Trivia: Universally regarded among the screen's greatest actors, Spencer Tracy was a most unlikely leading man. Stocky, craggy-faced, and gruff, he could never be considered a matinee idol, yet few stars enjoyed greater or more consistent success. An uncommonly versatile performer, his consistently honest and effortless performances made him a favorite of both audiences and critics throughout a career spanning well over three decades. Born April 5, 1900, in Milwaukee, WI, Tracy was expelled from some 15 different elementary schools prior to attending Rippon College, where he discovered and honed a talent for debating; eventually, he considered acting as a logical extension of his skills, and went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His first professional work cast him as a robot in a stage production of R.U.R. at a salary of ten dollars a week. He made his Broadway debut in 1923's A Royal Fandango and later co-starred in a number of George M. Cohan vehicles. Tracy's performance as an imprisoned killer in 1930's The Last Mile made him a stage star, and during its Broadway run he made a pair of shorts for Vitaphone, The Hard Guy and Taxi Talks. Screen tests for MGM, Universal, and Warners were all met with rejection, however, but when John Ford insisted on casting Tracy as the lead in his prison drama Up the River, Fox offered a five-year contract.Tracy's second film was 1931's Quick Millions, in which he portrayed a racketeer. He was frequently typecast as a gangster during his early career, or at the very least a tough guy, and like the majority of Fox productions throughout the early part of the decade, his first several films were unspectacular. His big break arrived when Warners entered a feud with Jimmy Cagney, who was scheduled to star in 1933's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing; when he balked, the studio borrowed Tracy, and the picture was a hit. His next two starring roles in The Face in the Sky and the Preston Sturges epic The Power and the Glory were also successful, earning very positive critical notice. Still, Fox continued to offer Tracy largely low-rent projects, despite extending his contract through 1937. Regardless, much of his best work was done outside of the studio grounds; for United Artists, he starred in 1934's Looking for Trouble, and for MGM starred as The Show-Off. After filming 1935's It's a Small World, executives cast Tracy as yet another heavy in The Farmer Takes a Wife; he refused to accept the role and was fired. Despite serious misgivings, MGM signed him on. However, the studio remained concerned about his perceived lack of sex appeal and continued giving the majority of plum roles to Clark Gable. As a consequence, Tracy's first MGM offerings -- 1935's Riff Raff, The Murder Man, and 1936's Whipsaw -- were by and large no better than his Fox vehicles, but he next starred in Fritz Lang's excellent Fury. For the big-budget disaster epic San Francisco, Tracy earned the first of nine Academy Award nominations -- a record for male stars -- and in 1937 won his first Oscar for his work in Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous. Around the release of the 1938 smash Test Pilot, Time magazine declared him "cinema's number one actor's actor," a standing solidified later that year by Boys' Town, which won him an unprecedented second consecutive Academy Award. After 1939's Stanley and Livingstone, Tracy starred in the hit Northwest Passage, followed by a turn as Edison the Man. With the success of 1941's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he even usurped Gable's standing as MGM's top draw.Tracy was happily married to actress Louise Treadwell when he teamed with Katharine Hepburn in 1942's Woman of the Year. It was the first in a long series of collaborations that established them as one of the screen's greatest pairings, and soon the two actors entered an offscreen romance which continued for the remainder of Tracy's life. They were clearly soulmates, yet Tracy, a devout Catholic, refused to entertain the thought of a divorce; instead, they carried on their affair in secrecy, their undeniable chemistry spilling over onto their onscreen meetings like Keeper of the Flame. Without Hepburn, Tracy next starred in 1943's A Guy Named Joe, another major hit, as was the following year's 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Without Love, another romantic comedy with Hepburn, premiered in 1945; upon its release Tracy returned to Broadway, where he headlined The Rugged Path. Returning to Hollywood, he appeared in three more films with Hepburn -- The Sea of Grass, Frank Capra's State of the Union, and George Cukor's sublime Adam's Rib -- and in 1950 also starred as Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride, followed a year later by the sequel Father's Little Dividend. On Hepburn's return from shooting The African Queen, they teamed with Cukor in 1952's Pat and Mike. Without Hepburn, Tracy and Cukor also filmed The Actress the following year. Venturing outside of the MGM confines for the first time in years, he next starred in the 1954 Western Broken Lance. The well-received Bad Day at Black Rock followed, but as the decade wore on, Tracy was clearly growing more and more unhappy with life at MGM -- the studio had changed too much over the years, and in 1955 they agreed to cut him loose. He first stopped at Paramount for 1956's The Mountain, reuniting with Hepburn for Fox's Desk Set a year later. At Warners, Tracy then starred in the 1958 adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a major box-office disaster; however, The Last Hurrah signalled a rebound. After 1960's Inherit the Wind, Tracy subsequently reunited with director Stanley Kramer for 1961's Judgment at Nuremburg and the 1963 farce It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The film was Tracy's last for four years. Finally, in 1967 he and Hepburn reunited one final time in Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; it was another great success, but a success he did not live to see. Tracy died on June 10, 1967, just weeks after wrapping production.

