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: Famed for her saintly, natural beauty, Ingrid Bergman was the most popular actress of the 1940s; admired equally by audiences and critics, she enjoyed blockbuster after blockbuster -- until an unprecedented scandal threatened to destroy her career. Born August 29, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden, Bergman was only two years old when her mother died; her father passed on a decade later, and the spinster aunt who had become her guardian perished only a few months after that. Her inheritance allowed her to study at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, and in 1934 she made her screen debut after signing to Svenskfilmindustri with a small role in Munkbrovregen. Bergman's first lead performance followed a year later in Brunninger, and with the success of the 1936 melodrama Valborgsmassoafen, she rose to become one of Sweden's biggest stars. Later that year, she starred in the romance Intermezzo, which eventually made its way to New York where it came to the attention of producer David O. Selznick. After signing a Hollywood contract, she relocated to America where her first film, 1939's Intermezzo: A Love Story, was an English-language remake of her earlier success. Bergman's fresh-scrubbed Nordic beauty set her squarely apart from the stereotypical movie starlet, and quickly both Hollywood executives and audiences became enchanted with her. After briefly returning to Sweden to appear in 1940's Juninatten, Selznick demanded she return to the U.S., but without any projects immediately available he pointed her to Broadway to star in Liliom. Bergman was next loaned to MGM for 1941's Adam Had Four Sons, followed by Rage in Heaven. She then appeared against type as a coquettish bad girl in the latest screen adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. However, it was 1942's Casablanca which launched her to superstardom; cast opposite Humphrey Bogart after a series of other actresses rejected the picture, she was positively radiant, her chemistry with Bogart the stuff of pure magic. Now a major box-office draw, she won the coveted lead in 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls with the blessing of the novel's author, Ernest Hemingway; when her performance earned an Academy Award nomination, every studio in town wanted to secure her talents.Bergman next starred in Sam Wood's Saratoga Trunk, but because the studio, Warner Bros., wanted to distribute more timely material during wartime, the picture's release was delayed until 1944. As a result, audiences next saw her in Gaslight, starring opposite Charles Boyer; another rousing success, her performance won Best Actress honors from both the Oscar and Golden Globe voters. The 1945 Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was another massive hit, and a year later they reunited for Notorious. Sandwiched in between was The Bells of St. Mary's, and all told, the three pictures helped push Bergman to the position of Hollywood's top female box-office attraction. Upon fulfilling her contract with Selznick, she began freelancing, starring as a prostitute in 1948's Arch of Triumph; the public, however, reacted negatively to her decision to play against type, and later that year she was even more saintly than usual as the title heroine in Joan of Arc. Expected to become a blockbuster, the film performed to only moderate success, and after a similarly tepid response to the 1949 Hitchcock thriller Under Capricorn, she began to reconsider her options. Like so many viewers around the world, Bergman had been highly moved by director Roberto Rossellini's Italian neorealist masterpiece Roma Citta Aperta; announcing her desire to work with him, she accepted the lead in 1950's Stromboli. During production, Bergman and Rossellini fell in love, and she became pregnant with his child; at the time, she was still married to her first husband, Swedish doctor Peter Lindstrom, and soon she was assailed by criticism the world over. After divorcing Lindstrom, Bergman quickly married Rossellini, but the damage was already done: Stromboli was banned in many markets, boycotted by audiences in others, and despite much curiosity, it was a box-office disaster. Together, over the next six years, the couple made a series of noteworthy films including Europa '51, Siamo Donne, and Viaggio in Italia, but audiences wanted no part of any of them; to make matters worse, their marriage was crumbling, and their financial resources were exhausted. In 1956, Bergman starred in Jean Renoir's lovely Elena et les Hommes, but it too failed to return her to audience favor.Few stars of Bergman's magnitude had ever suffered such a sudden and disastrous fall from grace; even fewer enjoyed as remarkable a comeback as the one she mounted with 1957's Anastasia, a historical tale which not only proved successful with audiences but also with critics, resulting in a second Academy Award. For director Stanley Donen, Bergman next starred in 1958's Indiscreet, followed by The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Also in 1958, she married for the third time, to Swedish impresario Lars Schmidt, and when a series of planned projects failed to come to fruition she simply went on sabbatical, appearing in a television presentation of The Turn of the Screw in 1959 but otherwise keeping out of the public eye for three years. She resurfaced in 1961 with Aimez-Vous Brahms? Another three-year hiatus followed prior to her next feature project, The Visit. After 1965's The Yellow Rolls Royce, Bergman appeared in the 1967 Swedish anthology Stimulantia and then turned to the stage, touring in a production of Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions.Bergman's theatrical success re-ignited Hollywood's interest, and Columbia signed her to star in 1969's hit Cactus Flower; 1970's Spring Rain followed, before she returned to stage for 1971's Captain Brassbound's Conversion. After winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, Bergman appeared opposite Liza Minnelli in 1976's A Matter of Time before returning to Sweden to star in 1978's superb Herbstsonate, the first and only time she worked with her namesake, the legendary director Ingmar Bergman. After penning a 1980 autobiography, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, in 1982, she starred in the television miniseries A Woman Called Golda, a biography of the Israeli premier Golda Meir; the performance was her last -- on August 29 of that year she lost her long battle with cancer. In subsequent years, her daughter, Isabella Rossellini, emerged as a top actress and fashion model.

