Trivia: The daughter of a New York City cop, 14-year-old Alice Faye lied about her age to secure her first chorus girl job in 1929. While appearing in the 1933-1934 edition of George White's Scandals, Faye became the protégée of the show's star, Rudy Vallee, touring with Vallee's orchestra as vocalist. At Vallee's insistence, she was cast in the 1934 Fox Studios film version of George White's Scandals, elevated to the leading role when Lillian Harvey walked off the set. Despite unpleasant tabloid coverage when Vallee's wife sued her for alienation of her husband's affections, Faye was kept on by Fox, which lightened her already blonde hair and attempted to groom her as the "new Jean Harlow." After a few negligible leading roles in such Fox productions as She Learned About Sailors (1934) and 365 Nights in Hollywood (1935), she established her screen image as a tough, contralto-voiced cookie with a heart of gold, her popularity ascending with each successive film. During this period, she wed her frequent co-star Tony Martin, a union which lasted until 1940. Though a favorite with fans and coworkers alike, Faye regularly put her film career in jeopardy by clashing with 20th Century Fox head man Darryl F. Zanuck, who, realizing that he couldn't very well throw her off the payroll (not with such box-office hits as In Old Chicago and Rose of Washington Square to her credit), decided to "punish" her by hiring Betty Grable as Faye's potential successor. The press had a field day fabricating a deadly rivalry between Faye and Grable, though in fact the actresses got along reasonably well and were felicitously teamed in Tin Pan Alley (1940). Faye's feud with Zanuck came to a head in 1945 when her leading role in Fallen Angel was cut down to practically nothing. She quit movies cold, electing to devote her time to her second husband, bandleader Phil Harris, and her two daughters. Though banned from films by Zanuck, Faye flourished on radio, co-starring with Harris on a popular comedy series which ran for several successful seasons. In 1962, she returned to the screen in the ill-advised remake of State Fair, in which the 47-year-old actress played the mother of Pat Boone. She made several TV guest appearances in the 1960s and 1970s, toured the nightclub and straw hat circuit, and co-starred with John Payne in a Broadway revival of Good News. Since the death of Phil Harris in 1994, Alice Faye participated in several TV specials about Hollywood's "Golden Age," and remained in contact with her numerous, still-faithful fans until her death from cancer in early May 1998.

Trivia: American light leading man James Ellison was recruited from a stock company to appear in the forgotten 1932 film Play Girl. His biggest movie break was DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), in which he played Buffalo Bill Cody opposite Gary Cooper's Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur's Calamity Jane. This sagebrush endeavor led to two seasons' work as "Johnny Nelson" in Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy western programmers. Ellison was one of the stalwarts of the "B" units at 20th Century-Fox and RKO during the 1940s; thereafter he free-lanced in such cost-conscious second features as Dead Man's Trail (1952) and Ghost Town (1956). After starring in the negligible 1963 Castro spoof When The Girls Take Over, James Ellison decided that the time was ripe to leave show business in favor of the lucrative world of real estate.

Trivia: Moviedom's "Brazilian Bombshell" was actually born in Portugal, but as a child Carmen Miranda moved with her large and prosperous family to Rio de Janeiro. That she became a popular musical comedy star is all the more remarkable when one realizes that Miranda was born with deformed feet and had to wear special "lifts" for her performances. Miranda was a well-established and much beloved Brazilian radio, stage, and film personality when, at age 30, she was brought to America by the Schubert Brothers to appear in the 1939 Broadway revue The Streets of Paris (which also served as the "legit" debut of former burlesque comics Abbott and Costello). She was signed to a long-term 20th Century-Fox contract in 1940, which proved a wise move when World War II dried up the European movie market, leaving South America as practically the only foreign outlet for Hollywood films. A flamboyant exponent of the "good neighbor" policy, Miranda sang and danced her way through a series of garish Fox musicals, the most outrageous of which was The Gang's All Here (1943), in which she sang "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat" while adorned with a seemingly gargantuan piece of fruit-laden headgear. When the demand for South-of-the-Border musicals petered out during the postwar era, Miranda began limiting her screen performances, spending more of her professional time with successful nightclub engagements. Off-screen, Miranda was a talented sketch artist and costume designer; she was also very active in charitable work, seeing to it that a generous percentage of her earnings were sent to the destitute in South America. After completing a strenuous dance number for a 1955 episode of TV's The Jimmy Durante Show, Miranda suffered a fatal heart attack; her death touched off widespread mourning throughout all of Latin America. The actress' memory is kept alive by the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio De Janeiro.

