of Zenda. She made her film debut in 1920, re-creating her long-running stage role in 39 East. Preferring the stage to films during the silent era, Skipworth did not become a full-time movie actress until 1930, when establishing herself as one of Hollywood's most reliable character actresses. Exuding aristocratic hauteur from every pore, Skipworth was an excellent foil for Mae West in Night After Night (1932) and for W.C. Fields in If I Had a Million (1932) and Tillie and Gus (1933). She had leading assignments as the title character Madame Racketeer (1932) and opposite Polly Moran in the Republic programmers Two Wise Maids (1937) and Ladies in Distress (1938). Leaving films in 1938, Alison Skipworth returned to the stage, retiring for good in 1942; she died ten years later at the age of 88.

Trivia: American actor William Frawley had hopes of becoming a newspaperman but was sidetracked by a series of meat-and-potatoes jobs. At 21, he found himself in the chorus of a musical comedy in Chicago; his mother forced him to quit, but Frawley had already gotten greasepaint in his veins. Forming a vaudeville act with his brother Paul, Frawley hit the show-business trail; several partners later (including his wife Louise), Frawley was a headliner and in later years laid claim to having introduced the beer-hall chestnut "Melancholy Baby." Entering films in the early 1930s (he'd made a few desultory silent-movie appearances), Frawley became typecast as irascible, pugnacious Irishmen, not much of a stretch from his off-camera personality. Though he worked steadily into the late 1940s, Frawley's drinking got the better of him, and by 1951 most producers found him virtually unemployable. Not so Desi Arnaz, who cast Frawley as neighbor Fred Mertz on the I Love Lucy TV series when Gale Gordon proved unavailable. Frawley promised to stay away from the booze during filming, and in turn Arnaz promised to give Frawley time off whenever the New York Yankees were in the World Series (a rabid baseball fan, Frawley not only appeared in a half dozen baseball films, but also was one of the investors of the minor-league Hollywood Stars ball team). Frawley played Fred Mertz until the last I Love Lucy episode was filmed in 1960, then moved on to a five-year assignment as Bub, chief cook and bottle-washer to son-in-law Fred MacMurray's all male household on My Three Sons.

Trivia: After working his way through the University of Cincinnati, Porter Hall slaved away as a Pennsylvania steel worker, then turned to acting, spending nearly 20 years building a solid reputation as a touring Shakespearean actor. Hall was 43 when he made his first film, Secrets of a Secretary. Never entertaining thoughts of playing romantic leads, Hall was content to parlay his weak chin and shifty eyes into dozens of roles calling for such unattractive character traits as cowardice, duplicity and plain old mean-spiritedness. Cast as a murder suspect in The Thin Man (1934), Hall's guilt was so transparent that it effectively ended the mystery even before it began. In DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), Hall played Jack McCall, the rattlesnake who shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back (his performance won Hall a Screen Actors Guild award). In the rollicking Murder He Says (1944), Hall portrays the whacked-out patriarch of a family of hillbilly murderers. And in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Hall is at his most odious as the neurosis-driven psychiatrist who endeavors to commit jolly old Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) to the booby hatch. Even with only one scene in Going My Way (1944), Hall manages to pack five reels' worth of venom into his role of a loudmouthed atheist. In real life, Hall was the exact opposite of his screen image: a loyal friend, a tireless charity worker, and a deacon at Hollywood's First Presbyterian Church. Porter Hall died at age 65 in 1953; his last film, released posthumously, was Return to Treasure Island (1954).

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: Despite his Irish background, no one could play the typical British gentleman, or gentleman's gentleman, better than Lumsden Hare. There was definitely something aristocratic about the erect, dignified 6'1" Hare, who played the Prince Regent in The House of Rothschild (1934) and the King of Sweden in Cardinal Richelieu (1935), not to mention countless military officers, doctors, and lawyers. A leading man in his younger days to Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, Nance O'Neil, and Maxine Elliott, Hare made his screen debut, as F. Lumsden Hare, in 1916 and continued to mix film with Broadway appearances through the 1920s. Relocating to Hollywood after the changeover to sound, Hare became one of the era's busiest, and finest, character actors, appearing in hundreds of film and television roles until his retirement in 1960.

