Trivia: American actress Janet Gaynor, born Laura Gainor, was a star of the late silent era and early talkies who was able to project vulnerability and naiveté in any role. She attended high school in San Francisco; hoping to find work in films, she moved to L.A. shortly after graduation, supporting herself through odd jobs while appearing as an extra. This led her to some bit roles in Hal Roach comedy shorts and a lead in a two-reel western. Signed to a contract by Fox, Gaynor had her first significant role in The Johnstown Flood (1926). She soon went on to appear in two successful films, Murnau's masterpiece Sunrise and Borzage's hit Seventh Heaven (both 1927); as a result, within a year she was Fox's biggest star. At the very first Academy Awards ceremony Gaynor won the "Best Actress" Oscar for her work in several films in 1927-28 (the early Oscars were often given for cumulative work). Her charming, gentle voice was ideally suited to talkies, and she made the transition to the sound era with great success. Often co-starring with romantic idol Charles Farrell, their popularity as a team was at its peak in the early '30s when they were known as "America's favorite lovebirds." Gaynor was Hollywood's top box-office attraction in 1934. She retired from the screen in 1939, around the time of her marriage to Hollywood's most renowned costume designer, Gilbert Adrian, and much of her later years were spent on a Brazilian ranch. In the '50s she came back occasionally to work on radio and TV and had a role in one more film, Bernardine (1957). Widowed in 1959, she married producer Paul Gregory in 1964. She also took up painting, and in 1976 her still-lifes were exhibited in a New York gallery. In the early '80s she appeared in the Broadway show Harold and Maude.

Trivia: American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was the son of film star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Fairbanks Jr. made his acting debut in 1923's Stephen Steps Out, which was remarkable only in how quickly it went out of circulation. Young Fairbanks was more impressive as Lois Moran's fiancé in 1926's Stella Dallas, though it did give Fairbanks Sr. pause to see his teenaged son sporting a Fairbanksian mustache. Even as a youth, Fairbanks' restlessness would not be satisfied by mere film work; before he was 20 he'd written an amusing article about the Hollywood scene for Vanity Fair magazine. In 1927, Fairbanks appeared in a stage play, Young Woodley, which convinced detractors that he truly had talent and was not merely an appendage to his father's fame. When talking pictures came in, he demonstrated a well-modulated speaking voice and as a result worked steadily in the early 1930s. Married at that time to actress Joan Crawford, Fairbanks was a fixture of the Tinseltown social whirl, but he had a lot more going for him than suspected; in 1935 he offered the earliest evidence of his sharp business savvy by setting up his own production company, Criterion Films--the first of six such companies created under the Fairbanks imprimatur. Fairbanks had his best role in 1937's The Prisoner of Zenda, in which he was alternately charming and cold-blooded as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau. Upon his father's death in 1939, Fairbanks began to extend his activities into politics and service to his country. He helped to organize the Hollywood branch of the William Allen White Committee, designed to aid the allied cause in the European war. From 1939 through 1944, Fairbanks, ever an Anglophile, headed London's Douglas Voluntary Hospitals, which took special care of war refugees. Fairbanks was appointed by President Roosevelt to act as envoy for the Special Mission to South America in 1940, and one year later was commissioned as a lieutenant j.g. in the Navy. In 1942 he was chief officer of Special Operations, and in 1943 participated in the allied invasion of Sicily and Elba. Fairbanks worked his way up from Navy lieutenant to commander and finally, in 1954 to captain. After the war's end, the actor spent five years as chairman of CARE, sending food and aid to war-torn countries. How he had time to resume his acting career is anybody's guess, but Fairbanks was back before the cameras in 1947 with Sinbad the Sailor, taking up scriptwriting with 1948's The Exile; both films were swashbucklers, a genre he'd stayed away from while his father was alive (Fairbanks Sr. had invented the swashbuckler; it wouldn't have been right for his son to bank on that achievement during the elder Fairbanks' lifetime). Out of films as an actor by 1951 (except for a welcome return in 1981's Ghost Story), Fairbanks concentrated on the production end for the next decade; he also produced and starred in a high-quality TV anthology, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Presents (1952-55), which belied its tiny budget with excellent scripts and superior actors. Evidently the only setback suffered by Fairbanks in the last forty years was his poorly received appearance as Henry Higgins in a 1968 revival of My Fair Lady; otherwise, the actor managed to retain his status as a respected and concerned citizen of the world, sitting in with the U.S. delegation at SEATO in 1971 and accruing many military and humanitarian awards. He also published two autobiographies, The Salad Days in 1988 and A Hell of a War in 1993. Fairbanks, Jr. died on May 7, 2000, of natural causes.

