Trivia: If the stories about his activities as an Allied spy in Europe and Turkey during World War I can be believed, American actor John Boles had a far more exciting real life than he'd ever have in "reel" life. Whatever the case, the Texas-born Boles abandoned espionage for a stage career as a singer and actor. His screen bow was in the silent film So This is Marriage (1925), but he was shown to better advantage in talking pictures, beginning with his costarring role opposite Bebe Daniels in the 1929 musical blockbuster Rio Rita. A little more appealing and a lot more animated than most movie baritones, Boles was much in demand in the early 1930s, usually in parts originally intended for his Fox Studios coworker (and near-lookalike) Warner Baxter. Freelancing after his Fox contract ended in 1936, Boles experienced a dip in popularity, redeemed somewhat with a strong part as poverty-stricken Barbara Stanwyck's society husband in Stella Dallas (1937). When John Boles' film career wound down in 1943, he went back to the stage, making a somewhat melancholy return to Hollywood in the execrable low-budget farce Babes in Baghdad (1952), wherein he was trapped with fellow faded luminaries Paulette Goddard and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Trivia: Demure American leading lady Madge Evans was a professional from childhood. As an infant, she was featured in print ads as the "Fairy Soap girl." From 1915 through 1918, she was resident child actress of the World Film Company. During the early 1920s she kept busy as a ingenue, leaving films in 1924 to devote her time to the stage. Though her "official" return to films as an adult performer was 1931, Evans had earlier appeared as a saucy teenager in a 1929 Vitaphone short starring Walter Winchell. One of the best of MGM's second-echelon stars, Evans appeared in such "A"-pictures as Dinner at Eight (1933) and David Copperfield (1935), as well as a larger number of "B"s along the lines of Death on the Diamond (1934). Retiring from films in 1938 to marry playwright Sidney Kingsley, Evans continued to appear onstage until 1943. Madge Evans made her last appearances before the cameras on television, showing up as a panelist on one of the earlier incarnations of that hardy perennial Masquerade Party.

Trivia: After attending the University of the South in Tennessee, Bruce Cabot bounced around from job to job: working on a tramp steamer, selling insurances, even hauling away the bones of dead animals. While attending a Hollywood party, Cabot met RKO producer David O. Selznick, which resulted in Cabot's first film appearance in Roadhouse Murder. His most famous role while at RKO was as the heroic Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933), rescuing Fay Wray from the hairy paws of the 50-foot ape. Thereafter, Cabot was most often seen in villainous, brutish roles. It is hard to imagine anyone more venomous or vicious than Bruce Cabot in such roles as the scarred gangster boss in Let 'Em Have It (1936), the treacherous Magua in Last of the Mohicans (1936), or the thick-skulled lynch-mob instigator in Fury (1936). During World War II, Cabot worked in army intelligence and operations in Africa, Sicily and Italy. A good friend of John Wayne, Cabot was frequently cast in "The Duke's" vehicles of the 1960s, including The Green Berets (1968). Among Bruce Cabot's three wives were actresses Adrienne Ames and Francesca de Scaffa.

Trivia: The brassiest platinum blonde of them all, Marion Martin turned up in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s, usually only for a moment or two but long enough to make an impression. Reportedly hailing from Philadelphia's Main Line, Martin had made her Broadway bow in a 1927 revival of Lombardi Ltd. but was rather more noticeable in burlesque where she vowed 'em with a voluptuous body and with a throaty singing voice to match. She began popping up in films around 1935 and went on to play a host of characters named Blondie, Fifi, Lola, and Dixie, rarely awarded a last name and usually only a line or two. But she almost always made the line count, as in Sinner in Paradise (1938), when he-man Bruce Cabot introduces himself with a terse "the name is Malone." "Does it make you happy," she quips, with that bored look she had come to favor. Martin's screen career lasted well into the 1950s but by then her once-statuesque build had turned quite blowsy. In her later years as the wife of a Southern California physician, she occasionally expressed a desire to return to show business but no projects materialized.

Trivia: Canadian-born Gene Lockhart made his first stage appearance at age 6; as a teenager, he appeared in comedy sketches with another fledgling performer, Beatrice Lillie. Lockhart's first Broadway production was 1916's Riviera. His later credits on the Great White Way included Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesmen, in which Lockhart replaced Lee J. Cobb in the role of Willy Loman. In between acting assignments, Lockhart taught stage technique at the Juilliard School of Music. A prolific writer, Lockhart turned out a number of magazine articles and song lyrics, and contributed several routines to the Broadway revue Bunk of 1926, in which he also starred. After a false start in 1922, Lockhart launched his film career in 1934. His most familiar screen characterization was that of the cowardly criminal who cringed and snivelled upon being caught; he also showed up in several historical films as small-town stuffed shirts and bigoted disbelievers in scientific progress. When not trafficking in petty villainy, Lockhart was quite adept at roles calling for whimsy and confusion, notably Bob Cratchit in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol and the beleaguered judge in A Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Extending his activities to television, Lockhart starred in the 1955 "dramedy" series His Honor, Homer Bell. Gene Lockhart was the husband of character actress Kathleen Lockhart, the father of leading lady June Lockhart, and the grandfather of 1980s ingenue Anne Lockhart.

