Trivia: The daughter of a journalist and the niece of former U.S. Postmaster General James Farley, Penny Singleton spent a good portion of her childhood singing "illustrated" songs at Philadelphia movie theaters. After briefly attending Columbia University, Singleton -- billed under her given name, Dorothy McNulty -- made her Broadway debut as the energy-charged soubrette in the popular 1927 musical Good News. She repeated this vivacious performance in the 1930 film version, then settled into "other woman" and gold digger parts, the best of which was in 1936's After the Thin Man. Upon her marriage to dentist Lawrence Singleton, Singleton changed her professional name. When Shirley Deane was unable to play the title role in Columbia's 1938 filmization of Chic Young's comic strip Blondie, Singleton dyed her hair blonde to qualify for the part. She ended up starring in 28 Blondie B-pictures between 1928 and 1950, with Arthur Lake co-starring as hubby Dagwood Bumstead. During this period, she married for the second time to Blondie producer Robert Sparks. When Blondie folded, Singleton returned to the nightclub singing and dancing work that she'd been doing in the mid-'30s. As an officer in the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), Singleton lobbied for better and more equitable treatment of professional chorus dancers, a stance that earned her several powerful enemies in management (and the Mob). Inactive as a performer for several years, Singleton returned to acting in the early '60s, playing a supporting part in The Best Man (1964) and providing the voice of Jane Jetson on the prime-time animated TV series The Jetsons. Penny Singleton later revived her Jane Jetson characterization for several theatrical and made-for-TV animated features, and also appeared in a cameo role on the weekly Angela Lansbury series Murder She Wrote.

Trivia: Truly a single-note man, American actor Arthur Lake spent most of his adult life portraying only one screen role: Dagwood Bumstead. The son of circus acrobats and the brother of character actress Florence Lake (famed for her ongoing portrayal of Mrs. Edgar Kennedy in nearly 100 two-reel comedies), Lake began his professional career as one of the "Fox Kiddies" in a series of silent-film takeoffs of famous fairy tales, featuring casts comprised completely of children. Lake graduated to a succession of collegiate and office boy roles in feature films, gaining a degree of stardom in the late 1920s and early 1930s after appearing in the title role of Harold Teen (1928). The actor's high-pitched voice and Mama's boy features were amusing for a while, but audiences became bored with Lake by 1934, and the actor found himself shunted to supporting parts and bits. An amusing role as a flustered bellboy in Topper (1937) rejuvenated his career, but Lake's comeback wouldn't be complete until Columbia Pictures cast him as woebegone suburbanite Dagwood Bumstead in Blondie (1938), based on Chic Young's internationally popular comic strip. The strip's characterizations were altered to fit the personalities of Lake and his costar Penny Singleton; in the films, Dagwood was the dope and Blondie the brains of the family, precisely the opposite of the comic-strip situation. A few scattered "straight" performances aside, Lake was nothing other than Dagwood in films from 1938 through 1950; he not only starred in 28 "Blondie" pictures, but repeated the role on radio and starred in an unsuccessful 1954 TV series based on the property. Not at all the blithering idiot that he played on screen, Lake was a sagacious businessman in real life, his wise investments increasing the fortune he'd already accumulated by playing Dagwood -- and also bolstering the moneys inherited by his socialite wife, Patricia Van Cleve. Though he often remarked that it would be wonderful to play Dagwood forever, Lake parted company with the role in the mid-1950s; when another Blondie TV series appeared briefly in 1968, it starred Will Hutchins. Appearing publicly only rarely in the 1960s and 1970s (usually in summer theatres and revivals of 1920s musicals like No, No Nanette), Lake retired before his 70th birthday, a far more prosperous and secure man than his alter ego Dagwood Bumstead -- who's still being fired regularly by boss Mr. Dithers in the funny papers - ever would be.

Trivia: A child model from age two, Larry Simms was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout when he appeared in a 1937 Saturday Evening Post advertisement. The three-year-old, curly haired Simms made his screen debut as the infant son of Jimmy Stewart and Rose Stradner in MGM's The Last Gangster. He was then hired by Columbia to play Baby Dumpling in the 1938 cinemadaptation of Chic Young's comic strip Blondie. Simms remained with the Blondie series until its cessation in 1950, billed onscreen as Baby Dumpling until his character name was formalized as Alexander Bumstead. During this period, he also made a few "outside" appearances in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Madame Bovary (1949). Though his career as a child star was a pleasant experience (and, at 750 dollars per week, a lucrative one), Simms wasn't all that interested in acting; the technical end of moviemaking was more fascinating to him. In 1950, he quit show business to join the Navy, then studied aeronautical engineering at California Polytech. Larry Simms was then hired as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he remained until his retirement.

