Trivia: The jury is still out as to whether or not curly haired Shirley Temple was the most talented child star in movie history; there is little doubt, however, that she was the most consistently popular. The daughter of non-professionals, she started taking singing and dancing classes at the age of three, and the following year began accompanying her mother on the movie audition circuit. Hired by the two-reel comedy firm of Educational Pictures in 1933, she starred in an imitation Our Gang series called the Baby Burlesks, performing astonishingly accurate impressions of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; she was also featured in the films of Educational's other stars, including Andy Clyde and Frank Coghlan Jr. In 1934 she was signed by Fox Pictures, a studio then teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. After a handful of minor roles she created a sensation by stopping the show with her rendition of "Baby Take a Bow" in Fox's Stand Up and Cheer. She was promptly promoted to her own starring features, literally saving Fox (and its successor 20th Century Fox) from receivership, and earned a special Oscar in 1934 "in grateful recognition to her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment." With such tailor-made vehicles as Bright Eyes (1934), Curly Top (1935), The Little Colonel (1935), Dimples (1936), and Heidi (1937), Temple was not only America's number one box-office attraction, but a merchandising cash cow, inspiring an unending cascade of Shirley Temple dolls, toys, and coloring books. She also prompted other studios to develop potential Shirley Temples of their own, such as Sybil Jason and Edith Fellows (ironically, the only juvenile actress to come close to Temple's popularity was 20th Century Fox's own Jane Withers, who got her start playing a pint-sized villain in Temples' Bright Eyes). Though the Fox publicity mill was careful to foster the myth that Temple was just a "typical" child with a "normal" life, her parents carefully screened her friends and painstakingly predetermined every move she made in public. Surprisingly, she remained an unspoiled and most cooperative coworker, though not a few veteran character actors were known to blow their stacks when little Temple, possessed of a photographic memory, corrected their line readings. By 1940, Temple had outgrown her popularity, as indicated by the failure of her last Fox releases The Blue Bird and Young People. The following year, MGM, who'd originally wanted Temple to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, cast her in Kathleen, another box-office disappointment which ended her MGM association almost before it began. Under the auspices of producers Edward Small and David O. Selznick, Temple enjoyed modest success as a teenaged actress in such productions as 1942's Miss Annie Rooney (in which Dickie Moore gave her first screen kiss) and 1944's Since You Went Away. Still, the public preferred to remember the Shirley Temple that was, reacting with horror when she played sexually savvy characters in Kiss and Tell (1945) and That Hagen Girl (1947). Perhaps the best of her post-child star roles was spunky army brat Philadelphia Thursday in John Ford's Fort Apache (1947), in which she co-starred with her first husband, actor John Agar (the union broke up after four years when Agar began to resent being labeled "Mr. Shirley Temple"). She returned to 20th Century Fox for her last film, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), in which played second fiddle to star Clifton Webb. Retiring on her trust fund in 1950, she wed a second time to business executive Charles Black, a marriage that would endure for several decades and produce a number of children. In 1958 she made a comeback as host of The Shirley Temple Storybook, a well-received series of children's TV specials. Her final show business assignment was the weekly 1960 anthology The Shirley Temple Show, which though not a success enabled her to play a variety of character roles -- including a toothless old witch in an hour-long adaptation of Babes in Toyland! The staunchly Republican Temple went into an entirely different field of endeavor when she entered politics in the mid-'60s. The bitter taste of an unsuccessful congressional bid was dissipated in 1968 when she was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ghana (1974-1976) and Czechoslovakia (1989), and during the Ford and Carter years kept busy as the U.S. Chief of Protocol. In the 1980s, she went public with information about her mastectomy, providing hope and inspiration for other victims of breast cancer. Still one of the most beloved figures in the world, Temple seemingly went to great pains to dispel her goody two-shoes image in her candid 1988 autobiography Child Star, in which she cast a frequently jaundiced eye on her lifelong celebrity status, revealing among other things that several well-known Hollywood moguls had tried and failed to force their manhood upon her once she was of legal age (and even before!). Temple received several lifetime achievement awards towards the end of her life, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the SAG life achievement award in 2005. She died in 2014, at the age of 85.