Trivia: Born in Germany, actor Sig Rumann studied electro-technology in college before returning to his native Hamburg to study acting. He worked his way up from bits to full leads in such theatrical centers as Stettin and Kiel before serving in World War I. Rumann came to New York in 1924 to appear in German-language plays. He was discovered simultaneously by comedian George Jessel, playwright George S. Kaufman, and critic Alexander Woollcott. He began chalking up an impressive list of stage roles, notably Baron Preysig in the 1930 Broadway production of Grand Hotel (in the role played by Wallace Beery in the 1932 film version). Rumann launched his film career at the advent of talkies, hitting his stride in the mid 1930s. During his years in Hollywood, he whittled down his stage name from Siegfried Rumann to plain Sig Ruman. The personification of Prussian pomposity, Rumann was a memorable foil for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), and A Night in Casablanca (1946). He also was a favorite of director Ernst Lubitsch, appearing in Ninotchka (1939) as a bombastic Soviet emissary and in To Be or Not to Be (1942) as the unforgettable "Concentration Camp Ehrardt." With the coming of World War II, Ruman found himself much in demand as thick-headed, sometimes sadistic Nazis. Oddly, in The Hitler Gang (1944), Rumann was cast in a comparatively sympathetic role, as the ailing and senile Von Hindenburg. After the war, Rumann was "adopted" by Lubitsch admirer Billy Wilder, who cast the actor in such roles as the deceptively good-natured Sgt. Schultz in Stalag 17 (1953) and a marinet doctor in The Fortune Cookie (1966); Wilder also used Rumann's voice to dub over the guttural intonations of German actor Hubert von Meyerinck in One, Two, Three (1961). In delicate health during his last two decades, Rumann occasionally accepted unbilled roles, such as the kindly pawnbroker in O. Henry's Full House (1952). During one of his heartier periods, he had a recurring part on the 1952 TV sitcom Life with Luigi. Rumann's last film appearance was as a shoe-pounding Russian UN delegate in Jerry Lewis' Way... Way Out (1967).

Trivia: The screen's foremost "Mad Russian" (though he was more dour than demented in most of his movie appearances), Mischa Auer was the son of a Russian navy officer who died in the Russo-Japanese war. Auer's family scattered during the Bolshevik revolution, forcing the 12-year-old Mischa to beg, borrow, and steal to survive. Orphaned during a typhus epidemic, Auer moved to New York where he lived with his maternal grandfather, violinist Leopold Auer. Inspired by the elder Auer to become a musician, Mischa entered the Ethical Culture School in New York, where he developed an interest in acting. Playing small parts on Broadway and with Eva LeGalleine's company, Auer persisted until his roles increased in size and importance. While appearing with the Bertha Kalich Company in Los Angeles, Auer was hired by Hollywood director Frank Tuttle for a minor role in the Esther Ralston comedy Something Always Happens (1927). During his first nine years in films, the tall, foreboding Auer was typecast as sinister foreigners, often playing villainous Hindu priests, Arab chieftains, and feverish anarchists. His comic gifts were finally tapped by improvisational director Gregory La Cava, who cast Auer as society matron Alice Brady's free-loading "protege" in My Man Godfrey (1936). Thereafter, the actor flourished in eccentric comedy roles in such films as 100 Men and a Girl (1937), You Can't Take It With You (1938) (in which he popularized the catchphrase "Confidentially, it stinks!"), Destry Rides Again (1939), and Hellzapoppin' (1941). During the 1940s, Auer starred in the radio series Mischa the Magnificent and headlined several Broadway flops. The following decade, he spent most of his time in Europe, playing aging oddballs in films like Orson Welles' Mister Arkadin (1955). Among Mischa Auer's last professional engagements was a 1964-1965 revival of The Merry Widow -- one of his few successful stage ventures.

Trivia: Mustachioed character actor Bradley Page had the slick looks that made him the ideal choice for playing oily villains or crime lords and it was into those roles that he was most frequently cast in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: European character actor George Sorel made his first American film appearance in 1936. Usually showing up unbilled as gendarmes and maître d's, Sorel was afforded rare screen billing for his one scene and one line as Walter Woolf King's valet in Laurel and Hardy's Swiss Miss (1938). He flourished during WWII thanks to his rather shifty, sinister features, which permitted him to play many a Nazi or collaborator. One of George Sorel's most extensive assignments was in the 1946 Universal serial Lost City of the Jungle; when the serial's principal heavy, Lionel Atwill, died during production, Sorel was called in to double for Atwill in several transitional scenes.

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 handsome matinee idol from France, with a pronounced widow's peak, Gaston Glass often starred in Northwest melodramas the likes of Cameron of the Royal Mounted (1922) and Call of the Klondike (1926), but also appeared in more mainstream Western fare such as Untamed Justice (1929). A victim of talkies, Glass left acting to become a production manager for Poverty Row's only woman producer, Fanchon Royer, and later functioned as an assistant director at 20th Century Fox. He was married to Hollywood chorus girl Bo Peep Karlin.

