Trivia: Swedish actor Warner Oland was educated in Boston, but proudly retained his Scandinavian roots throughout his life, even devoting time to translating the works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen into English for the benefit of theatrical scholars. Trained at Dr. Curry's Acting School, Oland took on a theatrical career, ultimately tackling the movie industry in 1915 with an appearance in Sin opposite Theda Bara. Oland's curious facial features enabled the occidental actor to specialize in oriental roles, most often as a villain. While his silent film appearances ranged from Cesar Borgia in Don Juan (1926) to Al Jolson's Jewish cantor father in The Jazz Singer (1927), Oland's oriental roles gained him the widest popularity, especially his portrayal as the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in three early talking pictures. In 1931, Oland was cast as the wily, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan Carries On for the Fox studios (later 20th Century-Fox). He would make annual appearances as Chan until 1934, when Fox decided to use the Earl Derr Biggers character as the focal point of a regular B-movie series; Oland would now be seen as Charlie Chan three times per year, and ultimately the actor would make a total of sixteen Chan pictures. From 1934 onward, Warner Oland was Charlie Chan - and vice versa. He remained in character on the set even when giving an interview or flubbing a line, and during a 1935 visit to China, Oland was mobbed by his enthusiastic Chinese movie fans, some of whom were so enchanted by his performance that (it is said) they actually believed Oland was genuinely Asian. During production of Charlie Chan at the Arena in 1938, Warner Oland died, and the movie was rearranged as a Peter Lorre vehicle, Mr. Moto's Gamble. The movie role of Charlie Chan was inherited by Sidney Toler, and later by Roland Winters.

Trivia: "A brisk British blonde," to quote one Hollywood observer, Pat Patterson had played supporting roles in a couple of British programmers prior to making her Hollywood debut opposite Spencer Tracy in Bottoms Up (1934), a backstage musical and a notorious flop. She was relegated to even less desirable fare thereafter and concentrated instead on being Mrs. Charles Boyer.

Trivia: Thomas Beck was but one of a legion of pleasant, unassuming young men who were signed to 20th Century-Fox contracts in the mid-1930s. Beck was afforded romantic-lead assignments in several of Fox's "B" productions, including four "Charlie Chans," two "Mr. Motos" and a brace of the "Jones Family" comedies. He also played featured roles in a handful of "A"s: a dying legionnaire in Under Two Flags (1937), Brissac in Seventh Heaven (1937) and the village priest in Heidi (1938). Beck might have gone on to stardom had not his fervent political activities with the Screen Actors Guild prompted Fox to "punish" the actor by cutting his salary. Turning his back on films at age 30, Thomas Beck successfully pursued a number of business ventures before retiring to Florida in the early 1970s.

Trivia: The definitive femme fatale of the 1940s, Rita Hayworth was the Brooklyn-born daughter of Spanish dancer Eduardo Cansino and Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Volga Haworth. She joined the family dancing act in her early teens and made a few '30s films under her real name, Margarita Cansino, and with her real hair color (black), including Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) and Meet Nero Wolfe (1936). Over the next few years -- at the urging of Columbia Studios and her first husband -- she reshaped her hairline with electrolysis, dyed her hair auburn, and adopted the name Rita Hayworth. Following her performance in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), she became a major leading lady to most of the big stars, including Tyrone Power, Fred Astaire, Charles Boyer, Gene Kelly, and her second and soon to be ex-husband Orson Welles in The Lady From Shanghai (1948). Hayworth then became involved in a tempestuous romance with married playboy Aly Khan, son of the Pakistani Muslim leader Aga Khan III, and they married in 1949. Following their divorce two years later, she was married to singer Dick Haymes from 1953 to 1955, and then for three years to James Hill, the producer of her film Separate Tables (1958). Her career had slowed down in the '50s and came to a virtual standstill in the '60s, when rumors of her supposed erratic and drunken behavior began to circulate. In reality, Hayworth was suffering from the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. For years, she would be cared for by her daughter Princess Yasmin Khan, and her death from the disease in 1987 gave it public attention that led to increased funding for medical research to find a cure.

