Trivia: Beery was a character actor in silents and talkies and the half-brother of actor Noah Beery, Sr. and uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr. At age 16 (1902) he joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer; two years later he began singing in New York variety shows, then worked in both Broadway musicals and Kansas City stock companies. A peculiar career path led him to his first series of silent comedy shorts in the cross-dressing role of Sweedie, a Swedish maid, beginning with his move to Hollywood in 1913 when he signed a contract with Essanay; from there he did one- and two-reelers with Keystone and Universal, then tried unsuccessfully to produce films in Japan. Returning to Hollywood, Beery tended (like his half-brother Noah) to be cast as "heavies" and villains, though by the late '20s his performances were tinted with considerable humor. Although he did not have a smooth voice, he made the transition into talkies and soon achieved great success in the role of a retired boxer in The Champ (1931), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar (the previous year he had been nominated for his work in The Big House). The huge box office sales for The Champ propelled Beery into a position as one of Hollywood's top ten stars, and he ceased to be cast as heavies, instead adopting a tough, dim-witted, easy-going persona, and often playing lovable slobs. He appeared in several films with Marie Dressler, and for a time the two of them were among Hollywood's most noteworthy screen couples; later he often played opposite Marjorie Main. From 1916-18 he was married to actress Gloria Swanson, with whom he had co-starred in a series of Mack Sennett comedies.

Trivia: Actor/director/producer. In his early career, from the late '20s to the early '40s, Montgomery was an amiable light comedian and dramatic actor, appearing in almost 40 sound films before 1935. He starred opposite Norma Shearer in Private Lives (1931), Joan Crawford in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937), Carole Lombard in Hitchcock's comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Night Must Fall (1937) and Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). His career took a more serious turn after his stint in World War II. For his first film after returning, They Were Expendable (1945), Montgomery not only starred but assisted John Ford in the direction. He also starred in and directed the Raymond Chandler detective thriller Lady in the Lake, noted for its unique first-person point of view. His attentions then turned to politics and television. Montgomery gave "friendly" testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and by the mid '50s was a consultant to Republican President Eisenhower. As a prestigious television producer, he supervised the '50s dramatic anthology series Eye Witness (1953) and Robert Montgomery Presents (1950-57), which offered his daughter Elizabeth her acting debut and which won him an early Emmy Award in 1952.

Trivia: An actor with slicked-back hair, a jutting jaw and a hooked nose, Morris was the son of well-known Broadway performers. As a child he appeared in silents and as a teenager he began a stage acting career; he made his Broadway debut in 1918. He debuted onscreen in Alibi (1929), for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to a busy screen career, usually in gun-toting roles. He is best remembered as Boston Blackie, the character he played in a series of 13 films. He retired from the screen in 1956, returning in 1970 to play the fight manager in The Great White Hope (1970). Shortly thereafter he died of an overdose of barbiturates.

Trivia: At the turn of the century, 14-year-old Karl Dane first appeared on stage in the Copenhagen theater owned by his father. During the 1910s he traveled to Hollywood and in 1918 was cast in My Four Years in Germany and To Hell With the Kaiser both silent anti-German propaganda pieces. After his impressive portrayal of a U.S. infantryman in the World War I chronicle The Big Parade (1925) his popularity and film roles declined and he began working as a character comedian, often opposite George K. Arthur. Because he retained his heavy Danish accent, his acting career was finished at the end of the silent-film era. Sadly, at the age of 48, Karl Dane committed suicide.

Trivia: He was an established matinee idol in his mid-thirties when he broke into films in 1915. After a career interruption caused by service in the cavalry in World War I, he returned to films as a popular leading man. Throughout the '20s, he was very busy onscreen playing dignified, well-mannered romantic heroes. For his work in The Patriot (1928), he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Stone's career remained very busy through the mid-'30s, and then continued at a slower pace through the early '50s; in the early sound era, when he was in his fifties, he played mature leads for some time before moving into character roles. Stone is best remembered as Judge Hardy, Andy's father in the Andy Hardy series of films with Mickey Rooney; typically, later in his career, he played Judge Hardy-like senior citizens. Ultimately, he appeared in over 200 films, almost all of them at MGM.

Trivia: Born into a family of vaudevillians (her parents were the popular "bickering" comedy team of Johnny Hyams and Leila McIntyre), Leila Hyams started out as a juvenile performer. Leila's movie career was an outgrowth of her many appearances in magazine advertisements of the 1920s. She often played conventional ingenues, though she was allowed a bit more three-dimensionality in such roles as a baseball team owner in The Busher (1927), the prime murder suspect in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), and the wisecracking circus-artiste heroine in Freaks (1932). Hyams' finest film hour was as the good-natured saloon girl who teaches Roland Young how to play the drums in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). Retiring from the screen in 1936, Leila Hyams maintained her show business contacts through the activities of her husband, agent Phil Berg.