Trivia: Chicago-born Robert Young carried his inbred "never give up" work ethic into his training at the Pasadena Playhouse. After a few movie-extra roles, he was signed by MGM to play a bit part as Helen Hayes' son in 1931's Sin of Madelon Claudet. At the request of MGM head Irving Thalberg, Young's role was expanded during shooting, thus the young actor was launched on the road to stardom (his first-released film was the Charlie Chan epic Black Camel [1931], which he made while on loan to Fox Studios). Young appeared in as many as nine films per year in the 1930s, usually showing up in bon vivant roles. Alfred Hitchcock sensed a darker side to Young's ebullient nature, and accordingly cast the actor as a likeable American who turns out to be a cold-blooded spy in 1936's The Secret Agent. Some of Young's best film work was in the 1940s, with such roles as the facially disfigured war veteran in The Enchanted Cottage (1945) and the no-good philanderer in They Won't Believe Me (1947). In 1949, Young launched the radio sitcom Father Knows Best, starring as insurance salesman/paterfamilias Jim Anderson (it was his third weekly radio series). The series' title was originally ironic in that Anderson was perhaps one of the most stupidly stubborn of radio dads. By the time Father Knows Best became a TV series in 1954, Young had refined his Jim Anderson characterization into the soul of sagacity. Young became a millionaire thanks to his part-ownership of Father Knows Best, which, despite a shaky beginning, ran successfully until 1960 (less popular was his 1961 TV dramedy Window on Main Street, which barely lasted a full season). His second successful series was Marcus Welby, M.D. (1968-1973). Young's later TV work has included one-shot revivals of Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, and the well-received 1986 TV-movie Mercy or Murder, in which Young essayed the role of a real-life pensioner who killed his wife rather than allow her to endure a painful, lingering illness. Young passed away from respiratory failure at his Westlake Village, CA, home at the age of 91.

Trivia: After training at the University of Michigan School of Drama, Ruth Hussey worked as a fashion commmentator on a local radio station, then moved to New York, becoming a Powers model. In the mid '30s she performed in several plays with touring companies, and shortly thereafter was signed to a film contract with MGM. She debuted onscreen in 1937, and for the remainder of the decade she appeared in minor films. In 1940 she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in The Philadelphia Story, after which she became a leading lady; she was often cast as a graceful, sophisticated, intelligent woman. Her greatest success came on the stage, starring opposite Ralph Bellamy in the 1945 Broadway production State of the Union, after which she concentrated on the stage and made only sporadic film appearances, lastly in 1960. She is the mother of Oscar-winning filmmaker John William Longenecker.

Trivia: An alumnus of both Washington State University and Pomona College, Addison Richards began acting on an amateur basis in California's Pilgrimage Play, then became associate director of the Pasadena Playhouse. In films from 1933, Richards was one of those dependable, distinguished types, a character player of the Samuel S. Hinds/Charles Trowbridge/John Litel school. Like those other gentlemen, Richards was perfectly capable of alternating between respectable authority figures and dark-purposed villains. He was busiest at such major studios as MGM, Warners, and Fox, though he was willing to show up at Monogram and PRC if the part was worth playing. During the TV era, Addison Richards was a regular on four series: He was narrator/star of 1953's Pentagon USA, wealthy Westerner Martin Kingsley on 1958's Cimarron City, Doc Gamble in the 1959 video version of radio's Fibber McGee and Molly, and elderly attorney John Abbott on the short-lived 1963 soap opera Ben Jerrod.