Trivia: Richard Greene was a charming, tall, handsome, dimpled, black-haired British leading man. The son of an actor and actress, in his teens he joined a repertory company. When he was 20 he was brought to Hollywood by 20th Century-Fox as a potential rival to MGM's Robert Taylor. Greene debuted onscreen in 1938 and over the next several years he was a busy leading man, becoming a very popular matinee idol in pretty-boy romantic and swashbuckling leads. His career was interrupted by service in World War II, and when he returned he was unable to regain his momentum, but he continued playing leads in international films for the next decade, and then more sporadically after 1955. He became very famous as the title-role star of the long-running British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, which was syndicated world-wide. From 1941-52 Richard Greene was married to actress Patricia Medina.

Trivia: Blonde, blue-eyed, Dresden Doll-featured Anita Louise was an actress from age 6, appearing with Walter Hampden in the Broadway production of Peter Ibbetson. She played juvenile roles in silent pictures, billed as Anita Fremault; in 1929, she dropped her "Fremault" surname, billing herself by her first and second names only. Many of her best screen roles were concentrated in the years 1934-1938. She played Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), the unwed mother of the title character in Anthony Adverse (1936), and two famous personages of the French Revolutionary era: Marie Antoinette in Madame DuBarry (1934) and the Princess de Lamballe in Marie Antoinette (1938). She continued accepting ingenue roles into the 1940s, adding spice to the stew with an occasional villainess (she was the much-hated murder victim in 1944's Nine Girls). In 1956, looking as young and fragile as ever, she played Johnny Washbrook's mother in the TV series My Friend Flicka. That same year, she was substitute host on The Loretta Young Show while Young (one of Louise's closest friends) recuperated from life-threatening surgery. Louise was long-married to producer Buddy Adler, who died in 1962. Retiring from show business upon the occasion of her second marriage to businessman Henry L. Berger, Anita Louise devoted her final years to charitable pursuits like the Children's Asthma Research Center and the National Hemophilia Foundation.

Trivia: Born in New York City to parents of Cuban extraction, American actor Cesar Romero studied for his craft at Collegiate and Riverdale Country schools. After a brief career as a ballroom dancer, the tall, sleekly handsome Romero made his Broadway debut in the 1927 production Lady Do. He received several Hollywood offers after his appearance in the Preston Sturges play Strictly Dishonorable, but didn't step before the cameras until 1933 for his first film The Shadow Laughs (later biographies would claim that Romero's movie bow was in The Thin Man [1934], in which he was typecast as a callow gigolo). Long associated with 20th Century-Fox, Romero occasionally cashed in on his heritage to play Latin Lover types, but was more at home with characters of indeterminate nationalities, usually playing breezily comic second leads (whenever Romero received third billing, chances were he wasn't going to get the girl). Cheerfully plunging into the Hollywood social scene, Romero became one of the community's most eligible bachelors; while linked romantically with many top female stars, he chose never to marry, insisting to his dying day that he had no regrets over his confirmed bachelorhood. While he played a variety of film roles, Romero is best remembered as "The Cisco Kid" in a brief series of Fox programmers filmed between 1939 and 1940, though in truth his was a surprisingly humorless, sullen Cisco, with little of the rogueish charm that Duncan Renaldo brought to the role on television. The actor's favorite movie role, and indeed one of his best performances, was as Cortez in the 1947 20th Century-Fox spectacular The Captain From Castile. When his Fox contract ended in 1950, Romero was wealthy enough to retire, but the acting bug had never left his system; he continued to star throughout the 1950s in cheap B pictures, always giving his best no matter how seedy his surroundings. In 1953 Romero starred in a 39-week TV espionage series "Passport to Danger," which he cheerfully admitted to taking on because of a fat profits-percentage deal. TV fans of the 1960s most closely associate Romero with the role of the white-faced "Joker" on the "Batman" series. While Romero was willing to shed his inhibitions in this villainous characterization, he refused to shave his trademark moustache, compelling the makeup folks to slap the clown white over the 'stache as well (you can still see the outline in the closeups). As elegant and affluent-looking as ever, Romero signed on for the recurring role of Peter Stavros in the late-1980s nighttime soap opera "Falcon Crest." In the early 1990s, he showed up as host of a series of classic 1940s romantic films on cable's American Movie Classics. Romero died of a blood clot on New Year's Day, 1994, at the age of 86.

