Trivia: Born in 1895 in what was then Austria and what is now Russia, Paul Muni was brought to the U.S. in 1902 by his parents, who were both touring Yiddish-language actors. Muni made his stage debut in 1907, and before reaching his teen years was recruited by Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, where Muni specialized in playing very old men. He did not perform in English until he was 29; his first Broadway appearance was in 1926's We Americans. Minus the character makeup which distinguished most of his earlier stage appearances, Muni scored a hit as a gangster in the Broadway production Four Walls. He was signed by Fox Studios in 1929, but he was so displeased by his first two films (The Valiant and Seven Faces) that he hurried back to Broadway. In 1931, Muni starred in the original stage production of Counsellor at Law, and also resumed his film career, playing a sister-obsessed Al Capone-type in Scarface. With his still-powerful portrayal of a hunted (and haunted) convict in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Muni launched his long association with Warner Bros. Insisting upon being permitted the broadest range of characterizations possible, Muni alternated between "entertainments" like Dr. Socrates and prestige pictures which allowed him to don makeup and experiment with accents. He is most fondly remembered for his trio of biographies: 1936's The Story of Louis Pasteur (which won Muni his Oscar), 1937's The Life of Emile Zola, and 1939's Juarez. On the set, Muni was almost completely reliant upon the advice and counsel of his wife; if she didn't like a "take," the scene would have to be reshot. Like many highly individual talents, Muni gained a reputation as an eccentric, his character quirks ranging from relaxing between takes by playing his violin to (reportedly) going into a panic whenever he saw someone wearing the color red. Extremely self-involved, Muni often came to the set with his performance totally developed in advance, and did not alter his interpretation no matter what nuances or surprises his fellow actors might throw at him. After a long period of professional disappointments, Muni made a triumphant comeback in the role of the Clarence Darrow-like Henry Drummond in the 1955 Broadway production Inherit the Wind, for which he won the Tony award. After his final film, The Last Angry Man, Paul Muni was forced to curtail his appearances due to encroaching physical infirmities; one of his last performances was in the TV play The Last Clear Chance, wherein Muni was seen sporting a hearing aid through which he was "fed" his dialogue. In addition to his Best Actor win for Pasteur and his four Best Actor nominations for The Valiant, Chain Gang, Zola and The Last Angry Man, Muni received an "unofficial" Best Supporting Actor nomination, as a write-in candidate, for Casablanca helmer Michael Curtiz's 1935 Black Fury; he came in second. Hampered by increasing blindness that kept him out of work, Paul Muni died on August 25, 1967 of a heart ailment, one month shy of his 72nd birthday.

Trivia: American actress Ann Dvorak was the daughter of silent film director Sam McKim and stage actress Anne Lehr ("Dvorak" was her mother's maiden name). Educated at Page School for Girls in Los Angeles, Dvorak secured work as a chorus dancer in early talking films: she is quite visible amongst the female hoofers in Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929). Reportedly it was her friend Joan Crawford, a headliner in Hollywood Revue, who introduced Dvorak to multimillionaire Howard Hughes, then busy putting together his film Scarface (1931). Dvorak was put under contract and cast in Scarface as gangster Paul Muni's sister, and despite the strictures of film censorship at the time, the actress' piercing eyes and subtle body language made certain that the "incest" subtext in the script came through loud and clear. Hughes sold Dvorak's contract to Warner Bros., who intended to pay her the relative pittance she'd gotten for Scarface until she decided to retreat to Europe. Warners caved in with a better salary, but it might have been at the expense of Dvorak's starring career. Though she played roles in such films as Three on a Match (1932) and G-Men (1935) with relish, the characters were the sort of "life's losers" who usually managed to expire just before the fadeout, leaving the hero to embrace the prettier, less complex ingenue. Dvorak cornered the market in portraying foredoomed gangster's molls with prolonged death scenes, but they were almost always secondary roles. One of her rare forays into comedy occurred in producer Hal Roach's Merrily We Live (1938), an amusing My Man Godfrey rip-off. In 1940, Dvorak followed her first husband to England, starring there in such wartime films as Squadron Leader X (1941) and This Was Paris (1942). Upon her return to Hollywood in 1945, Dvorak found very little work beyond westerns and melodramas; she did have a bravura role as a cabaret singer held prisoner by the Japanese in I Was an American Spy (1951), but it was produced at second-string Republic Pictures and didn't get top bookings. After Secret of Convict Lake (1951), Dvorak quit film work; she had never found it to be as satisfactory as her stage career, which included a year's run in the 1948 Broadway play The Respectful Prostitute. During her retirement, spent with her third husband, she divided her time between her homes in Malibu and Hawaii, and her passion for collecting rare books.