Trivia: Once Canadian-born actor Jonathan Hale became well known for his portrayal of well-to-do businessmen, he was fond of telling the story of how he'd almost been a man of wealth in real life--except for an improvident financial decision by his father. A minor diplomat before he turned to acting, Hale began appearing in minor film roles in 1934, showing up fleetingly in such well-remembered films as the Karloff/Lugosi film The Raven (1935), the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935) and the first version of A Star is Born (1937). In 1938, Hale was cast as construction executive J. C. Dithers in Blondie, the first of 28 "B"-pictures based on Chic Young's popular comic strip. Though taller and more distinguished-looking than the gnomelike Dithers of the comics, Hale became instantly synonymous with the role, continuing to portray the character until 1946's Blondie's Lucky Day (his voice was heard in the final film of the series, Beware of Blondie, though that film's on-camera Dithers was Edward Earle). During this same period, Hale also appeared regularly as Irish-brogued Inspector Fernack in RKO's "The Saint" series. After 1946, Hale alternated between supporting roles and bits, frequently unbilled (e.g. Angel on My Shoulder, Call Northside 777 and Son of Paleface); he had a pivotal role as Robert Walker's hated father in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), though the part was confined to a smidgen of dialogue and a single long-shot. Hale worked prolifically in television in the '50s, with substantial guest roles in such series as Disneyland and The Adventures of Superman. In 1966, after a long illness, Jonathan Hale committed suicide at the age of 75, just months before the TV release of the Blondie films that had won him prominence in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: American actor Ernest Truex fulfilled the dream of many a performer by playing Hamlet--at age six, in a kiddie talent show. A professional from adolescence onward, Truex appeared in several plays produced by the legendary David Belasco, including a "character juvenile" in The Good Little Devil, in which he supported Mary Pickford. Good Little Devil served as Truex's film debut in 1914, though it would be at least fifteen years and numerous plays later before he'd tackle the movies on a fulltime basis. During the '20s, Truex gained so much popularity in light domestic comedies that several writers concocted vehicles especially for him. Usually cast in wistful, milquetoast roles, Truex in real life was fiercely competitive, much to the chagrin of directors and writers who had to fight tooth and nail to keep Truex from hogging every scene he was in. Talking pictures allowed Truex a few leading roles, as in the first version of the comedy melodrama Whistling in the Dark (1933) (a role played in the remake by Red Skelton), but soon found his weight was more effectively felt in supporting parts. Many of these recycled his "downtrodden little man" routine, with such spectacular exceptions as The Warrior's Husband (1933), in which he played an outrageously campy "nance," and Roadblock (1939), where the actor went against the mild-mannered grain to play a scheming, demonic gang boss. Truex continued his stage work in the '30s and '40s, notably as the "back to the farm" homeowner in Kaufman and Hart'sGeorge Washington Slept Here (Jack Benny did the movie version). Becoming slightly more precious as he got older, Truex portrayed any number of "sly grandpop" roles in the '50s, with television providing fresh new outlets for the actor's talent. He had recurring roles in such sitcoms as Mr. Peepers, Jamie, Pete and Gladys; a potential long-lasting 1958 stint as a hotel manager on The Ann Sothern Show came to an abrupt end because Ms. Sothern, some say, was a tad intolerant of inveterate scene stealers. Like many veteran performers, Ernest Truex was given ample opportunity to shine on Rod Serling's anthology Twilight Zone, first as a prescient peddler in the 1959 episode "What You Need," then more memorably as a nursing home resident desperate to recapture his youth in 1962's "Kick the Can." Ernest Truex was married to actress Sylvia Field, herself an early-'60s TV favorite as Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace.

Trivia: After attending City College of New York, Marc Lawrence studied acting with Eva Le Gallienne. Among the many stage productions in which Lawrence appeared were Sour Mountain and Waiting for Lefty. First signed for films by Columbia in 1932, Lawrence's scarred face and growly voice made him indispensable for gangster parts, though he generally displayed an intelligence far higher than the average goon or gunman. Though usually limited to villainy, Lawrence was not always confined to urban roles, as witness his successful portrayals of a mountaineer in Shepherd of the Hills (1942) and a western saddle tramp in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). The actor's own favorite role was Corio in 1947's Captain from Castille. During the House UnAmerican Activities Committee investigations of the 1950s, Lawrence reluctantly offered testimony implicating several of his coworkers as alleged communist sympathizers; the experience virtually destroyed his American career and left him embittered and defensive (he would always refuse to be interviewed by historians of the "Blacklist" era, referring to them as "ghouls"). Lawrence was forced to seek out work in Europe, where he'd emerge in the early 1960s as a director of crime films and spaghetti westerns. Back in the U.S. in the 1980s, Lawrence made several TV appearances and showed up in such films as The Big Easy (1987) and Newsies (1992), typecast once more as gangsters. In 1993, Lawrence privately published his memoirs, in which for the first time in print he addressed his dark days as an HUAC "friendly witness."