Trivia: American actress Paulette Goddard, born Pauline Marion Levy, spent her teen years as a Broadway chorus girl, gaining attention when she was featured reclining on a prop crescent moon in the 1928 Ziegfeld musical Rio Rita. In Hollywood as early as 1929, Goddard reportedly appeared as an extra in several Hal Roach two-reel comedies, making confirmed bit appearances in a handful of these short subjects wearing a blonde wig over her naturally raven-black hair. Continuing as a blonde, she appeared as a "Goldwyn Girl" in the 1932 Eddie Cantor film Kid From Spain, where she was awarded several close-ups. Goddard's career went into full gear when she met Charlie Chaplin, who was looking for an unknown actress to play "The Gamin" in his 1936 film Modern Times. Struck by the actress's breathtaking beauty and natural comic sense, Chaplin not only cast her in the film, but fell in love with her. It is still a matter of contention in some circles as to whether or not Chaplin and Goddard were ever legally married (Chaplin claimed they were; it was his third marriage and her second), but whatever the case, the two lived together throughout the 1930s. Goddard's expert performances in such films as The Young in Heart (1938) and The Cat and the Canary (1939) enabled her to ascend to stardom without Chaplin's sponsorship, but the role she truly craved was that of Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. Unfortunately, that did not work out, and Vivien Leigh landed the part.After working together in The Great Dictator (1940), Goddard and Chaplin's relationship crumbled; by the mid-1940s she was married to another extremely gifted performer, Burgess Meredith. The actress remained a box-office draw for her home studio Paramount until 1949, when (presumably as a result of a recent flop titled Bride of Vengeance) she received a phone call at home telling her bluntly that her contract was dissolved. Goddard's film appearances in the 1950s were in such demeaning "B" pictures as Vice Squad (1953) and Babes in Baghdad (1953). Still quite beautiful, and possessed of a keener intellect than most movie actors, she retreated to Europe with her fourth (or third?) husband, German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front). This union was successful, lasting until Remarque's death. Coaxed out of retirement for one made-for-TV movie in 1972 (The Snoop Sisters), Goddard preferred to remain in her lavish Switzerland home for the last two decades of her life.

Trivia: He trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; in 1908 he made his London debut, and four years later debuted in New York. Remaining in the U.S., he served with the American Army in World War One. He appeared in two silent films in the '20s, but remained primarily a stage actor. With the advent of the sound era, however, he began his screen career in earnest in 1929. He played character comedy parts in many films over the next two decades, usually cast as whimsical, bemused types. He is perhaps best remembered for playing the title role in Topper (1937) and its sequels.

Trivia: The daughter of a circus clown, American actress Billie Burke became a musical comedy star in the early 1900s under the aegis of two powerful Broadway producers: Charles K. Frohman and Florenz Ziegfeld. Burke's career soared after her marriage to Ziegfeld, which was both a blessing and a curse in that some newspaper critics, assuming she wouldn't have reached the heights without her husband's patronage, gave her some pretty rough reviews. Actually, she had a very pleasant singing voice and ingratiating personality, not to mention natural comic gift that transferred well to the screen for her film debut in Peggy (1915). She had no qualms about adjusting to characters roles upon reaching 40, but she was devoted to the stage and didn't intend to revive her film career - until the crippling debts left behind by Ziegfeld after his death in 1932 forced her to return full-time to Hollywood. At first concentrating on drama, Burke found that her true strength lay in comedy, particularly in portraying fey, birdbrained society ladies. She worked most often at MGM during the sound era, with rewarding side trips to Hal Roach studios, where she appeared as Mrs. Topper in the three Topper fantasy films, played Oliver Hardy's wife in Zenobia (1939) and earned an academy award nomination for her performance in Merrily We Live (1938). A tireless trouper, Burke appeared in virtually every sort of film, from rugged westerns like Sgt. Rutledge (1960) to a pair of surprisingly good two-reel comedies for Columbia Pictures in the late 1940s. If she had done nothing else worthwhile in her seven-decade career, Burke would forever be remembered for her lighthearted portrayal of Glinda the Good Witch in the matchless The Wizard of Oz (1939). In addition to her many film portrayals, Burke was herself portrayed in two filmed biographies of Flo Ziegfeld: Myrna Loy played her in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), while Samantha Eggar took the role in the TV-movie Ziegfeld: The Man and His Women (1978).