Trivia: Raft spent his childhood in the tough Hell's Kitchen area of New York, then left home at 13. He went on to be a prizefighter, ballroom dancer, and taxi-driver, meanwhile maintaining close contacts with New York's gangster underworld. He eventually made it to Broadway, then went to Hollywood in the late '20s. At first considered a Valentino-like romantic lead, Raft soon discovered his forte in gangster roles. He was the actor most responsible for creating the '30s cinema image of gangster-as-hero, particularly after his portrayal of coin-flipping Guido Rinaldo in Scarface (1932). He was highly successful for almost two decades, but then bad casting diminished his popularity. By the early '50s he was acting in European films in a vain attempt to regain critical respect, but he was unsuccessful. He starred in the mid-'50s TV series "I Am the Law," a failure that seriously hurt his financial status. In 1959 a Havana casino he owned was closed by the Castro government, further damaging his revenues; meanwhile, he owed a great deal to the U.S. government in back taxes. In the mid '60s he was denied entry into England (where he managed a high-class gambling club) due to his underworld associations. Most of his film appearances after 1960 were cameos. He was portrayed by Ray Danton in the biopic The George Raft Story (1961).

Trivia: Willowy leading lady Karen Morley received most of her acting training at Pasadena Playhouse. Signed to an MGM contract in 1931, she distinguished herself in a series of offbeat roles, notably the defiant heroine in Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), the title character's foredoomed predecessor in Mata Hari (1932), and the mistress of the President of the United States in Gabriel Over the White House (1933). On loan to Howard Hughes, she was seen as gangster Paul Muni's "high-class" paramour in Scarface (1931); and at RKO, she was the much-despised blackmailer (and well-deserved murder victim) in The Phantom of Crestwood (1933). Too mannered and aloof to become an audience favorite, she nonetheless worked steadily on-stage and onscreen well into the late '40s. Her film career came to a sudden halt in 1951 when she invoked the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blacklisted from Hollywood, she unsuccessfully attempted to start a career in politics, then completely retired, refusing numerous entreaties to resume her film work once the blacklist had relaxed in the 1960s. Formerly married to director Charles Vidor, Karen Morley was later the wife of fellow blacklistee Lloyd Gough.

Trivia: American actor Osgood Perkins primarily played character roles on-stage, but during the '20s and '30s made the occasional foray into feature films. His son is actor Anthony Perkins.

Trivia: The long-reigning king of Hollywood horror, Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt on November 23, 1887, in South London. The youngest of nine children, he was educated at London University in preparation for a career as a diplomat. However, in 1909, he emigrated to Canada to accept a job on a farm, and while living in Ontario he began pursuing acting, joining a touring company and adopting the stage name Boris Karloff. His first role was as an elderly man in a production of Molnar's The Devil, and for the next decade Karloff toiled in obscurity, traveling across North America in a variety of theatrical troupes. By 1919, he was living in Los Angeles, unemployed and considering a move into vaudeville, when instead he found regular work as an extra at Universal Studios. Karloff's first role of note was in 1919's His Majesty the American, and his first sizable part came in The Deadlier Sex a year later. Still, while he worked prolifically, his tenure in the silents was undistinguished, although it allowed him to hone his skills as a consummate screen villain.Karloff's first sound-era role was in the 1929 melodrama The Unholy Night, but he continued to languish without any kind of notice, remaining so anonymous even within the film industry itself that Picturegoer magazine credited 1931's The Criminal Code as his first film performance. The picture, a Columbia production, became his first significant hit, and soon Karloff was an in-demand character actor in projects ranging from the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Cracked Nuts to the Edward G. Robinson vehicle Five Star Final to the serial adventure King of the Wild. Meanwhile, at Universal Studios, plans were underway to adapt the Mary Shelley classic Frankenstein in the wake of the studio's massive Bela Lugosi hit Dracula. Lugosi, however, rejected the role of the monster, opting instead to attach his name to a project titled Quasimodo which ultimately went unproduced. Karloff, on the Universal lot shooting 1931's Graft, was soon tapped by director James Whale to replace Lugosi as Dr. Frankenstein's monstrous creation, and with the aid of the studio's makeup and effects unit, he entered into his definitive role, becoming an overnight superstar. Touted as the natural successor to Lon Chaney, Karloff was signed by Universal to a seven-year contract, but first he needed to fulfill his prior commitments and exited to appear in films including the Howard Hawks classic Scarface and Business or Pleasure. Upon returning to the Universal stable, he portrayed himself in 1932's The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood before starring as a nightclub owner in Night World. However, Karloff soon reverted to type, starring in the title role in 1932's The Mummy, followed by a turn as a deaf-mute killer in Whale's superb The Old Dark House. On loan to MGM, he essayed the titular evildoer in The Mask of Fu Manchu, but on his return to Universal he demanded a bigger salary, at which point the studio dropped him. Karloff then journeyed back to Britain, where he starred in 1933's The Ghoul, before coming back to Hollywood to appear in John Ford's 1934 effort The Lost Patrol. After making amends with Universal, he co-starred with Lugosi in The Black Cat, the first of several pairings for the two actors, and in 1936 he starred in the stellar sequel The Bride of Frankenstein. Karloff spent the remainder of the 1930s continuing to work at an incredible pace, but the quality of his films, the vast majority of them B-list productions, began to taper off dramatically. Finally, in 1941, he began a three-year theatrical run in Arsenic and Old Lace before returning to Hollywood to star in the A-list production The Climax. Again, however, Karloff soon found himself consigned to Poverty Row efforts, such as 1945's The House of Frankenstein. He also found himself at RKO under Val Lewton's legendary horror unit. A few of his films were more distinguished -- he appeared in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Unconquered, and even Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer -- and in 1948 starred on Broadway in J.B. Priestley's The Linden Tree, but by and large Karloff delivered strong performances in weak projects. By the mid-'50s, he was a familiar presence on television, and from 1956 to 1958, hosted his own series. By the following decade, he was a fixture at Roger Corman's American International Pictures. In 1969, Karloff appeared in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets, a smart, sensitive tale in which he portrayed an aging horror film star; the role proved a perfect epitaph -- he died on February 2, 1969.