Trivia: Phil Baker was a comic personality and performer whose stardom, sad to say, was confined to a specific generation: in the 1920s and '30s he was a veritable fixture in the theater world as the comedic sparkplug of numerous revues, and in the latter decade he made the leap to radio with considerable success. By the 1930s and '40s, he bid fair to become a film star, but the right scripts and vehicles weren't there and he remained best known for his radio work. Baker was born in Philadelphia in 1896, to a middle-class family with no particular contacts in the entertainment world. He was musically inclined, however, a talent that manifested itself when he received an accordion as a bar mitzvah gift and learned to play it on his own. Before he was far into his teens, he was working as an office boy to future Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle at the Imp Film Company, and he was soon bitten by the performing bug in a way that simply wasn't going to be sated by playing the accordion at school or at parties. Baker ran away from home and ended up in Boston, where he financed his first night by winning an amateur talent competition and taking away the princely sum of 50 cents. There followed more amateur nights as he headed to Fall River, and then on to New York, where he became a part of a violin-and-accordion duo with Ed Janis that was as popular for their comic schtick as for their music. From there, he leaped into a partnership with Ben Bernie, and "Bernie & Baker" topped the vaudeville circuit before they split up the act. Baker joined the legitimate stage when Ziegfeld brought him into his Midnight Frolics, and he was later cast in the Greenwich Village Follies and other revue-type shows, where his quick wit soon began supplanting his music as the main focus of his act, and by the time he was cast in the Music Box Revue he was a star performer. A visit to England proved disastrous as his opening night audience sat silently through his jokes (though they did join in the music-making), but on his return he picked up exactly where he left off, and he was soon a part of such top entertainment vehicles as the stage revue Artists & Models. Baker also composed songs, including the hits "Park Avenue Strut" and "Pretty Little Baby." Apart from his overall success, Baker also always claimed that he originated the use of the "stooge" in modern comedy. As the story went, he was in the middle of performing one night when he found himself being heckled by a man in the fourth row; the man turned out to be an out-of-work comic, and the audience found their spontaneous give-and-take so funny that Baker hired the man to repeat his outburst as part of the act in subsequent shows, which greatly elevated Baker's already considerable popularity. Among those who passed through the spot as Baker's second banana was Sid Silvers, who went on to stardom in his own right on-stage. Baker had the desire to be taken seriously as an actor, and this proved his undoing financially. He mounted expensive productions of such serious works as Idiot's Delight as star vehicles for himself, and a lot of money in unsuccessful touring productions. Onscreen, he found occasional work pretty much as himself, or characters very close to his stage persona, in movies such as The Goldwyn Follies. Somehow, though, he never caught on in the way that other vaudeville and burlesque comic performers, such as Olsen & Johnson or Abbott & Costello did during the early '40s. It was in radio, however -- which was bigger and more influential than the movies for much of the 1930s -- that he became a media star. Debuting with his own show in 1933, Baker was busy on the airwaves for more than a decade. And in 1942, he became the host of a ground-breaking radio show called Take It or Leave It, often credited as the first modern quiz show in American popular culture. Baker served as quiz-master with a gently jocular tone for the lighthearted proceedings, which involved small amounts of money and lots of good-natured comic banter -- the top prize was for the "64-dollar question," a phrase that became part of the slang of the day and for many years after. He was also known for being especially kind to servicemen who were contestants, on one occasion handing a nervous navy enlisted man the script and telling him to handle the questions, which Baker answered before turning over the prize money to him. Old enough to have served in World War I, Baker was heavily involved with the Second World War as a civilian, supporting War Bond drives and other, similar activities. In Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943) -- probably his best movie -- Baker got to support all of those causes dear to him as well as playing lots of funny scenes. Baker's later attempts at dramatic theater work proved no more successful than Idiot's Delight had been, and at the end of the 1940s he retired from the stage. He starred in a film called Take It or Leave It late in the decade, based on his hit radio show, and also tried to make the jump to television. His small-screen appearances, however, were relatively unmemorable, and few younger viewers coming along after World War II had any idea of who he was. His marriage to Irmgaard Erik precipitated a move to Copenhagen, and it was there that he passed away in late 1963, after more than a decade out of the limelight.

