Trivia: The daughter of a New York City cop, 14-year-old Alice Faye lied about her age to secure her first chorus girl job in 1929. While appearing in the 1933-1934 edition of George White's Scandals, Faye became the protégée of the show's star, Rudy Vallee, touring with Vallee's orchestra as vocalist. At Vallee's insistence, she was cast in the 1934 Fox Studios film version of George White's Scandals, elevated to the leading role when Lillian Harvey walked off the set. Despite unpleasant tabloid coverage when Vallee's wife sued her for alienation of her husband's affections, Faye was kept on by Fox, which lightened her already blonde hair and attempted to groom her as the "new Jean Harlow." After a few negligible leading roles in such Fox productions as She Learned About Sailors (1934) and 365 Nights in Hollywood (1935), she established her screen image as a tough, contralto-voiced cookie with a heart of gold, her popularity ascending with each successive film. During this period, she wed her frequent co-star Tony Martin, a union which lasted until 1940. Though a favorite with fans and coworkers alike, Faye regularly put her film career in jeopardy by clashing with 20th Century Fox head man Darryl F. Zanuck, who, realizing that he couldn't very well throw her off the payroll (not with such box-office hits as In Old Chicago and Rose of Washington Square to her credit), decided to "punish" her by hiring Betty Grable as Faye's potential successor. The press had a field day fabricating a deadly rivalry between Faye and Grable, though in fact the actresses got along reasonably well and were felicitously teamed in Tin Pan Alley (1940). Faye's feud with Zanuck came to a head in 1945 when her leading role in Fallen Angel was cut down to practically nothing. She quit movies cold, electing to devote her time to her second husband, bandleader Phil Harris, and her two daughters. Though banned from films by Zanuck, Faye flourished on radio, co-starring with Harris on a popular comedy series which ran for several successful seasons. In 1962, she returned to the screen in the ill-advised remake of State Fair, in which the 47-year-old actress played the mother of Pat Boone. She made several TV guest appearances in the 1960s and 1970s, toured the nightclub and straw hat circuit, and co-starred with John Payne in a Broadway revival of Good News. Since the death of Phil Harris in 1994, Alice Faye participated in several TV specials about Hollywood's "Golden Age," and remained in contact with her numerous, still-faithful fans until her death from cancer in early May 1998.

Trivia: Daughter of a Texas postal clerk, actress Linda Darnell trained to be a dancer, and came to Hollywood's attention as a photographer's model. Though only 15, Darnell looked quite mature and seductive in her first motion picture, Hotel For Women (1937), and before she was twenty she found herself the leading lady of such 20th Century-Fox male heartthrobs as Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. Weary of thankless good-girl roles, Darnell scored a personal triumph when loaned out to United Artists for September Storm (1944), in which she played a "Scarlett O'Hara" type Russian vixen. Thereafter, 20th Century-Fox assigned the actress meatier, more substantial parts, culminating in the much-sought-after leading role in 1947's Forever Amber. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz followed up this triumph by giving Darnell two of her best parts--Paul Douglas' "wrong side of the tracks" wife in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Richard Widmark's racist girlfriend in No Way Out (1950) (though befitting her star status, Darnell "reformed" at the end of both films). When her Fox contract ended in 1952, Darnell found herself cast adrift in Hollywood, the good roles fewer and farther between; by the mid-1960s, she was appearing as a nightclub singer, touring in summer theatre, and accepting supporting roles on television. Tragically, Darnell died in 1965 of severe burns suffered in a house fire. Ironically, Darnell had a lifelong fear of dying in flames, speaking publicly of her phobia after appearing in a "burned at the stake" sequence in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam.

Trivia: Hard-fighting, strong, durable redhead Charles Bickford graduated from MIT before he began appearing in burlesque in 1914. After serving in World War I, he started a career on Broadway in 1919. He didn't come to Hollywood until the birth of the Sound Era in 1929. His first film was Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite, during the production of which, he punched out DeMille. He became a star after playing Greta Garbo's lover in Anna Christie (1930), but didn't develop into a romantic lead, instead becoming a powerful character actor whose screen appearances commanded attention throughout a career spanning almost four decades, in films such as Duel in the Sun (1946) and Johnny Belinda (1948). His craggy, intense features lent themselves to roles as likable fathers, businessmen, captains, etc. He sometimes played stubborn or unethical roles, but more often projected honesty or warmth. He co-authored a play, The Cyclone Lover (1928) and wrote an autobiography, Bulls, Balls, Bicycles, and Actors (1965). He was Oscar-nominated three times but never won the award. Late in his life he starred in the TV show The Virginian.

