Hollow Triumph

Paul Henreid (Actor) .. John Muller

Born: January 10, 1908
Died: March 29, 1992
Birthplace: Trieste, Austria-Hungary

Trivia: Some sources list actor Paul Henreid's birthplace as Italy, but at the time of his birth, Henreid's hometown of Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Of aristocratic stock, Henreid felt drawn to theatrical activities while attending college. He briefly supported himself as a translator before Max Reinhardt's assistant Otto Preminger officially discovered him and launched his stage career. Still billed under his given name of Von Hernreid, he made his film debut in a 1933 Moroccan production. Relocating to England in 1935, he was often as not cast as Teutonic villains, most memorably in the 1940 melodrama Night Train. In 1940, Henreid became an American citizen--and, at last, a leading man. Henreid's inbred Continental sophistication struck a responsive chord with wartime audiences. He spent his finest years as an actor at Warner Bros., where he appeared as Jerry Durrance in Bette Davis' Now Voyager (1942), as too-good-to-be-true resistance leader Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942), and as troubled medical student Philip Carey in the 1946 remake of Of Human Bondage (1946). Henreid exhibited a great deal of vivacity in such swashbucklers as The Spanish Main (1945), Last of the Buccaneers (1950) and The Siren of Bagdad (1953); in the latter film, the actor engagingly spoofed his own screen image by repeating his lighting-two-cigarettes bit from Now Voyager with an ornate water pipe. He was also an effective villain in Hollow Triumph (1948, which he also produced) and Rope of Sand (1949).Henreid's star faded in the 1950s, a fact he would later attribute (in his 1984 autobiography Ladies Man) to the Hollywood Blacklist. He turned to directing, helming such inexpensive but worthwhile dramas as For Men Only (a 1951 indictment of the college hazing process) and A Woman's Devotion (1954). One of his best directorial efforts was the 1964 meller Dead Ringer, starring his former Warners co-star (and longtime personal friend) Bette Davis. In addition, Henreid directed dozens of 30- and 60-minute installments of such TV series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Maverick. His last on-camera appearance was as "The Cardinal" in Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977). Henreid married Elizabeth Gluck in 1936, with whom he had two daughters, Monika Henreid and Mimi Duncan. On March 29, 1992, he died of pneumonia, following a stroke, in Santa Monica, California.

Joan Bennett (Actor) .. Evelyn Nash

Born: February 27, 1910
Died: December 07, 1990

Trivia: The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.

Eduard Franz (Actor) .. Frederick Muller

Born: October 31, 1902
Died: February 10, 1982

Trivia: Erudite, distinguished-looking American actor Eduard Franz started his stage career with the Provincetown Players. He was a leading Broadway actor for nearly 20 years before making his film bow in 1947's The Wake of the Red Witch. Franz was at his best when playing such worldly intellectuals as Justice Louis Brandeis in The Magnificent Yankee (1950). In 1963, Eduard Franz was cast in the tailor-made role of psychiatric clinic director Edward Raymer on the weekly TV drama Breaking Point.

Leslie Brooks (Actor) .. Virginia Taylor

Born: January 01, 1922

Trivia: At first acting under her given name of Lorraine Gettman, blonde film actress Leslie Brooks began appearing in movie bit roles in 1941. When her Warner Bros. contract was sold to Columbia, Brooks started landing more sizeable parts in such programs as Nine Girls (1944) and Cover Girl (1944). She was also seen to good advantage in Columbia's series films (The Whistler, Crime Doctor, et al.). Leslie Brooks retired from films in 1949.

John Qualen (Actor) .. Swangron

Born: December 08, 1899
Died: September 12, 1987

Trivia: The son of a Norwegian pastor, John Qualen was born in British Columbia. After his family moved to Illinois, Qualen won a high school forensic contest, which led to a scholarship at Northwestern University. A veteran of the tent-show and vaudeville circuits by the late '20s, Qualen won the important role of the Swedish janitor in the Broadway play Street Scene by marching into the producer's office and demonstrating his letter-perfect Scandinavian accent. His first film assignment was the 1931 movie version of Street Scene. Slight of stature, and possessed of woebegone, near-tragic facial features, Qualen was most often cast in "victim" roles, notably the union-activist miner who is beaten to death by hired hooligans in Black Fury (1935) and the pathetic, half-mad Muley in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Qualen was able to harness his trodden-upon demeanor for comedy as well, as witness his performance as the bewildered father of the Dionne quintuplets in The Country Doctor (1936). He was also effectively cast as small men with large reserves of courage, vide his portrayal of Norwegian underground operative Berger in Casablanca (1942). From Grapes of Wrath onward, Qualen was a member in good standing of the John Ford "stock company," appearing in such Ford-directed classics as The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Searchers (1955), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). John Qualen was acting into the 1970s, often appearing in TV dramatic series as pugnacious senior citizens.