Trivia: It's a source of amazement to those filmgoers born after 1915 -- which is to say, most of us in the early 21st century -- that rotund, frog-voiced, barrel-shaped Eugene Pallette started out in movies as a rough-and-tumble stuntman and graduated to romantic leading man, all in his first five years in pictures. Indeed, Pallette led enough differing career phases and pursued enough activities outside of performing to have made himself a good subject for an adventure story or a screen bio, à la Diamond Jim Brady, except that nobody would have believed it. He was born into an acting family in Winfield, KS, in the summer of 1889; his parents were performing together in a stage production of East Lynne when he came into the world. He grew up on the road, moving from town to town and never really putting down roots until he entered a military academy to complete high school -- which he apparently never quite managed to do. By his teens, Pallette, who was slender and athletic, was working as a jockey and had a winning record, too. Before long, he was part of a stage act involving riding, in a three-horse routine that proved extremely popular. He began acting on the stage as well, and was scraping out a living in the Midwest and West Coast, hoping to make it to New York. At one point, he was allowing a company manager in whose troupe he was working to pocket a major part of his earnings in anticipation of using the sum to finance a trip to New York, only to see the man abscond with the cash and leave him stranded. Pallette turned to movies when he arrived in Los Angeles looking for stage work and found that there was nothing for him. He headed to a nearby studio, where he was told they were looking for riders and took a job as a stuntman for $1.50 a day. He quickly realized that there was a need -- and much more money offered -- for leading men, and he was able to put himself forward in that role. In a matter of a few days, Pallette had managed to make the jump from bit player to lead, and by 1914, he was working opposite the likes of Dorothy Gish. Such was his range that he was just as capable of playing convincingly menacing villains as romantic leads and dashing heroes. He was in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in a small role as a wounded soldier. That same year, he played starring roles in three movies by director Tod Browning -- The Spell of the Poppy, The Story of a Story, and The Highbinders -- as, respectively, a drug-addicted pianist, a writer struggling with his conscience, and an abusive Chinese husband of a white woman. In Griffith's Intolerance, he had a much bigger heroic part in that movie's French sequences, while in Going Straight, also made in 1916, he gave a memorable performance as a sadistic villain. Pallette's career was interrupted by the American entry into the First World War, for which he joined the flying corps and served stateside. When he returned to acting in 1919, he discovered that he had to restart his career virtually from square one -- a new generation of leading men had come along during his two years away. He'd also begun putting on weight while in uniform and, with his now bland-seeming features, found that only supporting parts were open to him -- and that's what he got, including an important role in Douglas Fairbanks' 1921 adaptation of The Three Musketeers. For a time, he even gave up acting, pulling his available funds together and heading to the oil fields of Texas, where he made what was then a substantial fortune -- 140,000 dollars in less than a year -- only to see it disappear in a single bad investment. Pallette spent an extended period in seclusion, hospitalized with what would now be diagnosed as severe depression, and then turned back to acting. He reestablished himself during the late silent era in character roles, built on his newly rotund physique and a persona that was just as good at being comical as menacing. Pallette signed with Hal Roach Studios in 1927, where work as a comedy foil was plentiful, and his notable two-reel appearances included the role of the insurance man in the Laurel and Hardy classic The Battle of the Century that same year. It was with the advent of the talkies, however, that he truly came into his own; his croaky but distinctive, frog-like voice -- acquired from time spent as a streetcar conductor calling off stops to his passengers -- completed a picture that made him one of the movies' most memorable, beloved, and highly paid character actors and even a character lead at times. Paramount kept Pallette especially busy, and among his more notable movies were The Virginian, playing "Honey" Wiggin, and The Canary Murder Case and The Greene Murder Case in the studio's Philo Vance series, in which he portrayed Det. Sgt. Heath. He became especially good at portraying excitable wealthy men and belligerent officials. Pallette was a veritable fixture in Hollywood for the next decade and a half, playing prominent roles in every kind of movie from sophisticated screwball comedies such as My Man Godfrey (1936) to the relatively low-brow (but equally funny) Abbott & Costello vehicle It Ain't Hay, with digressions into Preston Sturges' unique brand of comedy (The Lady Eve), fantasy (The Ghost Goes West), musicals (The Gang's All Here, in which he also got to sing as part of the finale), and swashbucklers (The Adventures of Robin Hood). The latter, in which he portrayed Friar Tuck to Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, is probably the movie for which he is best remembered. He was earning more than 2,500 dollars a week and indulged himself freely in his main offscreen hobby: gourmet cooking. He was unique among Hollywood's acting community for having free round-the-clock access to the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel. Not surprisingly, Pallette's girth increased dramatically between the late '20s and the mid-'40s -- his weight rising to well over 300 pounds -- but it all meant more work and higher fees, right until the middle of the 1940s. He was diagnosed with what he referred to as a throat problem then, and gave up acting. By then, he had a ranch in Oregon where he and his wife lived. Pallette was also extremely pessimistic about the future of the human race, was on record as believing that some catastrophe would wipe us out, and reportedly had stockpiled food and water in a survivalist frame of mind. He died of throat cancer in the late summer of 1954, at age 65.

