Trivia: American comedian Bud Abbott was the tall, bullying member of the popular comedy team Abbott and Costello. The son of circus employees, Abbott entered show business as a burlesque show producer, then took to the stage himself as straight man for a number of comedians, finally teaming with fledgling comic Lou Costello in 1936. After working in burlesque, in radio, and on Broadway, Abbott and Costello made their movie debut in One Night in the Tropics (1940). Their first starring picture was Buck Privates (1941), a box-office bonanza which catapulted the team to "top moneymaker" status for the next 15 years; in all, Abbott and Costello made 36 feature films. In 1951, they made their TV debut on Colgate Comedy Hour, and later that year starred in a widely distributed 52-week, half-hour situation comedy series, The Abbott and Costello Show. After the team broke up in 1957, Abbott retired, but was compelled to revive his career due to income tax problems. He appeared solo in a supporting role on a 1961 G.E. Theatre TV drama, then made an unsuccessful comeback attempt as straight man for comedian Candy Candido. Abbott's last performing job was providing the voice of "himself" in a series of 156 Abbott and Costello animated cartoons produced for television by Hanna-Barbera in 1966.

Trivia: American comedian Lou Costello wasn't the most scholarly of lads growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, although he excelled in baseball and basketball. He won an athletic scholarship to Cornwall-on-Hudson Military School, but left before graduation to try a performing career. Reasoning that there'd be a lot of work for a top athlete in Hollywood, Lou travelled westward, but was only able to secure stunt-man work, specializing in the sort of spectacular falls that he'd still be staging during his later starring career. Tired of working anonymously in Hollywood, Costello decided to give stage work a try, and by the mid '30s he'd achieved minor prominence as a burlesque comedian. What he needed was the right straight man, and that man was Bud Abbott, with whom Lou teamed in 1936. Abbott was satisfied in burlesque, but Costello had bigger ambitions; it was he who actively promoted the team into radio and Broadway. In 1940, Lou finally realized his life's ambition to be a movie star when he and Abbott were signed by Universal Pictures. The team's second feature, Buck Privates, launched an amazingly durable film career; for the next ten years, Abbott and Costello were Hollywood's biggest moneymaking team. Though no pushover in real life, Lou became world famous for his portrayal of the hapless, trodden-upon patsy of the conniving, bullying Abbott; his plaintive "I'm a ba-a-ad boy" became a national catchphrase. A serious 1942 bout with rheumatic fever kept Lou out of radio and films for a full year. On the day of his professional return in 1943, an appalling tragedy struck Costello; his infant son drowned in the family's backyard swimming pool. Waving off mourners, Lou performed his comeback radio show that evening on schedule, as funny as ever, and broke down the minute the show signed off, while a visibly shaken Bud Abbott explained the situation to the studio audience. Lou was never quite the same after that, though his career flourished, surviving the occasional falling out with Bud Abbott and unprofitable attempts to change his screen image in such films as Little Giant and The Time of Their Lives (1946). Seldom making a professional misstep -- he moved from films to TV and back again with enormous success. Costello broke up permanently with Bud Abbott in 1956. His solo dates in nightclubs and television were satisfactory, and a starring appearance as a single in The Thirty Foot Bride of Candy Rock (1959) wasn't the disaster it might have been, but Lou Costello was basically unhappy going it alone. Still, he was thriving in show business and seemingly had a rosy future ahead of him in early 1959; sadly, in March of that year Lou Costello lost his lifelong battle with his rheumatic heart and died three days before his 53rd birthday.

