Trivia: The quintessential tough guy, Humphrey Bogart remains one of Hollywood's most enduring legends and one of the most beloved stars of all time. While a major celebrity during his own lifetime, Bogart's appeal has grown almost exponentially in the years following his death, and his inimitable onscreen persona -- hard-bitten, cynical, and enigmatic -- continues to cast a monumental shadow over the motion picture landscape. Sensitive yet masculine, cavalier yet heroic, his ambiguities and contradictions combined to create a larger-than-life image which remains the archetype of the contemporary antihero. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born December 25, 1899, in New York City. Upon expulsion from Andover, Massachusetts' Phillips Academy, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a ship's gunner. While roughhousing on the vessel's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, a splinter becoming lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became among his most distinctive onscreen qualities. (For years his injuries were attributed to wounds suffered in battle, although the splinter story is now more commonly accepted.) After the war, Bogart returned to New York to accept a position on Broadway as a theatrical manager; beginning in 1920, he also started appearing onstage, but earned little notice within the performing community. In the late '20s, Bogart followed a few actor friends who had decided to relocate to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance opposite Helen Hayes in the 1928 short The Dancing Town, followed by the 1930 feature Up the River, which cast him as a hard-bitten prisoner. Warner Bros. soon signed him to a 550-dollars-a-week contract, and over the next five years he appeared in dozens of motion pictures, emerging as the perfect heavy in films like 1936's The Petrified Forest, 1937's Dead End, and 1939's The Roaring Twenties. The 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory, on the other hand, offered Bogart the opportunity to break out of his gangster stereotype, and he delivered with a strong performance indicative of his true range and depth as a performer. The year 1941 proved to be Bogart's breakthrough year, as his recent success brought him to the attention of Raoul Walsh for the acclaimed High Sierra. He was then recruited by first-time director John Huston, who cast him in the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; as gumshoe Sam Spade, Bogart enjoyed one of his most legendary roles, achieving true stardom and establishing the archetype for all hardboiled heroes to follow. A year later he accepted a lead in Michael Curtiz's romantic drama Casablanca. The end result was one of the most beloved films in the Hollywood canon, garnering Bogart his first Academy Award nomination as well as an Oscar win in the Best Picture category. Bogart then teamed with director Howard Hawks for his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, appearing for the first time opposite actress Lauren Bacall. Their onscreen chemistry was electric, and by the time they reunited two years later in Hawks' masterful film noir The Big Sleep, they had also married in real life. Subsequent pairings in 1947's Dark Passage and 1948's Key Largo cemented the Bogey and Bacall pairing as one of the screen's most legendary romances. His other key relationship remained his frequent collaboration with Huston, who helmed 1948's superb The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In Huston, Bogart found a director sympathetic to his tough-as-nails persona who was also capable of subverting that image. He often cast the actor against type, to stunning effect; under Huston's sure hand, he won his lone Oscar in 1951's The African Queen.Bogart's other pivotal director of the period was Nicholas Ray, who helmed 1949's Knock on Any Door and 1950's brilliant In a Lonely Place for the star's production company Santana. After reuniting with Huston in 1953's Beat the Devil, Bogart mounted three wildly different back-to-back 1954 efforts -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tearful The Barefoot Contessa, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina, and Edward Dmytryk's historical drama The Caine Mutiny -- which revealed new, unseen dimensions to his talents. His subsequent work was similarly diffuse, ranging in tone from the grim 1955 thriller The Desperate Hours to the comedy We're No Angels. After completing the 1956 boxing drama The Harder They Fall, Bogart was forced to undergo cancer surgery and died in his sleep on January 14, 1957.