Trivia: Vince Barnett was the son of Luke Barnett, a well-known comedian who specialized in insulting and pulling practical jokes on his audiences (Luke's professional nickname was "Old Man Ribber"). Vince remained in the family business by hiring himself out to Hollywood parties, where he would insult the guests in a thick German accent, spill the soup and drop the trays--all to the great delight of hosts who enjoyed watching their friends squirm and mutter "Who hired that jerk?" The diminutive, chrome-domed Barnett also appeared in the 1926 edition of Earl Carroll's Vanities. He began appearing in films in 1930, playing hundreds of comedy bits and supporting parts until retiring in 1975. Among Vince Barnett's more sizeable screen roles was the moronic, illiterate gangster "secretary" in Scarface (1931).

Trivia: After a considerable career on stage as an actor and director, Dublin-born Edwin Maxwell made his screen debut as Baptista in the Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford version of Taming of the Shrew (1929). The stocky, balding Maxwell spent the 1930s specializing in oily bureaucrats, crooked businessmen and shyster lawyers. Once in a while, he'd play a sympathetic role, notably the scrupulously honest Italian-American detective in Scarface. More often (especially in the films of director Frank Capra), his characters existed merely as an easily deflatable foil. One of Maxwell's most flamboyant performances was as the maniacal serial killer, in Night of Terror(1933), who rose from the dead at fade-out time to warn the audience not to reveal the end of the film or else! Essaying more benign characters in 1940s, he was seen as William Jennings Bryan in Wilson (1944) and as Oscar Hammerstein in The Jolson Story (1946). From 1939 to 1942, Maxwell served as dialogue director for the films of Cecil B. DeMille. Edwin Maxwell holds the distinction of appearing in four Academy Award-winning films: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and You Can't Take It With You (1938).

Trivia: Cadaverous character actor Tully Marshall attended the University of Santa Clara in the 1880s. Drifting into acting, Marshall first appeared onstage at the age of 26, turning professional shortly thereafter. He had nearly a quarter century of theatrical experience behind him when he made his first film in 1914. Like his fellow actors Charles Coburn and Donald Crisp, Marshall was one of those performers who seemed to have been born at the age of 60. Throughout the silent era, he played a vast array of drunken trail scouts, lovable grandpas, unforgiving fathers, sinister attorneys and lecherous aristocrats. In films until his death at the age of 78, one of the best of Tully Marshall's last performances was as the wheelchair-bound criminal mastermind in This Gun For Hire (1942).

Trivia: A dark-haired, slick-looking character actor from England, Bert Starkey had spent years in repertory with Henry Savage and toured vaudeville with his own act prior to playing mostly unsympathetic characters in films, first under his real name of Buckley Starkey, then as plain Bert Starkey. A bit player after the changeover to sound, Starkey had several good moments as Epstein, the lawyer in Scarface (1932), and as one of the bus passengers in It Happened One Night (1935).

