Trivia: At age one he debuted onscreen (playing John Barrymore as a baby) in The Beloved Rogue (1927), then appeared in a number of films as a toddler. He stayed onscreen through his childhood and adolescence, becoming one of Hollywood's favorite child stars. He appeared in many Our Gang comedy shorts and more than 100 feature films. He was less successful as a teenage actor and young adult, and he retired from the screen in the early '50s. He went on to teach and write books about acting, edit Equity magazine, perform on Broadway, in stock, and on TV, write and direct for TV, produce an Oscar-nominated short film (The Boy and the Eagle), and produce industrial shows; he wrote the book Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (But Don't Have Sex or Take the Car) (1984), an insider's account of the hazards of being a child star. He was married to actress Jane Powell from 1988 until his death, at age 89, in 2015.

Trivia: The son of a Los Angeles minister, three-year-old Matthew Beard won out of 350 kids to replace Allen "Farina" Hoskins as the resident black child in Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies. Nicknamed Hercules in his first two-reeler, Teacher's Pet (1930), Beard was thereafter known as Stymie because of his innocent offscreen habit of confounding his elders. Wearing an oversized derby hat (borrowed from Roach comedian Stan Laurel), the clever, resourceful, eternally grinning Stymie quickly became one of the most popular Our Gang kids. After appearing in 36 Our Gang shorts, Beard began freelancing in 1935, playing small roles in big films like Captain Blood (1935), Jezebel (1938), The Great Man Votes (1939), and Stormy Weather (1943). Alas, after dropping out of high school in 1945, he fell into a bad crowd, spending the next two decades in and out of jails for committing crimes to feed his drug habit. Miraculously, Beard completely turned his life around in the mid-'60s when he entered the drug rehab organization Synanon. Looking remarkably like the eternally optimistic Stymie of old, Matthew Beard made a successful show business comeback in the 1970s, appearing in such films as The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and such weekly TV series as Good Times and The Jeffersons.

Trivia: American actor Spanky McFarland (born George Emmett McFarland in Forth Worth, TX) was the most popular member of the Our Gang children's comedy troupe. He got his start while still a baby as an advertising model for a bakery in Dallas because he looked so fat and happy. It was his pudginess as a toddler that led him to the Our Gang series of shorts when he was hired to replace Joe Cobb as the tubby child. In addition to appearing in that series, McFarland also appeared in a few feature films and in other shorts. By the mid-'40s, his acting career was over and he found gainful employment elsewhere.

Trivia: Nicknamed "Echo," Dorothy De Borba was the little brunette with the festive hair bows in the 1930-1933 Our Gang comedy shorts. De Borba arrived in the series at the dawn of sound, along with Jackie Cooper, Chubby Chaney, Stymie Beard, and Mary Ann Jackson, and her first series entries were released in both talkie and silent versions. Although the grown-up De Borba often complained that the boys were awarded the best lines, she certainly enjoyed her full share of quips in perhaps her best short, Love Business (1931), the one in which Jackie Cooper gets a fiery crush on Miss Crabtree (June Marlowe. De Borba, who had made her screen debut in the comedy-drama A Royal Romance (1930), left films after playing an autograph-hound in Jean Harlow's Bombshell (1933).

Trivia: Dark-haired silent-screen actress Lillian Rich was plucked from Jack Hoxie Westerns to star as the man-eating, social-climbing Flora in Cecil B. DeMille's extravagant The Golden Bed (1925). She played her femme fatale in a blond wig and the New York Times thought she looked "extraordinarily beautiful." Rich did several pseudo-DeMille melodramas -- usually lolling about on tiger skins -- but her only other notable performance came as H. B. Warner's leading lady in the railroad melodrama Whispering Smith (1926). Rich ended her screen career playing society matrons in two-reel comedies of the early 1930s.

Trivia: Silent-film leading man Creighton Hale was brought to America from his native Ireland via a theatrical touring company. While starring in Charles Frohman's Broadway production of Indian Summer, Hale was spotted by a representative of the Pathe film company and invited to appear before the cameras. His first film was the Pearl White serial The Exploits of Elaine, after which he rose to stardom in a series of adventure films and romantic dramas. Director D.W. Griffith used Hale as comedy relief in his films Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922)--possibly Hale's least effective screen appearances, in that neither he nor Griffith were comedy experts. Despite his comparative failure in these films, Hale remained a popular leading man throughout the 1920s. When talking pictures arrived, Hale's star plummeted; though he had a pleasant, well-modulated voice, he was rapidly approaching fifty, and looked it. Most of Hale's talkie roles were unbilled bits, or guest cameos in films that spotlighted other silent movie veterans (e.g. Hollywood Boulevard and The Perils of Pauline). During the 1940s, Hale showed up in such Warner Bros. productions as Larceny Inc (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1943); this was due to the largess of studio head Jack Warner, who kept such faded silent favorites as Hale, Monte Blue and Leo White on permanent call. Creighton Hale's final appearance was in Warners' Beyond the Forest (1949).

Trivia: Virile, dignified Canadian actor Wilfred Lucas was a stage veteran when he joined the Biograph movie company in 1907. He played a variety of leading roles in the films of D.W. Griffith, including the title character in Griffith's two-reel adaptation of Enoch Arden. Occasionally turning director himself, Lucas was especially busy in this capacity at the Keystone studios of Mack Sennett. During the 1920s, Lucas played several character roles in major productions and also kept busy as a director and screenwriter. In the talkie era, Wilfred Lucas played innumerable bit parts at Warner Bros., Hal Roach Studios and Paramount; he could occasionally be seen in sizeable roles in such films as Laurel and Hardy's Pardon Us (1931) and A Chump at Oxford (1940), and director James Cruze's I Cover the Waterfront (1933).