Trivia: Though often overshadowed by some of her female contemporaries as the years passed, Jennifer Jones came to embody one of the preeminent examples of a Hollywood star. With qualities that transcended preternatural beauty, she projected the sort of charisma that cannot be feigned, courting legions of fans in the process, as she graced one film after another with her presence. And then, just as suddenly as she had risen to greatness, Jones dropped out of the limelight and withdrew into anonymity, spending the last several decades of her life well outside of the public eye. Jennifer Jones began life in Tulsa, OK, as Phyllis Isley, the daughter of vaudeville performers. Ensconced in show business from the beginning, she dreamed of establishing herself as an actress from early childhood. As a young woman, Isley studied at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts and revealed incredible promise; during that tenure, she also met and grew enchanted with a young actor named Robert Walker; they did summer stock together, fell deeply in love, married, and parented two children, Robert Walker, Jr., and Michael Ross Walker. Then Hollywood beckoned to Isley, first with a supporting role in a Republic western, and then in the form of a talent agent from megaproducer David O. Selznick, the giant responsible for Gone With the Wind. Though the agent sensed greatness from the ingenue's initial reading and arranged a meeting between Isley and Selznick without hesitation, Isley reportedly felt ashamed by the Republic B picture and attempted to obscure its presence. She needn't have worried; the initial meeting between Selznick and Isley (whom he renamed Jennifer Jones) permanently changed both of their lives and made Jones a household name. For years, film historians have speculated (and fans have gossiped) about the initial exchanges that materialized between Jones and Selznick, the history of their relationship, and some of the tragedies surrounding it. Many of the exact details will never be known, but readily apparent were Selznick's vision of Jones as his next great star, Jones's decision to leave and then divorce Walker and marry Selznick, and Walker's understandable difficulty in handling these events. By all accounts an emotionally fragile individual (though an incredibly kind and sensitive one), Walker himself moved to Hollywood and experienced a brief period of stardom that peaked with a lead role in Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train, but he could never quite emotionally adjust to the end of his marriage, or the fact that Jones had left him and married the single most powerful and wealthy person in Hollywood. On a note of sad irony, the two appeared opposite one another as former lovers in a blockbuster produced by Selznick, the 1944 Since You Went Away. Tragically, Walker struggled for years to cope with the divorce, and his life ended at the age of 32, when, following a nervous breakdown and an institutionalization, he received a fatal dose of sodium amatol from a psychiatrist.Jones did the bulk of her early work under new husband Selznick's aegis, and for 15-20 years her career thrived. Selznick preferred casting her in romantic material (often with a tragic undercurrent), and his instincts struck a chord with the public. After receiving an Oscar for her turn as the scorned and martyred Catholic saint Bernadette in the 1943 religious drama The Song of Bernadette, she starred opposite Joseph Cotten in the 1948 fantasy romance Portrait of Jennie (also a huge hit), played Emma Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 Madame Bovary, and the tragic title character in William Wyler's Theodore Dreiser adaptation Carrie (1952). Yet Jones also unveiled a wicked flair for comedy on a number of occasions, notably as an English cockney plumber in Ernst Lubitsch's magnificent 1946 farce Cluny Brown, and as an English lord's wife plagued by pathological lying in the unfairly maligned John Huston comedy Beat the Devil (1953). Jones continued her acting work into the late '60s, and she racked up a series of four additional Oscar nods for various performances, yet her screen appearances grew less and less frequent. Her private life and marriage to Selznick reportedly brought its share of complications, and the couple's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage; following Selznick's death in June 1965, Jones endured a lengthy period of severe depression. The actress remarried philanthropist Norton Simon in the early '70s, and co-ran a foundation that he chaired, with the assistance of various celebrity friends. The second marriage lasted until Simon's death in the summer of 1993. Jones accepted one of her final screen roles in the 1974 disaster opus The Towering Inferno, a part for which she drew a substantial amount of acclaim. The actress died in December 2009 at the age of 90.