Trivia: Born in Italy, Henry Armetta stowed away on an American-bound boat in 1902. While employed as a pants-presser at New York's Lambs Club, Armetta befriended Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock, who secured Armetta a small role in his stage play A Yankee Consul. A resident of Hollywood from 1923, the hunch-shouldered, mustachioed Armetta gained fame in the 1930s in innumerable roles as excited, gesticulating Italians. Often cast as barbers or restaurateurs, Armetta was so popular that he was frequently awarded with extraneous bit roles that were specially written for him (vide 1933's Lady for a Day). Laurel and Hardy fans will remember Armetta as the flustered innkeeper who is kept awake nights trying to emulate Laurel's "kneesie-earsie-nosie" game in The Devil's Brother (1933). In the late 1930s, Armetta was briefly starred in a series of auto-racing films, bearing titles like Road Demon and Speed to Burn. He also headlined several short-subject series, notably RKO's "Nick and Tony" comedies of the early 1930s. Henry Armetta died of a sudden heart attack shortly after completing his scenes in 20th Century-Fox's A Bell for Adano (1945).

Trivia: Stocky, pinch-faced actor Purnell B. Pratt made his first film appearance in 1914, and his last in 1941, the year of his death. Pratt appeared as publisher John Bland in the very first version of George M. Cohan and Earl Derr Biggers' Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), co-starring with Cohan himself. He made a smooth transition to talkies with such 1929 efforts as Alibi and Thru Different Eyes. Many of his more famous roles, notably the stern policeman father of criminal-in-the-making Tom Powers in Public Enemy (1931), and the New York mayor in the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera (1935), were uncredited. In 1935, Purnell B. Pratt became the latest in a long line of actors to play district attorney Francis X. Markham in the Philo Vance mystery The Casino Murder Case (1935).

Trivia: A former boxer, Charles Sullivan turned to acting in 1925. Sullivan menaced such comedians as Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy before concentrating on feature-film work. When he wasn't playing thugs (Public Enemy, 1931), he could be seen as a sailor (King Kong, 1933). Most of the time, Charles Sullivan was cast as chauffeurs, right up to his retirement in 1958.

Trivia: A film actor from 1925, Norway native Harry Tenbrook usually played such functionary roles as shore patrolmen, sailors, gangsters, and bartenders. The names of Tenbrook's screen characters ran along the lines of Limpy, Spike, and Squarehead. With his supporting appearance in The Informer (1935), the actor became a member of director John Ford's stock company. Harry Tenbrook's association with Ford ended with 1958's The Last Hurrah.

Trivia: American comedian Hank Mann was a product of the turbulent tenement district of New York in the 1880s, where a kid had better learn to be handy with his fists or lose all his teeth by the age of 12. Putting his physical prowess to practical use, Mann became a circus acrobat, then headed westward for a job at Mack Sennett's Keystone studios. His junkyard-dog face was softened a bit by a huge paintbrush mustache, which emphasized his expressive, almost wistful eyes. Seldom a star comedian at Sennett, Mann quickly learned how to "catch flies" -- steal scenes, that is. In the most famous example of this, Mann played the foreman of a jury where Chester Conklin was on trial for his life; as Conklin energetically pleaded his case, Mann grabbed the audience's attention by silently yanking up his necktie in a hanging motion. Mann left Keystone for his own starring series at Fox, thence to a career as a character comic in feature films. He had the potential to be one of the top comedy stars of the era, but bad management and worse judgment left him broke by the late '20s. Mann was given a good break as Charlie Chaplin's contemptuous boxing opponent in City Lights (1931), and was provided with a meaty role as a house detective in the 1935 two-reeler Keystone Hotel, which reunited such former Sennett headliners as Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin and Marie Prevost. But Mann's talkie career consisted primarily of bit parts. He worked steadily in the films of Frank Capra, a friend from the silent days, and appeared prominently in two Three Stooge comedies, 1934's Men in Black (as a long-suffering janitor) and 1937's Goofs and Saddles (performing some bone-crushing pratfalls as a confused cattle rustler). Mann also showed up briefly in the two-reelers of such Columbia contractees as Andy Clyde, Buster Keaton and El Brendel. When jobs were scarce, Mann farmed out his services as a makeup artist, and also ran a small California malt shop. During the '50s, Hank Mann could always be relied upon for newspaper interviews about the good old days, and he was cast along with other silent comedy vets in such nostalgic feature films as Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955) and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: One of the great American film directors, Howard Hawks was a craftsman who made tight, lean pictures during the studio era. Not confined to a particular genre, his filmography provides outstanding and influential examples of a variety of movies. His style was non-obtrusive and no-nonsense, with telling images (he's famous for narratively significant cigarette lighting) and rapid-fire dialogue. Lines in his work were delivered overlapping each other, resulting in unnaturally quick-paced conversations that added tension and a sense of urgency to the stories. In addition to being a good screenwriter himself, he had a tendency to work with some of the era's best writers, including Ben Hecht, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman. Born in the Midwest in 1896, Hawks moved to California during the earliest days of Hollywood. After studying mechanical engineering at Cornell and serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he went to work at Famous Players-Laskey and started his own independent productions. By 1924, he was running the story department at Paramount and directing silent films for Fox. But he really began to make his mark with the advent of sound; his first talking pictures included the aviator adventure The Dawn Patrol, the prison film The Criminal Code, and sea adventure Tiger Shark. In 1932, he made the historically important Scarface, which, in many ways, defined the standard of gangster films. In 1938, he made the exemplary screwball comedy Bringing up Baby starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. This quick-talking duo was one of Hawks' many star pairings involving a tough wise guy and smart-mouthed heroine; another good team was Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in the comedy Twentieth Century. Hawks also had a knack for helping to initiate the careers of major Hollywood stars. His 1939 macho adventure Only Angels Have Wings featured Rita Hayworth in a supporting role before she became a leading femme fatale. He made the romantic comedy touchstone His Girl Friday the following year, with Rosalind Russell as the embodiment of the smart-mouthed heroine. In 1944, the director helped start the career of newcomer Lauren Bacall by pairing her with Humphrey Bogart in the war romance To Have and Have Not. Their obvious chemistry and snappy repartee led to one of the most beloved screen duos in history, and to Hawks' 1946 mystery The Big Sleep. During the '40s, he made the powerful Western drama Red River with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. He also had a hand in launching the iconic stardom of Marilyn Monroewith the '50s comedy Monkey Business and the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In a response to the Western High Noon, Hawks teamed up again with Wayne for the revisionist Western Rio Bravo. As age caught up with him during the '60s, Hawks' career slowed down -- and so did the pace of his films. He received his first Oscar in 1974, an honorary award from the Academy before his death in Palm Springs, CA, in 1977.