Mabel Paige (Actor) .. Charwoman

Born: January 01, 1880
Died: February 09, 1954

Trivia: Mabel Paige was virtually "born in a trunk"; both her parents were busy stock company actors. Paige made her own stage bow at age four, in a production of Van the Virginian. When Paige was 11, she was headlining her own Southern stock company; upon reaching adulthood, she established the Paige Theater in Jacksonville, FL. During her stay in Jacksonville, Paige appeared in a quartet of silent comedies, co-starring with her husband, Charles Ritchie, and up-and-coming Oliver Hardy. Retiring from show business in the 1920s to raise her family, Paige returned to acting on radio and on Broadway in the late '30s. In 1941, she was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role as an eccentric theatrical boarding house landlady in Out of the Frying Pan, which wouldn't be released until 1943, under the title Young and Willing. Because of the delayed release of this film, Paige's "official" talkie debut was as the Runyon-esque street peddler in Paramount's Lucky Jordan (1942). Usually heading the supporting cast, and generally cast as a tart-tongued "swinging senior," Paige was given one top-billed starring role in Republic's Someone to Remember (1943), playing a feisty old lady who resides in a college dormitory in hopes of being reunited with her long lost son. After completing her final film, Houdini (1953), Mabel Paige accepted brief roles in such TV series as Racket Squad and I Love Lucy, but illness and age had eroded her comic gifts.

Herbert Rudley (Actor) .. Marcy

Born: January 01, 1911
Died: September 09, 2006

Trivia: Herbert Rudley had barely left his teens when he won a scholarship to Eva Le Galleine's Repertory Theater in the early '30s. The experienced gleaned with this organization led to Rudley's being cast in his first Broadway play, Elmer Rice's We, the People. In films since 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Rudley's best movie role was as Ira Gershwin in the 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue. He matured into character parts in the 1950s, usually playing suave villains or bristly military types. Herbert Rudley was a regular on several TV series, most prominently as Eve Arden's husband on the 1967 sitcom The Mothers-in-Law.

Paul E. Burns (Actor) .. Clerk

Born: January 26, 1881
Died: May 17, 1967

Trivia: Wizened character actor Paul E. Burns tended to play mousey professional men in contemporary films and unshaven layabouts in period pictures. Bob Hope fans will recall Burns' con brio portrayal of boozy desert rat Ebeneezer Hawkins in Hope's Son of Paleface (1952), perhaps his best screen role. The general run of Burns' screen assignments can be summed up by two roles at both ends of his career spectrum: he played "Loafer" in D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and "Bum in Park" in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

Charles Trowbridge (Actor) .. Deputy

Born: January 10, 1882
Died: October 30, 1967

Trivia: Actor Charles Trowbridge was born in Mexico to American parents. An architect for the first decade of his adult life, Trowbridge turned to stage acting in the early teens, making his film bow in 1918's Thais. Silver-haired even as a young man, Trowbridge was generally cast in kindly but authoritative roles, usually as doctors, lawyers and military officers. He also had a bad habit of being killed off before the film was half over; in 1940, Trowbridge had the distinction of being murdered (by Lionel Atwill and George Zucco respectively) in two separate Universal horror films, Man Made Monster and The Mummy's Hand. While he was active until 1957, Charles Trowbridge was best known to millions of wartime servicemen as the cautionary military doctor in John Ford's venereal disease prevention film Sex Hygiene (1941).

Ann Staunton (Actor) .. Blonde

Mack Williams (Actor) .. Cashier

Born: January 01, 1906
Died: January 01, 1965

Franklyn Farnum (Actor) .. Big Winner

Born: June 05, 1878

Morgan Farley (Actor) .. Howard Anderson

Born: July 14, 1903
Died: October 11, 1988

Trivia: Morgan Farley made his first Broadway appearance in 1918 as one of the supporting players in Booth Tarkington's Seventeen. He gained prominence in the 1920s, starring in such stage productions as Candida and An American Tragedy. After a brief flurry of film activity in 1929-1930, he returned to the stage where he remained until interrupting his career to serve in WWII. Back in films as a character actor and dialogue coach in 1946, Morgan Farley went on to essay minor roles in such films as Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953), in which he was seen in the expository part of Artimedorus. He made his last screen appearance in 1967.