Trivia: A charming, rotund, portly, double-chinned character actor of British and American stage and screen, Robert Morley tended to be cast in jovial or pompous comedic roles. He was educated in England, Germany, France, and Italy, intending to go into diplomacy. He switched to acting and studied theater at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Morley debuted on the London stage in 1929, and on Broadway in 1938 when he reprised his London performance in the title role of Oscar Wilde. Also in 1938, he debuted onscreen in the Hollywood film Marie Antoinette, portraying the feeble-minded Louis XVI opposite Norma Shearer; for that performance he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to play supporting roles in many films on both sides of the Atlantic. He was also a playwright; one of his plays, Edward My Son (written with Noel Langley), became a film in 1949. He was frequently seen as a witty, erudite guest on TV talk shows, and he was the TV commercial spokesman for British Airways.

Trivia: With the possible exception of Edward G. Robinson, no actor has so often been the target of impressionists as the inimitable, Hungarian-born Peter Lorre. Leaving his family home at the age of 17, Lorre sought out work as an actor, toiling as a bank clerk during down periods. He went the starving-artist route in Switzerland and Austria before settling in Germany, where he became a favorite of playwright Bertolt Brecht. For most of his first seven years as a professional actor, Lorre employed his familiar repertoire of wide eyes, toothy grin, and nasal voice to invoke laughs rather than shudders. In fact, he was appearing in a stage comedy at the same time that he was filming his breakthrough picture M (1931), in which he was cast as a sniveling child murderer. When Hitler ascended to power in 1933, Lorre fled to Paris, and then to London, where he appeared in his first English-language film, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Although the monolingual Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically for Hitchcock, he picked up English fairly rapidly, and, by 1935, was well equipped both vocally and psychologically to take on Hollywood. On the strength of M, Lorre was initially cast in roles calling for varying degrees of madness, such as the love-obsessed surgeon in Mad Love (1935) and the existentialist killer in Crime and Punishment (1935). Signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936, Lorre asked for and received a chance to play a good guy for a change. He starred in eight installments of the Mr. Moto series, playing an ever-polite (albeit well versed in karate) Japanese detective. When the series folded in 1939, Lorre freelanced in villainous roles at several studios. While under contract to Warner Bros., Lorre played effeminate thief Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), launching an unofficial series of Warner films in which Lorre was teamed with his Falcon co-star Sidney Greenstreet. During this period, Lorre's co-workers either adored or reviled him for his wicked sense of humor and bizarre on-set behavior. As far as director Jean Negulesco was concerned, Lorre was the finest actor in Hollywood; Negulesco fought bitterly with the studio brass for permission to cast Lorre as the sympathetic leading man in The Mask of Dimitrios (1946), in which the diminutive actor gave one of his finest and subtlest performances. In 1951, Lorre briefly returned to Germany, where he directed and starred in the intriguing (if not wholly successful) postwar psychological drama The Lost One. The '50s were a particularly busy time for Lorre; he performed frequently on such live television anthologies as Climax; guested on comedy and variety shows; and continued to appear in character parts in films. He remained a popular commodity into the '60s, especially after co-starring with the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone in a series of tongue-in-cheek Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for filmmaker Roger Corman. Lorre's last film, completed just a few months before his fatal heart attack in 1964, was Jerry Lewis' The Patsy, in which, ironically, the dourly demonic Lorre played a director of comedy films.

Trivia: A one-time steeplejack jockey, British actor Edward Underdown began his film career in 1934, but the starring roles didn't come until the mid '40s. Tall and good looking in a bookish sort of way, Underdown built his reputation on such postwar films as The October Man (1947), The Dark Man (1952), Shadow Man (1954), and the Humphrey Bogart/John Huston/Truman Capote cult collaboration Beat the Devil (1954). In the latter film Underdown was cast as Jennifer Jones' dull, plodding husband; while this characterization worked to the benefit of Beat the Devil, unfortunately most of Underdown's '50s performances were equally dull and plodding. By the mid '60s, Edward Underdown was playing such one-scene parts as his "Air Vice Marshall" in the 1965 James Bond thriller Thunderball.