Trivia: A debonair, mustachioed supporting actor from France, Jean De Briac played prominent roles in the silent era -- Fred Thomson's fisherman brother in Mary Pickford's The Love Light (1921), the notorious "The Knifer" in Clara Bow's Parisian Love (1925), the stage director in Greta Garbo's The Divine Woman (1928) -- but mainly bit parts thereafter. De Briac, whose career continued well into the '50s, even turned up in a 1949 episode of television's The Lone Ranger.

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: The older brother of film actors Andy and Jean Clyde, David Clyde was an actor/director/theatre manger in his native Scotland. Clyde came to Hollywood in 1934, by which time his brother Andy was firmly established as a screen comedian. Though the older Clyde never scaled the professional heights enjoyed by Andy, he found steady work in films for nearly a decade. His more sizeable roles included T. P. Wallaby in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and Canadian constable Thompson in the excellent Sherlock Holmes opus The Scarlet Claw (1944). David Clyde was the husband of actress Fay Holden, of Andy Hardy fame.

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: Short, portly, and possessed of a high-pitched laugh that cuts through the air like a buzzsaw, Massachussetts-born Dick Elliott had been on stage for nearly thirty before making his screen bow in 1933. Elliott was a frequent visitor to Broadway, enjoying a substantial run in the marathon hit Abie's Irish Rose. Physically and vocally unchanged from his first screen appearance in the '30s to his last in 1961, Elliott was most generally cast in peripheral roles designed to annoy the film's principal characters with his laughing jags or his obtrusive behavior; in this capacity, he appeared as drunken conventioneers, loud-mouthed theatre audience members, and "helpful" pedestrians. Elliott also excelled playing small-scale authority figures, such as stage managers, truant officers and rural judges. Still acting into his mid 70s, Dick Elliott appeared regularly as the mayor of Mayberry on the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, and was frequently cast as a department-store Santa in the Yuletide programs of such comics as Jack Benny and Red Skelton.

Trivia: Silent-film leading man Creighton Hale was brought to America from his native Ireland via a theatrical touring company. While starring in Charles Frohman's Broadway production of Indian Summer, Hale was spotted by a representative of the Pathe film company and invited to appear before the cameras. His first film was the Pearl White serial The Exploits of Elaine, after which he rose to stardom in a series of adventure films and romantic dramas. Director D.W. Griffith used Hale as comedy relief in his films Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922)--possibly Hale's least effective screen appearances, in that neither he nor Griffith were comedy experts. Despite his comparative failure in these films, Hale remained a popular leading man throughout the 1920s. When talking pictures arrived, Hale's star plummeted; though he had a pleasant, well-modulated voice, he was rapidly approaching fifty, and looked it. Most of Hale's talkie roles were unbilled bits, or guest cameos in films that spotlighted other silent movie veterans (e.g. Hollywood Boulevard and The Perils of Pauline). During the 1940s, Hale showed up in such Warner Bros. productions as Larceny Inc (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1943); this was due to the largess of studio head Jack Warner, who kept such faded silent favorites as Hale, Monte Blue and Leo White on permanent call. Creighton Hale's final appearance was in Warners' Beyond the Forest (1949).

Trivia: Comic actor George Chandler entered the University of Illinois after World War I service, paying for his education by playing in an orchestra. He continued moonlighting in the entertainment world in the early 1920s, working as an insurance salesman by day and performing at night. By the end of the decade he was a seasoned vaudevillian, touring with a one-man-band act called "George Chandler, the Musical Nut." He began making films in 1927, appearing almost exclusively in comedies; perhaps his best-known appearance of the early 1930s was as W.C.Fields' prodigal son Chester in the 1932 2-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer. Chandler became something of a good-luck charm for director William Wellman, who cast the actor in comedy bits in many of his films; Wellman reserved a juicy supporting role for Chandler as Ginger Rogers' no-good husband in Roxie Hart (1942). In all, Chandler made some 330 movie appearances. In the early 1950s, Chandler served two years as president of the Screen Actors Guild, ruffling the hair of many prestigious stars and producers with his strongly held political views. From 1958 through 1959, George Chandler was featured as Uncle Petrie on the Lassie TV series, and in 1961 he starred in a CBS sitcom that he'd helped develop, Ichabod and Me.

