Trivia: Wisconsinite John Litel was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. When World War I broke out in Europe, Litel didn't feel like waiting until America became officially involved and thus joined the French army, serving valiantly for three years. Returning to America, Litel studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and entered into the peripatetic world of touring stock companies. His first film was the 1929 talkie The Sleeping Porch, which starred top-hatted comedian Raymond Griffith. He settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1937, spending the next three decades portraying a vast array of lawyers, judges, corporate criminals, military officers, and even a lead or two. Litel was a regular in two separate "B"-picture series, playing the respective fathers of Bonita Granville and James Lydon in the Nancy Drew and Henry Aldrich series. On television, John Litel was appropriately ulcerated as the boss of Bob Cummings on the 1953 sitcom My Hero.

Trivia: A stage actor of many years' standing, James Stephenson made his British film debut in 1937. That following year, Stephenson was hired as a contract player by Warner Bros., where he spent most of his time playing suave villains or disgraced gentlemen. He was afforded better roles in films like 1938's Boy Meets Girl (as the movie bit player who "legitimizes" Marie Wilson's baby), 1939's You Can't Get Away With Murder and Elizabeth the Queen, and 1940's The Sea Hawk. His big break came when, ignoring studio resistance, director William Wyler and star Bette Davis insisted upon casting Stephenson as self-sacrificing family lawyer Howard Joyce in the 1940 adaptation of The Letter. This performance earned the actor an Academy Award nomination and, more importantly, the old "star build-up" from the Warners publicity flacks (who proceeded to slice 15 years off Stephenson's age in his "official" studio biography). James Stephenson went on to play the title role in Calling Philo Vance (1940) and above-the-title parts in a handful of programmers until his fatal heart attack at the age of 53.

Trivia: The son of actors Frank M. Thomas and Mona Bruns, Frankie Thomas made his first stage appearance in 1932. The following year, the 12-year-old Thomas played the lead in the Broadway comedy-drama Wednesday's Child. He went on to star in the 1935 film Dog of Flanders, then played ever-faithful Ted Nickerson in all four of Warner Bros.' Nancy Drew programmers. Another of Thomas' roles of note was the title character in the 1937 Universal serial Tim Tyler's Luck. He became an idol of millions of baby boomers when he starred in both the radio and TV versions of the futuristic Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which ran from 1950 through 1955. Retiring from acting after Corbett ran its course ("After Tom, where could I go?" he observed years later), Frankie Thomas launched two brand-new careers as a world-renowned bridge expert and mystery novelist.

Trivia: Moonfaced American actor Frank Orth came to films from vaudeville, where he was usually co-billed with wife Ann Codee. Orth and Codee continued appearing together in a series of two-reel comedies in the early '30s, before he graduated to features with 1935's The Unwelcome Stranger. From that point until his retirement in 1959, Orth usually found himself behind a counter in his film appearances, playing scores of pharmacists, grocery clerks and bartenders. He had a semi-recurring role as Mike Ryan in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, and was featured as a long-suffering small town cop in Warners' Nancy Drew films. Orth was an apparent favorite of the casting department at 20th Century-Fox, where he received many of his credited screen roles. From 1951 through 1953, Frank Orth was costarred as Lieutenant Farraday on the Boston Blackie TV series.

Trivia: The daughter of British actress Irene Riano, young Renie Riano headlined in music halls and vaudeville as "Baby Irene." As an adult, Riano's unusual appearance assured her steady work as a character comedienne. She was featured in several Broadway productions, notably Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, before entering films in 1937. Amidst dozens of cameos and bits, she played the recurring role of sardonic maidservant Effie Schneider in Warner Bros.' Nancy Drew series, and starred as Maggie opposite Joe Yule Sr.'s Jiggs in a late-'40s Monogram series based on the comic strip Bringing up Father. Active until 1966, Renie Riano's later assignments included a frantic maid in the American-International musicomedy Pajama Party (1964) and an amorous ghost in a first-season episode of TV's Green Acres.