Trivia: Burly, military-mustached British actor Montague Love may well have been the finest villain of the silent screen. Love's first important job was as a London newspaper cartoonist; assigned to cover the Boer War, Love gained popularity by virtue of his vivid battle sketches. After launching his stage career in Britain, Love came to the U.S. in a 1913 road-company production of Cyril Maude's Grumpy. His film career commenced at New Jersey's World Studios in 1915. Concentrating on villainy in the 1920s, Love menaced Valentino in Son of the Sheik (1926), John Barrymore in Don Juan (1926), and Lillian Gish in The Wind (1928). Despite the sinister nature of his roles, the offscreen Love was highly respected for his courteous nature and his courage under pressure. During the talkie era, Love's bad-guy activities diminished to the point that he was avuncular and likeable in such films as A Damsel in Distress (1937) and Gunga Din (1939). He was often called upon to portray historic leaders, notably Henry VIII in The Prince and the Pauper (1937), King Philip II in The Sea Hawk (1940), and two American presidents: Jefferson in Alexander Hamilton (1931) and Washington in The Remarkable Andrew (1942). Montague Love's final film, The Constant Nymph, was released three years after his death in 1943.

Trivia: Born and raised on a Wyoming ranch, American actress Isabel Jewell would only rarely be called upon to play a "Western" type during her career. For the most part, Isabel -- who made her screen debut in Blessed Event (1932) -- was typecast as a gum-chewing, brassy urban blonde, or as an empty-headed gun moll. Jewell's three best remembered film performances were in Tale of Two Cities (1935), where she was atypically cast as the pathetic seamstress who is sentenced to the guillotine; Lost Horizon (1937), as the consumptive prostitute who finds a new lease on life when she is whisked away to the land of Shangri-La; and Gone with the Wind (1939), where she appears briefly as "poor white trash" Emmy Slattery. In 1946, Isabel finally got to show off the riding skills she'd accumulated in her youth in Wyoming when she was cast as female gunslinger Belle Starr in Badman's Territory. Denied starring roles because of her height (she was well under five feet), Isabel Jewell worked as a supporting player in films until the '50s and in television until the '60s.

Trivia: A former stock company juvenile, Hugh Sothern (born Roy Sutherland) returned to acting in 1937 after years of heading his own brokerage firm. Gray-haired and distinguished, Sothern played President Andrew Jackson in Cecil B. DeMille's gargantuan The Buccaneer (1938) and was then unmasked as the villainous master criminal The Lightning in the serial The Fighting Devil Dogs (1938). There were more action serials to come, including Captain America (1944), and a few B-Westerns as well. Sothern retired in 1944.