Trivia: Stocky, stiff-backed actor DeWitt C. Jennings made his film bow in Cecil B. DeMille's The Warrens of Virginia (1915). After scores of silents, Jennings made a seamless transition to talkies, appearing in half a dozen films in 1929 alone. He was usually cast as gruff police captains or baffled suburban fathers (he was Harold Lloyd's dad in 1932's Movie Crazy). Generally dignified and reserved, DeWitt C. Jennings was afforded a rare opportunity to tear a passion to tatters as the "mystery" murderer (one of the most obvious in movie history) in 1934's Death on the Diamond.

Trivia: Towering character actor Matthew Betz toured in vaudeville and stock before making his film debut in 1921. Betz' best-remembered silent-screen assignment was as Schani Eberle in Von Stroheim's The Wedding March. He proved that sound would be no obstacle to his career by appearing in the first all-talkie horror film The Terror (1928). Most often cast as a menacing gangster, Betz was also seen in the plum role of Hugo the Mute in 1932's Mystery of the Wax Museum. Undoubtedly his least taxing role was in Salvation Nell (1931), in which he was cast as "Matthew Betz"!

Trivia: Descended from an old, well-established performing family, American actress Claire McDowell was one of those weathered character players who seemed to have been born at the age of 50. Only 32 years old when she first stepped before Billy Bitzer's camera at Biograph studios in 1910, Ms. McDowell almost immediately found herself playing everyone's mother. She spent the next four years working for D.W. Griffith before retiring to raise a family; her husband was fellow Griffith player Charles Hill Mailes. Back in films in 1917, McDowell continued her celluloid maternal career. Perhaps her most celebrated matriarchal role was as John Gilbert's mother in The Big Parade (1924), in which she has an unbearably poignant scene as she embraces her amputee son, recalling in flashback when her infant boy took his first steps. Ms. McDowell also has some potent sequences as Ramon Novarro's mother in Ben-Hur; stricken with leprosy, she dares not embrace her sleeping son, but instead kisses the stones upon which he lies. Semi-retired when talkies came in, Claire McDowell occasionally emerged to play bits, often in the company of her husband (as in Murder By Television [1935]). One of her last last notable roles, albeit unbilled, was as the ailing mother (again!) who faints on the bus in It Happened One Night (1934).

Trivia: Boasting a colorful show-biz background as a circus and vaudeville performer, Robert Emmet O'Connor entered films in 1926. Blessed with a pudgy Irish mug that could convey both jocularity and menace, O'Connor was most often cast as cops and detectives, some of them honest and lovable, some of them corrupt and pugnacious. His roles ranged from such hefty assignments as the flustered plainclothesman Henderson in Night at the Opera (1935) to such bits as the traffic cop who is confused by Jimmy Cagney's barrage of Yiddish in Taxi! (1932). One of his most famous non-cop roles was warm-hearted bootlegger Paddy Ryan in Public Enemy. During the 1940s, O'Connor was a contract player at MGM, showing up in everything from Our Gang comedies to the live-action prologue of the Tex Avery cartoon classic Who Killed Who? (1944). Robert Emmet O'Connor's last film role was Paramount studio-guard Jonesy in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Twelve years later, he died of injuries sustained in a fire.

Trivia: Mississippi-born Roscoe Ates spent a good portion of his childhood overcoming a severe stammer. Entering show business as a concert violinist, the shriveled, pop-eyed Ates found the money was better as a vaudeville comedian, reviving his long-gone stutter for humorous effect. In films from 1929, Ates appeared in sizeable roles in such films as The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932) and Alice in Wonderland (1933), and also starred in his own short subject series with RKO and Vitaphone. Though his trademarked stammer is something of an endurance test when seen today, it paid off in big laughs in the 1930s, when speech impediments were considered the ne plus ultra of hilarity. By the late 1930s Ates's popularity waned, and he was reduced to unbilled bits in such films as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Dixie (1942). His best showing during the 1940s was as comic sidekick to singing cowboy Eddie Dean in a series of 15 low-budget westerns. Remaining busy in films and on TV into the 1960s, Roscoe Ates made his last appearance in the 1961 Jerry Lewis comedy The Errand Boy.

Trivia: American actor Tom Kennedy at first entertained no notions of becoming a performer. An honor student in college, Tom excelled as an athlete; he played football, wrestled, and won the national amateur heavyweight boxing title in 1908. Eschewing a job with the New York City police force for a boxing career, Kennedy didn't have anything to do with movies until he was hired as Douglas Fairbanks Sr.'s trainer in 1915. Shortly afterward, he was hired for small parts at the Keystone Studios and remained primarily a bit actor throughout the silent period. Graduating to supporting roles in talkies, he was often cast as a dumb cop or an easily confused gangster. In 1935, Kennedy achieved star billing by teaming with comedian Monty Collins in a series of 11 Columbia two-reelers. In most of these, notably the hilarious Free Rent (1936), Tom was cast as a lummox whose density caused no end of trouble to the sarcastic Collins. Outside of his short subject work, Tom's most memorable screen appearances occured in Warner Bros' Torchy Blaine B-pictures, in which he was cast as the cretinous, poetry-spouting detective Gahagan. Tom Kennedy stayed active in films into the early '60s, looking and sounding just about the same as he had in the '30s; his most conspicuous screen bits in his last years were in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).