Trivia: Yes, that was her real name. Born in Massachussetts, Veda Ann Borg established herself as a model in New York in the early 1930s. Though she'd never had any previous acting experience, Veda was given a secret screen test by Paramount in 1936 and signed on the spot. After a few years of nondescript roles, Veda was nearly killed in a serious automobile accident in 1939. Her face completely reconstructed by plastic surgery, Veda emerged from the bandages with a harder, more distinctive countenance than before--one that proved ideal for the many brassy chorus girls, gun molls and "kept women" that she would portray over the next twenty years. Usually laboring away in B pictures, Veda began picking up some impressive "A" credits in the 1950s, notably as Vivian Blaine's showgirl pal in the mammoth musical Guys and Dolls (1955). Her last appearance was as an bedraggled Indian woman in the John Wayne-directed The Alamo (1960). For eleven years, Veda Ann Borg was the wife of director Andrew V. McLaglen.

Trivia: It is quite probable that, in real life, Jack Rice was an all-around good friend and stout fellow. In films, however, the shifty-eyed, weak-chinned Rice was forever typecast as malingerers, wastrels, back-stabbers, and modern-day Uriah Heeps. He was particularly well cast as Edgar Kennedy's shiftless brother-in-law in a series of RKO two-reel comedies produced between 1934 and 1948. Rice also appeared as the snivelly Ollie in 11 entries of Columbia's Blondie series. Jack Rice remained active until 1963, five years before his death.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: American actor/director George Tyne began his performing career under his own name, Martin "Buddy" Yarus, in films as varied as Errol Flynn's Objective Burma (1945) and Laurel and Hardy's Dancing Masters (1943). Under the new soubriquet George Tyne, the actor had sizable roles in a multitude of films from 1946 to the late '70s. One of his better parts during this period was as Pfc. Harris in the splashy John Wayne war epic Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); he could also be seen in Thieves' Highway (1949), No Way Out (1950), Marlowe (1969) and I Will, I Will...For Now (1976). Turning increasingly to TV directing in the '60s, George Tyne worked extensively behind the camera on such situation comedies as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-70), Love American Style (1969-72) and Sanford and Son (1972-77).

Trivia: Slight, owlish American actor Francis Pierlot made his film debut in 1914, but it wasn't until 1931 that he abandoned the stage to settle permanently in Hollywood. Pierlot generally essayed minor roles, showing up briefly but memorably as scores of judges, professors, priests, and orchestra leaders. Film buffs have a special place in their hearts for the actor's sly portrayal of lovable pyromaniac Nero Smith in 1942's Henry Aldrich, Editor. Francis Pierlot made his final screen appearance in a surprisingly sizeable role as Jean Simmons' manservant in the 1953 biblical epic The Robe.

Trivia: Lightweight American leading man Ray Walker moved from stage work to films in 1933. While he would occasionally earn a lead in a big-studio film -- he was Alice Faye's vis-à-vis in Music Is Magic (1935) -- Walker could usually be found heading the cast of programmers filmed at Hollywood's B-picture outfits. One of Walker's best screen roles was in Monogram's The Mouthpiece (1935), in which he was ideally cast as a swell-headed radio personality, brought down to earth by the loss of both his sponsor and his girlfriend (Jacqueline Wells). By the early '40s, Walker had eased into minor and supporting roles, even accepting the occasional short subject (he shows up as Vera Vague's ex-husband in the 1946 two-reeler Reno-Vated). Still, Ray Walker's previous reputation assured him a comfortable living; for his single scene as luggage shop proprietor Joe in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, Walker received his standard asking price of 1,000 dollars per day.

Trivia: The brother of country/western singer Roy Acuff, actor Eddie Acuff drifted to Hollywood in the early 1930s, where he almost immediately secured day-player work at Warner Bros. studios. From his 1934 debut in Here Comes the Navy onward, Acuff showed up in film after film as reporters, photographers, delivery men, sailors, shop clerks, and the occasional western comical sidekick. Acuff's most memorable acting stint occured after actor Irving Bacon left Columbia's Blondie series. From 1946 through 1949, Eddie Acuff made nine Blondie appearances as the hapless postman who was forever being knocked down by the eternally late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake).

