Trivia: A graduate of Bowdoin college, Albert Dekker made his professional acting bow with a Cincinnati stock company in 1927. Within a few months he was featured in the Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions. After a decade's worth of impressive theatrical appearance, Dekker made his first film, 1937's The Great Garrick. Usually cast as villains, Dekker was starred in the Technicolor horror film Dr. Cyclops (1940) and played a fascinating dual role in the 1941 suspenser Among the Living. Dekker's offscreen preoccupation with politics led to his winning a California State Assembly seat in 1944; during the McCarthy era, Dekker became an outspoken critic of the Wisconsin senator's tactics, and as a result the actor found it hard to get work in Hollywood. He returned to Broadway, then made a movie comeback in 1959. During his last decade, Dekker alternated between film, stage and TV assignments; he also embarked on several college-campus lecture tours. In May of 1968, Dekker was found strangled to death in his Hollywood home. His naked body was bound hand and foot, a hypodermic needle was jammed into each arm, and obscenities were scrawled all over the corpse. At first, it seemed that Dekker was a closet homosexual who had committed suicide (early reports suggested that the writings on his body were his bad movie reviews) or had died while having rough sex. While the kinky particulars of the case were never officially explained, it was finally ruled that Albert Dekker had died of accidental asphyxiation.

Trivia: Ian Wolfe was determined to become an actor even as a youth in his hometown of Canton, IL. His Broadway debut was in the warhorse Lionel Barrymore vehicle The Claw. While acting with Katherine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Wolfe was spotted by MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who brought the actor to Hollywood to re-create his Barretts role. Though not yet 40, Wolfe had the receding hairline and lined features necessary for aged character roles. By his own count, Wolfe appeared in over 200 films, often uncredited assignments in the roles of judges, attorneys, butlers, and shopkeepers. Some of his best screen moments occurred in producer Val Lewton's Bedlam (1946), wherein Wolfe played an 18th century scientist confined to a mental asylum for proposing the invention of motion pictures. Because his actual age was difficult to pinpoint, Wolfe kept working into the 1990s (and his nineties); he was a particular favorite of TV's MTM productions, appearing on such sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Rhoda. Co-workers during this period noted affectionately that, despite his many years as a professional, Wolfe was always seized with "stage fright" just before walking on the set. Though often cast in timid roles, Ian Wolfe was quite outspoken and fiercely defensive of his craft; when asked what he thought of certain method actors who insist upon playing extensions of "themselves," Wolfe snapped that he became an actor to pretend to be other people.

Trivia: The son of American actress Lillian Elliott, Lloyd Corrigan began working in films as a bit actor in the silent era. But Corrigan's heart was in writing and directing during his formative professional years. He was among Raymond Griffith's writing staff for the Civil War comedy Hands Up (1926), and later penned several of Bebe Daniels' Paramount vehicles. Corrigan worked on the scripts of all three of Paramount's "Fu Manchu" films (1929-30) starring Warner Oland; he also directed the last of the series, Daughter of the Dragon (1930). In contrast to his later light-hearted acting roles, Corrigan's tastes ran to mystery and melodrama in most of his directing assignments, as witness Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) and Night Key (1937). In 1938, Corrigan abandoned directing to concentrate on acting. A porcine little man with an open-faced, wide-eyed expression, Corrigan specialized in likable businessmen and befuddled millionaires (especially in Columbia's Boston Blackie series). This quality was often as not used to lead the audience astray in such films as Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), in which the bumbling, seemingly harmless Corrigan would turn out to be a master criminal or murderer. Lloyd Corrigan continued acting in films until the mid '60s; he also was a prolific TV performer, playing continuing roles in the TV sitcoms Happy (1960) and Hank (1965), and showing up on a semi-regular basis as Ned Buntline on the long-running western Wyatt Earp (1955-61).

Trivia: Although he appeared in films for more than a decade, handsome Warren McCollum will forever be identified with the cult film Reefer Madness (1936), in which he played heroine Dorothy Short's wayward brother. It is McCollum's Jimmy Lane who almost kills an elderly gent in a drug-induced hit-and-run accident.

Trivia: Piping-voice, hamster-faced Scottish character actor Olaf Hytten left the British stage for films in 1921. By the time the talkie era rolled around, Hytten was firmly established in Hollywood, playing an abundance of butlers and high-society gentlemen. The actor was primarily confined to one or two-line bits in such films as Platinum Blonde (1931), The Sphinx (1933), Bonnie Scotland (1935), Beloved Rebel (1936), The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Bride Came COD (1941). He was a semi-regular of the Universal B-unit in the '40s, appearing in substantial roles as military men and police official in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and as burgomeisters and innkeepers in the studio's many horror films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, etc.) Olaf Hytten was active until at least 1956; one of his more memorable assignments of the '50s was as the larcenous butler who participates in a scheme to drive Daily Planet editor Perry White crazy in the "Great Caesar's Ghost" episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman.

Trivia: A stalwart-looking, mustachioed supporting actor/bit-part player from Colorado, Harold Minjir was extremely busy in the early sound era, as one of the three bachelors raising little Betty Van Allen in Bachelor Father (1931) (a version of the old stage play The Prince Chap); as Ruth Chatterton's erstwhile lover in Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931); and a man dallying with Bess Flowers onboard Irene Dunne's love boat in Love Affair. Like the redoubtable Miss Flowers, Minjir would become one of Hollywood's busiest dress extras, appearing in literally hundreds of films until the mid-'40s.

Trivia: A tough-looking, often bearded bit player, onscreen from 1937 to 1942, Earl Gunn's roles ranged from Porfirio Diaz in The Mad Empress to Thug Number Two in the serial The Green Hornet Strikes Again, both released in 1940.