Trivia: Blonde American actress Charlotte Wynters made her talkie debut as Nina in D.W. Griffith's final film, The Struggle (1931). Wynters spent the rest of her career freelancing at every major studio, and not a few of the minor ones. Either by accident or design, she essayed supporting parts in several B-film series, including Warners' Nancy Drew, MGM's Andy Hardy, RKO's The Falcon, and Columbia's Ellery Queen. Charlotte Wynters retired in 1955.

Trivia: Cutting her theatrical teeth in regional stock, American actress Nana Bryant appeared steadily on Broadway from 1925 thrugh 1935. Her forte during this period was musical-comedy character work, a field she still cultivated in the 1940s with Song of Norway. Bryant's first film was 1935's Guard That Girl; for the next twenty years she appeared mainly in benign, understanding roles, as typified by her last movie assignment as a kindly Mother Superior in The Private War of Major Benson (1955). That same year, Bryant had a six-month run as Mrs. Nestor, owner of a private school, on the popular TV sitcom Our Miss Brooks. So firmly associated was Bryant in motherly roles that she quite took the audience's breath away when playing a nasty character. Even Nana Bryant's daughter-in-law, who knew the real woman as well as anyone, could not bear watching Bryant portray a steely-eyed murderer in the Roy Rogers western Eyes of Texas (1949).

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: A football star in his high school and college days, Donald Barry forsook an advertising career in favor of a stage acting job with a stock company. This barnstorming work led to movie bit parts, the first of which was in RKO's Night Waitress (1936). Barry's short stature, athletic build and pugnacious facial features made him a natural for bad guy parts in Westerns, but he was lucky enough to star in the 1940 Republic serial The Adventures of Red Ryder; this and subsequent appearance as "Lone Ranger" clone Red Ryder earned the actor the permanent sobriquet Donald "Red" Barry. Republic promoted the actor to bigger-budget features in the 1940s, casting him in the sort of roles James Cagney might have played had the studio been able to afford Cagney. Barry produced as well as starred in a number of Westerns, but this venture ultimately failed, and the actor, whose private life was tempestuous in the best of times, was consigned to supporting roles before the 1950s were over. By the late 1960s, Barry was compelled to publicly entreat his fans to contribute one dollar apiece for a new series of Westerns. Saving the actor from further self-humiliation were such Barry aficionados as actor Burt Reynolds and director Don Siegel, who saw to it that Don was cast in prominent supporting roles during the 1970s, notably a telling role in Hustle (1976). In 1980, Don "Red" Barry killed himself -- a sad end to an erratic life and career.

Trivia: Actor Morgan Conway made his first film appearance in Looking for Trouble (1934). He arrived in Hollywood just in time to get on the ground floor of the industry's burgeoning labor movement; along with such notables as Boris Karloff and Lyle Talbot, Conway was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. While under contract to RKO in 1945, Conway was assigned to star in Dick Tracy, Detective, becoming the second actor to impersonate Chester Gould's jut-jawed comic-strip detective (Ralph Byrd was the first). After his brief spurt of stardom, Morgan Conway went back to secondary roles, leaving movies altogether in 1949.

Trivia: Chinese character actor Willie Fung spent his entire Hollywood career imprisoned by the Hollywood Stereotype Syndrome. During the silent era, Fung was the personification of the "Yellow Peril," never more fearsome than when he was threatening Dolores Costello's virtue in Old San Francisco (1927). In talkies, Fung was a buck-toothed, pigtailed, pidgin-English-spouting comedy relief, usually cast as a cook or laundryman.

Trivia: Born in Kansas and raised in Colorado, Dwight Frye studied for a career in music, and by his mid-teens was a talented concert pianist. He switched to acting when he joined the O.D. Woodward stock company in 1918. During his years on Broadway, Frye specialized in comedy parts. When Hollywood called, however, the actor found himself typed as a neurotic villain. The role that both made and broke him was the bug-eating lunatic Renfield in 1931's Dracula. Though he begged producers to allow him to play comic or "straight" parts, he was hopelessly typed as Renfield, and spent the bulk of his career portraying murderers, grave robbers, crazed hunchbacks and mad scientists. When the first "horror" cycle subsided, Frye found himself accepting nondescript bit roles in films like The People vs. Dr. Kildare (1939). During the 1940s, Frye bounced from one "B" factory to another, doing his usual in such cheap thrillers as Dead Men Walk (1942). In between acting jobs, he supported himself and his family as a designer in an aircraft factory. Dwight Frye was about to undertake the stereotype-breaking role of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker in the lavish 20th Century-Fox biopic Wilson when he died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 44.