Trivia: Tall, long-legged comic actress Charlotte Greenwood received her first speaking part in a 1907 musical comedy starring the Rogers Brothers, a dialect team. She formed a vaudeville act called "Two Girls and a Piano," then performed solo specialty spots in such revues as The Passing Show, bringing houses down with her wisecracks and high kicks. Her stardom was secured in 1915 with a stage musical uniquely suited for her talents, So Long, Letty--the first of several productions in which Greenwood was cast as the energetic, man-chasing Letty. Also in 1915, she made her film debut in Jane. A Broadway headliner throughout the 1920s, Greenwood made her talkie bow in the 1930 film version of So Long Letty; she went on to co-star with Eddie Cantor in Palmy Days (1931), Bert Lahr in Flying High (1931) and Buster Keaton in Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1931). By 1940, Greenwood had settled into character roles, usually playing the all-knowing aunt or guardian of the heroine. She brightened many a 20th Century-Fox musical of the 1940s, including Moon Over Miami (1941), Springtime in the Rockies (1942) and The Gang's All Here (1943). Rodgers and Hammerstein conceived the role of "Aunt Eller" in their 1943 Broadway hit Oklahoma with Greenwood in mind, but her film commitments made it impossible for her to appear in the original stage version of that musical. She finally got to play Aunt Eller in the 1955 film version of Oklahoma--one of her last screen appearances before her 1956 retirement. Married twice, Charlotte Greenwood's first husband was actor Cyril Ring, the brother of musical comedy star Blanche Ring and brother-in-law of actors Thomas Meighan and Charles Winninger.