Trivia: A veteran of tent and medicine shows, vaudeville, and stock companies, Brooklyn-born George Rosener claimed to have appeared in and/or directed more than 200 plays. He left show business to become a staff writer with the New York World in the early 1910s but was soon back on the boards, appearing in or co-writing such plays as the original Artists and Models and, with star Dorothy Donnelly, My Maryland. His later Broadway success Speakeasy became an early talkie for Fox and Rosener began his association with motion pictures writing and directing dialogue scenes, notably for the 1932 Warner Bros. Technicolor hit Doctor X, in which he also played the butler, Otto. He went on to appear in countless small supporting roles, often playing stern officials, but would occasionally accept a writing assignment, including the 1937 Columbia serial Jungle Menace.

Trivia: Born John Myrtland LaVarre, John Merton has appeared on Broadway as "Myrtland LaVarre" in the Theatre Guild's hit production of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1922). More theater work followed and he was spotted in the background of several silent films, including as a fireman in W.C. Fields' It's the Old Army Game (1926). But the handsome, slightly frosty-looking actor found his rightful place in B-Westerns and serials. He would appear in a total of 170 films, turning up as an assortment of blackguards. Usually a bit more sophisticated than the average "dog heavy," Merton could nevertheless rough it with the best of 'em, a talent he passed on to his equally tough-looking son, Lane Bradford. Father and son appeared in six films together, including 1947's Jack Armstrong. (Another son played supporting roles on television in the '50s under the moniker of Robert La Varre.) Retiring after a bit in Cecil B. DeMille's gigantic The Ten Commandments (1956), Merton died of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Trivia: A slightly built, often mustachioed, supporting actor who usually played professional men (dentists, fingerprint experts, druggists, bookkeepers, etc.), Perry Ivins had been in the original 1924 production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. He entered films as a dialogue director in 1929 (The Love Parade [1929], The Benson Murder Case [1930]) before embarking on a long career as a bit part player. Among Ivins' more notable roles were the copy editor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the assistant home secretary in Charlie Chan in London, and the mysterious but ultimately benign Crenshaw in the serial Devil Dogs of the Air (1937). Ivins' acting career lasted well into the television era and included guest roles on such programs as Gunsmoke and Perry Mason.

Trivia: A former lawyer, Irish-born D'Arcy Corrigan came to films with a varied background that included a stint as private secretary for a member of Parliament and as a stock company leading man. In Hollywood from 1925, Corrigan played everything from barristers to opium addicts to cockneys to undertakers. Rarely onscreen for more than a minute or two, he usually made every second count. He is especially memorable as the morgue keeper in Bela Lugosi's Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), the blind man in John Ford's The Informer, and as the Spirit of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol (1938).

Trivia: A veteran of vaudeville and the legitimate stage, Berlin-born Max Davidson was well past forty when he made his first film appearance. A small man with hunched shoulders and an scraggly beard, Davidson specialized in playing stereotypical Jewish characters: pushcart peddlers, pawnbrokers, shopkeepers, ragmen and the like. He signed with the Hal Roach comedy studio in 1925, at first appearing in support of Charley Chase. Under the supervision of Leo McCarey, Davidson was given his own starring series, resulting in such 2-reel laughspinners as Dumb Daddies (1926), Jewish Prudence (1927), Call of the Cuckoo (1927) and Pass the Gravy (1928). Hal Roach discontinued Davidson's series late in 1928 because of complaints from Jewish filmgoers; even so, the comedian made periodic returns to the Roach lot as a supporting actor in such films as Our Gang's Moan and Groan Inc. (1929) and Charley Chase's Southern Exposure (1935). Elsewhere, Davidson spent the remainder of his career in brief bits, a casualty of the Hays Office's determination to purge the movies of potentially offensive ethnic humor. As in the 1920s, Max Davidson landed his most noticeable roles in short subjects, ranging from his hilarious cameo as a court musician in the 1931 Masquers Club production Oh Oh Cleopatra to his apoplectic appearance as a shopkeeper in the Three Stooges' No Census, No Feeling (1940).

Trivia: American character actor Stanley Price reportedly launched his screen career in 1922. Possessed of a sharkish smile and luminescent stare, Price was usually seen as a villain, often of the psychotic variety. He was a "regular" in the serial field, appearing in such chapter plays as The Miracle Rider (1935), Red Barry (1938), Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Holt of the Secret Service (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), Superman (1948), and King of the Rocket Man (1949). His flair for comedy was well represented in such films as Road to Morocco (1942), in which he played the blithering idiot in the opening bazaar scene, and his many appearances with the Three Stooges. According to at least one source, Stanley Price was briefly a dialogue director at Lippert Studios.

Trivia: Dark-eyed, exotic American actress Belle Mitchell first appeared on screen in 1928. A Theda Bara type at a time when that type was passe, Mitchell paid her bills with a series of featured roles. She was seen as Mexicans, Native Americans, Middle Easterners and Gypsies; she was most frequently cast as a maid, medium or fortune teller. Belle Mitchell was 86 when she made her last screen appearance in 1973's Soylent Green.

Trivia: A true screen pioneer, Evelyn Selbie entered films in 1912 as leading lady to the first true Western star, Broncho Billy Anderson. Although billed as "The Broncho Billy Girl," Selbie was actually Anderson's third onscreen counterpart, having followed Marguerite Clayton and Vedah Bertram. Filmed more or less by the seat of his pants at Niles Canyon near Oakland, CA, Anderson's one- and two-reel Westerns were extremely popular in the early 1910s and Selbie was soon considered a major star. When Marguerite Clayton returned in 1915, however, the already middle-aged Selbie quickly settled into a career as a supporting player, a career encompassing films, radio, and the legitimate stage, and lasting until at least 1941. She died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture House and Hospital's care facility in Woodland Hills, CA.