Trivia: American actor Hugh Beaumont originally studied for the clergy, remaining busy as a lay minister throughout his acting career. After stage experience, Beaumont arrived in Hollywood in 1940. While most of the draftable leading men were away during World War II, Beaumont enjoyed a brief spell of stardom; his faint resemblance to actor Lloyd Nolan enabled Beaumont to inherit Nolan's screen role of detective Michael Shayne in a series of inexpensive programmers. After the war, Beaumont returned to character parts, contributing memorable moments to such films as The Blue Dahlia (1946) and The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947). He also played quite a few villains during this period; fans of Beaumont's later television work are in for a jolt as they watch the affable Hugh connive and murder his way through 1948's Money Madness. During the early 1950s, Beaumont frequently popped up in uncredited featured roles at 20th Century-Fox, most prominently in Phone Call From a Stranger (1952) as the doctor killed by drunken driver Michael Rennie, and in The Revolt of Mamie Stover as the Honolulu cop who advises goodtime girl Jane Russell to get out of town. In 1957, Beaumont was cast as philosophy-dispensing suburban dad Ward Cleaver on the popular sitcom Leave It to Beaver (he replaced Casey Adams, who played Ward in the 1955 pilot). While he despaired that the series might ruin his chances for good film roles, Beaumont remained with Beaver until its cancellation in 1963. Hugh Beaumont retired from show business in the late 1960s, launching a second career as a successful Christmas tree farmer.

Trivia: The 1938 Tournament of Roses Queen, model Cheryl Walker began her film career at Paramount that same year. After several nondescript roles, Walker briefly changed her name to Sharon Lee and starred in the low-budget exploitationer Secrets of a Model (1939), a fact that tended to be ignored in her later studio publicity. Her best film role was as Eileen, the "GI's ideal" in the all-star Stage Door Canteen (1943). Cheryl Walker retired from moviemaking at the end of the 1940s.

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: In films from 1938's Tenth Avenue Kid, American actor Paul Bryar remained a durable character player for over thirty years, usually in police uniform. Among his screen credits were Follow Me Quietly (1949), Dangerous When Wet (1952), Inside Detroit (1955) and The Killer is Loose (1956). He also showed up in one serial, Republic's Spy Smasher (1942), and was a regular in Hollywood's B factories of the 1940s (he made thirteen pictures at PRC Studios alone, three of them "Michael Shayne" mysteries). Television took advantage of Bryar's talents in a number of guest spots, including the unsold pilot The Family Kovack (1974). He had somewhat better job security as a regular on the 1965 dramatic series The Long Hot Summer, playing Sheriff Harve Anders, though he and everyone else in the cast (from Edmond O'Brien to Wayne Rogers) were back haunting the casting offices when the series was cancelled after 26 episodes. One of Paul Bryar's last screen appearances was as one of the card players (with future star Sam Elliott) in the opening scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Trivia: When actor Charles C. Wilson wasn't portraying a police chief onscreen, he was likely to be cast as a newspaper editor. The definitive Wilson performance in this vein was as Joe Gordon, reporter Clark Gable's apoplectic city editor in the 1934 multi-award winner It Happened One Night. Like many easily typecast actors, Wilson was usually consigned to one-scene (and often one-line) bits, making the sort of instant impression that hundreds of scripted words could not adequately convey. Shortly before his death in 1948, Charles C. Wilson could once more be seen at the editor's desk of a big-city newspaper -- this time as the boss of those erstwhile newshounds the Three Stooges in the two-reel comedy Crime on Their Hands (1948).

Trivia: In films from 1933, handsome, curly haired leading man Charles Quigley was signed by Columbia Pictures in 1937. Here he was groomed as a leading man in the studio's B-picture product, appearing in such features as Girls Can Play and The Shadow, opposite another young hopeful named Rita Hayworth. In the end, however, it was Hayworth who clicked with the public and Quigley's option was dropped in 1938. He recovered somewhat with a starring role in the 1939 Republic serial Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939), then gradually drifted into character roles. Out of films for nearly 15 years, Charles Quigley died of cirrhosis at the age of 55.

Trivia: The winner of a Chicago Tribune "Perfect Blind Date" contest, blonde Marie Harmon obtained a contract with Universal, who then wasted her in supporting roles in such fare as Hers to Hold (1943) and the All-Girl Ladies Courageous (1944). She was rather better served by Poverty Row company Monogram, for whom she appeared opposite singing cowboy Jimmy Wakeley, and Republic Pictures, who put her under contract in 1946. More B-Westerns followed but Harmon retired in 1951 to marry. She is the mother of actress Cherie Currie and the mother-in-law of actor Robert Hays.

Trivia: In films since the earliest days of sound, distinguished-looking Henry Hall specialized in playing small-town doctors, lawyers, benign businessmen, or the heroine's father, often in low-budget Westerns and frequently unbilled. On Broadway in the first decade of the 20th century, Hall spent his final years as a resident at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.