Trivia: One of comedian Joe E. Brown's proudest claims was that he was perhaps the only kid whose parents encouraged him to run away with the circus. In 1902, the 10-year-old Brown joined a circus tumbling act called the Five Marvellous Ashtons, with whom he started his vaudeville career. He toured in burlesque in an acrobatic act, and also briefly played semi-professional baseball. His avid interest in baseball inaugurated a lifelong association with that sport which would included his participation in the National Vaudeville Artists ballteam, his part-ownership of the minor league Kansas City Blues, and his providing pregame "color" for the televised New York Yankees games of the 1950s (Joe's son Joe L. became manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955). On the verge of his leaving vaudeville for Broadway in 1919, Joe discovered that Actors' Equity had called a strike; with very little hesitation, he grabbed a sign and joined the picket line. In 1920, Brown finally made it to Broadway as a comedian in the all-star review Jim Jam Jems. He went on to star in such New York productions as Captain Jinks and Twinkle Twinkle. In 1928, he began his movie career, uncharacteristically appearing in turgid melodramas until he was signed by Warner Bros. in 1929. In his popular Warners vehicles, Brown alternated between playing naive young men who made good despite impossible odds, or brash braggarts who had to be taken down a peg or two. His trademark was his huge mouth, cavernous grin, and drawn-out yell. Joe's best films were those in which he was permitted to display his athletic prowess, such as his "baseball trilogy" Fireman Save My Child (1932), Elmer the Great (1933) and Alibi Ike (1935). Personally selected by Max Reinhardt to play Flute in the lavish Warners adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), Brown easily stole the show from such formidable competition as James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Victor Jory, and Mickey Rooney. During his Warner years, Brown and his wife began sponsoring promising college athletes: among Joe's proteges were UCLA football star (and later producer) Mike Frankovitch, and Olympic contestant (and future politician) Ralph Metcalfe. After ending his Warners contract in 1936, Brown starred in a series of largely disappointing low-budget comedies for independent producer David Loew. By the early 1940s, Brown's pictures were strictly in the "B" category, though some of them, notably his brace of co-starring assignments with comedienne Judy Canova, had glimmers of the old Brown magic. He worked tirelessly entertaining troops in all corners of the world during World War II; their enthusiastic response enabled Brown to overcome the death of his son, Captain Donald Evans Brown, in a training accident. After the war, Brown devoted most of his energies to stage work, notably in the road companies of Harvey and Show Boat (he would repeat his interpretation of Captain Andy in the 1951 MGM film version of Show Boat). He added television to his long list of accomplishments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most of Joe E. Brown's final film appearances were cameo roles, with the outstanding exception of his portrayal of daffy millionaire Osgood Fielding in Some Like It Hot (1959), wherein Joe, after discovering that his "girlfriend" Jack Lemmon was actually a man, brought down the house by uttering the film's classic punchline: "Well, nobody's perfect."

Trivia: Brunette actress June Travis made her first film appearances as a Warner Bros. contractee in 1934. Alternately fiery and demure, June appeared opposite such Warners leading men as James Cagney, Pat O'Brien and Joe E. Brown; she was Brown's vis-a-vis twice, first in the 1936 Warners comedy Earthworm Tractors, then in the independently produced 1938 effort The Gladiator. She also was seen as Della Street in the 1936 "Perry Mason" programmer The Case of the Black Cat, co-starring with Ricardo Cortez as Mason. June Travis retired from films in 1939 to devote her activities to the stage; she made an isolated movie comeback as the wife of Hollywood agent Warner Anderson in 1953's The Star, which top-billed Travis's one-time Warner Bros. colleague Bette Davis.

Trivia: It is possible that when actor Guy Kibbee portrayed newspaper editor Webb in the 1940 film version of Our Town, he harked back to his own father's experiences as a news journalist. The cherubic, pop-eyed Kibbee first performed on Mississippi riverboats as a teenager, then matriculated to the legitimate stage. The 1930 Broadway play Torch Song was the production that brought Kibbee the Hollywood offers. From 1931 onward, Kibbee was one of the mainstays of the Warner Bros. stock companies, specializing in dumb politicos (The Dark Horse [1932]), sugar daddies (42nd Street [1933]) and the occasional straight, near-heroic role (Captain Blood [1935]). In 1934, Kibbee enjoyed one of his rare leading roles, essaying the title character in Babbitt (1934), a role he seemed born to play. During the 1940s, Kibbee headlined the Scattergood Baines B-picture series at RKO. He retired in 1949, after completing his scenes in John Ford's Three Godfathers. Kibbee was the brother of small-part play Milton Kibbee, and the father of Charles Kibbee, City University of New York chancellor.