Trivia: One of the most glamorous superstars of Hollywood's golden era, Lana Turner was born February 8, 1921, in Wallace, ID. At the age of 15, while cutting school, she was spotted by Hollywood Reporter staffer Billy Wilkinson in a Hollywood drugstore; enchanted by her beauty, he escorted her to the offices of the Zeppo Marx Agency, resulting in a bit part in 1937's A Star Is Born. Rejected by RKO, Fox, and any number of other studios, Turner next briefly showed up in They Won't Forget. Mervin LeRoy, the picture's director, offered her a personal contract at 50 dollars a week, and she subsequently appeared fleetingly in a series of films at Warner Bros. When LeRoy moved to MGM, Turner followed, and the usual series of bit parts followed before she won her first lead role in the 1939 B-comedy These Glamour Girls. Dancing Co-Ed, a vehicle for bandleader Artie Shaw, followed that same year, and after starring in 1940's Two Girls on Broadway, she and Shaw married. Dubbed "the Sweater Girl" by the press, Turner was touted by MGM as a successor to Jean Harlow, but audiences did not take her to heart; she did, however, become a popular pin-up, especially with American soldiers fighting overseas. In 1941 she starred opposite Clark Gable in Honky Tonk, her first major hit. They again teamed in Somewhere I'll Find You the next year. Upon separating from Shaw, Turner married actor Stephen Crane, but when his earlier divorce was declared invalid, a media frenzy followed; MGM chief Louis B. Mayer was so incensed by the debacle that he kept the now-pregnant Turner off movie screens for a year. Upon returning in 1944's Marriage Is a Private Affair, Turner's stardom slowly began to grow, culminating in her most sultry and effective turn to date as a femme fatale in 1946's The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film was a tremendous success, and it made Turner one of Hollywood's brightest stars. Both 1947's Green Dolphin Street and Cass Timberlane were hits, but a 1948 reunion with Gable in Homecoming failed to re-create their earlier sparks. After appearing in The Three Musketeers, she disappeared from screens for over a year, resurfacing in the George Cukor trifle A Life of Her Own. Turner's box-office stock was plummeting, a situation which MGM attempted to remedy by casting her in musicals; while the first, 1951's Mr. Imperium, was an unmitigated disaster, 1952's The Merry Widow was more successful. However, a string of failures followed, and after 1955's Diane, MGM opted not to renew her contract.When Turner's next project, The Rains of Ranchipur, also failed to ignite audience interest, she again took a sabbatical from movie-making. She returned in 1957 with Peyton Place, director Mark Robson's hugely successful adaptation of Grace Metalious' infamous best-seller about the steamy passions simmering beneath the surface of small-town life. Turner's performance won an Academy Award nomination, and the following year she made international headlines when her lover, gangster Johnny Stampanato, was stabbed to death by her teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane; a high-profile court trial followed, and although Crane was eventually acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide, Turner's reputation took a severe beating. The 1959 Douglas Sirk tearjerker Imitation of Life was Turner's last major hit, however, and after a string of disappointments culminating in 1966's Madame X, she did not reappear in films for three years, returning with The Big Cube. Also in 1969, she and George Hamilton co-starred in the short-lived television series The Survivors. After touring in a number of stage productions, Turner starred in the little-seen 1974 horror film Persecution, followed in 1976 by Bittersweet Love. Her final film, Witches' Brew, a semi-comic remake of the 1944 horror classic Weird Woman, was shot in 1978 but not widely released until 1985. In 1982, she published an autobiography, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, and also began a stint as a semi-regular on the TV soap opera Falcon Crest. After spending the majority of her final decade in retirement, Lana Turner died June 29, 1995, at the age of 74.