Trivia: It had originally been the hope of Walter Brennan (and his family) that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, an engineer; but while still a student, he was bitten by the acting bug and was already at a crossroads when he graduated in 1915. Brennan had already worked in vaudeville when he enlisted at age 22 to serve in World War I. He served in an artillery unit and although he got through the war without being wounded, his exposure to poison gas ruined his vocal chords, leaving him with the high-pitched voice texture that made him a natural for old man roles while still in his thirties. His health all but broken by the experience, Brennan moved to California in the hope that the warm climate would help him and he lost most of what money he had when land values in the state collapsed in 1925. It was the need for cash that drove him to the gates of the studios that year, for which he worked as an extra and bit player. The advent of the talkies served Brennan well, as he had been mimicking accents in childhood and could imitate a variety of different ethnicities on request. It was also during this period that, in an accident during a shoot, another actor (some stories claimed it was a mule) kicked him in the mouth and cost him his front teeth. Brennan was fitted for a set of false teeth that worked fine, and wearing them allowed him to play lean, lanky, virile supporting roles; but when he took them out, and the reedy, leathery voice kicked in with the altered look, Brennan became the old codger with which he would be identified in a significant number of his parts in the coming decades. He can be spotted in tiny, anonymous roles in a multitude of early-'30s movies, including King Kong (1933) (as a reporter) and one Three Stooges short. In 1935, however, he was fortunate enough to be cast in the supporting role of Jenkins in The Wedding Night. Directed by King Vidor and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, it was supposed to launch Anna Sten (its female lead) to stardom; but instead, it was Brennan who got noticed by the critics. He was put under contract with Goldwyn, and was back the same year as Old Atrocity in Barbary Coast. He continued doing bit parts, but after 1935, his films grew fewer in number and the parts much bigger. It was in the rustic drama Come and Get It (1936) that Brennan won his first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. Two years later, he won a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Kentucky (1938). That same year, he played major supporting roles in The Texans and The Buccaneer, and delighted younger audiences with his moving portrayal of Muff Potter, the man wrongfully accused of murder in Norman Taurog's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Brennan worked only in high-profile movies from then on, including The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Stanley and Livingston, and Goldwyn's They Shall Have Music, all in 1939. In 1940, he rejoined Gary Cooper in The Westerner, playing the part of a notoriously corrupt judge. Giving a beautifully understated performance that made the character seem sympathetic and tragic as much as dangerous and reprehensible, he won his third Best Supporting Actor award. There was no looking back now, as Brennan joined the front rank of leading character actors. His ethnic portrayals gradually tapered off as Brennan took on parts geared specifically for him. In Frank Capra's Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks' Sergeant York (both 1941), he played clear-thinking, key supporting players to leading men, while in Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (released that same year), he played another virtual leading role as a haunted man driven by demons that almost push him to murder. He played only in major movies from that point on, and always in important roles. Sam Wood used him in Goldwyn's The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Lewis Milestone cast him as a Russian villager in The North Star (1943), and he was in Goldwyn's production of The Princess and the Pirate (1944) as a comical half-wit who managed to hold his own working alongside Bob Hope. Brennan played the choice role of Ike Clanton in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and reprised his portrayal of an outlaw clan leader in more comic fashion in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff some 23 years later. He worked with Cooper again on Delmer Daves' Task Force (1949) and played prominent roles in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock and Anthony Mann's The Far Country (both 1955). In 1959, the 64-year-old Brennan got one of the biggest roles of his career in Hawks' Rio Bravo, playing Stumpy, the game-legged jailhouse keeper who is backing up the besieged sheriff. By that time, Brennan had moved to television, starring in the CBS series The Real McCoys, which became a six-season hit built around his portrayal of the cantankerous family patriarch Amos McCoy. The series was such a hit that John Wayne's production company was persuaded to release a previously shelved film, William Wellman's Goodbye, My Lady (1956), about a boy, an old man (played by Brennan), and a dog, during the show's run. Although he had disputes with the network and stayed a season longer than he had wanted, Brennan also liked the spotlight. He even enjoyed a brief, successful career as a recording artist on the Columbia Records label during the 1960s. Following the cancellation of The Real McCoys, Brennan starred in the short-lived series The Tycoon, playing a cantankerous, independent-minded multimillionaire who refuses to behave the way his family or his company's board of directors think a 70-year-old should. By this time, Brennan had become one of the more successful actors in Hollywood, with a 12,000-acre ranch in Northern California that was run by his sons, among other property. He'd invested wisely and also owned a share of his first series. Always an ideological conservative, it was during this period that his political views began taking a sharp turn to the right in response to the strife he saw around him. During the '60s, he was convinced that the anti-war and civil rights movements were being run by overseas communists -- and said as much in interviews. He told reporters that he believed the civil rights movement, in particular, and the riots in places like Watts and Newark, and demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, were the result of perfectly content "Negroes" being stirred up by a handful of trouble-makers with an anti-American agenda. Those on the set of his last series, The Guns of Will Sonnett -- in which he played the surprisingly complex role of an ex-army scout trying to undo the damage caused by his being a mostly absentee father -- say that he cackled with delight upon learning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. Brennan later worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of reactionary right-wing California Congressman John Schmitz, a nominee of the American Party, whose campaign was predicated on the notion that the Republican Party under Richard Nixon had become too moderate. Mostly, though, Brennan was known to the public for his lovable, sometimes comical screen persona, and was still working as the '60s drew to a close, on made-for-TV movies such as The Over-the-Hill Gang, which reunited him with one of his favorite directors, Jean Yarbrough, and his old stablemate Chill Wills. Brennan died of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.