Trivia: Of the many candidates for the throne of "Hollywood's favorite butler," Brighton-born Arthur Treacher was the undisputed victor. The son of a British lawyer, the tall, hook-nosed Treacher did not settle upon an acting career until he was 25, after serving in WWI. Starting out as a chorus "boy," Treacher rose to popularity as a musical comedy performer. He came to America in 1928 while he was appearing in a revue titled Great Temptations. Entering films in 1933, Treacher quickly established himself in butler or servant roles, notably in several Shirley Temple films. He was awarded top-billing in Thank You, Jeeves (1936) and Step Lively, Jeeves (1937), both based on the gentleman's-gentleman character created by P.G. Wodehouse. Remaining active on Broadway, Treacher was prominently billed in such stage productions as Cole Porter's Panama Hattie and the 1944 revival of The Ziegfeld Follies. After several years away from Hollywood, Treacher returned in 1964 to portray a constable in Disney's Mary Poppins, which turned out to be his final film. Arthur Treacher enjoyed a latter-day popularity in the 1960s as the acerbic sidekick of TV talk show host Merv Griffin, and through the franchising of his name and image for such business concerns as Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips and the Call Arthur Treacher Service System (a household help agency).

Trivia: A native of Capetown, South Africa, actress Sybil Jason appeared in several American films during the 1930s. She made her debut as a child in the British film Barnacle Bill in the early 1930s. A talented girl, Warner Brothers signed a contract and brought her to Hollywood in 1935 in hopes of usurping the reign of the town's current little princess Shirley Temple. Unfortunately, Jason, despite her considerable abilities, failed to capture American hearts and ended up relegated to small roles in Temple films. She temporarily relocated to South Africa following The Blue Bird, but by then WWII had broken out. When it finally ended, and Jason returned to America, she was well on her way to adulthood and had diffculty reviving her initial screen popularity. Instead, she married, started a family, and authored two musical shows and - eventually - an autobiography. Jason died in August 2011.

Trivia: The son of an English manufacturer, Miles Mander had dabbled in several careers before making his screen bow as an extra in 1918. He'd been a farmer, a novelist, a playwright, a stage director and a cinema exhibitor -- and, if all the stories can be believed, a fight promoter, horse and auto racer, and aviator. He was billed as Luther Miles in his earliest film appearances, reserving his real name for his screenwriting credits. In Hollywood from 1935 on, the weedy, mustachioed Mander made a specialty of portraying old-school-tie Britishers who, for various reasons, had fallen into disgrace. He was never more unsavory than when he portrayed master criminal Giles Conover in the 1945 "Sherlock Holmes" entry The Pearl of Death. Mander also showed up in two separate versions of The Three Musketeers, playing Louis XIII in the 1935 version and Richelieu in the 1939 edition (he also played Aramis in the Musketeers sequel The Man in the Iron Mask [1939]). Shortly after wrapping up his scenes in Imperfect Lady (1947), 57-year-old Miles Mander died of a sudden heart attack.

Trivia: The daughter of actress Freda Jones, dark-eyed, sad-faced child performer Marcia Mae Jones was an infant when she made her screen bow in Mannequin (1926). There was always an air of tragedy about Marcia Mae; more often than not she played cripples or consumptives who didn't survive past reel five. She was at her best as the terror-stricken Rosalie, the virtual slave of vitriolic Bonita Granville, in These Three (1936). She also proved a good, realistic "opposite" to sweetness'n'light Shirley Temple in Heidi (1937) and A Little Princess. In the 1940s, Jones played grown-up leads in several Monogram and PRC films; she was always worth watching, even when he films were barely tolerable. Latterly billed as Marsha Jones, the actress continued appearing in supporting and minor roles in TV and films until the early 1970s.