Trivia: Ivor Barnard was a busy actor for 40 years on stage and screen, with dozens of plays and more than 60 movies to his credit. In England, he was respected enough, and got leading roles right into his sixties, including the part of Mr. Murdoch in the 1948 London production of Brigadoon. If there was a sad element to his career, it was that he had to wait until the final year of his life -- at the age of 66, in the role of would-be assassin Major Ross in John Huston's Beat the Devil -- to finally get noticed by American film critics, who thought him delightful. Barnard was almost too good at what he did, melting into the character roles that were his forte onscreen. Apart from a bit part in a 1920 silent, he confined his work on the stage until the dawn of the sound era. He was very active with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company in the teens, and was established in London by the early '20s. Barnard's movie career began with a small part in Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of John Galsworthy's play The Skin Game. Two years later, he got one of the more prominent movie roles of his career when he played Dr. Falke, the character who sets the story in motion when he is the victim of a practical joke, in William Thiele's screen adaptation of Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus. Most of the parts that Barnard portrayed, however, were much smaller, with as little as a single line of dialogue, though he often made them memorable, such as his performance as the sarcastic bystander in the opening scene of Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard's Pygmalion (1938). Asquith thought enough of Barnard to use him in The Importance of Being Earnest 14 years later. Barnard also played small but memorable parts in David Lean's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. It fell to John Huston to give him the most prominent screen time of his career, however, as the diminutive Ross in Beat the Devil, in which Barnard managed to hold his own in a cast that included Humphrey Bogart, Robert Morley, and Peter Lorre.

Trivia: One of the greatest comic talents of his generation, Peter Sellers had an exceptional gift for losing himself in a character -- so much so that, beyond his remarkable skill as a performer and his fondness for the humor of the absurd, it's difficult to draw a connection between many of his best performances. While his fondness for playing multiple roles in the same film may have seemed like a stunt coming from many other actors, Sellers had the ability to make each character he played seem distinct and different, and while he was known and loved as a funnyman, only in a handful of roles was he able to explore the full range of his gifts, which suggested he could have had just as strong a career as a dramatic actor.Born Richard Henry Sellers on September 8, 1925, Sellers was nicknamed "Peter" by his parents, Bill and Agnes Sellers, in memory of his brother, who was a stillbirth. Bill and Agnes made their living as performers on the British vaudeville circuit, and Sellers made his first appearance on-stage only two days after his birth, when his father brought out his infant son during an encore. As a child, Sellers studied dance at the behest of his parents when not occupied with his studies at St. Aloysius' Boarding and Day School for Boys. Sellers also developed a knack for music, and in his teens began playing drums with local dance bands. Shortly after his 18th birthday, Sellers joined the Royal Air Force, and became part of a troupe of entertainers who performed at RAF camps both in England and abroad. During his time in the service, Sellers met fellow comedians Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine; after the war, they found work as performers with the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Sellers hoped to follow suit. After several failed auditions, Sellers struck upon the idea of calling Roy Speer, a BBC producer, posing as one of the network's top actors. Sellers gave Sellers an enthusiastic recommendation, and Speer gave him a spot on the radio series Show Time.After he signed on with the BBC, Sellers became reacquainted with Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine, and together they comprised the cast of The Goon Show, which upon its debut in 1949 became one of Great Britain's most popular radio shows; the absurd and often surreal humor of the Goons would prove to be the first glimmer of the British Comedy Movement of the '60s and '70s, paving the way for Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The Goon Show provided Sellers with his entry into film acting, as he appeared in several short comedies alongside Milligan and Secombe, as well as the feature film Down Among the Z Men (aka The Goon Movie). Sellers also married for the first time during the height of Goon-mania, wedding Anne Howe in the fall of 1951. Sellers won his first significant non-Goon screen