Trivia: Paris-born actress Claudette Colbert was brought to New York at the age of seven by her banker father. She planned an art career after high school graduation, studying at the Art Student's League. Attending a party with actress Anne Morrison, the 18-year-old was offered a three-line bit in Morrison's new play The Wild Westcotts. That ended her art aspirations, and Colbert embarked on a stage career in 1925, scoring her first big critical success in the 1926 Broadway production of The Barker, in which she played a duplicitous snake charmer. One year later, the actress made her first film at Long Island's Astoria studio, For the Love of Mike (1927), but the film was unsuccessful and she enjoyed neither the experience nor her young director, Frank Capra. So back she went to Broadway, returning to films during the talkie revolution in The Hole in the Wall (1929), which was also the movie-speaking debut of Edward G. Robinson. Once again, Colbert disliked film acting; but audiences responded to her beauty and cultured voice, so she forsook the stage for Hollywood. Colbert's popularity (and salary) skyrocketed after she was cast as "the wickedest woman in history," Nero's unscrupulous wife Poppaea, in the Biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932). Colbert expanded her range as a street-smart smuggler's daughter in I Cover the Waterfront and in the pioneering screwball comedy Three-Cornered Moon (both 1933), but it was for a role she nearly refused that the actress secured her box-office stature. Virtually every other actress in Hollywood had turned down the role of spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews in Columbia's It Happened One Night (1934), and when director Frank Capra approached an unenthusiastic Colbert, she wearily agreed to appear in the film on the conditions that she be paid twice her normal salary and that the film be completed before she was scheduled to go on vacation in four weeks. Colbert considered the experience one of the worst in her life -- until the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony, in which It Happened One Night won in virtually all major categories, including a Best Actress Oscar for her. Colbert spent the next decade alternating between comedy and drama, frequently in the company of her most popular co-star, Fred MacMurray. She gained a reputation of giving 110 percent of her energies while acting, which compensated for her occasional imperviousness and her insistence that only one side of her face be photographed (which frequently necessitated redesigning movie sets just to accommodate her phobia about her "bad side"). Colbert remained a top money-making star until her last big hit, The Egg and I (1947), after which she lost some footing, partly because of producers' unwillingness to meet her demands that (under doctor's orders) she could only film a short time each day (her doctor was her husband). She hoped to jump-start her career in the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve, but those plans were squelched when she injured her back and had to relinquish the character to Bette Davis. Traveling the usual "fading star" route, Colbert made films in Europe and a budget Western in the U.S. before returning triumphantly to Broadway, first in 1956's Janus, then in the long-running 1958 comedy Marriage Go Round. The actress also appeared on television, although reportedly had trouble adjusting to live productions. In 1961, she returned to Hollywood as Troy Donahue's mother in Parrish. It would be her last film appearance until the 1987 TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles -- in which she far outclassed her material. Still a prominent figure in the Hollywood hierarchy, Colbert retired to her lavish home in California, where she frequently entertained her old friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Claudette Colbert died in 1996 in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 92.

Trivia: British actor Herbert Marshall was born to a theatrical family, but initially had no intentions of a stage career himself. After graduating from St. Mary's College in Harrow, Marshall became an accounting clerk, turning to acting only when his job failed to interest him. With an equal lack of enthusiasm, Marshall joined a stock company in Brighton, making his stage debut in 1911; he ascended to stardom two years later in the evergreen stage farce, Brewster's Millions. Enlisting in the British Expeditionary Forces during World War I, Marshall was severely wounded and his leg was amputated. While this might normally have signalled the end of a theatrical career, Marshall was outfitted with a prosthesis and determined to make something of himself as an actor; he played a vast array of roles, his physical handicap slowing him down not one iota. In tandem with his first wife, actress Edna Best, Marshall worked on stage in a series of domestic comedies and dramas, then entered motion pictures with Mumsie (1927). His first talking film was the 1929 version of Somerset Maugham's The Letter, which he would eventually film twice, the first time in the role of the heroine's illicit lover, the second time (in 1940) as the cuckolded husband. With Ernst Lubitsch's frothy film Trouble in Paradise (1932), Marshall became a popular romantic lead. Easing gracefully into character parts, the actor continued working into the 1960s; he is probably best remembered for his portrayal of author Somerset Maugham in two separate films based on Maugham's works, The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor's Edge (1946). Alfred Hitchcock, who'd directed Marshall twice in films, showed the actor to good advantage on the Hitchcock TV series of the 1950s, casting Marshall in one episode as a washed-up matinee idol who wins a stage role on the basis of a totally fabricated life story. Marshall hardly needed to embroider on his real story of his life: he was married five times, and despite his gentlemanly demeanor managed to make occasional headlines thanks to his rambunctious social activities.

Trivia: Actor William Gargan began his career in 1924, shortly after leaving high school, and made it to Broadway within a year. In 1932 he won great acclaim for his work in the play The Animal Kingdom, leading to an invitation from Hollywood where he made his film debut in 1932. During the '30s he played high-energy, gregarious leads in many "B"-movies and second leads in major films; later he moved into character roles. For his work in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he received a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination. He made few films after 1948, but from 1949 to 1951 he starred in the title role of the TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye then reprised the role in 1957 in The New Adventures of Martin Kane. He was stricken by cancer of the larynx, and in 1960 his voice box was removed in surgery, ending his career. He learned esophageal speech then taught this method for the American Cancer Society; the same group enlisted him as an anti-smoking campaigner. Two years after losing his speech, he gave his final performance, portraying a mute clown on TV in King of Diamonds. He authored an autobiography, Why Me? (1969), recounting his struggle with cancer. His brother was actor Edward Gargan.