Joel Friedkin (Actor) .. Williams

Born: January 01, 1884
Died: January 01, 1954

Renny McEvoy (Actor) .. Clerk

Born: January 22, 1905
Died: April 05, 1987

Philip Morris (Actor) .. Doorman

Born: January 20, 1893
Died: December 18, 1949

Trivia: It is perhaps superfluous to note that actor Philip Morris was no relation to the cigarette-manufacturing family of the same name. In films from 1935 to 1948, Morris was generally cast as a cop, doorman, cabbie, or truck driver. He can be glimpsed near the end of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as the traffic cop investigating George Minafer's auto accident, and in High, Wide and Handsome (1937) as one of the sweating teamsters. One of Philip Morris' few screen characters to be given a name was Howard Ross in the 1948 Western Whirlwind Raiders.

Tom Stevenson (Actor) .. Lester

Born: February 22, 1910

Trivia: Handsome British stage actor Tom Stevenson had played the homicidal husband in the stage version of Gaslight before making his screen debut as the gravedigger in The Wolf Man (1941). Freelancing, Stevenson played minor supporting roles at almost every Hollywood studio, often portraying supercilious headwaiters or forbidding military officers. When MGM filmed Gaslight in 1944, Stevenson played Williams, the constable, and he was Reverend Hyslip in Bette Davis's Mr. Skeffington later that year. Stevenson, who also appeared in early television shows, returned to the legitimate stage in 1950.

Benny Rubin (Actor) .. Cabbie

Born: February 02, 1899
Died: July 15, 1986

Trivia: Benny Rubin inaugurated his career as a 14-year-old tap dancer in his hometown of Boston. He worked in stock and on showboats during the WWI years, breaking into burlesque as a dialect comedian in 1918. A vaudeville headliner throughout the 1920s, Rubin seemed a sure bet for movie stardom when he was signed by MGM in 1927. According to one source, however, the powers-that-be decided that Rubin looked "too Jewish" for movies. Nonetheless, he entered films during the talking era, starring in a brace of Tiffany Studios musicals -- Sunny Skies and Hot Curves, both filmed in 1930 -- before freelancing as a character actor. Though he was top-billed in a handful of two-reelers and was given prominent screen credit as one the scenarists for the Wheeler and Woolsey films Off Again -- On Again (1937) and High Flyers (1937), Rubin had to settle for bits and minor roles as a feature-film actor. He would later claim that his fall from grace was due to his bad temper and his chronic gambling. Far more successful on radio, Rubin became one of the most prominent members of Jack Benny's "stock company," usually playing an obnoxious information desk attendant ("I dunno! I dunno! I dunno!). During the 1950s and 1960s, Rubin worked steadily in TV programs, feature films, and two-reel comedies; he also worked in animated cartoons and TV commercials as a voice-over artist, truthfully proclaiming that he could convincingly convey any foreign accent -- "except Arabian." In 1973, Rubin produced a self-published, self-serving autobiography, Come Backstage With Me, in which he made innumerable specious claims about his show biz accomplishments; for example, he stated that it was he who advised fledging film director Orson Welles to hire cameraman Gregg Toland for the 1941 classic Citizen Kane (in truth, Rubin's contribution to the film was confined to a one-scene bit as a typesetter, which was cut from the final release print). Benny Rubin's final appearance was in the TV miniseries Glitter.

Charles Arnt (Actor) .. Coblenz

Born: August 20, 1908
Died: August 06, 1990

Trivia: Indiana native Charles Arnt attended Princeton University, where he was president of the Triangle Club and where he earned a geological engineering degree. Short, balding and with an air of perpetual suspicion concerning his fellow man, Arnt seemed far older than his 30 years when he was featured in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday. In the movies, Arnt was often cast as snoopy clerks, inquisitive next-door neighbors or curious bystanders. Charles Arnt was seen in such films as The Falcon's Brother (1942), The Great Gildersleeve (1943) and That Wonderful Urge (1948); he also played one top-billed lead, as an obsessive art dealer in PRC's Dangerous Intruder (1946).