Trivia: If Donald Crisp had any peer as an actor, it was probably his fellow Scotsman Finlay Currie, who made a virtual star career (albeit mostly in England) playing the same kind of dour roles that Crisp often essayed -- but even that only overlapped with one aspect of Crisp's career. An Oscar-winning character actor whose career spanned three generations, from the 1910s to the 1960s, Crisp was also unique as a director and, before that, an assistant and colleague to such figures as D.W. Griffith -- and none of those activities even touched upon his most influential role in the movie business. Donald Crisp was born in Abberfeldy, Scotland, in 1880, and was educated at Oxford. He served as a trooper in the 10th Hussars in the Boer War, which allowed him to cross paths with a young Winston Churchill, before emigrating to the United States in 1906. While on the boat coming over, he chanced to sing in a ship's concert and impressed John C. Fisher, an opera impresario, sufficiently to offer him a job with his company as both a member of the chorus and a handyman. It was while touring with the company in the United States and Cuba that Crisp became interested in theater. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he was working as a stage manager for George M. Cohan, and soon after that he met D.W. Griffith, a former stage actor who had developed a yen for making movies; Crisp accompanied the legendary director to Hollywood in 1912. After serving as Griffith's assistant and watching him work, Crisp -- who portrayed General Ulysses S. Grant in The Birth of a Nation -- became a director in his own right. He later told an interviewer that he gave up directing because he wearied of being forced to do favors for studio production chiefs by employing their relatives in his films, so he returned to acting. In between working for Griffith and producers such as William H. Clune, Crisp managed to return to England to serve in army intelligence during the First World War. After returning to Hollywood, he went to work for Adolph Zukor at his Famous Players company in 1919, which was later to become Paramount Pictures; Zukor employed Crisp as an executive, charged with setting up the studio's operations in Europe. He later worked as a director for Douglas Fairbanks Sr. on such movies as Son of Zorro. Crisp's most visible role to the public during the silent era, however, may well have come right after his military service, as the brutal villain in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). With the advent of sound, Crisp moved into acting entirely, and across the 1930s and '40s he essayed a wide range of roles, most memorably as the taciturn but loving father in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) (for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), one of the put-upon crew in Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and Doctor Kenneth in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). Crisp was equally good in lovable or sinister roles; during the same period in which he was playing charming old codgers in National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, he was also memorable as Commander Beach, the tormented presumptive grandfather to Gail Russell's Stella Meredith in Lewis Allen's The Uninvited (1944), who dies at the hands of the vengeful spirit of his own daughter. All of this activity, which included as many as nine movies in a single year, didn't prevent Crisp from contributing to the war effort, once the Second World War came along -- by then, he held the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army reserves. What few people outside of the movie community realized during this period was that, beyond his work as an actor, Crisp was also one of the most influential people in Hollywood, wielding more power than most directors and even more than many producers (most of whom were, in the end, just hired executives). He was one of Hollywood's gatekeepers, one of the responsible adults who worked to make the business side of the industry work while stars of the era paraded their egos and vices before the cameras. Specifically, Crisp's long experience as not only an actor but also as a director and a production and studio executive made him ideal as an advisor to Bank of America -- one of the leading sources of working capital for the movie business (whose life-blood was loans) -- on which movies to make. He was on the bank's advisory board for decades, including a stint as its chairman, and had the ear of its directors, and many of the major movies financed by the bank in the 1930s and '40s got their most important approval from Crisp. He was also, not surprisingly, one of the more well-off members of the acting community, his banker's sobriety and clear-headedness allowing Crisp to make good investments, especially in real estate, across the decades that paid off well for him and his wife of 25 years, screenwriter Jane Murfin. Crisp continued acting right up through 1960 and Walt Disney's Pollyanna (he'd worked for Mary Pickford, who'd played in and produced the silent version of the same story 45 years earlier), mostly because he liked to work. Crisp passed away in 1974 at the ripe old age of 93, one of the most revered and beloved senior members of the acting community.