Trivia: Affable "good guy" singer/actor Dick Foran was the son of a U.S. senator. After a tentative stab at a career as a geologist, Foran achieved prominence as a band and radio singer. Billed as Nick Foran, he made his screen debut as a "Paul Revere" type in a surrealistic production number in Fox's Stand Up and Cheer (1934). Signed by Warner Bros., Foran was utilized as that studio's "answer" to Gene Autry in a series of "B" musical westerns; ironically, he also played a devastatingly parodied cowboy star in 1938's Boy Meets Girl. After enjoying nominal stardom in Warners' second-feature product--and incidentally picking up an Oscar nomination for his supporting work in The Petrified Forest (1936)--Foran moved to Universal, where he worked in everything from serials to horror films to Abbott and Costello comedies. In one A&C romp, Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942), Foran introduced what would become his signature theme, the lovely "I'll Remember April." Those who worked with Foran during this period remember him being as likable and uncomplicated offscreen as on; one Universal starlet never tired of recalling the time that Foran invited her into his dressing room then asked quite sincerely if she wanted to play a game of jacks! Dick Foran remained in films and TV as a reliable, pleasantly portly character actor into the 1960s; one of his last films was Donovan's Reef, which starred his longtime friend John Wayne.

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: The younger brother of actress Jobyna Howland, Olin Howland established himself on Broadway in musical comedy. The actor made his film debut in 1918, but didn't really launch his Hollywood career until the talkie era. Generally cast as rustic characters, Howland could be sly or slow-witted, depending on the demands of the role. He showed up in scores of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, most amusingly as the remonstrative Dr. Croker (sic) in The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934). A favorite of producer David O. Selznick, Howland played the laconic baggage man in Nothing Sacred (1937), the grim, hickory-stick wielding schoolmaster in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and an expansive Yankee businessman in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1940s, he could often as not be found at Republic, appearing in that studio's westerns and hillbilly musicals. One of his best screen assignments of the 1950s was the old derelict who kept shouting "Make me sergeant in charge of booze!" in the classic sci-fier Them (1954). Howland made several TV guest appearances in the 1950s, and played the recurring role of Swifty on the weekly Circus Boy (1956). In the latter stages of his career, Olin Howland billed himself as Olin Howlin; he made his final appearance in 1958, as the first victim of The Blob.

Trivia: American actor Joseph Crehan bore an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant and appeared as Grant in a number of historical features, notably They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944). Appearing in hundreds of other films as well, the short, snappish actor's field-commander personality assured him authoritative roles as police chiefs, small-town mayors and newspaper editors. Because he never looked young, Joseph Crehan played essentially the same types of roles throughout his screen career, even up until 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. Perhaps Joseph Crehan's oddest appearance is in a film he never made; in West Side Story (1961), it is Crehan's face that appears on those ubiquitous political campaign posters in the opening Jets vs. Sharks sequences.

Trivia: After a tentative movie debut in the New York-filmed 1929 musical Glorifying the American Girl, stately character actress Sarah Edwards settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1935. Another of those performers who evidently jumped directly from birth to old age, Edwards portrayed many a kindly grandmother, imperious dowager, hardy pioneer wife, ill-tempered teacher and strict governess. She played peripheral roles in films like The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Shadow of the Doubt (1942), and enjoyed larger assignments in films like Hal Roach's Dudes are Pretty People (1942, as "The Colonel") and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Sarah Edwards is not related to the 1980s TV personality of the same name.