Trivia: Born in Iowa, Nat Pendleton was raised in New York, where he attended Columbia University. A champion wrestler in his college days, Pendleton joined the U.S. Olympic team in 1920, winning a silver medal for his grappling talents. He turned professional, becoming World's Champion in 1924. Around this time, Pendleton was hired to play a wrestler (what a stretch) in the Broadway play Naughty Cinderella. He decided to switch to acting full-time, heading to Hollywood in 1927. Some of his earlier film roles required him to merely look tough and flex his muscles while the stars around him made funny; as football player McHardie in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932), Pendleton isn't even given a screen credit. He finally graduated to leading roles in 1933, playing a wrestler (what, again?) in Deception, for which he wrote the screenplay. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Pendleton was one of Hollywood's busiest and best-liked character actors -- still specializing in brawny roles, but at last permitted to get some of the laughs himself rather than simply stooging for others. For his second appearance in a Marx Brothers film, 1939's At the Circus, Pendleton, decked in a handlebar mustache and Harpo-like wig, was prominently billed as crooked strongman Goliath. His best-remembered film roles included thick-eared ambulance driver Joe Wayland in MGM's Dr. Kildare films and blustering cop-turned-drill sergeant Mike Collins in Abbott and Costello's two Buck Privates efforts. Thanks to careful investments, Pendleton was able to retire from filmmaking in 1947, at the age of 52. Nat Pendleton was the brother of another busy character actor, Gaylord (Steve) Pendleton.

Trivia: Despite his Irish background, no one could play the typical British gentleman, or gentleman's gentleman, better than Lumsden Hare. There was definitely something aristocratic about the erect, dignified 6'1" Hare, who played the Prince Regent in The House of Rothschild (1934) and the King of Sweden in Cardinal Richelieu (1935), not to mention countless military officers, doctors, and lawyers. A leading man in his younger days to Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, Nance O'Neil, and Maxine Elliott, Hare made his screen debut, as F. Lumsden Hare, in 1916 and continued to mix film with Broadway appearances through the 1920s. Relocating to Hollywood after the changeover to sound, Hare became one of the era's busiest, and finest, character actors, appearing in hundreds of film and television roles until his retirement in 1960.

Trivia: Vaudeville, stock and Broadway actor Donald MacBride made his Hollywood debut in the 1938 Marx Brothers farce Room Service, reprising his stage role as explosive hotel manager Wagner ("Jumping Butterballs!!!") His previous film appearances had been lensed in his native New York, first at the Vitagraph studios in Flatbush, where he showed up in the Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew comedies of the 1910s. During the early talkie years, MacBride showed up in several one- and two-reelers, providing support to such Manhattan-based talent as Burns & Allen, Bob Hope and Shemp Howard. After Room Service, the bulldog-visaged MacBride was prominently cast in picture after picture, usually as a flustered detective. He was teamed with Alan Mowbray in a brace of 1940 RKO "B"s about a pair of shoestring theatrical producers, and was featured in four of Abbott and Costello's comedies. Among the actor's rare noncomic roles were the dying gangster boss in High Sierra (1941) and the dour insurance executive in The Killers (1946). MacBride's television work includes a season as dizzy Marie Wilson's long-suffering employer on the early-1950s TV sitcom My Friend Irma. Donald MacBride's last film role was as Tom Ewell's backslapping boss in the 1955 Billy Wilder comedy The Seven-Year Itch.

Trivia: British actor Douglas Walton kept busy in the Hollywood of the 1930s playing upper-class twits, ineffectual weaklings, and other such highly coveted roles. Walton was most memorably cast as the genteelly depraved Percy Shelley in the prologue scenes of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also played the dull-witted, cowardly Darnley in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Douglas Walton remained in films until the late '40s, usually in bit parts but sometimes in such sizeable characterizations as Percival Priceless in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1947).

Trivia: Taking up dramatics while attending the University of Pittsburgh, Regis Toomey extended this interest into a profitable career as a stock and Broadway actor. He specialized in singing roles until falling victim to acute laryngitis while touring England in George M. Cohan's Little Nellie Kelly. In 1929, Toomey made his talking-picture bow in Alibi, where his long, drawn-out climactic death scene attracted both praise and damnation; he'd later claim that, thanks to the maudlin nature of this scene, producers were careful to kill him off in the first or second reel in his subsequent films. Only moderately successful as a leading man, Toomey was far busier once he removed his toupee and became a character actor. A lifelong pal of actor Dick Powell, Regis Toomey was cast in prominent recurring roles in such Powell-created TV series of the 1950s and 1960s as Richard Diamond, Dante's Inferno, and Burke's Law.