Trivia: Anne Revere trained as an actress at the American Laboratory Theater, then did some work in stock. In 1931 she debuted on Broadway; during the '30s she appeared in one film, the screen version of a play in which she had appeared, Double Door (1934). In 1940 she moved to Hollywood and for a decade she appeared as a character actress in many major films; she was nominated three times for Oscars, and won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in National Velvet (1945). In 1951 she fell victim to the McCarthy-Era witch trials; accused of being a Communist, she plead the Fifth and was blacklisted. She went years without work, then returned to Broadway in 1958 and won a Tony for her work in Toys in the Attic in 1960; she did more stage work and had regular roles on two TV soap operas. In the '70s she returned to the screen in three films. She was married to stage director Samuel Roser.

Trivia: After attending the University of the South in Tennessee, Bruce Cabot bounced around from job to job: working on a tramp steamer, selling insurances, even hauling away the bones of dead animals. While attending a Hollywood party, Cabot met RKO producer David O. Selznick, which resulted in Cabot's first film appearance in Roadhouse Murder. His most famous role while at RKO was as the heroic Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933), rescuing Fay Wray from the hairy paws of the 50-foot ape. Thereafter, Cabot was most often seen in villainous, brutish roles. It is hard to imagine anyone more venomous or vicious than Bruce Cabot in such roles as the scarred gangster boss in Let 'Em Have It (1936), the treacherous Magua in Last of the Mohicans (1936), or the thick-skulled lynch-mob instigator in Fury (1936). During World War II, Cabot worked in army intelligence and operations in Africa, Sicily and Italy. A good friend of John Wayne, Cabot was frequently cast in "The Duke's" vehicles of the 1960s, including The Green Berets (1968). Among Bruce Cabot's three wives were actresses Adrienne Ames and Francesca de Scaffa.

Trivia: Though best known to modern filmgoers as a horror star, cadaverous John Carradine was, in his prime, one of the most versatile character actors on the silver screen. The son of a journalist father and physician mother, Carradine was given an expensive education in Philadelphia and New York. Upon graduating from the Graphic Arts School, he intended to make his living as a painter and sculptor, but in 1923 he was sidetracked into acting. Working for a series of low-paying stock companies throughout the 1920s, he made ends meet as a quick-sketch portrait painter and scenic designer. He came to Hollywood in 1930, where his extensive talents and eccentric behavior almost immediately brought him to the attention of casting directors. He played a dizzying variety of distinctive bit parts -- a huntsman in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a crowd agitator in Les Miserables (1935) -- before he was signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936. His first major role was the sadistic prison guard in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which launched a long and fruitful association with Ford, culminating in such memorable screen characterizations as the gentleman gambler in Stagecoach (1939) and Preacher Casy ("I lost the callin'!") in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Usually typecast as a villain, Carradine occasionally surprised his followers with non-villainous roles like the philosophical cab driver in Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) and Abraham Lincoln in Of Human Hearts (1938). Throughout his Hollywood years, Carradine's first love remained the theater; to fund his various stage projects (which included his own Shakespearean troupe), he had no qualms about accepting film work in the lowest of low-budget productions. Ironically, it was in one of these Poverty Row cheapies, PRC's Bluebeard (1944), that the actor delivered what many consider his finest performance. Though he occasionally appeared in an A-picture in the 1950s and 1960s (The Ten Commandments, Cheyenne Autumn), Carradine was pretty much consigned to cheapies during those decades, including such horror epics as The Black Sleep (1956), The Unearthly (1957), and the notorious Billy the Kid Meets Dracula (1966). He also appeared in innumerable television programs, among them Twilight Zone, The Munsters, Thriller, and The Red Skelton Show, and from 1962 to 1964 enjoyed a long Broadway run as courtesan-procurer Lycus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Though painfully crippled by arthritis in his last years, Carradine never stopped working, showing up in films ranging from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) to Peggy Sue Got Married (1984). Married four times, John Carradine was the father of actors David, Keith, Robert, and Bruce Carradine.