Trivia: A London stage actor from the early 1900s, Jameson Thomas made his film debut in 1923's Chu Chin Chow. With such exceptions as Hitchcock's The Farmer's Wife (1928), Thomas was dissatisfied with the British phase of his film career, though he remained philosophical, observing, "If one wants to live by playing in British films, it is better to be miscast than never to be cast at all." Moving to Hollywood in the early talkie era, he was largely confined to minor roles until his death in 1939. His larger assignments included the role of Claudette Colbert's fortune-hunting husband King Westley in It Happened One Night (1934) and Charles Craig in the 1934 version of Jane Eyre. Jameson Thomas was married to actress Dorothy Dix.

Trivia: The embodiment of corporate dignity, British actor Frank Conroy nonetheless gave the impression of being a long-trusted executive who was about to abscond with the company funds. During his Broadway career, Conroy frequently achieved above-the-title billing; he never quite managed this in Hollywood, but neither was he ever without work. Conroy made his first film, Royal Family of Broadway, in 1930; uncharacteristically, he plays the ardent suitor of the leading lady (Ina Claire), and very nearly wins the lady before she decides that her stage career comes first. Conroy's respectable veneer allowed him to play many a "hidden killer" in movie mysteries like Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935). He left films periodically for more varied assignments on stage; in 1939, he originated the role of dying millionaire Horace Giddens in Lillian Hellmans The Little Foxes. Returning to Hollywood in the 1940s, it was back to authoritative villainy, notably his role in The Ox-Bow Incident as a martinet ex-military officer who rigidly supervises a lynching, then kills himself when he realizes he's executed three innocent men. More benign roles came Conroy's way in All My Sons (1948), in which he plays an industrialist serving a prison sentence while the guilty man (Edward G. Robinson) walks free; and in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), wherein Conroy has a lengthy unbilled role as the American diplomat who listens to the demands of outer-space visitor Michael Rennie. Frank Conroy remained a top character player until his retirement in 1960, usually honored with "guest star" billing on the many TV anthologies of the era.

Trivia: Cadaverous British actor Nigel De Brulier is most closely associated with classical roles. His first film (after decades of stage work) was a 1915 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts; six years later he was in another Ibsen adaptation, A Doll's House. In Douglas Fairbanks' 1921 version of The Three Musketeers De Brulier played the cunning Cardinal Richelieu, a role he repeated briefly in the 1929 sequel The Iron Mask. He was also prominently featured in the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame as Dom Claude, the head priest. Possessed of a rich theatrical voice, Nigel de Brulier made the transition to sound with ease, but most of his '30s roles were mere character bits; an exception was the 1935 Three Musketeers, in which he played Richelieu again. Towards the end of his career, and without complaint or regret, the venerable actor accepted one-day parts in "B" pictures, short subjects, westerns and serials. The best of Nigel De Brulier's latter-day assignments was as the robed, white-bearded Shazam, the ancient mystic who gives young Billy Batson (Frank Coghlan Jr.) superhuman powers in the Republic serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941).

Trivia: A former opera singer in his native Sicily, bull-necked, waxed-moustached character actor Paul Porcasi made his screen bow in 1917's Fall of the Romanoffs. Porcasi flourished in the talkie era, playing innumerable speakeasy owners, impresarios, chefs, and restaurateurs. The nationalities of his screen characters ranged from Italian to French to Greek to Spanish; most often, however, he played Greeks with such onomatopoeic monikers as Papapopolous. Porcasi's best-remembered film roles include Nick the Greek in Broadway (1929), the obsequious garment merchant in Devil in the Deep (1932), dour border guard Gonzalez in Eddie Cantor's The Kid From Spain (1932), and the apoplectic apple vendor ("Hey! You steal-a!") in King Kong (1933). Paul Porcasi was also starred in the first three-strip Technicolor short subject, La Cucaracha (1934), wherein his face turned a deep crimson after he ingested one too many hot chili peppers.