Trivia: Richard Carlson received his M.A. at the University of Minnesota and taught there briefly before working in the theater as an actor, director, and writer. He appeared on Broadway, then was brought to Hollywood in 1938 by David O. Selznick, who hired him as a writer assigned to work on the film The Young at Heart; Janet Gaynor, the film's star, urged that he appear in the movie, which became his debut. After that, he had lead and costarring roles in many films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Typecast early in his career as a diffident juvenile, he had trouble breaking out of the mold and landing more mature roles; he tended to appear in monster flicks and B-movies in the '50s. He turned to directing in that decade, beginning with Riders to the Stars (1954), which he also wrote and in which he acted. Besides acting and directing, he also became a magazine writer and wrote scripts for TV. Carlson starred in the TV series I Led Three Lives and McKenzie's Raiders and appeared in episodes of numerous others.

Trivia: Yet another stage star given short shrift by Hollywood, Minnie Dupree played only one memorable screen role: as the old lady who reforms an entire family of swindlers in The Young at Heart (1938). The sentimental comedy-drama starred Janet Gaynor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Billie Burke, but according to the New York Times, "when Dupree is on the screen the rest are merely supernumeraries." With such praise it is regrettable that her only follow-up was to be a standard old lady role in Anne of Windy Poplars (1940). Having appeared opposite such theatrical legends as Richard Mansfield, Nat Goodwin, and William Gillette, Dupree was pronounced a star herself in The Road to Yesterday in 1906. Known for the lightness of her comedic style, she made her final stage appearance in Jed Harris' production of Dark Eyes in 1943.

Trivia: Like his fellow character actors C. Aubrey Smith and Sir Guy Standing, the dignified Henry Stephenson was seemingly born with a relief map of the British Empire chiseled on his countenance. Born in the British West Indies, Stephenson was educated at England's Rugby College. He turned to acting in his twenties, touring the provinces before settling into leading roles in London and New York. Though he made a smattering of silent film appearances, Stephenson's movie career did not really begin until 1932, with his supporting appearance in The Animal Kingdom. Virtually always cast as an aristocrat or man of means, Stephenson essayed such roles as Mr. Laurence in Little Women (1933), Sir Joseph Banks in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), the Duke of Norfolk in The Prince and the Pauper, and Count Matthieu de Lesseps in Suez (1938). Henry Stephenson acted in films until his mid-seventies; his last film assignments included the part of Mr. Brownlow in the David Lean-directed Oliver Twist (1948).

Trivia: British actress Eily Malyon enjoyed a lucrative Hollywood screen career playing scores of no-nonsense schoolteachers, maids, governesses and maiden aunts. Ideally suited for costume pieces, she was seen in two major Dickens adaptations of the 1930s, playing Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations (1934) and Mrs. Cruncher in Tale of Two Cities (1935). She was also appropriately sinister as Mrs. Barryman in Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Mrs. Sketcher in Jane Eyre (1943). Eily Malyon's most hissable screen role was maiden Aunt Demetria Riffle in 1939's On Borrowed Time; Aunt Demetria's onerous Victorianism proved so distasteful to Julian Northrup(Lionel Barrymore) and his grandson Pud (Bob Watson) that they literally chose to die rather than submit to her whims.