Trivia: Moderately successful as a leading man in British films from 1931 through 1934, Lester Matthews moved to the U.S. in the company of his then-wife, actress Anne Grey. Though Grey faded from view after a handful of Hollywood pictures (Break of Hearts [35] and Bonnie Scotland [35] among them), Matthews remained in Tinseltown until his retirement in 1968. At first, his roles were substantial, notably his romantic-lead stints in the Karloff/Lugosi nightmare-inducer The Raven (35) and the thoughtful sci-fier Werewolf of London (35), which starred Henry Hull in the title role. Thereafter, Matthews was consigned to supporting roles, often as British travel agents, bankers, solicitors, company clerks and military officers. Active in films, radio and television throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Lester Matthews was last seen in the Julie Andrews musical Star (1968).

Trivia: In films from 1932, actor/stunt man Eddie Parker spent the better part of his career at Universal. Parker doubled for most of Universal's horror stars, especially Lon Chaney Jr: rumors still persist that it was Parker, and not Chaney, who actually starred in the studio's Mummy pictures of the 1940s. He also performed stunts for many of Universal's A-list actors, including John Wayne. In the 1950s, he doubled for Boris Karloff in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), and played at least one of the title characters in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). His long association with Universal ended when he walked off the set of 1955's This Island Earth (in which he'd been cast as the "head mutant") during a salary dispute; he made one last return to the studio as one of the gladiators in Spartacus (1960). In addition to his Universal duties, Parker worked as both an actor and stunter in virtually every Republic serial made during the 1940s and 1950s. Eddie Parker died of a heart attack shortly after staging a comedic fight sequence on TV's The Jack Benny Program.

Trivia: A former stage actor, Donald Castle was groomed for stardom by MGM in the late 1930s. Castle played Marian Hardy's (Cecilia Parker) beau Dennis Hunt in three of MGM's Andy Hardy features, but apparently he didn't catch on with audiences, in spite of his close resemblance to Clark Gable. He moved into character parts, playing both lawmen and disreputables in crime flicks and westerns. A close friend of actress Bonita Granville and her entrepreneur-husband Jack Wrather, Castle was part owner of a commercial 16-millimeter film production company run by Wrather, and in the 1950s and early 1960s served as associate producer for Wrather's TV series Lassie. Following a traffic accident in 1966, 49-year-old Don Castle died of a medication overdose.

Trivia: Gangly L.A.-born Rand Brooks made his first film appearance in 1938. The following year, he gained a small niche in film history with his performance as Charles Hamilton, ill-fated first husband of Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), in Gone With the Wind (1939). He spent the next several years in Westerns, most frequently appearing as Lucky Jenkins in the Hopalong Cassidy series. On television, Brooks was seen as Corporal Boone on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1956-1958). Rand Brooks was at one time married to comedian Stan Laurel's daughter Lois, with whom he operated a successful emergency ambulance service. As the 1970s wound to a close, Brooks disappeared entirely from the screen.On September 1, 2003, the man who gave legendary bombshell Marilyn Monroe her first screen kiss died of cancer at his Santa Ynez, CA home. He was 84.

Trivia: Actress Verna Felton had spent years honing her craft on the stage before she established her reputation on radio. Felton's contributions to the airwaves ranged from the part of Mme. DeFarge in a Lux Radio Theatre version of Tale of Two Cities to the recurring role of the Mean Widdle Kid's grandma on The Red Skelton Show. After the death of her actor/husband Lee Millar in 1941, Felton began her screen career. Her movie assignments consisted largely of voiceover work for Walt Disney's animated features: she can be heard as a gossiping elephant in Dumbo (1941), the Fairy Godmother who sings "Bibbidy Bobbidy Boo" in Cinderella (1950), the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Flora the good fairy in Sleeping Beauty (1959), and still another elephant in The Jungle Book (1967). She carried her voiceover activities into television, supplying the voice of Fred Flintstone's eternally nagging mother-in-law in The Flintstones (1960-66). Verna Felton is best-known to TV fans as Hilda Crocker on the popular sitcoms December Bride (1954-58) and Pete and Gladys (1960-62).