role in 1955, with the classic Alec Guinness comedy The Ladykillers, but his first international hit would have to wait until 1958, when he appeared in George Pal's big-budget musical Tom Thumb. In 1959, Sellers appeared in the satiric comedy I'm All Right, Jack, which earned him Best Actor honors from the British Film Academy; the same year, Sellers enjoyed a major international success with The Mouse That Roared, in which he played three different roles (one of them a woman). While a bona-fide international comedy star, Sellers had a hard time finding roles that made the most of his talents, and it wasn't until after a handful of unremarkable features that he received a pair of roles that allowed him to truly shine. In 1961, Sellers starred as an Indian physician in The Millionairess opposite Sophia Loren, based on a play by George Bernard Shaw (Sellers and Loren would also record a comic song together, "Goodness Gracious Me," which was a hit single in Britain), and a year later Stanley Kubrick cast him as Claire Quilty in his controversial adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita.1964 would prove to be a very big year for Peter Sellers; he would marry actress Britt Ekland in February of that year (his marriage to Anne Howe ended in divorce in 1961), and he starred in four of his most memorable films: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which reunited him with Stanley Kubrick and gave him star turns in three different roles; The World of Henry Orient, a comedy which won a small but devoted cult following; The Pink Panther, in which Sellers gave his first performance as the bumbling French detective Inspector Clouseau, and that film's first sequel, A Shot in the Dark. Sellers, who was described by many who knew him as a workaholic, maintained a busy schedule over the next ten years, but while the quality of his own work was consistently strong, many of the films he appeared in were sadly undistinguished, with a handful of exceptions, among them I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, The Wrong Box, and The Optimists. Sellers' appeal at the box office began to wane, and his love life took a beating as well -- he divorced Britt Ekland in 1968 and married Miranda Quarry in 1969, only to see that marriage end in 1971. But Sellers made a striking comeback in 1974 with The Return of the Pink Panther, in which he revisited his role as Inspector Clouseau. The film was a massive international hit, and Sellers would play Clouseau two more times, in The Pink Panther Strikes Again and The Revenge of the Pink Panther, though he became critical of the formulaic material in the films and would begin writing a script for a sixth Pink Panther film without the input of Blake Edwards, who had written and directed the other films in the series.In 1977, Sellers took his fourth wife, actress Lynne Frederick, and he managed to rack up a few moderate box-office successes outside the Pink Panther series with Murder by Death and The Prisoner of Zenda. But in 1979, Sellers gave perhaps his greatest performance ever as Chance, a simpleton gardener whose babblings about plants are seen as deep metaphors by those around them, in a screen adaptation of Jerzy Kozinski's novel Being There -- a project Sellers had spent the better part of a decade trying to bring to the screen. The film won Sellers a Golden Globe award and a National Board of Review citation as Best Actor, while he also received an Academy Award nomination in the same category. While Being There seemed to point to better and more ambitious roles for Sellers, fate had other plans; the actor, who had a long history of heart trouble, died of a heart attack on July 24, 1980, not long after completing The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, a disastrous comedy whose direction was taken over by Sellers midway through the shoot (though the original director received sole credit). Two years after his death, Peter Sellers would return to the screen in a final Pink Panther adventure, The Trail of the Pink Panther, which Blake Edwards assembled from outtakes and discarded scenes shot for the previous installments in the series.

Trivia: Born into a theatrical family, British actor Bernard Lee first trod the boards at age six. Supporting himself as a fruit salesman, Lee attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, making his West End stage bow in 1928. In films from 1934, Lee showed up in dozens of bits and minor roles, his screen time increasing throughout the 1950s. He showed up prominently as the resident police inspector in several of the "Edgar Wallace" "B"-picture series of the early 1960s. In 1962, Lee was cast as M, the immediate superior to Secret Agent 007 James Bond, in Dr. No. Bernard Lee continued to portray M in all subsequent Bond endeavors, up to and including 1979's Moonraker; he also essayed the role in the 1967 Bond spin-off, Operation Kid Brother, which starred Sean Connery's younger brother Neil.