Trivia: Few actors were more beloved of audiences across multiple generations -- and from more different fields of entertainment -- than Edward Everett Horton. For almost 70 years, his work delighted theatergoers on two coasts (and a lot of the real estate in between) and movie audiences, first in the silents and then in the talkies, where he quickly became a familiar supporting player and then a second lead, often essaying comically nervous "fuddy-duddy" parts, and transcended the seeming limitations of character acting to rival most of the leading men around him in popularity; he subsequently moved into television, both as an actor and narrator, and gained a whole new fandom for his work as the storyteller in the animated series "Fractured Fairy Tales." Edward Everett Horton was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1886 -- when it was a separate city from New York City -- the son of Edward Everett Horton and Isabella Diack Horton. His grandfather was Edward Everett Hale, the author of the story The Man Without a Country. He attended Boys High School and later studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Columbia University in Manhattan. His path to graduation was thwarted when he joined the university's drama club -- despite his 6'2" build, his first role had him cast as a woman. He never did graduate from Columbia, but he embarked on a performing career that was to keep him busy for more than six decades. In those days, he also sang -- in a baritone -- and joined the Staten Island-based Dempsey Light Opera Company for productions of Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. His singing brought him to the Broadway stage as a chorus member, and he subsequently spent three years with the Louis Mann company honing his acting skills while playing in stock -- Horton made his professional acting debut in 1908 with a walk-on role in The Man Who Stood Still. By 1911, he was working steadily and regularly, and often delighting audiences with his comedic talents, and remained with the Mann company for another two years. He was a leading man in the Crescent Theatre stock company, based in Brooklyn, and spent the remainder of the teens playing leading roles in theater companies across the United States, eventually basing himself in Los Angeles. Horton entered movies in 1918, and became well known to screen audiences with his performance in the 1923 version of Ruggles of Red Gap. He was identified almost entirely with comedic work after that, and by the end of the '20s had starring roles in a string of comedic shorts. It was after the advent of sound, however, that he fully hit his stride on the big screen. Horton's first talking feature was The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, in which he played fidgety reporter Roy Bensinger. Starting in the early '20s, Horton based most of his stage work on the West Coast, producing as well as acting. He leased the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles and found success with works such as The Nervous Wreck, in which he worked with Franklin Pangborn, a character actor who would also -- like Horton -- specialize in nervous, fidgety roles (though Pangborn, unlike Horton, never rose beyond character actor and supporting player status in features). In 1932, he leased the Hollywood Playhouse, which he subsequently operated for a season starring in Benn Wolfe Levy's Springtime for Henry, in which he performed more than 3000 times, making enough money from that play alone to buy his summer home in the Adirondacks. Horton fit in his movie work in between productions of Springtime for Henry (which was filmed in 1934, without Horton), and was always in demand. Amid his many roles over the ensuing decade, Horton worked in a half-dozen of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO. His other notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, and a neurotic paleontologist (who first appears disguised as a woman) in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). He worked in at least six movies a year from the early '30s through the end of the 1940s, and there were occasional serious variations in his roles -- Horton played an unusually forceful part in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), and he delivered a comedic tour de force (highlighted by a delightful scene with Carmen Miranda) in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943). Horton kept busy for more than 60 years, and not just in acting -- along with his brother George he bought up property in the San Fernando Valley from the 1920s onward, eventually assembling Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his mother (who passed away at age 102). His hobbies included antiques, and at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection with an estimated value of a half million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s and '60s, not only in onscreen work but also voice-overs for commercials, and he even hosted the Westminster Kennel Club dog show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was a regular cast member on the comedy Western series F Troop, playing Roaring Chicken (also referred to as Running Chicken), the Hekawi indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales," the Jay Ward-produced co-feature to Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. That engagement endeared him to millions of baby boomers and their parents, and his work in those cartoons continues to gain Horton new fans four decades after his death. He grew frail in appearance during the 1960s, and was not averse to playing off of that reality on series such as Dennis the Menace, where he did a guest-star spot in one episode as Uncle Ned, a health-food and physical-culture fanatic. Horton never married, and shared a home later in life with his sister, Hannabelle Grant. He was hospitalized weeks before his death from cancer in September 1970, and was so busy that during that hospitalization he showed up as a guest star in two episodes of the sitcom The Governor and J.J., His final big-screen appearance was in the Bud Yorkin/Norman Lear comedy Cold Turkey, which wasn't released until the following year.

Trivia: American actor Tony de Marco was primarily a vaudeville and nightclub performer. He also appeared in a few films in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: Perky brunette leading lady Sheila Ryan became a television pioneer when, in 1938, she appeared on camera in an experimental Los Angeles broadcast. In 1940, Ryan was signed by 20th Century Fox, where she played energetic if unmemorable roles in such films as The Gay Caballero (1940) and Dressed to Kill (1941). She also appeared opposite Laurel and Hardy in two of their Fox vehicles, Great Guns (1941) and A-Haunting We Will Go (1942). Her best opportunity at Fox came in The Gang's All Here (1943), in which she was not only permitted to sing, but was afforded a special-effects "curtain call" in the film's finale. By the late '40s, Ryan's career had dwindled to B-pictures at the lesser studios. While co-starring with Gene Autry in 1950s Mule Train, Ryan fell in love with Autry's sidekick, Pat Buttram; they were married shortly afterward, and remained that way until Ryan's death in 1975. Sheila Ryan retired in 1958 after a handful of TV appearances and a featured role in something called Street of Darkness.