Trivia: A specialist in portraying light-headed, pretentious society dowagers, American actress Mary Boland began her stage career at age 15, shortly after the death of her actor father. Though she played roles of every sort throughout her theatrical career, Boland found that her forte was scatterbrained comedy in such Broadway productions of the 1920s as Clarence, The Torch Bearers and The Cradle Snatchers. Boland made her movie debut in the silent film The Edge of the Abyss (1914), but her Hollywood career really took off with the advent of the talkies. She worked in movies steadily throughout the 1930s and 1940s, collaborating with everyone from Cecil B. DeMille to W.C. Fields; her most frequent costar was comic actor Charlie Ruggles, with whom she appeared in a number of droll domestic comedies. Mary Boland continued to alternate between stage and screen work until her retirement in the mid 1950s, finding time for occasional TV appearances.

Trivia: Leo Carrillo was descended from a long-established, aristocratic California family. His great-grandfather was the first provisional governor of California, while his father was the first mayor of Santa Monica. His parents wanted him to be a priest, but Carrillo decided to go for an engineering degree while attending Loyola University. A talented caricaturist, Carrillo secured a job as a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Examiner. At the encouragement of his fellow employees, Carrillo decided to parlay his gift for mimicry and dialects into a vaudeville career. He went on to provide comedy relief for several stage plays and musical productions, starring in one tailor-made vehicle, Lombardi Ltd. In films from 1929, Carrillo was frequently cast as excitable, malaprop-ridden Spaniards and Italians; in only a few instances, notably John Ford's The Fugitive (1947), did Carrillo perform in his normal California cadence, sans dialect. From 1950 through 1955, Carrillo co-starred with Duncan Renaldo in the popular TV western series The Cisco Kid, playing Cisco's sidekick Pancho. Though well into his seventies, Carrillo claimed to be in his mid-fifties so that the Cisco Kid company would qualify for insurance coverage. As active in California politics and civic affairs as his forebears, Leo Carrillo was in charge of the annual Fiesta de Santa Barbara, and at one juncture was appointed to the State Park Commission; there still exists a California beach named in Carrillo's honor.

Trivia: Silver-haired, aristocratic American actress Nella Walker was a salesgirl in her native Chicago before touring in vaudeville with her husband, entertainer Wilbur Mack. After her talking-picture debut in Vagabond Lover (1929), Ms. Walker joined the ranks of the "lorgnette and old lace" character actresses. Nearly always a society matron in her film appearances, Nella was virtually unsurpassed in her ability to summon up disdain for all those born "beneath" her, and to haughtily enunciate such lines as "The very idea!" and "My dear, it just isn't being done." By providing so easily deflatable a target, Ms. Walker was an ideal foil for such low comedians as Laurel and Hardy (Air Raid Wardens [1943]) and Abbott and Costello (In Society [1944]). Nella Walker remained a member in good standing of moviedom's "upper crust" until her final appearance in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), in which she played the mother of both Humphrey Bogart and William Holden.

Trivia: Born in the Arizona Territory to Mexican parents, Chris-Pin Martin developed a reputation as a laughgetter at an early age. He made his earliest film appearance in 1911, playing an Indian. During his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, Martin earned his salary perpetuating a stereotype that nowadays would be the ultimate in political incorrectness: the lazy, dull-witted Hispanic comic foil. Chris-Pin Martin appeared in several Cisco Kid programmers, playing sidekick Pancho (sometimes named Gorditor) to such screen Ciscos as Warner Baxter, Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland and Duncan Renaldo.

Trivia: Billed variously as José De La Cruz and Joe de la Cruz, this Mexican supporting actor played that standard B-western cliché, the "half-breed." Sometimes Mexican, often American Indian, the character was very popular in the early silent era when he was even the hero in several films. But by the time of sound, the "half-breed" mainly lurked in the background, sneering and unkempt. De La Cruz's characters usually had names like Cheyenne, The Apache Kid, Vaquerro Tony, or Indian Joe, but they always bit the dust well before the fadeout. Onscreen from the 1910s, De La Cruz ended his career playing bits in Republic serials.

Trivia: The daughter of actor-manager Samuel Rupert Woods and actress Lillie Roberts, Ethel Griffies began her own stage career at the age of 3. Griffies was 21 when she finally made her London debut in 1899, and 46 when she made her first Broadway appearance in Havoc (1924). Discounting a tentative stab at filmmaking in 1917, she made her movie bow in 1930, repeating her stage role in Old English (1930). Habitually cast as a crotchety old lady with the proverbial golden heart, she alternated between bits and prominently featured roles for the next 35 years. Her larger parts included Grace Poole in both the 1935 and 1944 versions of Jane Eyre, and the vituperous matron who accuses Tippi Hedren of being a harbinger of doom in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Every so often, she'd take a sabbatical from film work to concentrate on the stage; she made her last Broadway appearance in 1967, at which time she was England's oldest working actress. Presumably at the invitation of fellow Briton Arthur Treacher, Ethel Griffies was a frequent guest on TV's Merv Griffin Show in the late 1960s, never failing to bring down the house with her wickedly witty comments on her 80 years in show business.