Trivia: Familiar to million as the twangy, bucolic Pa Kettle, Percy Kilbride first stepped on the stage in the role of an 18th-century French fop in a San Francisco production of Tale of Two Cities. Interrupting his career to serve in World War I, Kilbride spent the postwar years in regional stock companies. He made a few scattered movie appearances in the 1930s, then returned to Hollywood to stay in 1942, when he re-created his Broadway role in the film version of George Washington Slept Here. Kilbride played a variety of rustic parts until 1947, when he created the Pa Kettle role in The Egg and I. From 1949 through 1955, he starred exclusively in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle series, retiring from the screen after Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955) (Kilbride's co-star Marjorie Main appeared in two more Kettle films opposite Arthur Hunnicutt and Parker Fennelly). In 1964, Percy Kilbride and his actor friend Ralf Belmont were crossing a Los Angeles street near Kilbride's home when a car struck both of them down; Belmont was killed instantly, but Kilbride survived long enough to undergo brain surgery. He died of his injuries after a long hospital stay.

Trivia: The younger brother of actress Jobyna Howland, Olin Howland established himself on Broadway in musical comedy. The actor made his film debut in 1918, but didn't really launch his Hollywood career until the talkie era. Generally cast as rustic characters, Howland could be sly or slow-witted, depending on the demands of the role. He showed up in scores of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, most amusingly as the remonstrative Dr. Croker (sic) in The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934). A favorite of producer David O. Selznick, Howland played the laconic baggage man in Nothing Sacred (1937), the grim, hickory-stick wielding schoolmaster in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and an expansive Yankee businessman in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1940s, he could often as not be found at Republic, appearing in that studio's westerns and hillbilly musicals. One of his best screen assignments of the 1950s was the old derelict who kept shouting "Make me sergeant in charge of booze!" in the classic sci-fier Them (1954). Howland made several TV guest appearances in the 1950s, and played the recurring role of Swifty on the weekly Circus Boy (1956). In the latter stages of his career, Olin Howland billed himself as Olin Howlin; he made his final appearance in 1958, as the first victim of The Blob.

Trivia: American character actress Mira McKinney specialized in conveying silent outrage, imperiousness and embarrassment. One of McKinney's first screen appearances was Modern Times (1936), in which she and Charlie Chaplin exchanged baleful glances at one another while their stomachs growled in unison. She went on to play scores of snooty maiden aunts, angry shop customers, gimlet-eyed landladies, and at least one over-the-hill streetwalker. Mira McKinney's last known film appearance was in 1955.

Trivia: A somber-looking, bit-part player from Philadelphia, Gus Glassmire popped up in scores of high- and low-budget movies from 1938-1945, often playing clerks, storekeepers, hospital doctors, and newspaper editors. Today, Glassmire is probably best remembered as one of the victims of Dr. Daka's (J. Carrol Naish fiendish plot to overthrow the world in the 1943 Columbia serial Batman.

Trivia: The pint-sized American actor Jimmy Conlin preceded his film career as a vaudeville headliner on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, where he appeared with his wife Muriel Glass in a song-and-dance turn called "Conlin and Glass." After starring in the 1928 Vitaphone short Sharps and Flats, Conlin began regularly appearing in movie bit roles in 1933. Writer/director Preston Sturges liked Conlin's work and saw to it that the actor received sizeable roles--with good billing--in such Sturges projects as Sullivan's Travels (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). Conlin's all-time best role was as Wormy, the birdlike barfly who persuades Harold Lloyd to have his first-ever drink in Sturges' The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946). When Sturges' fortunes fell in the 1950s, Conlin and his wife remained loyal friends, communicating on a regular basis with the former top director and helping out in any way they could. In 1954, Conlin had a regular role as Eddie in the syndicated TV series Duffy's Tavern. Jimmy Conlin remained a Hollywood fixture until 1959, when he appeared in his last role as an elderly habitual criminal in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

Trivia: The son of an actress, Garry Owen first appeared on-stage with his mother in vaudeville. Owen went on to perform in such Broadway productions as Square Crooks and Miss Manhattan. In films from 1933, Owen was occasionally seen in such sizeable roles as private-eye Paul Drake in the 1936 Perry Mason movie Case of the Black Cat. For the most part, however, he played character bits, most memorably in the films of Frank Capra; in Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), for example, he plays the monumentally impatient taxi driver who closes the picture with the exclamation, "I'm not a cab driver, I'm a coffee pot!" In addition to his feature-film work, Garry Owen showed up in scores of short subjects for Hal Roach and MGM.