Trivia: Born Edward Flanagan, O'Keefe was a lithe, brash, charming, tall, rugged lead actor. The son of vaudevillians, he began appearing onstage in his parents' act while still a toddler. By age 16 he was writing scripts for "Our Gang" comedy shorts. He attended some college and did more work on vaudeville before entering films in the early '30s, appearing in bit roles in more than 50 films under the name Bud Flanagan. His work in a small role in the film Saratoga (1937) impressed Clark Gable, who recommended that he be cast in leads. MGM agreed, so he changed his name to Dennis O'Keefe and went on to play leads in numerous films, beginning with Bad Man of Brimstone (1938). Besides many light action-oriented films, he also appeared in numerous '40s comedies, and later specialized in tough-guy parts. Later in his career he directed a film or two and also wrote mystery stories. In the late '50s O'Keefe starred in the short-lived TV series "The Dennis O'Keefe Show." He was in only two films in the '60s. He died at 60 of lung cancer. His widow is actress Steffi Duna.

Trivia: The son of an advertising man, John Lee Mahin's first ambition was to be a playwright. Mahin spent a season as an actor with the Provincetown Playhouse before deciding upon a career in journalism. While attending Harvard, he secured a job as movie critic for publisher William Randolph Hearst's Boston American, a job that abruptly came to an end when Mahin slammed Hearst's "protégé," actress Marion Davies. Undaunted, Mahin went on to write for several New York dailies. In 1931, he was invited by Ben Hecht to come to Hollywood and try his luck as a screenwriter. Mahin spent most of his subsequent movie career at MGM. He was a personal favorite of actor Clark Gable and director Victor Fleming, frequently contributing additional dialogue or rewrites to their films without screen credit. In 1933, he helped organize the Screen Writers' Guild, but after becoming disenchanted with the leftist leanings of many of his colleagues, he left the SWG to join the studio-sanctioned Screen Playwrights union. His outspoken conservatism came to the forefront during the "blacklist" era, a fact that has earned him the vilification of many latter-day film historians. In 1959, he formed a production company with fellow screenwriter Martin Rackin: the results of this collaboration were two of John Wayne's best films, The Horse Soldiers (1959) and North to Alaska (1960). Closing out his film career in 1966, Mahin moved into television; his last project was The Jimmy Stewart Show, a one-season sitcom from 1971. Martin Rackin earned Oscar nominations for his work on 1937's Captains Courageous and 1957's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (his personal favorite), and in 1957 was honored with the SWG's Laurel Award for lifetime achievement.