Trivia: Barton MacLane may have been born on Christmas Day, but there was precious little chance that he'd ever be cast as Santa Claus. A star athlete at Wesleyan University, MacLane won his first movie role in the 1924 silent Quarterback as the result of his football skills. This single incident sparked his interest in performing, which he pursued on a serious basis at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He performed in stock, on Broadway, and in bit parts in films lensed at Paramount's Astoria studios (notably the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts). In 1932, MacLane wrote a slice-of-life play titled Rendezvous, selling it to influential Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins on the proviso, that he, MacLane, be given the lead. The play was a success, leading to a lucrative film contract from Warner Bros. Most effectively cast as a swaggering villain ("who never spoke when shouting would do," as historian William K. Everson observed), MacLane played good-guy leads in several Warner "B"s: he played the conclusion-jumping lieutenant Steve McBride in the studio's Torchy Blaine series. Free-lancing in the 1940s, MacLane made an unfortunate return to writing in 1941, penning the screenplay for the PRC quickie Man of Courage; it is reported that audiences erupted in shrieks of laughter when MacLane, reciting his own lines, recalled his childhood days on the farm by declaring "Boy! Did I love ta plow!" He was better served in a brace of John Huston-directed films, beating up Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and being beaten up by Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. MacLane's TV-series work included a starring stint on The Outlaws (1960-62) and the recurring role of General Peterson on I Dream of Jeannie (1965-69). Having come into the world on a holiday, Barton MacLane died on New Years' Day, 1969; he was survived by his wife, actress Charlotte Wynters.

Trivia: Actor C. Aubrey Smith was, so far as many American moviegoers were concerned, the very personification of the British Empire. Even so, when young English journalist Alistair Cooke first travelled to Hollywood in the early 1930s to interview Smith, it was not to discuss the actor's four decades in show business, but to wax nostalgic on his athletic career. The son of a London surgeon, Smith played soccer for the Corinthians and cricket for Cambridge. For four years, "Round the Corner Smith" (so named because of his unique playing style) was captain of the Sussex County Cricket Club, playing championship matches throughout the Empire. When time came to choose a "real" vocation, Smith dallied with the notion of following in his dad's footsteps, then worked as a teacher and stockbroker. In 1892, at the age of 29, he finally decided to become an actor (not without family disapproval!), launching his stage career with the A. B. Tappings Stock Company. He made his London debut in 1895, and the following year scored his first significant success as Black Michael in The Prisoner of Zenda; also in 1896, he married Isobel May Wood, a union that endured for over fifty years. His subsequent stage triumphs included Shaw's Pygmalion, in which he succeeded Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree as Professor Henry Higgins. Despite the theatrical community's disdainful attitude towards the "flickers", Smith enthusiastically launched his film career in 1914. He was one of the co-founders of the short-lived but energetic Minerva Film Company, and by 1915 had begun making movies in America. It was his 1928 stage hit Bachelor Father that led to Smith's phenomenally successful career in talking pictures. For 18 years, he was perhaps Hollywood's favorite "professional Englishmen." He was at his best in martinet military roles, most memorably in a brace of 1939 productions: The Sun Never Sets, in which he used a wall-sized map to dutifully mark off the far-flung locations where his progeny were serving the Empire, and The Four Feathers, wherein he encapsulated his generation by crustily declaring "War was war in my day, sir!" Other notable roles in the Smith canon included Jane's father in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), a close-minded aristocrat who turns out to be an out-of-work actor in Bombshell (1933), the intensely loyal Colonel Zapt in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and an outraged murder-victim-to-be in Ten Little Indians (1945). Smith briefly returned to the stage in 1941, and throughout the war years could be seen in roles ranging from single-scene cameos (The Adventures of Mark Twain, Unconquered) to full leads (1945's Scotland Yard Inspector). A recipient of the Order of the British Empire in 1938, he was knighted by King George VI in 1944, largely because of the positive image of Mother England that the actor invariably projected. The undisputed leader of Tinseltown's "British Colony," Smith also organized the Hollywood Cricket Club, taking great pride in the fact that he hadn't missed a weekend match for nearly sixty years. Sir C. Aubrey Smith was still in harness when he died of pneumonia at the age of 85; his last film appearance as Mr. Lawrence in Little Women was released posthumously in 1949.