Trivia: Succinctly described as "portly and pompous" by B-Western aficionado Don Miller, American character-actor Horace Murphy was the Eugene Pallette of the sagebrush. Spending most of his career in cowboy flicks, Murphy was usually cast as intrusive sheriffs, know-it-all doctors, and orotund snake-oil peddlers. In 1937, he made the first of several appearances as comedy-relief sidekick Stubby in the films of Western hero Tex Ritter. In non-Westerns, he could usually be found playing bartenders, burgomeisters, and train conductors. Horace Murphy made his last screen appearance in 1946.

Trivia: Former radio actress Martha Wentworth played the Duchess, Allan Lane's robust-looking aunt, in seven of Republic Pictures' popular Red Ryder Westerns from 1946-1947. The original Duchess, Alice Fleming, had left the series along with William Elliott, who was being groomed for Grade-A Westerns. As the new Duchess, Wentworth joined Lane, Elliott's replacement, and little Bobby Blake (later Robert Blake), the former Our Gang star, who played Indian sidekick Little Beaver in all the Republic Red Ryder films. For a great majority of the series' fans, the Lane-Wentworth-Blake combination turned out the quintessential Red Ryder films, the trio becoming one of the most successful combinations in B-Western history. Republic sold the Red Ryder franchise to low-budget Eagle-Lion in 1948 and four additional films were produced, but Wentworth was replaced with former silent-action heroine Marin Sais. In her later years, Wentworth did quite a bit of voice-over work for Walt Disney.

Trivia: Wizened character actor Paul E. Burns tended to play mousey professional men in contemporary films and unshaven layabouts in period pictures. Bob Hope fans will recall Burns' con brio portrayal of boozy desert rat Ebeneezer Hawkins in Hope's Son of Paleface (1952), perhaps his best screen role. The general run of Burns' screen assignments can be summed up by two roles at both ends of his career spectrum: he played "Loafer" in D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and "Bum in Park" in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

Trivia: The son of a Los Angeles minister, three-year-old Matthew Beard won out of 350 kids to replace Allen "Farina" Hoskins as the resident black child in Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies. Nicknamed Hercules in his first two-reeler, Teacher's Pet (1930), Beard was thereafter known as Stymie because of his innocent offscreen habit of confounding his elders. Wearing an oversized derby hat (borrowed from Roach comedian Stan Laurel), the clever, resourceful, eternally grinning Stymie quickly became one of the most popular Our Gang kids. After appearing in 36 Our Gang shorts, Beard began freelancing in 1935, playing small roles in big films like Captain Blood (1935), Jezebel (1938), The Great Man Votes (1939), and Stormy Weather (1943). Alas, after dropping out of high school in 1945, he fell into a bad crowd, spending the next two decades in and out of jails for committing crimes to feed his drug habit. Miraculously, Beard completely turned his life around in the mid-'60s when he entered the drug rehab organization Synanon. Looking remarkably like the eternally optimistic Stymie of old, Matthew Beard made a successful show business comeback in the 1970s, appearing in such films as The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and such weekly TV series as Good Times and The Jeffersons.

Trivia: William Haade spent most of his movie career playing the very worst kind of bully--the kind that has the physical training to back up his bullying. His first feature-film assignment was as the arrogant, drunken professional boxer who is knocked out by bellhop Wayne Morris in Kid Galahad (37). In many of his western appearances, Haade was known to temper villainy with an unexpected sense of humor; in one Republic western, he spews forth hilarious one-liners while hacking his victims to death with a knife! William Haade also proved an excellent menace to timorous comedians like Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello; in fact, his last film appearance was in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (55).

