Trivia: South African-born Basil Rathbone was the son of a British mining engineer working in Johannesburg. After a brief career as an insurance agent, the 19-year-old aspiring actor joined his cousin's repertory group. World War I service as a lieutenant in Liverpool Scottish Regiment followed, then a rapid ascension to leading-man status on the British stage. Rathbone's movie debut was in the London-filmed The Fruitful Vine (1921). Tall, well profiled, and blessed with a commanding stage voice, Rathbone shifted from modern-dress productions to Shakespeare and back again with finesse. Very much in demand in the early talkie era, one of Rathbone's earliest American films was The Bishop Murder Case (1930), in which, as erudite amateur sleuth Philo Vance, he was presciently referred to by one of the characters as "Sherlock Holmes." He was seldom more effective than when cast in costume dramas as a civilized but cold-hearted villain: Murdstone in David Copperfield (1934), Evremonde in Tale of Two Cities (1935), and Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (Rathbone was a good friend of Robin Hood star Errol Flynn -- and a far better swordsman). Never content with shallow, one-note performances, Rathbone often brought a touch of humanity and pathos to such stock "heavies" as Karenin in Anna Karenina (1936) and Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Pompeii (1936). He was Oscar-nominated for his portrayals of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and the crotchety Louis XVI in If I Were King (1938). In 1939, Rathbone was cast as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first of 14 screen appearances as Conan Doyle's master detective. He also played Holmes on radio from 1939 through 1946, and in 1952 returned to the character (despite his despairing comments that Holmes had hopelessly "typed" him in films) in the Broadway flop The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was written by his wife, Ouida Bergere. Famous for giving some of Hollywood's most elegant and elaborate parties, Rathbone left the West Coast in 1947 to return to Broadway in Washington Square. He made a movie comeback in 1954, essaying saturnine character roles in such films as We're No Angels (1955), The Court Jester (1956), and The Last Hurrah (1958). Alas, like many Hollywood veterans, Rathbone often found the pickings lean in the 1960s, compelling him to accept roles in such inconsequential quickies as The Comedy of Terrors (1964) and Hillbillies in the Haunted House (1967). He could take consolation in the fact that these negligible films enabled him to finance projects that he truly cared about, such as his college lecture tours and his Caedmon Record transcriptions of the works of Shakespeare. Basil Rathbone's autobiography, In and Out of Character, was published in 1962.

Trivia: Though a British subject through and through, actor Nigel Bruce was born in Mexico while his parents were on vacation there. His education was interrupted by service in World War I, during which he suffered a leg injury and was confined to a wheelchair for the duration. At the end of the war, Bruce pursued an acting career, making his stage debut in The Creaking Door (1920). A stint in British silent pictures began in 1928, after which Bruce divided his time between stage and screen, finally settling in Hollywood in 1934 (though he continued to make sporadic appearances in such British films as The Scarlet Pimpernel). Nigel's first Hollywood picture was Springtime for Henry (1934), and soon he'd carved a niche for himself in roles as bumbling, befuddled middle-aged English gentlemen. It was this quality which led Bruce to being cast as Sherlock Holmes' companion Dr. Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), a pleasurable assignment in that the film's Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was one of Bruce's oldest and closest friends. While Bruce's interpretation of Watson is out of favor with some Holmes purists (who prefer the more intelligent Watson of the original Conan Doyle stories), the actor played the role in 14 feature films, successfully cementing the cinema image of Sherlock's somewhat slower, older compatriot - even though he was in fact three years younger than Rathbone. Bruce continued to play Dr. Watson on a popular Sherlock Holmes radio series, even after Rathbone had deserted the role of Holmes in 1946. Bruce's last film role was in the pioneering 3-D feature, Bwana Devil (1952). He fell ill and died in 1953, missing the opportunity to be reunited with Basil Rathbone in a Sherlock Holmes theatrical production.