Trivia: Born in Spain to British parents, actress Beryl Mercer was on-stage from early childhood. Too short and matronly for leading lady roles, Beryl thrived for four decades as a character actress. In films from 1922, she specialized in frail, motherly roles in talkies, e.g., All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Broken Lullaby (1932). She was also supremely capable of conveying feistiness and determination; in the last year of her life, she played a snappish spiritualist in Hound of the Baskervilles and Queen Victoria in The Little Princess. Beryl Mercer was the wife of British leading man Holmes Herbert.

Trivia: Born in Wales, E. E. Clive studied for a medical career before switching his field of endeavor to acting at age 22. Touring the provinces for a decade, Clive became an expert at virtually every sort of regional dialect in the British Isles. He moved to the U.S. in 1912, where after working in the Orpheum vaudeville circuit he set up his own stock company in Boston. By the 1920s, his company was operating in Hollywood; among his repertory players were such up-and-comers as Rosalind Russell. He made his film debut as a rural police officer in 1933's The Invisible Man, then spent the next seven years showing up in wry bit roles as burgomeisters, butlers, reporters, aristocrats, shopkeepers and cabbies. Though he seldom settled down too long in any one characterization, E. E. Clive was a semi-regular as Tenny the Butler in Paramount's Bulldog Drummond "B" series.

Trivia: A former circus and minstrel-show performer, British actor Holmes Herbert toured on the provincial-theatre circuit as a juvenile in the early 1900s. Born Edward Sanger, Herbert adopted his professional first name out of admiration for Sherlock Holmes -- a role which, worse luck, he never got to play. Herbert never appeared in films in his native country; he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, appeared in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1918), and never looked homeward. Talking pictures enabled Holmes Herbert to join such countrymen as Reginald Denny and Roland Young in portraying "typical" British gentlemen. The stately, dynamic-featured Herbert nearly always appeared in a dinner jacket, selflessly comforting the heroine as she pined for the man she really loved. He received some of his best roles in the early-talkie era; he appeared as a soft-spoken police inspector in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), then recreated the role for the 1937 remake. Herbert also appeared as Dr. Lanyon, Henry Jekyll's closest friend and confidante in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). By the '40s, many of Herbert's roles were uncredited, but he was still able to make a maximum impression with a minimum of lines in such roles as the village council head in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Herbert's second wife was another supporting-cast stalwart of the '30s, Beryl Mercer (best remembered as James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy [1931]). Holmes Herbert remained in films until 1952's The Brigand; reportedly, he also appeared in a few early west-coast television productions.

Trivia: A distinguished-looking, often bespectacled supporting actor from England, Guy Bellis lent his considerable presence to several well-remembered costume dramas in the 1930s and '40s, appearing as Buckingham in Cardinal Richelieu (1935), as Lord Charles Howard in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and as a host of typically British domestics. Bellis, whose characterizations often went unbilled, continued his screen career well into the 1950s.

Trivia: A debonair stage actor from South Africa who often sported an impressively florid mustache, Kenneth Hunter played the "other man" in several melodramas of the early 1910s, including The Ransom (1916) opposite Broadway star Julia Dean and Daredevil Kate (1916) opposite femme fatale Virginia Pearson (both produced in New York City). After more than a decade of stage work, Hunter returned to the screen in the late '30s, mainly playing ramrod-straight military officers: the commandant in Lancer Spy (1937), a general in The Little Princess (1939), and a brigadier general in The Red Danube (1949). He was also Sir Mortimer in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Lord Tyrmanell in The Earl of Chicago (1940), and a mounted police inspector in The Lodger (1944).

Trivia: British actress Eily Malyon enjoyed a lucrative Hollywood screen career playing scores of no-nonsense schoolteachers, maids, governesses and maiden aunts. Ideally suited for costume pieces, she was seen in two major Dickens adaptations of the 1930s, playing Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations (1934) and Mrs. Cruncher in Tale of Two Cities (1935). She was also appropriately sinister as Mrs. Barryman in Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Mrs. Sketcher in Jane Eyre (1943). Eily Malyon's most hissable screen role was maiden Aunt Demetria Riffle in 1939's On Borrowed Time; Aunt Demetria's onerous Victorianism proved so distasteful to Julian Northrup(Lionel Barrymore) and his grandson Pud (Bob Watson) that they literally chose to die rather than submit to her whims.

