Trivia: California-born Jeanette Nolan racked up an impressive list of radio and stage credits in the 1930s, including a stint with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe. She made her film debut in 1948 in Welles' MacBeth; her stylized, Scottish-burred interpretation of Lady MacBeth was almost universally panned by contemporary critics, but her performance holds up superbly when seen today. Afterwards, Ms. Nolan flourished as a character actress, her range extending from society doyennes to waterfront hags. She appeared in countless TV programs, and played the rambunctious title role on the short-lived Western Dirty Sally (1974). Nolan made her final film appearance playing Robert Redford's mother in The Horse Whisperer (1998). From 1937, Jeanette Nolan was married to actor John McIntire, with whom she frequently co-starred; she was also the mother of actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: American actor Harry Tyler wasn't really as old as the hills when he started his film career in 1929; in fact, he was barely 40. Still, Tyler's wizened, gimlet-eyed face was his fortune, and he spent most of his movie years playing variations of the Spry Old Timer. Tyler began his stage career as a boy soprano in 1901, under the aegis of producer Flo Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld's wife Anna Held. He married Gladys Crolius in 1910, and for the next twelve years they toured vaudeville in a precursor to Burns and Allen's smart guy/dumb dora act. Returning to the legitimate stage in 1925, Tyler journeyed to Hollywood when talking pictures took hold four years later. His inaugural screen appearance was a recreation of his stage role in The Shannons on Broadway. Harry Tyler played bits and featured roles as janitors, sign painters, philandering businessmen, frontier farmers and accident victims from 1929 until his farewell appearance in John Ford's The Last Hurrah (1958).

Trivia: American actor Robert Emhardt began his Broadway career in the late '30s as an understudy for corpulent character star Sidney Greenstreet whom he closely resembled. In films from 1952, the paunchy, phlegmatic Emhardt carved a niche in characterizations calling for gross, obnoxious villainy. His best and most typical screen role was the "respectable" crime boss in Sam Fuller's Underworld U.S.A. (1961). A television fixture well into the 1980s, Robert Emhardt showed up in several Alfred Hitchcock Presents installments, was seen on a regular basis as Mackenzie Cory on the daytime soap opera Another World, and won an Emmy for his wonderful performance as an ulcerated businessman stranded in Mayberry, NC, in "Man in a Hurry," a 1963 episode of The Andy Griffith Show.

Trivia: The son of a New York University professor of marketing, American actor James Drury spent his youth dividing his time between Manhattan and Oregon, where his mother ran a ranch. At age 8, Drury made his stage debut as King Herod-- crepe beard and all--in a Christmas production at a Greenwich Village settlement house. Sidelined by polio at age 10, Drury became a voracious reader, often acting out the characters in the books. At NYU, Drury dove full-force into acting, developing his craft to such an extent that in 1954 he was signed by MGM. His film roles were of the "other guy in the room" calibre (Forbidden Planet [1956]), so Drury's contract lapsed, after which he spent time at 20th Century-Fox in support of Pat Boone (Bernardine [1957]) and Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender [1958]). In 1958, Drury was cast by Screen Gems studios in a TV pilot film based on the Owen Wister story The Virginian. It didn't sell, but in 1962 Universal optioned the rights to The Virginian, bringing Drury in along for the ride. He spent the next nine years in The Virginian, during which time Drury's reputation for recalcitrance on the set and reluctance to reveal anything of himself in interviews earned him the soubriquet "The Garbo of the Sagebrush" (a nickname bestowed by Drury's father!) James Drury wasn't seen much after The Virginian, though he did show up on the small screen as the lead in an Emergency clone titled Firehouse, which ran on the ABC network for eight months in 1974.

Trivia: Rotund, moon-faced character actor Charles Watts made a mini-career out of portraying glad-handing politicians, voluble businessmen and salesmen, crafty bankers, and cheerful or cynical parents, uncles, family friends, and other supporting players. He never had a starring role, or even a co-starring role, in a motion picture, but his physical presence and voice made for some memorable moments. Born in Clarksville, TN, in 1912, Watts was a high-school teacher -- handling both business law and drama -- for a time during his mid-twenties, working in Chattanooga. He worked in local theater and tent shows early in his career, and after World War II was also in demand for industrial shows. Watts didn't start doing movie or television appearances until 1950, and in that first year he played small, uncredited roles in such serious dramas as The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), as a mailman, and Storm Warning (1951), as a lunch-counter proprietor -- and somewhat larger parts, as a sheriff, in three episodes of The Lone Ranger. Over the next 16 years, he was seen in nearly 100 movies and television shows. His most prominent big-screen role was that of Judge (and later United States Senator) Oliver Whiteside in George Stevens' Giant (1956), where his rich, melodious voice and cheerful demeanor were put to extensive use. Watts was also an uncredited man in the crowd in Stuart Heisler's I Died a Thousand Times, a police sergeant in Philip Dunne's The View From Pompey's Head (both 1955), and Mr. Schultz, the salesman from the suspender company, in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Watts even found his way into two big-scale musicals -- Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Jumbo (1962) -- a decade apart. When he had a role with dialogue of any length, he was often used -- or so it seemed -- for his tendency to speechify, and to make even ordinary words stand out in relief. As active on television as he was in movies, Watts was familiar to several generations of young viewers for his role as Bill Green, the skeptical anti-superstition league leader in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Lucky Cat" (1955). He also played a small but key role in the Father Knows Best episode "24 Hours in Tyrantland," done on behalf of the Treasury Department to sell U.S. Savings Bonds, as the Andersons' skeptical neighbor, whose brief, cynical talk to son Bud finally pushes Jim Anderson (Robert Young) to straighten his kids out about the importance of savings bonds. Watts remained busy into the mid-'60s, and died of cancer in 1966.

Trivia: Supporting actor, onscreen from the '60s.