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: Broderick Crawford was the typical example of "overnight" success in Hollywood -- the 1949 release of All the King's Men turned him into one of the most popular "character" leads in Hollywood, a successor to Wallace Beery and a model for such unconventional leading men to come as Ernest Borgnine. His "overnight" success, however, involved more than a decade of work in routine supporting roles in more than 20 movies, before he was ever considered as much more than a supporting player. Crawford was born into a performing family -- both of his maternal grandparents, William Broderick and Emma Kraus, were opera singers, and his mother, Helen Broderick, was a Broadway and screen actress, while his father, Lester Crawford, was a vaudeville performer. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he accompanied his parents on tour as a boy and later joined them on-stage. He attended the Dean Academy in Franklin, MA, and excelled in athletics, including football, baseball, and swimming. Crawford entered show business by way of vaudeville, joining his parents in working for producer Max Gordon. With vaudeville's decline in the later 1920s, he tried attending college but dropped out of Harvard after just three months, preferring to make a living as a stevedore on the New York docks, and he also later served as a seaman on a tanker. Crawford returned to acting through radio, including a stint working as a second banana to the Marx Brothers. He entered the legitimate theater in 1934 when playwright Howard Lindsay selected him for a role in the play She Loves Me Not, portraying a football player in the work's London run -- although the play only ran three weeks, that was enough time for Crawford to meet Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (then theater's leading "power couple" on either side of the Atlantic) and come to the attention of Noel Coward, who selected him for a role in his production of Point Valaine, in which the acting couple was starring. After a string of unsuccessful plays, Crawford went to Hollywood and got a part as the butler in the comedy Woman Chases Man, produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Crawford's theatrical breakthrough came in 1937 when he won the role of the half-witted Lennie in the theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. His performance won critical accolades from all of the major newspapers, and Crawford was on his way, at least as far as the stage was concerned -- when it came time to do the movie, however, the part went to Lon Chaney Jr.. In movies, Crawford made the rounds of the studios in one-off roles, usually in relatively minor films such as Submarine D-1, Undercover Doctor, and Eternally Yours. The murder mystery Slightly Honorable gave him a slight boost in both billing and the size of his role, but before he could begin to develop any career momentum the Second World War intervened. Crawford served in the U.S. Army Air Force and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned to civilian life, he immediately resumed his screen career with a series of fascinating films, including The Black Angel and James Cagney's production20of The Time of Your Life. True stardom however, still eluded him. That all changed when director-producer Robert Rossen selected Crawford to portray Willie Stark in All the King's Men. In a flash, Crawford became a box-office draw, his performance attracting raves from the critics and delighting audiences with its subtle, earthy, rough-hewn charm. His portrayal of the megalomaniac political boss of a small state, based on the life and career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, won Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor. He signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1949, which resulted in his starring in the comedy hit Born Yesterday (1950). That was to be his last major hit as a star, though Crawford continued to give solid and successful lead performances for much of the next five years, portraying a tough undercover cop in the crime drama T he Mob, and a villainous antagonist to Clark Gable in Vincent Sherman's Lone Star. During the early '50s, Crawford was Hollywood's favorite tough-guy lead or star antagonist, his persona combining something of the tough charm of Spencer Tracy and the rough-hewn physicality of Wallace Beery -- he could be a charming lunkhead, in the manner of Keenan Wynn, or dark and threatening, calling up echoes of his portrayal of Willie Stark. In the mid-'50s at 20th Century Fox, he added vast energy and excitement to such films as Night People and Between Heaven and Hell -- indeed, his performance in the latter added a whole extra layer of depth and meaning to the film, moving it from wartime melodrama into territory much closer to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with his character Waco serving as the dramatic stand-in for Kurtz. In 1955, after working on the melodrama Not As a Stranger and Fellini's Il Bidone (his portrayal of the swindler Augusto being one of his best performances), Crawford became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era to make the jump to television. He signed to do the series Highway Patrol for Ziv TV, which was a hit for three seasons. In its wake, however, Crawford was never able to get movies or roles of the same quality that he'd been offered in the early '50s. He did two more series, King of Diamonds and The Interns, and did play the title role in Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which attracted some offbeat notice; otherwise, Crawford's work during his final 30 years of acting involved roles as routine as the ones he'd muddled through while trying for his break at the other end of his career. One of his most visible screen appearances took place on television, in a 1977 episode of CHiPS that played off of his work in Highway Patrol, with Crawford making a gag appearance as himself, a motorist pulled over and cited for a moving violation by the series' motorcycle police officers.