Trivia: It was his failure as a playwright that led Robert Ryan to a three-decade career as an actor. He was a unique presence on both the stage and screen, and in the Hollywood community, where he was that rarity: a two-fisted liberal. In many ways, at the end of the 1940s, Ryan was the liberals' answer to John Wayne, and he even managed to work alongside the right-wing icon in Flying Leathernecks (1951). The son of a successful building contractor, Ryan was born in Chicago in 1909 and attended Dartmouth College, where one of his fraternity brothers was Nelson Rockefeller. He was a top athlete at the school and held its heavyweight boxing title for four straight years. Ryan graduated in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, and intended to write plays. Finding no opportunities available in this field, he became a day laborer; he stoked coal on a ship bound for Africa, worked as a sandhog, and herded horses in Montana, among other jobs. Ryan finally had his chance to write as a member of a theater company in Chicago, but proved unsuccessful and turned to acting. He arrived in Hollywood at the end of the '30s and studied at the Max Reinhardt Workshop, making his professional stage debut in 1940. He appeared in small roles for Paramount Pictures, but Ryan's real film career didn't begin until several years later. He returned east to appear in stock, and landed a part in Clifford Odets' Clash by Night, in which he worked opposite Tallulah Bankhead and got excellent reviews. Ryan came to regard that production and his work with Bankhead as the pivotal point in his career. The reviews of the play brought him to the attention of studio casting offices, and he was signed by RKO. The actor made his debut at the studio in the wartime action thriller Bombardier. It was a good beginning, although his early films were fairly lackluster and his career was interrupted by World War II -- he joined the Marines in 1944 and spent the next three years in uniform. Ryan's screen career took off when he returned to civilian life in 1947. He starred in two of the studio's best releases that year: Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach and Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, the latter an extraordinary film for its time dealing with troubled veterans and virulent anti-Semitism, with Ryan giving an Oscar-nominated performance as an unrepentant murderer of an innocent Jewish man. He continued to do good work in difficult movies, including the Joseph Losey symbolic drama The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and with Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949). The latter film (which Ryan regarded as his favorite of all of his movies) was practically dumped onto the market by RKO, though the studio soon found itself with an unexpected success when the film received good reviews, it was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, and it won the Best Picture award in the British Academy Award competition. Ryan also distinguished himself that year in Dmytryk's Act of Violence and Max Ophüls' Caught, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground in 1951, and then repeated his stage success a decade out in Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952). Along with Robert Mitchum, Ryan practically kept the studio afloat during those years, providing solid leading performances in dozens of movies. In the late '50s, he moved into work at other studios and proved to be one of the most versatile leading actors in Hollywood, playing heroes and villains with equal conviction and success in such diverse productions as John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958), Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (1962). Even in films that were less-than-good overall, he was often their saving grace, nowhere more so than in Ray's King of Kings (1961), in which he portrayed John the Baptist. Even during the late '40s, Ryan was never bashful about his belief in liberal causes, and was a highly vocal supporter of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" at a time when most other movie professionals -- fearful for their livelihoods -- had abandoned them. He was also a founder of SANE, an anti-nuclear proliferation group, and served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union. During the early '50s, he'd fully expected to be named in investigations and called by the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities or Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, but somehow Ryan was never cited, despite his public positions. In later years, he attributed it to his Irish last name, his Catholic faith, and the fact that he'd been a marine. Considering his career's focus on movies from the outset, Ryan also fared amazingly well as a stage actor. In addition to Clash by Night, he distinguished himself in theatrical productions of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in 1954 at Broadway's Phoenix Theater and a 1960 production of Antony and Cleopatra opposite Katharine Hepburn at the American Shakespeare Festival. (Hepburn later proposed him for the lead in the Irving Berlin musical Mr. President in 1962.) Ryan's other theatrical credits included his portrayal of the title role in the Nottingham (England) Repertory Theater's production of Othello, Walter Burns in a 1969 revival of The Front Page, and James Tyrone in a 1971 revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Not all of Ryan's later films were that good. His parts as the American field commander in Battle of the Bulge and Lee Marvin's army antagonist in The Dirty Dozen were written very unevenly, though he was good in them. He was also a strange choice (though very funny) for black comedy in William Castle's The Busy Body, and he wasn't onscreen long enough (though he was excellent in his scenes) in Robert Siodmak's Custer of the West. But for every poor fit like these, there were such movies as John Sturges' Hour of the Gun and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in which he excelled. His success in Long Day's Journey Into Night was as prelude to his last critical success, as Larry in John Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh (1973). Ironically, at the time he was playing a terminally ill character in front of the camera, Ryan knew that he was dying from lung cancer. During this time he also filmed a hard-hitting anti-smoking public service announcement that directly attributed his condition to his long-time heavy use of cigarettes.