Trivia: Actor Charles Trowbridge was born in Mexico to American parents. An architect for the first decade of his adult life, Trowbridge turned to stage acting in the early teens, making his film bow in 1918's Thais. Silver-haired even as a young man, Trowbridge was generally cast in kindly but authoritative roles, usually as doctors, lawyers and military officers. He also had a bad habit of being killed off before the film was half over; in 1940, Trowbridge had the distinction of being murdered (by Lionel Atwill and George Zucco respectively) in two separate Universal horror films, Man Made Monster and The Mummy's Hand. While he was active until 1957, Charles Trowbridge was best known to millions of wartime servicemen as the cautionary military doctor in John Ford's venereal disease prevention film Sex Hygiene (1941).

Trivia: Australian-born Mae Busch was the daughter of an opera singer mother and a symphony conductor father. Her family came to the U.S. when Mae was 3 years old, and she was placed in a convent school while her parents toured the world. While still a teenager, Mae achieved stage stardom by replacing Lillian Lorraine in the musical comedy Over the River. In 1915 she became a Mack Sennett bathing beauty at the invitation of her close friend, Sennett-star Mabel Normand. Later, Mae was hired by Eric von Stroheim to play a lusty Spanish dancer in Stroheim's The Devil's Passkey. The director used her again in Foolish Wives (1922), casting Mae as the amoral--and fraudulent--Princess Vera. She was later signed by MGM, where she was billed as "the versatile vamp." Upset at the nondescript leading-lady roles she was getting, Mae walked out of her contract; this action caused producers to hesitate casting Mae in major productions. While free-lancing at second-rate studios, Mae accepted a comedy-vamp role in the Hal Roach 2-reeler Love 'Em and Weep (1927), which represented her first appearance with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Though she made an impressive sound feature-film debut in Roland West's Alibi (1929), the steely-voiced Ms. Busch's stardom had passed, and for the most part her talkie assignments were bits and secondary roles. Her best opportunities in the 1930s came in the films of Laurel and Hardy, where she was often cast as a shrewish wife or sharp-tongued "lady of the evening." In the team's Oliver the Eighth (1934), she essayed her most flamboyant role as an insane widow with a penchant for marrying and murdering any man named Oliver--which happened to be the first name of the hapless Mr. Hardy. Ms. Busch went into semi-retirement in the 1940s, occasionally resurfacing in small roles in such films as Ziegfeld Girl (1946); she died of a heart attack at the age of 49. Formerly married to silent-film star Francis McDonald, Mae Busch was also the aunt of 1960s leading lady Brenda Scott.

Trivia: In films from infancy, Tommy Bupp became a familiar juvenile actor in the 1930s. He was often cast as the younger version of the grown-up leading man in both A- and B-pictures. He worked steadily in Westerns, was briefly associated with Hal Roach's Our Gang, and was a memorable spoiled brat in 1939's Nancy Drew, Reporter. Comedy buffs will recall Bupp as Jimmy the Crippled Kid in the sentimental Three Stooges short Cash and Carry (1937). Tommy Bupp's credits are sometimes confused with those of his brother Sonny Bupp, who played Orson Welles' son in Citizen Kane (1941).

Trivia: It is probably correct to assume that American actor Stuart Holmes never turned down work. In films since 1914's Life's Shop Window, Holmes showed up in roles both large and microscopic until 1962. In his early days (he entered the movie business in 1911), Holmes cut quite a villainous swath with his oily moustache and cold, baleful glare. He played Black Michael in the 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda and Alec D'Uberville in Tess of the D'Ubervilles (1923), and also could be seen as wicked land barons in the many westerns of the period. While firmly established in feature films, Holmes had no qualms about accepting bad-guy parts in comedy shorts, notably Stan Laurel's Should Tall Men Marry? (1926) In talkies, Holmes' non-descript voice tended to work against his demonic bearing. Had Tom Mix's My Pal the King (1932) been a silent picture, Holmes would have been ideal as one of the corrupt noblemen plotting the death of boy king Mickey Rooney; instead, Holmes was cast as Rooney's bumbling but honest chamberlain. By the mid '30s, Holmes' hair had turned white, giving him the veneer of a shopkeeper or courtroom bailiff. He signed a contract for bits and extra roles at Warner Bros, spending the next two decades popping up at odd moments in such features as Confession (1937), Each Dawn I Die (1939) and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), and in such short subjects as At the Stroke of Twelve (1941). Stuart Holmes remained on call at Central Casting for major films like Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) until his retirement; he died of an abdominal aortic aneurism at the age of 83.