Trivia: New York-born Ursula Eileen Patricia Augustus Fraser Morison was once described by the Hollywood press as a "blond brunette," that is, a brunette with the vivacity of a blonde. She also had what, at 39 inches, was considered the longest hair in Hollywood. The daughter of a playwright/actor and a theatrical agent, Patricia Morison studied at the Art Students League in New York and also trained in dance with Martha Graham. At 19, she was working as a dress designer and thinking of a career in either art or dance, but was roped into an audition by a friend, and suddenly found herself with a stage career. Morison understudied for Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina and appeared in The Two Bouquets before being offered a screen test and a contract with Paramount in 1938, at the age of 24. Her stay in Hollywood was not a happy one, as the studio tried to alter her image and generally put her into less-than-stellar films, such as Persons in Hiding, Rangers of Fortune, and Tarzan and the Huntress. Among the few major films she did were The Fallen Sparrow starring John Garfield, Song of Bernadette, the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn romantic comedy Without Love, and Dressed to Kill, the last of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies.Fortunately, she had done some singing on USO tours during the war and had taken the trouble to train her voice under the instruction of Richard Borchert. Among those who heard her sing in Hollywood was Cole Porter, who -- after being satisfied that Morison had the vivacity required for the role -- pushed her for the part of Lili Vanessi in the musical Kiss Me, Kate, over the objections of the producer and director. With further training from Constance Collier, Morison became a star in the biggest hit of Porter's career, as the shrewish actress who is tamed by Alfred Drake. Morison appeared in over 1000 performances of the show, on Broadway and later in the British production, and also reunited with Drake to do it on television on the Hallmark Hall of Fame anthology series. Since the early '50s, she has also appeared in stage productions of The King And I, Kismet, The Merry Widow, and Song of Norway. She has appeared in two movies since, one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s, and done occasional television work (most visibly an episode of Cheers in which she plays the corporate wife who engages Woody to entertain as a clown at her grandchild's birthday party), and pursued her early aspirations as a painter, her work enjoying numerous showings in Los Angeles. In 1999, Morison, along with the rest of the surviving original cast, were saluted by the cast of the successful Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate.

Trivia: Bespectacled, dignified British stage actor Frederick Worlock came to Hollywood in 1938. During the war years, Worlock played many professorial roles, some benign, some villainous. A semi-regular in Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, he essayed such parts as Geoffrey Musgrave in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943). Active until 1966, Frederick Worlock's final assignments included a voice-over in the Disney cartoon feature 101 Dalmations (1961).

Trivia: Carl Harbord was a very busy English actor from the outset of his career, on stage and later in movies, and had the distinction of appearing in one of the earliest dramas ever broadcast by the BBC. Born in Salcombe, Devonshire, England, Harbord began working on stage in the early '20s, and his theatrical appearances included work in The Painted Veil, When Ladies Meet, and The Happy Husband. In 1932, as the BBC began experimental television broadcasts, Harbord starred opposite Isobel Elsom in The Christmas Present, which was one of the very first dramas ever shown on television. Harbord entered motion pictures in 1928 as Lt. Gunther in Bolibar, a historical drama directed by Walter Summers. He easily made the transition to sound and among the early talkies he appeared in was a now-forgotten 1929 British-made version of Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer, directed by Arthur Robinson (and featuring a young Ray Milland in a tiny role). Harbord was busy in British films right up through 1937, although his earlier films tended to be more notable, such as his portrayal of one of the doomed Australian soldiers in Anthony Asquith's 1931 drama Tell England (aka The Battle of Gallipoli). After 1937, Harbord ceased working in British films and his screen career resumed in Hollywood in 1942 with his performance as Blake in the Technicolor action vehicle Captains of the Clouds, starring James Cagney. In middle age in Hollywood, Harbord usually played small but important character roles in good movies, such as Zoltan Korda's Sahara and Roy William Neill's final Sherlock Holmes series entry with Basil Rathbone, Dressed to Kill, in 1946. In 1957, the year before his death, Harbord appeared on Broadway in Hide and Seek, an atomic-age drama that also starred Rathbone and Barry Morse.

Trivia: There's a bit of a cloud surrounding the origins of character actor Harry Cording. The 1970 biographical volume The Versatiles lists his birthplace as New York City, while the exhaustive encyclopedia Who Was Who in Hollywood states that Cording was born in England. Whatever the case, Cording made his mark from 1925 through 1955 in distinctly American roles, usually portraying sadistic western bad guys. A break from his domestic villainy occurred in the 1934 Universal horror film The Black Cat, in which a heavily-made-up Harry Cording played the foreboding, zombie-like servant to Satan-worshipping Boris Karloff.

Trivia: Diminutive Scottish stage and screen actress Mary Gordon was seemingly placed on this earth to play care-worn mothers, charwomen and housekeepers. In films from the silent area (watch for her towards the end of the 1928 Joan Crawford feature Our Dancing Daughters), Gordon played roles ranging from silent one-scene bits to full-featured support. She frequently acted with Laurel and Hardy, most prominently as the stern Scots innkeeper Mrs. Bickerdyke in 1935's Bonnie Scotland. Gordon was also a favorite of director John Ford, portraying Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Englishwomen with equal aplomb (and sometimes with the same accent). She was the screen mother of actors as diverse as Jimmy Cagney, Leo Gorcey and Lou Costello; she parodied this grey-haired matriarch image in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer (1945), wherein her tearful court testimony on behalf of her son (Ed Brophy) is accompanied by a live violinist. Mary Gordon is most fondly remembered by film buffs for her recurring role as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films of 1939-46 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a role she carried over to the Holmes radio series of the '40s.