Trivia: African American comedic character actor Stepin Fetchit, born Lincoln Perry, left his home in 1914 to pursue a show-business career. He first joined the Royal American Shows plantation revues adopting the stage name "Stepin Fetchit." He went on to spend several years on the vaudeville circuit. In the late '20s, he arrived in Hollywood where he made an immediate impact; by the time he appeared in Hearts in Dixie (1929) he was being hailed by some as one of the greatest screen comedians. In the more politically correct 1990s, Fetchit's screen persona of the lazy, inarticulate, and easily frightened Negro is considered extremely racist and offensive, but back in the unenlightened '30s, audiences found him hysterically funny, and he was the most celebrated black comic actor in Hollywood. He made few films after 1940, drifting into obscurity before resurfacing in the late '60s as a member of boxer Muhammad Ali's entourage (he had converted to the Black Muslim faith); he was also the litigant in a suit against CBS, whom he felt had negatively represented him in a 1968 TV documentary. He made two more films in the '70s, Amazing Grace (1974) and Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976).

Trivia: Launching his theatrical career in his native Germany, actor/director Frank Reicher worked in London before coming to the US in 1899. His entree into the movies was as co-director of the 1915 production The Clue; he continued to direct in Hollywood before returning to the stage in 1921. At the dawn of the talkie era, Reicher was brought back to California to direct German-language versions of American films. For his acting bow before the microphones, Reicher was cast in the title role of Napoleon's Barber (1928) a Fox Movietone two-reeler which represented the first talkie for director John Ford. Reicher specialized at this time in humorless, wizened authority figures: college professors, doctors, scientists, cabinet ministers. In 1933 he was cast as Captain Engelhorn in the classic adventure fantasy King Kong; director Ernest Schoedsack later characterized Reicher as "the best actor we had" in a cast which included Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray. He repeated the Engelhorn role, with a modicum of uncharacteristic humor added, in Son of Kong (1933). The remainder of Reicher's film career was devoted to brief character roles, often as murder victims. He was killed off at least twice by Boris Karloff (Invisible Ray [1936] and House of Frankenstein [1944]), and was strangled by Lon Chaney Jr. at the very beginning of The Mummy's Ghost (1944) (When Chaney inadvertently cut off his air during the feigned strangulation, Reicher subjected the star to a scorching reprimand, reducing Chaney to a quivering mass of meek apologies). During the war, Reicher's Teutonic name and bearing came in handy for the many anti-Nazi films of the era, notably To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Mission to Moscow (1944). In 1946, Reicher had one of his largest parts in years as the general factotum to hypnotist Edmund Lowe in The Strange Mr. Gregory (1946); that the part may have been written for the venerable actor is evidenced by the fact that his character name was Reicher. Frank Reicher retired in 1951; he died fourteen years later, at age 90.

Trivia: Actor and director George Irving gained fame on both the Broadway stage and in feature films. Before launching his professional career, Iriving graduated from New York's City College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He then went on to play the leads in numerous Broadway shows before breaking into film in 1913, where he played many different character roles.

Trivia: Character actor John Davidson entered films in 1914. Though a native New Yorker, Davidson seemed most at home playing sinister Middle Easterners or Europeans; he was, for example, cast as the sheik in Priscilla Dean's 1922 version of Under Two Flags and as Cardinal Richelieu in the 1924 Rudolph Valentino vehicle Monsieur Beaucaire. In talkies, he was seen in roles ranging from bit-part concierges to criminal masterminds. Busiest in serials, Davidson menaced his way through such chapter plays as The Perils of Pauline (1934), Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc. (1941), The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1942), The Perils of Nyoka (1942), and The Purple Monster Strikes (1945). Even in his fleeting A-picture appearances, he remained an unsavory presence (e.g., Benedict Arnold in Where Do We Go From Here?). Once in a while, he'd spoof his established screen image, notably as the capricious sidewalk hypnotist in the 1939 Our Gang one-reeler Duel Personalities. He retired from films sometime in the early '50s. John Davidson is no relation to the singer of the same name.