Trivia: When actor Charles C. Wilson wasn't portraying a police chief onscreen, he was likely to be cast as a newspaper editor. The definitive Wilson performance in this vein was as Joe Gordon, reporter Clark Gable's apoplectic city editor in the 1934 multi-award winner It Happened One Night. Like many easily typecast actors, Wilson was usually consigned to one-scene (and often one-line) bits, making the sort of instant impression that hundreds of scripted words could not adequately convey. Shortly before his death in 1948, Charles C. Wilson could once more be seen at the editor's desk of a big-city newspaper -- this time as the boss of those erstwhile newshounds the Three Stooges in the two-reel comedy Crime on Their Hands (1948).

Trivia: Blunt, burly American actor William B. Davidson was equally at home playing gangster bosses, business executives, butlers and military officials. In films since 1914, Davidson seemed to be in every other Warner Bros. picture made between 1930 and 1935, often as a Goliath authority figure against such pint-sized Davids as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. In the early '40s, Davidson was a fixture of Universal's Abbott and Costello comedies, appearing in In the Navy (1941), Keep 'Em Flying (1941) and In Society (1944). In Abbott & Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941), Davidson shows up as Moose Matson, the dying gangster who sets the whole plot in motion. An avid golfer, William B. Davidson frequently appeared in the all-star instructional shorts of the '30s starring legendary golf pro Bobby Jones.

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

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: In films since the earliest days of sound, distinguished-looking Henry Hall specialized in playing small-town doctors, lawyers, benign businessmen, or the heroine's father, often in low-budget Westerns and frequently unbilled. On Broadway in the first decade of the 20th century, Hall spent his final years as a resident at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Handsome American silent-screen comic Harry Depp starred for producer Al Christie in two-reel situation comedies such as Girl in the Box (1918) and 'Twas Henry's Fault (1919), both opposite pretty Elinor Field. He later showed a talent for female impersonation in several Universal comedies of the 1920s and continued to play bit parts through the late 1940s. In the talkie era, however, Depp was better known as an artists' representative.

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: Chances are when a doctor made a house call in a '40s movie, that doctor was portrayed by Sam Flint. Silver-haired, authoritative, and distinguished by an executive-style moustache, Flint entered films in the early '30s after a long stage career. Though his movie roles were usually confined to one or two scenes per picture, Flint was always instantly recognizable in his characterizations of businessmen, bankers, chairmen of the board, politicians, publishers, fathers of the bride--and, as mentioned before, doctors. In addition to his prolific feature-film work, Sam Flint was always welcome in short subjects, appearing in support of everyone from Our Gang to the Three Stooges.

Trivia: A veteran stage actor, Jack Richardson began his screen career at the American Film Manufacturing Company opposite his then-wife Louise Lester, the studio's comic "Calamity Anne." One of the better "Boss Heavies" around, Richardson even starred in a couple of low-budget Westerns in the 1920s, but was not really suitable hero material. Today he is perhaps best remembered for playing the brutal servant -- in blackface, no less -- in Thomas H. Ince's justly infamous Free and Equal (1915, released 1925). Richardson's career lasted through the 1940s, but mostly in minor roles.

Trivia: Over his 60-year career, American stunt man Harvey Parry appeared in close to 600 films. He got his start playing a Keystone Kop for Mack Sennett and over the years played stunt doubles for some of Hollywood's brightest stars including James Cagney, for whom he doubled most often, Bogart, Peter Lorre, and once, Shirley Temple. Though not generally known until long after famed silent comedian Harold Lloyd's death, Parry also doubled for Lloyd in the action sequences of Feet First (1930) on the long shots. During the '70s through the early '80s, Parry did stunt and character work (specializing as a stumbling drunk) on several television series including The Fall Guy.

Trivia: Actress Carol Hughes was 13 years old when she married comic actor Frank Faylen. Hughes' own film career began in 1936: while sometimes enjoying full supporting roles, e.g. Frank McHugh's nagging wife in Three Men on a Horse (1936), she generally made do with bits, such as the Modiste Salon salesgirl in 1939's The Women. In 1940, Hughes replaced Jean Rogers in the role of Dale Arden in the third and last of Universal's "Flash Gordon" serials, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. She retired from films in the early 1950s, after playing Gil Lamb's leading lady in a series of RKO Radio 2-reelers. Carol Hughes is the mother of actress Carol Faylen, who appeared in the 1964 TV sitcom The Bing Crosby Show as Crosby's daughter Joyce.