Sid Tomack (Actor) .. Artell the Manager

Born: January 01, 1906
Died: January 01, 1962

George Chandler (Actor) .. Aubrey the Assistant

Born: June 30, 1898
Died: June 10, 1985

Trivia: Comic actor George Chandler entered the University of Illinois after World War I service, paying for his education by playing in an orchestra. He continued moonlighting in the entertainment world in the early 1920s, working as an insurance salesman by day and performing at night. By the end of the decade he was a seasoned vaudevillian, touring with a one-man-band act called "George Chandler, the Musical Nut." He began making films in 1927, appearing almost exclusively in comedies; perhaps his best-known appearance of the early 1930s was as W.C.Fields' prodigal son Chester in the 1932 2-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer. Chandler became something of a good-luck charm for director William Wellman, who cast the actor in comedy bits in many of his films; Wellman reserved a juicy supporting role for Chandler as Ginger Rogers' no-good husband in Roxie Hart (1942). In all, Chandler made some 330 movie appearances. In the early 1950s, Chandler served two years as president of the Screen Actors Guild, ruffling the hair of many prestigious stars and producers with his strongly held political views. From 1958 through 1959, George Chandler was featured as Uncle Petrie on the Lassie TV series, and in 1961 he starred in a CBS sitcom that he'd helped develop, Ichabod and Me.

Alvin Hammer (Actor) .. Jerry

Born: January 02, 1915

Trivia: American character actor Alvin Hammer performed in vaudeville, on stage, in nightclubs, on television, and in many films between the '40s and the late '80s.

Jerry Marlowe (Actor) .. Hiker

Cliff Clark (Actor) .. Man

Born: January 01, 1893
Died: February 08, 1953

Trivia: After a substantial stage career, American actor Cliff Clark entered films in 1937. His movie credits ranged from Mountain Music to the 1953 Burt Lancaster/Virginia Mayo affair South Sea Woman. The weather-beaten Clark usually played surly city detectives, most frequently in RKO's Falcon series of the 1940s. In 1944, Clark briefly ascended from "B"s to "A"s in the role of his namesake, famed politico Champ Clark, in the 20th Century-Fox biopic Wilson. And in the 1956 TV series Combat Sergeant, Cliff Clark was second-billed as General Harrison.

Eddie Dunn (Actor) .. Man

Born: March 31, 1896
Died: May 05, 1951

Trivia: In the '30s, tall, sandy-haired, deep-voiced American actor Eddie Dunn was frequently cast as a laconic police officer in the 2-reelers of comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. The actor's feature-film roles consisted mainly of small-town bullies, prison guards, bartenders, military policemen and private detectives. Eddie Dunn was last seen in a fleeting role as a sheriff in the 1950 MGM musical Summer Stock.

Constance Purdy (Actor) .. Mrs. Neyhmer

Born: January 01, 1884
Died: January 01, 1960

Cay Forester (Actor) .. Nurse

Carmencita Johnson (Actor) .. Elevator Operator

Born: March 31, 1923

Lucien Littlefield (Actor) .. Davis

Born: August 16, 1895
Died: June 04, 1960

Trivia: Versatile character actor Lucien Littlefield attended a military academy before making his first stage appearance at the age of 17, and his first film in 1913. Short and balding even in his teens, Littlefield began impersonating old men before he was of voting age. In 1925, he played the grizzled comedy relief sidekick of William S. Hart (27 years Littlefield's senior!) in Tumbleweeds; three years later he portrayed the sore-footed father of Mary Pickford (born two years before Littlefield) in My Best Girl. His most memorable silent role was as the menacing red-herring doctor in the "old dark house" mystery The Cat and the Canary (1927). When talkies came in, Littlefield was able to provide a fresh new voice for each characterization. He starred in his own Vitaphone short subjects series, The Potters, and played roles both large and small in any number of feature films. He was veterinarian Horace Meddick in Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert (1934), a prissy office manager in W.C. Fields' The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), the snobbish Belknap-Jackson in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), and an ancient rustic sheriff in Whistling in Brooklyn (1942). In Paramount's Henry Aldrich "B"-picture series of the 1940s, Littlefield played the recurring role of ill-tempered schoolteacher Mr. Crosley. He also wrote several screenplays, most notably the Charlie Ruggles/Mary Boland vehicle Early to Bed (1936). Reversing the usual process, Lucien Littlefield's characters became younger as he grew older, as witness his spirited performances on such TV series as Superman and The Abbott and Costello Show.

Norma Varden (Actor) .. Mrs. Gerry

Born: January 20, 1898
Died: January 19, 1989

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.