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: At the outbreak of World War II, Yugoslav actress Lenore Aubert headed to the U.S. Discovered by a talent scout while starring in a Los Angeles community theatre production, Lenore was signed to a contract with Sam Goldwyn, but appeared under the Goldwyn banner in only one film, They Got Me Covered (1943). Free-lancing throughout the 1940s, Lenore played many a mysterious foreigner or femme fatale: she was at her slinky best in the 1948 horror comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). She left Hollywood in 1949, appearing in a brace of 1950s European films before retiring permanently. In the 1960s, Lenore was active with the United Nations Activity and Housing Section.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: A New Mexican of Native American extraction, actor Glenn Strange held down several rough-and-tumble jobs, from deputy sheriff to rodeo rider, before settling on a singing career. He made his radio bow on Los Angeles station KNX (the CBS-owned affiliate) as a member of the Arizona Wranglers singing group. Thanks to his husky physique and plug-ugly features, Strange had no trouble finding work as a stuntman/villain in western films and serials. He also displayed a flair for comedy as the sidekick to singing cowboy Dick Foran in a series of B-sagebrushers of the late '30s. During the war years, Strange became something of a bargain-basement Lon Chaney Jr., playing homicidal halfwits in a handful of horror pictures made at PRC and other low-budget studios. These appearances led to his being cast as the Frankenstein monster in the 1944 Universal programmer House of Frankenstein; he was coached in this role by the "creature" from the original 1931 Frankenstein, Boris Karloff. Given very little to do in House of Frankenstein and the 1945 sequel House of Dracula other than stalk around with arms outstretched at fadeout time, Strange brought none of the depth and pathos to the role that distinguished Karloff's appearances. Strange was shown to better advantage in his last appearance as The Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) where he convincingly menaced the eternally frightened Lou Costello and even indulged in a couple of time-honored "scare" routines, while still remaining in character (Some scenes had to be reshot because Strange couldn't stop laughing at Costello's antics; towards the end of shooting, Strange broke his ankle and had to be replaced in a few shots by Lon Chaney Jr., who was costarring in the film as the Wolf Man). Though typecast as heavies in both movies and television -- he played the hissable Butch Cavendish in the Lone Ranger TV pilot -- Strange was well known throughout Hollywood as a genuine nice guy and solid family man. Glenn Strange's last engagement of note was his 11-year run (1962-73) as Sam, the Long Branch bartender on TV's Gunsmoke.

Trivia: A former model, brunette leading lady Jane Randolph made her first film appearance in Warner Bros.' Manpower (1941) playing a bit as a hat check girl. Randolph was immediately signed to a contract by RKO Radio Pictures, where she spent the next few years in the studio's "B"-picture mill. Her best role under the RKO banner was Alice Moore, the young lady terrorized during a nocturnal swim by the malevolent Simone Simon in Val Lewton's Cat People (1942) She reprised this role in the 1944 follow-up Curse of the Cat People, expertly handling the film's complex, literate dialogue sequences. Jane Randolph retired from films after playing blonde insurance investigator Joan Raymond in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

Trivia: Busy character actor Frank Ferguson was able to parlay his pinched facial features, his fussy little moustache, and his bellows-like voice for a vast array of characterizations. Ferguson was equally effective as a hen-pecked husband, stern military leader, irascible neighbor, merciless employer, crooked sheriff, and barbershop hanger-on. He made his inaugural film appearance in Father is a Prince (1940) and was last seen on the big screen in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). Ferguson proved himself an above-average actor by successfully pulling off the treacly scene in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) in which Babe (William Bendix) says "Hi, kid" to Ferguson's crippled son--whereupon the boy suddenly stands up and walks! Among Franklin Ferguson's hundreds of TV appearances were regular stints on the children's series My Friend Flicka (1956) and the nighttime soap opera Peyton Place (1964-68).

Trivia: An attractive if undistinguished secondary male lead, Charles Bradstreet had a career of a little more than a half-decade in Hollywood, and might well be totally forgotten today, but for a role that he only took very reluctantly. Born in Maine, he had no real aspirations as an actor, but chanced to be asked to read at an audition to which he'd accompanied his own brother. From that beginning, which propelled him into the leading role of the play in question, he got his first taste of professional acting. An abortive entre to Columbia Pictures was followed by a short stint at MGM and then a period freelancing from 1947 onward. That year, he took the role of Professor Stevens, the handsome (if somewhat bland) scientist who finds himself in the midst of a nest of monsters in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein -- it wasn't a movie he had much faith in (as indicated by some aspects of his performance in the finished film), but it is probably the only movie for which he is remembered. Bradstreet worked in a handful of subsequent films and then left the business, preferring to make his living in real estate. He passed away in 2004 at the age of 86.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Howard Negley made his screen bow as Nelson in 20th Century Fox's Smokey. Negley went on to reasonably prominent character parts in such B-pictures as Charlie Chan in the Trap (1947). For the most part, he played nameless bit parts as police captains, politicians, and reporters. Howard Negley was last seen as the Twentieth Century Limited conductor in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