Trivia: Affectionately described by film historian William K. Everson as "That lovable old wreck of a busybody," actress Vera Lewis was indeed quite lovable in person, even though most of her screen characters were sharp-tongued and spiteful in the extreme. Lewis first appeared in films in 1915, playing bits in such historical spectacles as D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) and the privately-funded Argonauts of California. By the 1920s, she was well-established in such venomous characterizations as the remonstrative stepmother in the 1926 Colleen Moore starrer Ella Cinders. She continued playing small-town snoops, gimlet-eyed landladies, irksome relatives and snobbish society doyennes well into the talkie era. Even when unbilled, Lewis was unforgettable: in 1933's King Kong, she's the outraged theater patron who mercilessly browbeats an usher upon finding out that the mighty Kong will be appearing in person instead of on film. When all is said and done, Vera Lewis was never better than when she was playing a gorgon-like mother-in-law, as witness her work as Mrs. Nesselrode in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and as Andy Clyde's vituperative mom-by-marriage in the 1947 2-reeler Wife to Spare.

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: Trained for an industrial career but sidetracked into showbiz by a few seasons at Pasadena Playhouse, "Mr. Average Man" utility player John Ridgely spent most of his Hollywood years at Warner Bros. From his first film Submarine D-1 (1937), Ridgely was one of the studio's most reliable and ubiquitous supporting players, portraying first-reel murder victims, last-reel "surprise" killers, best friends, policemen, day laborers, and military officers. One of his largest film roles was the commanding officer in Howard Hawks' Air Force (1943), in which he was billed over the more famous John Garfield. His indeterminate features could also convey menace, as witness his portrayal of blackmailing gangsters Eddie Mars in Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946). Freelancing after 1948, John Ridgely continued to essay general-purpose parts until he left films in 1953; thereafter he worked in summer-theater productions and television until his death from a heart attack at the age of 58.

Trivia: A film actor from 1914, Cliff Saum was much in demand during WWI as scurrilous Teutonic types. Saum also served as assistant director for By Whose Hand? (1927) and other silent productions. From 1930 to 1942, he essayed dozens of bits and supporting roles, usually at Warner Bros. Amidst many one-day roles as detectives, truck drivers, and the like, Cliff Saum played a comic Native American named Chief Thunderbird in 1940's Ladies Must Live.

Trivia: As a young girl, Joanne Tree Winship was a film and early television actress, but when she grew up, she became a Broadway actress and finally ended up a journalist at The New York Postcovering everything from fashion shows and lifestyles, to the profiles of artists performing at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Born and raised in New York City, Tree launched her film career at ten with a bit part in Nancy Drew - Detective (1938). From there she appeared in numerous other youth-oriented pictures, including Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) and First Love (1939). Tree also appeared in the Andy Hardy film series. Tree headed for Broadway shortly after hitting her teens and appeared in numerous plays. She became a journalist after marrying United Press senior editor Frederick M. Winship. Tree was also heavily involved with charity work and was in charge of arranging benefits for the New York City Opera and other institutions representing the arts. After suffering a long illness the 73-year-old Tree passed away on August 20, 1997, in New York City.

Trivia: A distinguished stage actor from Ireland, gray-haired Brandon Tynan appeared in the odd film during the silent era -- including the starring role in Success (1923), a drama about a famous Shakespearean actor who succumbs to alcoholism -- but was rather more visible onstage until 1937, when he relocated to Hollywood. As a Hollywood character actor, Tynan played John Redmond in the controversial Parnell (1937) (and, that same year, was Captain Cobb in the equally maligned Sh The Octopus), the mayor in The Girl and the Mob (1939), James Ellison's lawyer in a RKO "B" Almost a Gentleman and, also for RKO, one of the Bohemians in Lucky Partners (1940). Tynan was the husband of American stage (and later television) actress Lily Cahill (1886-1955).