Catharine Doucet (Actor) .. Mrs. Nielsen

Victor Jones (Actor) .. Bellboy

Babe London (Actor) .. Lady with Orchid

Born: September 02, 1900
Died: November 01, 1980

Trivia: A delightful comedienne, rotund Babe London reportedly began her screen career as a teenager after purchasing a makeup kit. She played a switchboard operator in Douglas Fairbanks' When the Clouds Roll By (1919) but hit her stride for comedy companies Christie and Educational in the 1920s. Scrambled Eggs (1925), from the latter studio, is extant and features London as a correspondence bride, who has used the oldest trick in the book and substituted her own portrait with that of glamorous friend Helen Marlowe. Today, however, London is best remembered for her onetime-only partnership with Oliver Hardy, in the 1931 Laurel and Hardy two-reeler Our Wife. London plays Hardy's equally hefty fiancée and the comedy's absolute highlight has Stan Laurel attempting to squeeze the hefty couple, as well as himself, into a tiny automobile. According to London, the sequence took two days and quite a bit of bruising to complete, mainly because of the mirth it generated among the crew. Continuing to appear in minor roles on screen until 1970, Babe London was also an accomplished artist, whose series of paintings depicting various silent stars is housed at the University of Wyoming.

Florence Wix (Actor) .. Guest

Born: January 01, 1882
Died: January 01, 1956

Lulu Mae Bohrman (Actor) .. Guest

Cyril Ring (Actor) .. Croupier

Born: January 01, 1893
Died: July 17, 1967

Trivia: Bostonian Cyril Ring certainly had the pedigree for a successful show business career; he was the brother of stage luminary Blanche Ring and the less famous but equally busy actress Frances Ring. And Cyril certainly had the right connections: he was the brother-in-law of stage comedian Charles Winninger (Blanche's husband) and film star Thomas Meighan (Frances' husband). All Cyril Ring lacked was talent. He managed to coast as actor on his family ties and his rakish good looks, but his range never matured beyond a tiny handful of by-rote mannerisms and facial expressions. In the early '20s, Ring was briefly married to musical comedy star Charlotte Greenwood. Reasonably busy as a silent-film western villain, Ring was cast as the caddish Harvey Yates in the Marx Bros.' 1929 film debut The Cocoanuts. The subsequent reviews bent over backward to condemn Ring's performance as the stiffest and most amateurish of the year -- and thus his fate was sealed. For the rest of his movie career, Ring would be confined to microscopic bit parts and extra roles, with the occasional supporting parts in 2-reel comedies (he's the fugitive crook who demands a shave from W.C. Fields in 1933's The Barber Shop). One of the few features in which he had more than five lines was RKO's 1945 mystery-comedy Having Wonderful Crime; perhaps significantly, his sister Blanche Ring topped the film's supporting cast. Cyril Ring's last recorded credits occured in 1947, after which he dropped from public view until his obituary was published in the trades twenty years later.

Sam Finn (Actor) .. Patron

Joaquin Elizondo (Actor) .. Houseman

Felice Ingersoll (Actor) .. Woman

Vera Marshe (Actor) .. Woman

Born: January 01, 1905
Died: January 01, 1984

Jeanne Blackford (Actor) .. Woman

Dulce Daye (Actor) .. Woman

Ray Bennett (Actor) .. Official

Born: March 21, 1895

Steve Carruthers (Actor) .. Man

Sayre Dearing (Actor) .. Man

Born: September 19, 1899

Robert Bice (Actor) .. Thug

Born: March 14, 1914

Dave Shilling (Actor) .. Thug

Nolan Leary (Actor) .. Newcomer

Born: January 01, 1888
Died: January 01, 1987

Trivia: American actor/playwright Nolan Leary made his stage debut in 1911; 60 years later, he was still appearing in small film and TV roles. From 1943 onward, Leary showed up in some 150 movies, mostly in bit roles. One of his juicier screen assignments was as the deaf-mute father of Lon Chaney James Cagney in Man of 1000 Faces (1958). In 1974, Nolan Leary showed up briefly as Ted Baxter's prodigal father on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Tony Horton (Actor) .. Patron

Born: July 02, 1958

Robert Ben Ali (Actor) .. Rosie

Bud Wolfe (Actor) .. Al

Born: January 12, 1918

Henry Brandon (Actor) .. Big Boy

Born: June 18, 1912
Died: July 15, 1990

Trivia: Born Henry Kleinbach, the name under which he appeared until 1936, Brandon was a tall man with black curly hair; he occasionally played the handsome lead but was more often typecast to play villains. As the latter, he appeared as white, Indian, German, and Asian men. Brandon's film career began with Babes in Toyland (1934) and went on to span fifty years. He played villains whom the audiences loved to hate in serials in the '30s and '40s, such as the Cobra in Jungle Jim, the mastermind criminal Blackstone in Secret Agent X-9, Captain Lasca in Buck Rogers Conquers the Universe (1939), and a sinister Oriental in Drums of Fu Manchu. Brandon played Indian chiefs no fewer than 26 times, notably in two John Ford westerns. He had occasional leading roles on New York stage, such as in a 1949 revival of Medea in which he played a virile Jason opposite Judith Anderson.