Trivia: Ian Wolfe was determined to become an actor even as a youth in his hometown of Canton, IL. His Broadway debut was in the warhorse Lionel Barrymore vehicle The Claw. While acting with Katherine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Wolfe was spotted by MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who brought the actor to Hollywood to re-create his Barretts role. Though not yet 40, Wolfe had the receding hairline and lined features necessary for aged character roles. By his own count, Wolfe appeared in over 200 films, often uncredited assignments in the roles of judges, attorneys, butlers, and shopkeepers. Some of his best screen moments occurred in producer Val Lewton's Bedlam (1946), wherein Wolfe played an 18th century scientist confined to a mental asylum for proposing the invention of motion pictures. Because his actual age was difficult to pinpoint, Wolfe kept working into the 1990s (and his nineties); he was a particular favorite of TV's MTM productions, appearing on such sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Rhoda. Co-workers during this period noted affectionately that, despite his many years as a professional, Wolfe was always seized with "stage fright" just before walking on the set. Though often cast in timid roles, Ian Wolfe was quite outspoken and fiercely defensive of his craft; when asked what he thought of certain method actors who insist upon playing extensions of "themselves," Wolfe snapped that he became an actor to pretend to be other people.

Trivia: Over her long career, Lillian Bronson played numerous small character roles in a wide variety of films. The New York City native made her screen debut in The Happy Land (1943) starring Don Ameche. After many film appearances, she branched out into television, working as a regular on shows like Kings Row, where she played Grandma from 1955 to 1956, and Date With the Angels between 1957 and 1958. Bronson also guest starred on numerous television shows, especially Westerns like The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Guns of Will Sonnett.

Trivia: A former circus and minstrel-show performer, British actor Holmes Herbert toured on the provincial-theatre circuit as a juvenile in the early 1900s. Born Edward Sanger, Herbert adopted his professional first name out of admiration for Sherlock Holmes -- a role which, worse luck, he never got to play. Herbert never appeared in films in his native country; he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, appeared in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1918), and never looked homeward. Talking pictures enabled Holmes Herbert to join such countrymen as Reginald Denny and Roland Young in portraying "typical" British gentlemen. The stately, dynamic-featured Herbert nearly always appeared in a dinner jacket, selflessly comforting the heroine as she pined for the man she really loved. He received some of his best roles in the early-talkie era; he appeared as a soft-spoken police inspector in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), then recreated the role for the 1937 remake. Herbert also appeared as Dr. Lanyon, Henry Jekyll's closest friend and confidante in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). By the '40s, many of Herbert's roles were uncredited, but he was still able to make a maximum impression with a minimum of lines in such roles as the village council head in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Herbert's second wife was another supporting-cast stalwart of the '30s, Beryl Mercer (best remembered as James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy [1931]). Holmes Herbert remained in films until 1952's The Brigand; reportedly, he also appeared in a few early west-coast television productions.

Trivia: Piping-voice, hamster-faced Scottish character actor Olaf Hytten left the British stage for films in 1921. By the time the talkie era rolled around, Hytten was firmly established in Hollywood, playing an abundance of butlers and high-society gentlemen. The actor was primarily confined to one or two-line bits in such films as Platinum Blonde (1931), The Sphinx (1933), Bonnie Scotland (1935), Beloved Rebel (1936), The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Bride Came COD (1941). He was a semi-regular of the Universal B-unit in the '40s, appearing in substantial roles as military men and police official in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and as burgomeisters and innkeepers in the studio's many horror films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, etc.) Olaf Hytten was active until at least 1956; one of his more memorable assignments of the '50s was as the larcenous butler who participates in a scheme to drive Daily Planet editor Perry White crazy in the "Great Caesar's Ghost" episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman.

Trivia: British actor Leyland Hodgson launched his theatrical career at the advanced age of six. From 1915 to 1919, Hodgson toured the British provinces of the Orient with the Bandmann Opera Company, then retraced most of this tour as head of his own stock company. A star of the Australian stage from 1920 to 1929, Hodgson moved to Hollywood, where he made his film bow in RKO's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1930). Largely confined to minor roles in films, Hodgson enjoyed some prominence as a regular of Universal's Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s. Otherwise, he contented himself with bits as butlers, military officers, hotel clerks, reporters and chauffeurs until his retirement in 1948. Either by accident or design, Leyland Hodgson was frequently teamed on screen with another busy British utilitarian player, Charles Irvin.

Trivia: Reversing the usual procedure, Scottish actor Edmund Breon began his film career in Hollywood in 1928, then returned to the British Isles in 1932. Breon was most often seen in self-effacing roles, usually military in nature. He was cast as Lt. Bathurst in The Dawn Patrol (1930), Colonel Morgan in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), and General Huddleston in Gaslight (1944). Among Edmund Breon's late-'40s assignments was the role of Julian Emery in the Sherlock Holmes opus Dressed to Kill (1946), an indication perhaps that the part had been slated for the real Gilbert Emery, a British actor who, like Breon, specialized in humble, passive characterizations.