Trivia: Chicago-born William Marshall worked as a vocalist for orchestra leader Fred Waring before forming his own band in 1937. Marshall came to Hollywood as an actor in 1940; during his Tinseltown years, he was married to actresses Michèle Morgan and Ginger Rogers respectively. In 1950, he became a producer through the auspices of Errol Flynn, with whom he'd acted in Santa Fe Trail. Marshall and Flynn's newly formed Silver Productions came forth with Hello God, a 64-minute semi-documentary starring Flynn and produced, directed, written and narrated by Marshall. While looking for a distributor for Hello God (they never found one), the Flynn-Marshall team commenced work on the 1951 costume drama The Adventures of Captain Fabian; Robert Florey was slated to direct, but he dropped out of the project, obliging Marshall to finish the direction himself. Silver Productions was dissolved during an acrimonious legal battle, and Marshall was not heard from professionally for several years. William Marshall re-emerged in 1961 as director of the undistinguished sci-fier Phantom Planet.

Trivia: Though born in Omaha, George Givot gained fame in vaudeville with his characterization of an English-language-fracturing Greek immigrant. Givot's catch-phrase "How'd ya like that?" served as the title for one of the many 2-reelers he starred in between 1933 and 1934; another of his short-subject vehicles was Roast Beef and Movies (1933), in which he was teamed with the 3 Stooges' Curly Howard. After making his feature debut in Meet the Baron (1933), Givot continued playing dialect parts in films and on radio. By 1940, however, he was accepting "straight" roles, speaking without a trace of accent and frequently opting for dramatics rather than laughs. His later screen efforts include The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943) and Riff Raff (1947). In 1949, he co-hosted the TV musical series Versatile Varieties, reviving his malapropish Greek characterization. George Givot briefly returned to dialect humor once more as the voice of Italian restaurateur Tony in the Disney cartoon feature Lady and the Tramp (1956).

Trivia: A diminutive actor (somewhere under five feet tall) with a vaudeville background, Jerry Bergen specialized in comedy roles on film, usually (though not always) involving the use of a violin. Bergen's earliest screen appearance was in the 1933 Charley Chase short Arabian Tights. The same year, he starred in the short film 20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang, and appeared in the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle short Tomalio. He had uncredited roles in the W.C. Fields vehicle Poppy and in Artists and Models (both 1937), and played the title role in the short The Little Maestro (1937), in which he put his violin to work with great effect. Bergen was Prof. Jasper Chinn in the Gracie Allen/Bob Hope vehicle College Swing (1938). In the 1942 East Side Kids movie Let's Get Tough!, he got a whole comic specialty vignette -- involving nearly ten percent of the film's running time -- to himself, in which his character tries to teach Huntz Hall to play the violin. That same year, he worked in Flying With Music, a musical comedy with a cast that included the '40s actor William Marshall and a young Jane Kean (of Walter Winchell and latter-day Honeymooners fame). His last two big-screen appearances were small roles in Vincente Minnelli's musical The Pirate (1948) (as Bolo), and as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956). In 1955-1956, he was a regular on the children's television show Supercircus, and he appeared on The Tonight Show With Jerry Lewis as guest host in June 1962.

Trivia: The daughter of a retired sea captain, British actress Norma Varden was a piano prodigy. After study in Paris, she played concerts into her teens, but at last decided that this was be an uncertain method of making a living--so she went to the "security" of acting. In her first stage appearance in Peter Pan, Varden, not yet twenty, portrayed the adult role of Mrs. Darling, setting the standard for her subsequent stage and film work; too tall and mature-looking for ingenues, she would enjoy a long career in character roles. Bored with dramatic assignments, Varden gave comedy a try at the famous Aldwych Theatre, where from 1929 through 1933 she was resident character comedienne in the theatre's well-received marital farces. After her talkie debut in the Aldwych comedy A Night Like This (1930), she remained busy on the British film scene for over a decade. Moving to Hollywood in 1941, she found that the typecasting system frequently precluded large roles: Though she was well served as Robert Benchley's wife in The Major and the Minor (1942), for example, her next assignment was the unbilled role of a pickpocket victim's wife in Casablanca (1942). Her work encompassed radio as well as films for the rest of the decade; in nearly all her assignments Norma played a haughty British or New York aristocrat who looked down with disdain at the "commoners." By the '50s, she was enjoying such sizeable parts as the society lady who is nearly strangled by Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train (1951), the bejeweled wife of "sugar daddy" Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and George Sanders' dragonlike mother in Jupiter's Darling (1955). Norma Varden's greatest film role might have been as the mother superior in The Sound of Music (1965), but the producers decided to go with Peggy Wood, consigning Varden to the small but showy part of Frau Schmidt, the Von Trapps' housekeeper. After countless television and film assignments, Norma Varden retired in 1972, spending most of her time thereafter as a spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild, battling for better medical benefits for older actors.