Trivia: Ever on the lookout for a potential Betty Grable replacement, 20th Century-Fox signed leggy blonde band singer June Haver to a contract in 1943. Though there was no love lost between Grable and Haver, they worked well together in the splashy 1945 musical The Dolly Sisters, which turned out to be Haver's best effort at Fox. She was loaned to Warner Bros. for two moderately successful films, Look for the Silver Lining (1949) and The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady (1950), before trying her luck at Fox again. Profoundly depressed by an unsuccessful marriage and by the sudden death of her new fiancé, Haver was about to enter a convent when she fell in love with recently widowed film-star Fred MacMurray. Upon marrying MacMurray in 1953, June Haver retired completely from show business, re-emerging briefly (and very reluctantly) to play herself on a 1958 Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz special in which her husband was the guest star.

Trivia: Born in Odessa, Ukraine Leon Belasco was prepared for a musical career at various seats of learning in Japan and Manchuria. For several years, Belasco was first violinist for the Tokyo Symphony, and later led his own orchestra. Though he made his first film in 1926, his Hollywood career proper didn't begin until 1939. Together with Leonid Kinsky and Mischa Auer, Belasco was one of filmdom's favorite comic Russians, usually cast as an excitable musician, choreographer or aesthete. He also registered well in sinister roles, especially in World War II and Cold War espionagers. On radio, Leon Belasco was heard as larcenous informant Pagan Zeldschmidt on The Man Called X; his best-known TV role was Appopoplous the landlord in My Sister Eileen (1960).

Trivia: American actor Frank Faylen was born into a vaudeville act; as an infant, he was carried on stage by his parents, the song-and-dance team Ruf and Clark. Traveling with his parents from one engagement to another, Faylen somehow managed to complete his education at St. Joseph's Prep School in Kirkwood, Missouri. Turning pro at age 18, Faylen worked on stage until getting a Hollywood screen test in 1936. For the next nine years, Faylen played a succession of bit and minor roles, mostly for Warner Bros.; of these minuscule parts he would later say, "If you sneezed, you missed me." Better parts came his way during a brief stay at Hal Roach Studios in 1942 and 1943, but Faylen's breakthrough came at Paramount in 1945, where he was cast as Bim, the chillingly cynical male nurse at Bellevue's alcoholic ward in the Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend. Though the part lasted all of four minutes' screen time, Faylen was so effective in this unpleasant role that he became entrenched as a sadistic bully or cool villain in his subsequent films. TV fans remember Faylen best for his more benign but still snarly role as grocery store proprietor Herbert T. Gillis on the 1959 sitcom Dobie Gillis. For the next four years, Faylen gained nationwide fame for such catch-phrases as "I was in World War II--the big one--with the good conduct medal!", and, in reference to his screen son Dobie Gillis, "I gotta kill that boy someday. I just gotta." Faylen worked sporadically in TV and films after Dobie Gillis was canceled in 1963, receiving critical plaudits for his small role as an Irish stage manager in the 1968 Barbra Streisand starrer Funny Girl. The actor also made an encore appearance as Herbert T. Gillis in a Dobie Gillis TV special of the 1970s, where his "good conduct medal" line received an ovation from the studio audience. Faylen was married to Carol Hughes, an actress best-recalled for her role as Dale Arden in the 1939 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and was the father of another actress, also named Carol.