Trivia: Hugh Herbert was a stage and vaudeville performer and playwright before coming to Hollywood as a dialogue director in the early talkie era. Signed as an actor at RKO Radio, Herbert played a variety of comic and noncomic roles in films like Hook Line and Sinker (1930), Danger Lights (1931) and Friends and Lovers (1931). His forte turned out to be comedy, as witness his sidesplitting performances as an arm-wrestling prime minister in Million Dollar Legs (1932) and an aphorism-spouting Chinaman in Diplomaniacs (1933). During his long association with Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s, Herbert developed his familiar half-in-the-bag screen persona, complete with fluttering, hand-clapping gestures and his trademarked cries of "woo woo!" and "oh, wunnerful, wunnerful." In the opinion of several film buffs, the quintessential Hugh Herbert performance can be found in the 1936 Warners musical Colleen (1936). At Universal in the 1940s, Herbert starred in a string of "B" comedies, one of which, There's One Born Every Minute (1942), represented the screen debut of Elizabeth Taylor; he was also a stitch as the resourceful detective in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941). From 1943 through 1952, Herbert starred in 23 two-reelers at Columbia Pictures, which were popular at the time but in retrospect represent a low point for the actor. Columbia director Edward Bernds has observed that Herbert considered these shorts beneath his talents, which may account for his listless performance in most of them. Throughout his Columbia stay, Herbert made scattered feature-film appearances, the best of which was in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Hugh Herbert died a of heart attack shortly after completing his final Columbia short, A Gink at the Sink (1952); he was preceded in death by his brother, movie bit player Tom Herbert.

Trivia: Sloe-eyed character actress whose icy persona lent itself to the portrayal of villainous women, Sondergaard took up acting after college, paying her dues with several years in stock and then reaching Broadway in the late '20s. In 1930 she married director Herbert Biberman, whom she followed to Hollywood in the mid 1930s. Reluctantly, she accepted a role in Anthony Adverse (1936), her screen debut; for her work she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (the first ever awarded). For the next decade-plus she specialized in playing evil women, though occasionally her characters were warm-hearted. In the late '40s she became yet another victim of the Red Scare witch hunts -- her husband was one of the "Hollywood Ten" sentenced to prison terms following appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and neither he nor she could get any more work. Sondergaard returned to acting in 1965 with Woman, an off-Broadway one-woman show. Her first film appearance in 20 years was in Slaves (1969) -- the last film her husband ever directed. After Slaves she appeared in two more movies throughout the next fifteen years.