Trivia: Irvin S. Cobb was an author, journalist, and sometime actor whose greatest influence on film came through the adaptations of his work by director John Ford, who made two major adaptations of his work two decades apart. The second of four children, he was born Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb in Paducah, KY, in 1876; one ancestor, his grandfather Reuben Saunders (1808-1891), achieved fame as the physician who developed the hypodermic use of morphine-atropine as a treatment for cholera, as well as being the earliest known advocate of fresh air as a treatment for pneumonia and tuberculosis. Cobb was born in the year in which radical Reconstruction came to an end in the south, and he came of age in an era whose most pronounced characteristic was the imposition of Jim Crow laws and other manifestations of racial segregation restricting the rights of African American citizens. Many of the images and much of the content and sensibilities behind his writing were derived from childhood memories of Paducah and the surrounding area during the last decade of the nineteenth century, amid the slowly changing rural environment of his part of the south. It was Cobb's hope to pursue a career in law, but the death of his grandfather in 1892, and his father's subsequent descent into alcoholism, forced him to go to work full-time at age 16. His writing career began soon after, at the Paducah Daily News, when he was 17. Two years later, he was the newspaper's managing news editor, reportedly the youngest man ever to have held such a job on a daily newspaper. He later wrote for the Louisville Evening Post and then moved to New York City in 1904. Cobb coverage's of the Russian-Japanese peace conference in Portsmouth, NH, was picked up by newspapers all over the United States, transforming him into a leader in his profession and resulting in his being hired by the New York World under Joseph Pulitzer.He also wrote numerous short stories, mostly about life in the south of the late nineteenth century. In his work, he depicted a world that was already starting to fade from view in the first two decades of the new century, populated by a cast of lovable eccentrics, colorful reprobates, upright and honorable civic leaders, and -- most controversially, in retrospect -- contented and deferential African Americans. Many of these tales were later collected in book form. The first of those, Old Judge Priest, was published in 1915; it later became common knowledge that the writer had based Judge Priest on a real-life local figure from Kentucky, Judge William Pitman Bishop. It was around this time that Cobb also made his first screen appearances. He was sufficiently well-known to play himself, alongside actress Billie Burke and financier and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (also playing themselves), in John W. Noble's Our Mutual Girl (1914); and he portrayed an American tourist in the 1915 Cecil B. DeMille-directed drama The Arab. He was a rotund but attractive, even striking looking man -- and his appearance and fame made him easily caricatured -- and might have created something of a second career for himself as a screen actor; but his ventures into movies were interrupted by the onset of the First World War, which Cobb covered as a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post. He later published a book about the war entitled Paths of Glory.By the end of the teens, he was again writing articles for numerous periodicals and was as famous as ever. Cobb's short stories began getting licensed for movie adaptations during the silent era, and he was both the star and subject of an experimental early sound short entitled Irvin S. Cobb All-American Storyteller, made in 1921. During this time he also became a screenwriter, composing the titles (which is to say, the dialogue up on the screen) for the comedies Peck's Bad Boy and Pardon My French (both 1921), among other films. His writing was still popular in the early '30s and became the source for such movies as The Woman Accused (1933), starring Cary Grant and Nancy Carroll. But the most impressive adaptations of his work came from director John Ford, who made two major films based on his work. The first, Judge Priest (1934), starred Will Rogers in the title role and included Cobb himself in a small part, and was made at Fox. It was a success at the time, but later fell out of distribution with the lapsing of its story rights. The second, The Sun Shines Bright, was done 19 years later through Ford's own production company by way of Republic Pictures, and it was a more elaborate film. The sources for the later movie were three specific stories, "The Sun Shines Bright," "The Mob from Massac," and "The Lord Provides," and the film cast Charles Winninger -- best remembered by audiences as Captain Andy in James Whale's Showboat (1936) -- as Judge Billy Priest. Although the movie was badly treated by Republic, which edited it without Ford's consent on its original release (though an uncut print was found decades later and issued on VHS tape), it was reportedly the director's personal favorite among all of his movies.Cobb was no longer alive at the time of that movie's release, having passed away in 1944 at the age of 67 in New York City. And except for Ford's film, his stories didn't endure as attractive source material following his death. His benign vision of the rural south no longer seemed relevant or accessible amid the rising of the civil rights movement and the call for an end to segregation. Indeed, Ford's decision to accurately portray Cobb's vision made his 1953 movie very controversial in some circles, appearing as it did just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which began the gradual unraveling of at least some of the racial aspects of the social order that Cobb's work embodied. But he had been beloved of the Hollywood establishment in his time, standing in well enough to be chosen as the host of the 6th Academy Awards in 1935. One can hardly imagine any author aspiring to (or being given) such an honor in modern times. Cobb's daughter Patricia Cobb Harris was a published author in her own right, and in the 1950s, a decade after Cobb's death, his granddaughter, Patricia Chapman (aka, Buff Cobb), became a television personality and the second wife of then up-and-coming television journalist Mike Wallace. In addition to humorous stories of the old south, Cobb also wrote horror tales and was apparently an influence on H.P. Lovecraft. Cobb, in turn, enjoyed the admiration of Joel Chandler Harris, himself a major popular figure in southern popular culture.

