Trivia: Kent Taylor headed for Hollywood after graduating from high school -- though not as soon after graduation as he'd later claim. Signed by Paramount in 1932, the handsome but slightly callow Taylor appeared in bits and small supporting roles in films like The Devil and the Deep, If I Had a Million, and Sign of the Cross. He befriended comedian Will Rogers, who spotlighted young Taylor in good leading man roles in several of his vehicles at Fox (notably 1934's David Harum). Taylor's film assignments improved after he adopted a mustache and developed a go-getting screen personality. He freelanced in big and small productions at such studios as RKO, Paramount, Columbia, and Universal, often cast as detectives or soldiers of fortune. In 1951, Taylor was cast in the title role of the syndicated TV series Boston Blackie, which ran profitably in rerun form into the 1960s. In 1958, Taylor starred in a network Western, The Rough Riders. Kent Taylor remained active in films into the 1970s, albeit in progressively cheaper efforts like Al Adamson's Satan's Sadists (1968).

Trivia: Breen began appearing as a nightclub and stage singer at age seven, becoming nationally famous in 1936 when he became a regular on Eddie Cantor's weekly radio show. That same year he was hired by RKO and shortly was the studio's leading child star. Before his voice changed he appeared in several films as a singing actor, beginning with Let's Sing Again (1936). His last film was Johnny Doughboy (1942). After his film career he continued working as a singer in nightclubs and a musical performer in stock. He graduated from UCLA and was a guest pianist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra on radio. Breen served in the infantry in World War Two, then studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. For a while he had a local TV show in New York.

Trivia: American actress Joyce Compton was born into a traveling family; she received her schooling bit by bit in classrooms from Texas to Toronto. In the company of her parents, Compton made the Hollywood casting-office rounds in the mid-1920s, finally landing a role in What Fools Men (1925). In 1926 she was designated a Wampas Baby Star (a publicity ploy created by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers), in the company of such future luminaries as Mary Astor, Joan Crawford, Dolores Del Rio, Janet Gaynor and Fay Wray. Compton's career never quite reached the heights of these contemporaries; small and delicate, she was advised by her parents not to go out for large roles for fear of endangering her health. When talkies came in, she cornered the market in squeaky-voiced dumb blondes, often applying her natural Southern accent for full comic effect. She worked frequently in two-reel comedies with such funsters as Clark and McCullough, Walter Catlett and Charley Chase. Compton's feature appearances were confined to supporting roles as waitresses, good-time girls and ditzy Southern belles. Occasionally a big part would come her way, and she'd make the most of it; her best role of the 1930s was nightclub singer Dixie Belle Lee in The Awful Truth, whose striptease number "Gone with the Wind" is later hilariously imitated by the film's star, Irene Dunne. Among Compton's favorite films was Sky Murder (1939) an MGM "Nick Carter" mystery in which she played a deceptively dim-witted female private eye. She married once, very briefly, in 1956; she lived in her well-appointed California home with her parents until their deaths. Retiring from the screen in 1961, Compton worked from time to time as a private nurse, preferring to spend her spare hours painting and designing clothes.

Trivia: Born in Germany, Anders was billed under his given name of Rudolph Amendt when he made his American screen bow in Stamboul Quest (1934). He became "Robert O. Davis" for such roles as Franz Joseph in Champagne Waltz (1937) and "His Excellency" in the 1941 serial King of the Texas Rangers. During the war years, when character actors with Germanic names became bankable commodities, he settled upon "Rudolph Anders," and remained so until his retirement in 1964. Anders flourished in sinister roles, often playing Nazis or communist spies. In the early 1950s, he was seen as Teutonic scientists in the sci-fiers Phantom from Space (1953) and The Snow Creature (1954). And on TV, he played Dr. Von Meter on the kiddie serial Space Patrol. Rudolph Anders was back at work for Der Fatherland as a Nazi doctor in his final film, 36 Hours (1964).

Trivia: Born in Italy, Frank Yaconelli emigrated to the U.S. after WWI, where he thrived in vaudeville as a monologist, dialectician, and comic musician. Yaconelli went to Hollywood in 1929, spending the next three decades playing innumerable character bits in such films as W.C. Fields' The Barber Shop (1933) and the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935). In the early '40s, he began showing up as comic relief in Tex Ritter's B-Westerns. Frank Yaconelli later played Pancho opposite Gilbert Roland's Cisco in a series of Cisco Kid Westerns for Monogram.