Trivia: Whenever Ellen Corby or Mary Field weren't available to play a timid, spinsterish film role, chances are the part would go to Dorothy Adams. Though far from a shrinking violet in real life, Ms. Adams was an expert at portraying repressed, secretive women, usually faithful servants or maiden aunts. Her best-remembered role was the overly protective maid of Gene Tierney in Laura (1944). Dorothy Adams was the wife of veteran character actor Byron Foulger; both were guiding forces of the Pasadena Playhouse, as both actors and directors. Dorothy and Byron's daughter is actress Rachel Ames, who played Audrey March on TV's General Hospital.

Trivia: Working in virtual anonymity throughout his film career, the sharp-featured, gangly character actor Harry Strang was seldom seen in a feature film role of consequence. From 1930 through 1959, Strang concentrated on such sidelines characters as soldiers, sentries, beat cops and store clerks. He was given more to do and say in 2-reel comedies, notably in the output of RKO Radio Pictures, where he appeared frequently in the comedies of Leon Errol and Edgar Kennedy. Harry Strang will be remembered by Laurel and Hardy fans for his role as a desk clerk in Block-Heads (1938), in which he was not once but twice clobbered in the face by an errant football.

Trivia: Muscle-bound Mexican-born character actor Max Wagner kept busy in films from 1931 to 1957. Seldom given a line to speak, Wagner showed up in innumerable small roles as thugs, sailors, bodyguards, cabbies, and moving men. In one of his better-known assignments, he played an actor pretending to be the gangster character played by Barton MacLaine in the film-within-a-film segment in Bullets or Ballots (1936). Max Wagner's thick Latino accent served him well in such brief roles as the bull-farm attendant in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945).

Trivia: J. Farrell MacDonald was one of the most beloved and prolific character actors in Hollywood history. A former minstrel singer, MacDonald toured the U.S. in stage productions for nearly two decades before he ever set foot in Tinseltown. He made his earliest film appearances in 1911 with Carl Laemmle's IMP company (the forerunner of Universal); within two years he was a firmly established lead actor and director. While functioning in the latter capacity with L. Frank Baum's Oz Film Company, MacDonald gave much-needed work to up-and-coming extras Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd. When Roach set up his own production company in 1915 with Lloyd as his star, he signed MacDonald as director (both Roach and Lloyd would hire their one-time employer as character actor well into the sound era). In the 1920's, MacDonald had returned to acting full time, appearing extensively in westerns and Irish-flavored comedies. A particular favorite of director John Ford, he was prominently featured in such Ford silents as The Iron Horse (1924), The Bad Man (1926) and Riley the Cop (1927, as Riley). He also showed up as Kelly in some of Universal's culture-clash "Cohens and Kellys" comedies. With a voice that matched his personality perfectly, MacDonald was busier than ever in the early-talkie era, usually playing such workaday roles as cops and railroad engineers; in 1932 alone, he showed up in 18 films! Even when his footage was limited, he was always given a moment or two to shine, as witness his emotional curtain speech in Shirley Temple's Our Little Girl. He kept up his workload into the 1940s, often popping up in the films of John Ford and Preston Sturges. His later roles often went unbilled, but he gave his all no matter how fleeting the assignment. One of his choicest roles of the 1940s was as the Dodge City barkeep in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). J. Farrell MacDonald continued working right up to his death in 1952; one of his last assignments was a continuing character on the Gene Autry-produced TV series Range Rider.

Trivia: A 1929 Wampas Baby Star, auburn-haired Betty Boyd came to films in 1926 more or less straight from fabled Hollywood High School. A rather exotic type despite her all-American background, Boyd slaved away in Educational comedies before gaining some notoriety as Neptuna, Queen of the Mermaids in Tod Browning's The Show (1927), a sideshow attraction scaly from the waist down. Even more bizarre was Maid to Order (1931), which starred female impersonator Julian Eltinge in an ill-advised comeback attempt. Eltinge, however, stayed in male attire for the duration, leaving Boyd to contribute the film's main feminine flavor. By then, Boyd's career was quietly winding down, but a sensational divorce from Pasadena stockbroker Charles Henry Over -- complete with public accusations of adultery -- kept her name in the news for a while longer. Remarried, she later returned to Hollywood as an extra.