Thomas Browne Henry (Actor) .. Stansyck

Born: November 07, 1907
Died: June 30, 1980

Jack Webb (Actor) .. Bullseye

Born: April 02, 1920
Died: December 23, 1982
Birthplace: Santa Monica, California, United States

Trivia: Following World War II, California native Jack Webb planned to renew the art studies that he'd abandoned for the military. Instead, he turned to acting, appearing on various San Francisco-based radio programs. He briefly hosted his own satirical comedy series before finding his true metier in detective melodramas. In collaboration with future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard L. Breen (who remained a Webb associate until his death in 1967), Webb concocted a hard-boiled private eye show entitled Pat Novak for Hire. The popularity he gained from this effort enabled Webb to secure small film roles -- one of these was as a police lab technician in the 1948 film noir He Walked by Night (1948). Intrigued by the police procedure he'd learned while preparing for the role, Webb immersed himself in the subject until he felt ready to launch what many observers still consider the first realistic radio cop show: Dragnet, which premiered June 3, 1949. Webb carried over his terse characterization of L.A. police sergeant Joe Friday into the Dragnet TV series (which he also directed) beginning in 1952. Armed with a bottomless reserve of police terminology and a colorful repertoire of catchphrases, the laconic, ferret-faced Webb became one of the most successful -- and most widely imitated -- TV personalities of the 1950s; almost always in the Top Ten, Dragnet, produced by Webb's own Mark VII Productions, ran until 1959. Webb's newfound industry clout permitted him to direct for the big screen as well -- his 1950s movie credits (outside of such pre-star efforts as The Men, Sunset Boulevard, and Halls of Montezuma) include the 1954 feature version of Dragnet, 1955's Pete Kelly's Blues (based on another of Webb's radio series), 1957's The D.I., and 1959's 30. In addition, Webb's Mark VII produced such TV series as Noah's Ark, The D.A.'s Man, and the video version of Pete Kelly's Blues. Webb kicked off the 1960s with a rare attempt at directing comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). From 1962 through 1964, he was in charge of Warner Bros.' television division, an assignment which came to an end as a result of several failed TV ventures. A 1966 TV-movie version of Dragnet kicked off Webb's second career. He went on to star in a successful weekly Dragnet revival, which ran from 1967 through 1970, while his Mark VII outfit was responsible for a score of TV series, the most successful of which were Emergency and Adam 12. Regarded as something of a relic by the "hipper" viewers, Jack Webb nonetheless remained profitably active in television until the late '70s; he might have continued into the 1980s had not his drinking and smoking habits accelerated his death at the age of 62. Married three times, Jack Webb's first wife was singing star Julie London, whom he'd first met when he was 21 and she was 15.

Dick Wessel (Actor) .. Sidekick

Born: January 01, 1913
Died: April 20, 1965

Trivia: American actor Dick Wessel had a face like a Mack Truck bulldog and a screen personality to match. After several years on stage, Wessel began showing up in Hollywood extra roles around 1933; he is fleetingly visible in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), and the Columbia "screwball" comedy She Couldn't Take It (1935). The size of his roles increased in the '40s; perhaps his best feature-film showing was as the eponymous bald-domed master criminal in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). He was a valuable member of Columbia Pictures' short subject stock company, playing a variety of bank robbers, wrestlers, jealous husbands and lazy brother-in-laws. Among his more memorable 2-reel appearances were as lovestruck boxer "Chopper" in The Three Stooges' Fright Night (1947), Andy Clyde's invention-happy brother-in-law in Eight Ball Andy (1948), and Hugh Herbert's overly sensitive strongman neighbor in Hot Heir (1947). Wessel was shown to good (if unbilled) advantage as a handlebar-mustached railroad engineer in the superspectacular Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and had a regular role as Carney on the 1959 TV adventure series Riverboat. Dick Wessel's farewell screen appearance was as a harried delivery man in Disney's The Ugly Dachshund (1965).

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