Trivia: Briton Peter Godfrey enjoyed a lengthy stage career in London and the provinces as an actor, director, producer, vaudeville comedian (in partnership with his first wife Renee Haal) and sleight-of-hand artist before packing up for Hollywood. Godfrey's first film directorial assignment was The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (1939), arguably the best-ever entry in Columbia's "Lone Wolf" series. After a brief stay at RKO, Godfrey entered into a long association with Warner Bros. Most of his Warners films were fluffy vehicles for such contractees as Jack Carson, Jane Wyman, Barbara Stanwyck and Errol Flynn. His two crowning achievements at the studio were the Yuletide TV perennial Christmas in Connecticut (1945) and the marrow-chilling Gothic melodrama The Woman in White (1947). In the 1950s, Peter Godfrey turned to filmed television, directing many a half-hour anthology episode and virtually all 39 installments of Ella Raines' TV series Janet Dean, Registered Nurse.

Trivia: Born to a middle-class Irish family and educated at the Marlborough Street Training College, 19-year-old Sara Allgood joined the Irish National Theatre Society, obtaining her first speaking role in a 1903 production of W.B. Yeats' The King's Threshold. She became a member of Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1904; within a few years she was lauded as Ireland's foremost actress. While touring Australia in 1918, she made her film bow in Just Peggy. She didn't like the experience, and it would be eleven years before she would face the cameras again, this time in the role of Anna Ondra's mother in Blackmail (1929), Alfred Hitchcock's (and the British film industry's) first talkie. One year later, Hitchcock cast Sara in the demanding title role in the cinematic adaptation of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, a role she had created on stage with the Abbey Players in 1924. After a decade of worthwhile stage assignments and forgettable film roles, Sara came to Hollywood in 1940, where she was cast by John Ford in a strong role in the Oscar-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). This led to a long-term contract with 20th Century-Fox, which was financially satisfying but dramatically unrewarding; after years of incisive, commanding stage roles, Sara was compelled to play cliched Irish mothers and servants. Sara Allgood's final screen appearance was in Fox's Cheaper By the Dozen (1950), in which she received prominent billing--and approximately five lines of dialogue.

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: The son of veteran vaudeville headliner Julius Tannen and the brother of actor Charles Tannen, William Tannen entered films as a Columbia contractee in 1934. Along with several other young stage-trained performers, Tannen was "discovered" by MGM in 1938's Dramatic School. During his subsequent years at MGM, he was briefly associated with three top comedy teams: He played Virginia Grey's brother in the Marx Brothers' The Big Store (1941), a Nazi flunkey in Laurel and Hardy's Air Raid Wardens (1943), and a "hard-boiled" assistant director in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945). On TV, William Tannen was seen in the recurring role of Deputy Hal on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Effervescent little Billy Bevan commenced his stage career in his native Australia, after briefly attending the University of Sydney. A veteran of the famous Pollard Opera Company, Bevan came to the U.S. in 1917, where he found work as a supporting comic at L-KO studios. He was promoted to stardom in 1920 when he joined up with Mack Sennett's "fun factory." Adopting a bushy moustache and an air of quizzical determination, Bevan became one of Sennett's top stars, appearing opposite such stalwart laughmakers as Andy Clyde, Vernon Dent and Madelyn Hurlock in such belly-laugh bonanzas as Ice Cold Cocos (1925), Circus Today (1926) and Wandering Willies (1926). While many of Bevan's comedies are hampered by too-mechanical gags and awkward camera tricks, he was funny and endearing enough to earn laughs without the benefit of Sennett gimmickry. He was particularly effective in a series of "tired businessman" two-reelers, in which the laughs came from the situations and the characterizations rather than slapstick pure and simple. Bevan continued to work sporadically for Sennett into the talkie era, but was busier as a supporting actor in feature films like Cavalcade (1933), The Lost Patrol (1934) and Dracula's Daughter (1936). He was frequently cast in bit parts as London "bobbies," messenger boys and bartenders; one of his more rewarding talkie roles was the uncle of plumbing trainee Jennifer Jones (!) in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946). Among Billy Bevan's final screen assignments was the part of Will Scarlet in 1950's Rogues of Sherwood Forest.

Trivia: Diminuitive Irish actor Forrester Harvey was most often cast as cockney tradesmen, family gardeners and pub hangers-on. He entered films in 1922, but only with the advent of talking pictures were his talents exploited to full advantage. Part subservient, part pugnacious, Harvey became a fixture of Hollywood films set in England, Ireland or Scotland. His better-known film stints included Beamish in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and Meredith the valet in Laurel and Hardy's A Chump at Oxford (1940). So ubiquitous was Forrester Harvey that he managed to appear in a film five years after his death! That film was Frank Capra's Riding High (1950), a remake of Broadway Bill (1934) which utilized extensive footage from the earlier film -- including virtually all of Harvey's scenes as a horse trainer.