Trivia: A performer from age 12, Australian comedian/acrobat Clyde Cook rose to theatrical fame as "The Kangaroo Boy." Arriving in the U.S. after World War I, he worked briefly for Mack Sennett, then switched to the Sunshine Comedy unit at Fox. A tiny man with a huge paintbrush moustache, Cook was an amusing screen presence, but his lack of a well-defined character kept him from becoming a major star. He played supporting roles in such features as He Who Gets Slapped (1924) before trying his luck again as a two-reel star at Hal Roach Studios. The comedian's fortunes improved when he signed on at Warner Bros. as comedy relief in a number of silent features, in which he was frequently teamed with William Demarest or Louise Fazenda. With the coming of sound, Cook's Australian accent enabled him to secure good supporting roles in such British-based films as Dawn Patrol (1930) and Oliver Twist (1935); he also returned to Roach for a brief series of knockabout comedies titled The Taxi Boys. His roles dwindled to bits by the late '30s, but Cook never wanted for work. He was still at it in the 1950s, showing up in movies (Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1951]) and on television (The Adventures of Superman). Clyde Cook retired after completing his one-day assignment on John Ford's Donovan's Reef (1963).

Trivia: Piping-voice, hamster-faced Scottish character actor Olaf Hytten left the British stage for films in 1921. By the time the talkie era rolled around, Hytten was firmly established in Hollywood, playing an abundance of butlers and high-society gentlemen. The actor was primarily confined to one or two-line bits in such films as Platinum Blonde (1931), The Sphinx (1933), Bonnie Scotland (1935), Beloved Rebel (1936), The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Bride Came COD (1941). He was a semi-regular of the Universal B-unit in the '40s, appearing in substantial roles as military men and police official in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and as burgomeisters and innkeepers in the studio's many horror films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, etc.) Olaf Hytten was active until at least 1956; one of his more memorable assignments of the '50s was as the larcenous butler who participates in a scheme to drive Daily Planet editor Perry White crazy in the "Great Caesar's Ghost" episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman.

Trivia: Diminutive William Sidney Stanton enjoyed an acting career that took him from London to Los Angeles. After honing his craft in the theater, Stanton made his motion-picture debut in 1927 and continued with a busy schedule of bit parts and character roles (specializing in comic drunks) into the 1930s and early 1940s. Raoul Walsh, for one, used him in nearly identical drunk roles in two films from 1932, Me And My Gal and Sailor's Luck. Often availing himself of his Cockney accent, Stanton's range also allowed him to play parts such as menacing thugs, crowd members, valets and butlers. His last screen role was in Adam's Rib (1949), in the uncredited part of a taxi driver.

Trivia: Onscreen from 1912, Australian-born Frank Baker was the brother of that country's foremost silent-screen action hero, Snowy Baker. Like Snowy, Frank settled in Hollywood in the 1920s and embarked on a long career as a stuntman and bit player. Rarely onscreen for more than minutes, Baker later portrayed Major Martling in the 1935 serial The New Adventures of Tarzan, George Davis in Clark Gable's Parnell (1937), Lord Dunstable in That Forsyte Woman (1949), and even General Robert E. Lee in Run of the Arrow (1957). Retiring in the mid-'60s, Frank Baker spent his final years at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital. He died in 1980 at the age of 88.

Trivia: A solid, good-looking leading man with an upper-class British accent, he moved to England while in his teens and joined the army in 1917, serving in France. He debuted onstage in 1919, then onscreen in 1924; for the next decade he alternated between plays and films, usually as a leading man, then moved to Hollywood in 1934 and appeared in many American films. He was often cast as an upright, conscientious husband, lover, or friend. He returned to England for war service in 1942. After the war he continued to perform in British plays and films for the next two decades.