Trivia: Canadian-born, convent-educated Lucille Watson studied acting in the waning years of the 19th century at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. On the Broadway stage from 1900, Watson scored her first big hit in the 1902 production The Girl with Green Eyes. She made her first film in 1916, but for the most part avoided Hollywood until after the death of her husband, playwright Louis Shipman, in 1934. Frequently cast as the mother, grandmother or maiden aunt of the hero/heroine, the formidable Ms. Watson was seen in such roles as Louisa Bradley in The Razor's Edge (1946) and Aunt March in the 1949 version of Little Women. In 1943, Lucille Watson earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of blinkered Washington D.C. matriarch Fanny Fannelly in Watch on the Rhine.

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: 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: One of the busiest members of Hollywood's British colony, actor Walter Kingsford inaugurated his stage career in London. Seldom a leading man (he wasn't tall enough), the august Kingsford provided support for such theatrical giants as John Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, and Fay Bainter. His first American film was 1934's The Pursuit of Happiness, a Revolutionary-era comedy in which Kingsford had appeared on Broadway. Most of the actor's film characters were unsympathetic; he had the air of a disgraced aristocrat who'd been caught misappropriating trust funds or selling government secrets. Often appearing in brief, uncredited roles, Kingsford enjoyed good billing and steady work as Dr. Walter Carew, the snobbish, ultra-conservative head of Blair General Hospital in MGM's Dr. Kildare series. As Hollywood began turning out fewer and fewer films in the '50s, Walter Kingsford secured steady work in television: In the pilot film of Amos 'n' Andy, Kingsford has the first line in the first scene as a rare-coin assessor.

Trivia: The very picture of an English gentleman officer, monocle and all, Lionel Pape came to Hollywood in 1935 after a distinguished career on stage and screen in his home country. Usually seen as a member of the horsy set, Pape played Major Allardyce in Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Lord Harry Droopy in The Big Broadcast of 1938, Lord Melrose in Raffles (1940), and Babberly in Charlie's Aunt (1941). Pape died at the then newly founded Motion Picture Country House and Hospital.

Trivia: French actress Lya Lys got her start working in such avant-garde films as Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. She later moved to the U.S. and appeared in a number of films of the '30s through the early '40s.

Trivia: European character actor George Sorel made his first American film appearance in 1936. Usually showing up unbilled as gendarmes and maître d's, Sorel was afforded rare screen billing for his one scene and one line as Walter Woolf King's valet in Laurel and Hardy's Swiss Miss (1938). He flourished during WWII thanks to his rather shifty, sinister features, which permitted him to play many a Nazi or collaborator. One of George Sorel's most extensive assignments was in the 1946 Universal serial Lost City of the Jungle; when the serial's principal heavy, Lionel Atwill, died during production, Sorel was called in to double for Atwill in several transitional scenes.

Trivia: French stage actor Georges Renavent made his first American film appearance in 1915's Seven Sisters. Fourteen years later, Renavent made an impressive talking-picture bow as the villainous Kinkajou in RKO's musical spectacular Rio Rita. He spent the rest of his Hollywood career playing roles of varying sizes, usually foreign ambassadors and international gigolos. An apparent favorite of producer Hal Roach, Renavent enjoyed a lengthy role in Roach's Turnabout (1940) as Mr. Ram, the ancient Indian god who performs a gender-switch on stars John Hubbard and Carole Landis. Sporadically during the 1930s and 1940s, Renavent managed his own touring Grand Guignol theatrical troupe. Georges Renavent was married to actress Selena Royle.