Trivia: Joe Kirk was seldom more than a supporting actor -- and usually a bit player -- in feature films, but he left an indelible mark on 1950s television comedy, through his association with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. That association was partly professional and largely personal, as he was Costello's brother-in-law. Some sources credit Kirk with film appearances as far back as the mid-'30s in movies such as Circle of Death and The Taming of the West, but his main body of movie work began at around the same time that Abbott & Costello first arrived in Hollywood in 1940. His early appearances weren't in their comedies (though that would soon change) but, rather, in the movies of the East Side Kids at Monogram, specifically Spooks Run Wild, Mr. Wise Guy, Smart Alecks, and Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc., usually as gangsters and thugs who had little more to do than stand there and look menacing in a group. He began appearing in his brother-in-law's movies with Pardon My Sarong (1942). Usually in small roles and often as gangsters and henchmen with occasional comic bits and once in a while advancing the plot, it wasn't until Abbott & Costello Go To Mars (1953) that Kirk got a featured scene; in a comic slapstick battle of wits (or half-wits) with Lou Costello. By that time, Abbott & Costello had already given Kirk the role by which he would become best known, as Mr. Bacciagalupe on The Abbott & Costello Show. With his phony moustache and broken English, Kirk was a masterpiece of politically incorrect characterization, but also extremely funny in his slapstick interactions with Costello, usually batting Costello around the set in one way or other. Most of the rest of Kirk's career was as a general purpose actor, playing a succession of clerks, police officers, workers, and character roles in films by directors as different as Jean Yarbrough's (Hot Shots) and Fritz Lang's (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). He retired in 1956, around the same time that Abbott & Costello split up and their respective careers ended.

Trivia: Bobby Barber was in at least 160-odd movies and television shows that we know about; there's no telling the actual number of films that this bit player -- who was almost more recognizable for his round face (topped with a bald head) and large, round, bulging eyes than for his voice -- actually showed up in. And for all of those dozens upon dozens of appearances, his only regular, prominent screen credits derived from his work in connection with a pair of comedians for whom he played a much more important role offscreen. Barber was a character actor and bit player, born in New York in 1894, who had some experience on-stage before coming to movies in the 1920s. His earliest known screen credit dates from 1926, in the Lloyd Hamilton feature Nobody's Business, directed by Norman Taurog; Taurog was also the director of the next movie in which Barber is known to have appeared, The Medicine Men (1929), starring the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough (which also included a young Sylvia Field and Symona Boniface). By the 1930s, Barber had moved up to bit parts in major films, including the Marx Brothers features Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Virtually all of Barber's work was uncredited, as he bounced between feature-film roles that involved perhaps a single scene and shorts -- the latter starring such popular funnymen of the time as Andy Clyde and Harry Langdon -- that gave him somewhat more to do. Sometimes Barber was little more than a face, albeit a funny, highly expressive face, in a crowd, as in his jail-cell scene in Pot o' Gold (1941). He played innumerable waiters and shopkeepers, sometimes with accents such as his thick Italian dialect in his one scene (albeit an important one) in Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor. In 1941, Barber began working with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, a pair of burlesque comics who had just burst to stardom on the screen. He shows up as one of the sailors in the finale of their movie In the Navy, and the radio engineer who gets a comical electric shock from Costello's antics in Who Done It? In later movies with the duo, Barber would even get a line or two, as in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which he plays a waiter in a scene with Lon Chaney Jr. But his work for the pair involved far more than these bit parts -- Barber was basically kept on the Abbott and Costello payroll to be their resident "stooge," to hang around and help them work out gags, and also to work gags on them and on anyone else working with and for them, so that the performances on film would never seem stale. Barber is highly visible in a pair of outtakes from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, playing gags on Costello and also on Bela Lugosi. Barber and Costello (who was the more outgoing of the pair) had an especially close backstage friendship, whether playing cards or playing practical jokes on each other. This relationship eventually came to be reflected onscreen when The Abbott & Costello Show went into production in 1952. Barber was in most of the episodes, sometimes playing as many as three different roles in a single 25-minute show; he can also be spotted, from the back, no less -- his physique and walk being that distinctive -- in one episode ("Hillary's Birthday") in the establishing shot of the supermarket. Barber kept working in feature films during the later part of his career, again portraying countless waiters, bellhops, and even a cart driver in the high-profile MGM production Kim (1950). He could play sinister, as in The Adventures of Superman episode "Crime Wave," or just surly as in the underrated Western A Day of Fury. He moved on to working with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as well, in Pardners (1956) (directed by Norman Taurog), and also showed up in serious dramas such as Career (1959) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as Elvis Presley's pictures (Blue Hawaii). But it was Barber's interactions with Lou Costello, right up to the latter's final film (The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock), with which he is most immortalized, especially on the two seasons of The Abbott & Costello Show (where his real name was even once used, in a comedic variant -- "Booby Barber" -- in a sketch that didn't involve him).

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.