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: Veteran British stage actor Lawrence Grant entered films in 1918, when his marked resemblance to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm made him a "natural" for such epics as To Hell with the Kaiser. An acknowledged expert in American Indian lore, Grant also took time in 1918 to produce an experimental color film about Native Americans. Sound proved no obstacle to Grant's film career, as he proved in his first talkie role, the scurrilous Dr. Lakington in Bulldog Drummond (1929). He later appeared with his Drummond co-star Ronald Colman in such films as The Unholy Garden (1931) and Lost Horizon (1937). Usually a villain, Grant enjoyed a sizeable sympathetic role as Sir Lionel Barton, the luckless aristocrat tortured to death by the insidious Boris Karloff, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Active until 1945, Lawrence Grant could be seen in minor roles (often unbilled) in such horror efforts as Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and The Living Ghost (1944).

Trivia: Formidable stage leading lady Doris Lloyd transferred her activities from British repertory to Hollywood in 1925. She was prominently cast as an alluring spy in George Arliss' first talkie Disraeli (1929); one year later, at the tender age of 30, she was seen as the matronly Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez in Charley's Aunt. Swinging back to younger roles in 1933, Lloyd was cast as the tragic Nancy Sykes in the Dickie Moore version of Oliver Twist. By the late 1930s, Lloyd had settled into middle-aged character roles, most often as a domestic or dowager. Doris Lloyd remained active until 1967, with substantial roles in such films as The Time Machine (1960) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Trivia: Her cultured Mayfair accent notwithstanding, frosty blonde actress Hillary Brooke was born on Long Island. After attending Columbia University, Hillary launched a modelling career, which led to film work in 1937. Though a handful of her screen portrayals were sympathetic, Hillary's talents were best utilized in roles calling for sophisticated truculence: "other women," murderesses, wealthy divorcees and the like. She is also known for her extensive work with the comedy team of Abbott and Costello. First appearing with the team in 1949's Africa Screams, she was briefly nonplused by their ad-libs and prankishness, but soon learned to relax and enjoy their unorthodox working habits. Retiring in 1960 upon her marriage to MGM general manager Ray Klune, Hillary Brooke has devoted much of her time since to religious and charitable work.

Trivia: Actress Mary Field kept her private life such a well-guarded secret that not even her most devoted fans (including several film historians who've attempted to write biographies of the actress) have ever been able to find out anything about her background. So far as anyone can ascertain, she entered films around 1937; her first important assignment was the dual role of the mothers of the title characters in The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Viewers may not know the name but they have seen the face: too thin and sharp-featured to be beautiful, too soft and kindly to be regarded as homely. Mary Field is the actress who played Huntz Hall's sister in the 1941 Universal serial Sea Raiders; the spinsterish sponsor of Danny Kaye's doctoral thesis in A Song of Born (1947); the nice lady standing in Macy's "Santa Claus" line with the little Dutch girl in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); the long-suffering music teacher in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950); and Harold Peary's bespectacled vis-a-vis in The Great Gildersleeve (1942)--to name just four films among hundreds.

Trivia: Character actor Aubrey Mather launched his stage career in 1905, touring the British provinces until his 1909 London debut in Brewster's Millions. Ten years later, Mather made his first Broadway appearance in Luck of the Navy. In British films from 1931, he essayed such supporting roles as Corin in As You Like It. Moving to Hollywood in 1940, he worked with regularity at 20th Century-Fox, playing roles like Colonel Dent in Jane Eyre (1943), the Scotland Yard chief inspector in The Lodger (1944), and, best of all, mild-mannered Nazi spy Mr. Fortune in Careful Soft Shoulders (1942). Other assignments included Professor Peagram, one of the "seven dwarfs" in Goldwyn's Ball of Fire (1941), and James Forsyte in That Forsyte Woman (1949). Like his fellow Britons Arthur Treacher and Charles Coleman, Aubrey Mather is fondly remembered for his butler roles, notably Merriman in the British The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).

Trivia: A solid, good-looking leading man with an upper-class British accent, he moved to England while in his teens and joined the army in 1917, serving in France. He debuted onstage in 1919, then onscreen in 1924; for the next decade he alternated between plays and films, usually as a leading man, then moved to Hollywood in 1934 and appeared in many American films. He was often cast as an upright, conscientious husband, lover, or friend. He returned to England for war service in 1942. After the war he continued to perform in British plays and films for the next two decades.