Trivia: At the peak of his career in the early '30s, actor Bela Lugosi was the screen's most notorious personification of evil; the most famous and enduring Dracula, he helped usher in an era of new popularity for the horror genre, only to see his own fame quickly evaporate. Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó was born in Lugos, Hungary, on October 20, 1882. After seeing a touring repertory company as they passed through town, he became fascinated by acting, and began spending all of his time mounting his own dramatic productions with the aid of other children. Upon the death of his father in 1894, Lugosi apprenticed as a miner, later working on the railroad. His first professional theatrical job was as a chorus boy in an operetta, followed by a stint at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts. By 1901, he was a leading actor with Hungary's Royal National Theatre, and around 1917 began appearing in films (sometimes under the name Arisztid Olt) beginning with A Régiséggyüjtö. Lugosi was also intensely active in politics, and he organized an actors' union following the 1918 collapse of the Hungarian monarchy; however, when the leftist forces were defeated a year later he fled to Germany, where he resumed his prolific film career with 1920's Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook. Lugosi remained in Germany through 1921, when he emigrated to the United States. He made his American film debut in 1923's The Silent Command, but struggled to find further work, cast primarily in exotic bit roles on stage and screen. His grasp of English was virtually non-existent, and he learned his lines phonetically, resulting in an accented, resonant baritone which made his readings among the most distinctive and imitated in performing history. In 1924, Lugosi signed on to direct a drama titled The Right to Dream, but unable to communicate with his cast and crew he was quickly fired; he sued the producers, but was found by the court to be unable to helm a theatrical production and was ordered to pay fines totalling close to 70 dollars. When he refused, the contents of his apartment were auctioned off to pay his court costs -- an inauspicious beginning to his life in America, indeed. Lugosi's future remained grim, but in 1927 he was miraculously cast to play the title character in the Broadway adaptation of the Bram Stoker vampire tale Dracula; reviews were poor, but the production was a hit, and he spent three years in the role. In 1929, Lugosi married a wealthy San Francisco widow named Beatrice Weeks, a union which lasted all of three days; their divorce, which named Clara Bow as the other woman, was a media sensation, and it launched him to national notoriety. After a series of subsequent films, however, Lugosi again faded from view until 1931, when he was tapped to reprise his Dracula portrayal on the big screen. He was Universal executives' last choice for the role -- they wanted Lon Chaney Sr., but he was suffering from cancer -- while director Tod Browning insisted upon casting an unknown. When no other suitable choice arose, however, only Lugosi met with mutual, if grudging, agreement. Much to the shock of all involved, Dracula was a massive hit. Despite considerable studio re-editing, it was moody and atmospheric, and remains among the most influential films in American cinema. Dracula also rocketed Lugosi to international fame, and he was immediately offered the role of the monster in James Whale's Frankenstein; he refused -- in order to attach himself to a picture titled Quasimodo -- and the part instead went to Boris Karloff. The project never went beyond the planning stages, however, and in a sense Lugosi's career never righted itself; he remained a prolific screen presence, but the enduring fame which appeared within his reach was lost forever. Moreover, he was eternally typecast: Throughout the remainder of the decade and well into the 1940s, he appeared in a prolific string of horror films, some good (1932's Island of Lost Souls and 1934's The Black Cat, the latter the first of many collaborations with Karloff), but most of them quite forgettable. Lugosi's choice of projects was indiscriminate at best, and his reputation went into rapid decline; most of his performances were variations on his Dracula role, and before long he slipped into outright parodies of the character in pictures like 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was to be his last film for four years.As Lugosi's career withered, he became increasingly eccentric, often appearing in public clad in his Dracula costume. He was also the victim of numerous financial problems, and became addicted to drugs. In 1952, he returned from exile to star in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, followed later that year by the similarly low-brow My Son, the Vampire and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. By 1953, Lugosi was firmly aligned with the notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, widely recognized as the worst director in movie history; together they made a pair of films -- Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster -- before Lugosi committed himself in 1955 in order to overcome his drug battles. Upon his release, he and Wood began work on the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, but after filming only a handful of scenes, Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 15, 1956; he was buried in his Dracula cape. In the decades to come, his stature as a cult figure grew, and in 1994 the noted filmmaker Tim Burton directed the screen biography Ed Wood, casting veteran actor Martin Landau as Lugosi; Landau was brilliant in the role, and won the Oscar which Lugosi himself never came remotely close to earning -- a final irony in a career littered with bittersweet moments.

Trivia: A former drama student at Missouri's Stephens College, redheaded leading lady Anne Gwynne was signed to a Universal Pictures contract in 1939. Pretty and vivacious, Gwynne was a welcome presence in Universal's "B" product, appearing in many of the studio's horror films (The Black Cat, The Strange Case of Dr. Rx, Weird Woman, House of Frankenstein et. al.). She also played the villainous Sonja in the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe and appeared with Abbott and Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy (1941). Free-lancing after Universal cut her loose in 1945, Gwynne played Tess Trueheart in RKO's Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947). She left films briefly in the mid-1950s, making an undistinguished comeback in Teenage Monster (1958), as the mother of the title character. Gwynne was coaxed out retirement once more in 1970 for Adam at 6 AM, playing the wife of another veteran of Hollywood's "B" mills, Richard Derr. Anne Gwynne is the mother of actress Gwynne Gilford.