Trivia: Willowy blonde actress Virginia Sale was seen on stage and screen from the mid-1920s. Sale was usually cast as either an efficient secretary or a well-coiffed socialite, appearing in such 1930s films as Her Majesty Love (1931), Man With Two Faces (1934) and Topper. In all, she was in some 200 films, not to mention her 1000-plus live appearances in her own one-woman show. For fifteen years, Ms. Sale offered this tour-de-force (a combination lecture on theatrical arts and demonstration of the actress' versatility) to schools, nightclubs and legitimate theatres, retiring only when the infirmities of age caught up with her in her 80s. Equally active on television, Sale showed up on innumerable anthologies and sitcoms; in 1964, she was the first actress to portray busybody Selma Plout on the long-running Petticoat Junction. The sister of vaudeville headliner Chic Sale, Virginia Sale was long married to Broadway actor Sam Wren, with whom she co-starred in the pioneering TV domestic comedy Wren's Nest (1949).

Trivia: British actor Leyland Hodgson launched his theatrical career at the advanced age of six. From 1915 to 1919, Hodgson toured the British provinces of the Orient with the Bandmann Opera Company, then retraced most of this tour as head of his own stock company. A star of the Australian stage from 1920 to 1929, Hodgson moved to Hollywood, where he made his film bow in RKO's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1930). Largely confined to minor roles in films, Hodgson enjoyed some prominence as a regular of Universal's Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s. Otherwise, he contented himself with bits as butlers, military officers, hotel clerks, reporters and chauffeurs until his retirement in 1948. Either by accident or design, Leyland Hodgson was frequently teamed on screen with another busy British utilitarian player, Charles Irvin.

Trivia: At age 16, Jeanne Crain won a beauty contest as "Miss Long Beach" and became a model; the next year she was named "Camera Girl of 1942," leading to contacts in Hollywood. She debuted on screen in 1943 in The Gang's All Here, beginning a starring career that lasted through the '50s. She rose to prominence through her performance in Henry Hathaway's Home in Indiana (1944). Crain was frequently cast as the "girl next door," and was generally employed to be a "pretty face" in the midst of light films, but occasionally she got more serious roles, as in Pinky (1949) in which she played a black girl passing for white; for that performance she was nominated for a "Best Actress Oscar," repeating a nomination she got for her role in Margie (1946). Her career waned in the '60s, but she continued to appear in films through the '70s.

Trivia: Frail-looking character actor Frank Darien began working in films around 1910, playing parts in a smattering of D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett shorts. Darien was busiest during the early-talkie era, essaying peripheral roles in such productions as Cimarron (1931), The Miracle Man (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932). He was most often cast as coroners, doctors, household servants, doormen and justices of the peace. Frank Darien's most memorable role was Uncle John in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by another D. W. Griffith alumnus, John Ford.

Trivia: In his heyday, jazz clarinet player and bandleader Benny Goodman was the undisputed "King of Swing." He was born the eighth son to an immigrant family of 12 on the west side of Chicago. Learning to play clarinet with an instrument loaned to him from a local synagogue, he started out playing in neighborhood bands. A year after his high school graduation, Goodman moved to California to work in Ben Pollack's band and from there went on to radio work and free-lance recording. In the early 1930s, Goodman founded his own band and began working for Billy Rose and eventually, after replacing Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Grill, moved to Hollywood to play his new "swing" music at the Palomar Ballroom. Later, he made major inroads against the racism of the music industry by hiring African American pianist Teddy Wilson, and vibraphone player Lionel Hampton. Others followed. In 1936, Goodman and his band made their screen debut in The Big Broadcast of 1937 and after that performed in several other musicals, including The Gang's All Here (1941). In 1946, Goodman played his clarinet for the animated musical Make Mine Music, and in 1956, Goodman became the subject of the musical biopic The Benny Goodman Story starring Steve Allen.

Trivia: Slick-haired utility actor Brooks Benedict held down several odd jobs in Hollywood before turning to acting in the early 1920s. Benedict's first role of note was "The Campus Cad" in Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925), one of several supporting assignments for producer/star Lloyd. In 1926, he shared a memorable scene on a bus with another legendary comedian, Harry Langdon, in The Strong Man. Except for such sizeable early-talkie roles as George Mason in 1932's Girl Crazy, Brooks Benedict was largely confined to bits and extra work until his retirement in the mid-1950s.