Trivia: Before coming to feature films in 1929, American actor Dick Cramer was a stage actor for 20 years. With a coarse face and a menacing demeanor, Cramer was well-suited to play villains.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

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: Bearlike, bushy-eyebrowed British actor Gibson Gowland began his stage career in England, where he was billed as T.E. Gowland. He came to America in the teens, almost immediately securing film work as a minor character actor. Director Erich Von Stroheim admired Gowland's naturalistic acting style, and cast the actor as the lead of two of his films. The better of the two was Greed (1924), in which Gowland etched an unforgettable portrait of an essentially decent man driven to madness and murder by his grasping, money-hungry wife. Gowland continued to play roughneck character parts throughout the silent era, returning to England in the 1930s. By 1940 Gibson Gowland was back in the U.S., where he spent his declining years playing bit roles in such films as The Wolf Man (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942).

Trivia: Actor Arthur Aylesworth's first regular film employment was in a series of Paramount "newspaper" short subjects produced between 1932 and 1933. Aylesworth signed a Warner Bros. contract in 1934, appearing in nine films his first year. His roles under the Warners escutcheon included the Chief Censor in Life of Emile Zola (1937), the auto court owner in High Sierra (1941) and the sleigh driver in Christmas in Connecticut (1946). He also showed up at other studios, playing the night court judge in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (Paramount 1935) and essaying minor roles in several of director John Ford's 20th Century-Fox productions. Arthur Aylesworth's last screen assignment was the part of a tenant farmer in Fox's Dragonwyck (1946).

Trivia: Rotund, ruddy-faced character actor Ferdinand Munier first showed up in films around 1923. Blessed with a rich, rolling voice that perfectly matched his portly frame, Munier flourished in the talkie era, playing scores of pompous foreign ambassadors, gouty aristocrats, and philandering businessmen. His many screen assignments included King Louis XIII in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and the aptly named Prince Too-Much-Belly in Diamond Horseshoe. A perfect Santa Claus type, Ferdinand Munier was frequently cast as Saint Nick, most amusingly in Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland (1934) and Hope and Crosby's Road to Utopia (1945).

Trivia: American actor George Eldredge began surfacing in films around 1936. A general hanger-on in the Universal horror product of the 1940s, Eldredge appeared in such roles as the village constable in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the DA in Calling Dr. Death (1943). His bland, malleable facial features enabled him to play everything from tanktown sheriffs to Nazi spies. Devotees of the "exploitation" films of the 1940s will remember Eldredge best as Dan Blake in the anti-syphilis tract Mom and Dad (1949). George Eldredge was once again in uniform as a small-town police chief in his final film, Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

Trivia: Bespectacled, dignified British stage actor Frederick Worlock came to Hollywood in 1938. During the war years, Worlock played many professorial roles, some benign, some villainous. A semi-regular in Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, he essayed such parts as Geoffrey Musgrave in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943). Active until 1966, Frederick Worlock's final assignments included a voice-over in the Disney cartoon feature 101 Dalmations (1961).

Trivia: Bald, lanky, laconic American actor Hank Worden made his screen debut in The Plainsman (1936), and began playing simpleminded rustics at least as early as the 1941 El Brendel two-reel comedy Love at First Fright. A member in good standing of director John Ford's unofficial stock company, Worden appeared in such Ford classics as Fort Apache (1948) and Wagonmaster (1950). The quintessential Worden-Ford collaboration was The Searchers (1955) wherein Worden portrayed the near-moronic Mose Harper, who spoke in primitive, epigrammatic half-sentences and who seemed gleefully obsessed with the notion of unexpected death. Never a "normal" actor by any means, Worden continued playing characters who spoke as if they'd been kicked by a horse in childhood into the '80s; his last appearance was a recurring role in the quirky David Lynch TV serial Twin Peaks. In real life, Hank Worden was far from addled and had a razor-sharp memory, as proven in his many appearances at Western fan conventions and in an interview program about living in the modern desert, filmed just before Worden's death for cable TV's Discovery Channel.