Trivia: Widely acclaimed as one of the great beauties of the stage, British actress Gladys Cooper had the added advantage of great talent. Daughter of a London magazine editor, she made her stage bow at age 17 in a Colchester production of Bluebell in Fairyland; at 19, she was a member of the "Gaiety Girls," a famous and famously attractive chorus-girl line. Graduating to leading roles, Cooper was particularly popular with young stage door johnnies; during World War I, she was the British troops' most popular "pin-up." Switching from light comedy to deep drama in the 1920s, Cooper retained her following, even when leaving England for extended American appearances after her 1934 Broadway debut in The Shining Hour. She made subsequent New York appearances in Shakespearean roles, thereafter achieving nationwide fame with her many Hollywood film appearances (she'd first acted before the cameras way back in 1911 in a British one-reeler, Eleventh Commandment). Now past fifty but still strikingly attractive, Cooper was often cast as aristocratic ladies whose sharp-tongued cattiness was couched in feigned politeness; her film parts ranged from Bette Davis' overbearing mother in Now Voyager (1941) to the hidden murderess in a Universal "B" horror, The Black Cat (1941). Returning to the London stage in 1947, Cooper remained there for several years before returning to Broadway in The Chalk Garden(1955). New York was again regaled by her in 1962 when she played Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India (the role which won Peggy Ashcroft an Oscar when Passage was filmed over 20 years later). The years 1960-1964 were particularly busy for Cooper on TV and in films; she won her third Oscar nomination for her role as Prof. Henry Higgins' mother in My Fair Lady (1964), starred as the matriarch of a family of genteel swindlers on the TV series The Rogues (1964), and even found time to co-star with a very young Robert Redford on a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone. Made a Dame Commander of the O.B.E. in 1967, Cooper had no plans for slowing down in her eighties, even though she was appalled by the "let it all hang out" theatre offerings of the era. Cooper was planning to tour in a Canadian revival of Chalk Garden in 1971 when she contracted pneumonia and died in November of that year.

Trivia: Blonde leading lady Claire Dodd came to Hollywood by way of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies. In films since 1930, Claire was for several years an employee of Warner Bros., where she played many a scheming seductress. She projected a more likeable, down-to-earth image as Della Street in a brace of Warners' "Perry Mason" movies, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) and The Case of the Lucky Legs (1936)--actually marrying lawyer Mason (Warren William) in the latter film. Claire Dodd's last Hollywood years were spent at Universal Pictures in the early 1940s, where she played pleasant but colorless heroines; in one such assignment, Abbott and Costello's In the Navy (1941), Claire was reunited with her old Warners colleague Dick Powell.

Trivia: Lean, lightly mustached general purpose actor John Eldredge came to films after several successful seasons with the New York Civic Repertory. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1934, Eldredge became a handy man to have around whenever the script called for a weakling or cad. He played Bette Davis' good-for-nothing husband in Dangerous (1935), and later offered a variation of the theme as Joan Leslie's callow beau in High Sierra (1941). Only rarely, as in Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), was he permitted to play a character with substance and intestinal fortitude. Even after the expiration of his Warners contract, he specialized in such namby-pamby characterizations as Walter W. Walker III in Columbia's Eve Knew Her Apples (1944). As he grew older and grayer, Eldredge's characters often assumed a weary dignity; one of his more rewarding later assignments was the part of Captain Collins in the sci-fi "sleeper" I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958). A busy TV performer in the 1950s, Eldredge could be seen playing slimy villains in virtually every other cop or adventure series of the era; on a more respectable note, he played the heroine's father in the 1954 syndicated sitcom Meet Corliss Archer. John Eldredge is one of the few character actors of Hollywood's Golden Era to be afforded his own Internet website, which can be found under the heading "The Man Without Qualities."

Trivia: Alan Ladd was a short (5' 5"), unexpressive lead actor with icy good looks and a resonant voice. He worked a variety of odd jobs -- in addition to radio and in local theater -- before entering films in his late teens as a bit player and grip. In the mid-'30s, he began appearing regularly in minor screen roles. Hollywood agent Sue Carol discovered him and began trumpeting him as star material, and the actor eventually landed a major role in This Gun for Hire (1942) opposite Veronica Lake. He quickly became a major star, and was teamed with Lake in other films -- all hits. Ladd and Carol married in 1942, and she remained his agent for the rest of his life. On the Top Ten box-office attractions list in 1947, 1953, and 1954, he continued to star in films throughout the '50s, but -- with the exception of Shane (1953) -- few of his films were noteworthy; most were entertaining adventures featuring Ladd bare-chested and in fistfights, but, by the late '50s, their appeal was waning. Ladd was the father of actors Alan Ladd Jr. and David Ladd, and former child actress Alana Ladd. He died in 1964.

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.