Trivia: The look-alike younger brother of character star Hugh Herbert, Tom Herbert suffered from inevitable comparison with his famous sibling. Lacking the distracted congeniality of his brother or a trademark like Hugh's "woo-woo," Tom instead played bit roles as comic cab drivers, drunks, waiters, and hotel clerks, often sporting a bushy mustache. Onscreen from 1934, Tom Herbert was a member of the stock company at 20th Century Fox.

Trivia: A tall, dark-haired, often elegant silent screen actor, Larry Steers had appeared with the famous Bush Temple Stock Company and opposite matinee idol Robert Edeson prior to making his film debut with Paramount in 1917. Extremely busy in the 1920s, Steers usually played professional men, doctors, lawyers, and politicians, typecasting that continued well into the sound era, albeit in much diminished circumstances. By the mid-'30s, the veteran actor had become a Hollywood dress extra.

Trivia: A former professional baseball player, Pat Flaherty was seen in quite a few baseball pictures after his 1934 screen debut. Flaherty can be seen in roles both large and small in Death on the Diamond (1934), Pride of the Yankees (1942), It Happened in Flatbush (1942), The Stratton Story (1949, as the Western All-Stars coach), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Winning Team (1952, as legendary umpire Bill Klem). In 1948's Babe Ruth Story, Flaherty not only essayed the role of Bill Corrigan, but also served as the film's technical advisor. Outside the realm of baseball, he was usually cast in blunt, muscle-bound roles, notably Fredric March's taciturn male nurse "Cuddles" in A Star is Born (1937). One of Pat Flaherty's most unusual assignments was Wheeler and Woolsey's Off Again, On Again (1937), in which, upon finding his wife (Patricia Wilder) in a compromising position with Bert Wheeler, he doesn't pummel the hapless Wheeler as expected, but instead meekly apologizes for his wife's flirtatiousness!

Trivia: Slight, grey-templed, bespectacled actor Harry Hayden was cast to best advantage as small-town store proprietors, city attorneys and minor bureaucrats. Dividing his time between stage and screen work from 1936, Hayden became one of the busiest members of Central Casting, appearing in everything from A-pictures like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) to the RKO 2-reelers of Leon Errol and Edgar Kennedy. Among his better-known unbilled assignments are horn factory owner Mr. Sharp (his partner is Mr. Pierce) in Laurel and Hardy's Saps at Sea (1940) and Farley Granger's harrumphing boss who announces brusquely that there'll be no Christmas bonus in O. Henry's Full House (1951). Hayden's final flurry of activity was in the role of next-door-neighbor Harry on the 1954-55 season of TV's The Stu Erwin Show (aka The Trouble with Father), in which he was afforded the most screen time he'd had in years -- though he remains uncredited in the syndicated prints of this popular series. From the mid '30s until his death in 1955, Harry Hayden and his actress wife Lela Bliss ran Beverly Hills' Bliss-Hayden Miniature Theatre, where several Hollywood aspirants were given an opportunity to learn their craft before live audiences; among the alumni of the Bliss-Hayden were Jon Hall, Veronica Lake, Doris Day, Craig Stevens, Debbie Reynolds, and Marilyn Monroe.

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

Trivia: Silver-tongued actor Douglas Dumbrille played just about every type in his long screen career, but it was as a dignified villain that he is best remembered. Born in Canada, Dumbrille did most of his stage work in the United States, breaking into films with His Woman in 1931. He bounced between supporting parts and unbilled bits in the early 1930s, usually at Warner Bros., where his sleek brand of skullduggery fit right in with the gangsters, shysters and political phonies popping up in most of the studio's 1930s product. Superb in modern dress roles, Dumbrille also excelled at costume villainy: it is claimed that, in Lives of the Bengal Lancers (1935), he was the first bad guy to growl, "We have ways of making you talk." The actor's pompous demeanor made him an ideal foil for such comedians as the Marx Brothers, with whom he appeared twice, and Abbott and Costello, who matched wits with Dumbrille in four different films. Sometimes, Dumbrille's reputation as a no-good was used to lead the audience astray; he was frequently cast as red-herring suspects in such murder mysteries as Castle in the Desert (1942), while in the Johnny Mack Brown western Flame of the West (1945), Dumbrille piqued the viewer's interest by playing a thoroughly honest, decent sheriff (surely he'd turn bad by the end, thought the audience -- but he didn't). In real life a gentle man whose diabolical features were softened by a pair of spectacles, Dumbrille mellowed his image as he grew older, often playing bemused officials and judges who couldn't make head nor tails of Gracie Allen's thought patterns on TV's The Burns and Allen Show. Late in life, a widowed Douglas Dumbrille married Patricia Mobray, daughter of his close friend -- and fellow screen villain -- Alan Mowbray.