Trivia: According to her own account, actress ZaSu Pitts was given her curious cognomen because she was named for two aunts, Eliza and Susan. Born in Kansas, Pitts moved with her family to California, where at age 19 she began her film career. Her first starring role was as an ugly duckling who finds true love in 1919's Better Times. Her calculated vagueness and fluttery hand gestures earned Pitts comedy roles from the outset, but director Erich Von Stroheim saw dramatic potential in the young actress. He cast her as the grasping, money-mad wife in his masterpiece Greed (1924), and she rose to the occasion with a searing performance. Except for a couple of later collaborations with Von Stroheim, Pitts returned to predominately comic assignments after Greed. One exception was her portrayal of Lew Ayres' ailing mother in the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a brilliant piece of work that unfortunately fell victim to the editors' scissors when a preview audience, conditioned to Pitts' comedy roles, broke out in loud laughter when she came onscreen (she was replaced by Beryl Mercer in the domestic version of All Quiet, though reportedly her scenes were retained for some European versions). Established as a top character comedian by the '30s (her oft-imitated catchphrase was "Oh, dear, oh my!"), Pitts co-starred with Thelma Todd in a series of Hal Roach two-reelers, was top-billed in such feature programmers as Out All Night (1933) and The Plot Thickens (1935), and showed up in select character roles in A-pictures. During the '40s and '50s, she toured in Ramshackle Inn, a play written especially for her by George Batson. From 1956 through 1960, Pitts played Elvira "Nugey" Nugent on the popular Gale Storm TV sitcom Oh, Susanna. ZaSu Pitts died in 1963, shortly after completing her final film appearance in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and just a few days after her last TV guest assignment on Burke's Law.

Trivia: Described by film historian William K. Everson as "that supercilious martyr" (he was of course referring to her on-screen personality), Canadian character actress Kathleen Howard usually comported herself before the cameras in a most operatic fashion. And who with better right? Howard was a Metropolitan opera star from 1916 through 1928, turning to film acting only after her voice broke. She was also an accomplished writer, serving on the executive staff of Harper's Bazaar. She made her first movie appearance, appropriately cast as an Italian grande dame, in Death Takes a Holiday (1934). Generations of W.C. Fields fans have doted upon Howard's full-blooded portrayals of Fields' virago wife in It's a Gift (1934) and The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935). Toning down her screen mannerisms a bit, Kathleen Howard spent her last decade in films in such supporting roles as the melancholy schoolmistress in Deanna Durbin's First Love (1939) and the wry lady judge in One Night in the Tropics (1940).

Trivia: Actress Brenda Forbes had two film careers; the first as young leading and supporting lady during the '30s and '40s, and the second as an elderly character actress of the '80s and '90s. The London-born Forbes was the daughter of actress Mary Forbes. Her brother, Ralph Forbes, acted too. Forbes launched her own acting career shortly after she moved to Hollywood with her mother. The pretty teen made her debut on the Southern California stage. Forbes' early film credits include The Perfect Gentleman (1935) and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). When film offers slowed, Forbes turned to the stage. She returned to sporadically appear in films in the mid-'80s. Credits from that period include a trio of television films in which she starred opposite Katharine Hepburn. Laura Lansing Slept Here (1988) is among that trilogy.

Trivia: American actress Elyse Knox started out as a fashion designer, eventually wearing many of her designs as a model for Vogue magazine. It was in this capacity that Elyse came to the attention of Hollywood, where she made her first film, Wake Up and Live, in 1937. She worked for 20th Century-Fox, Columbia and Hal Roach before settling at Universal in the '40s, where she appeared with everyone from Abbott and Costello to the Mummy (Lon Chaney Jr.). While her career was unremarkable, Elyse Knox's private life was touched with celebrity from all sides: she was the daughter of one-time Secretary of the Navy William Franklin Knox, the wife of football star/sportscaster Tom Harmon, the mother of actor Mark Harmon, the mother-in-law of singer Ricky Nelson, and the grandmother of actress Tracy Nelson.

Trivia: In films from 1935 to 1964, American character actor William "Billy" Newell was nearly always seen with his hat tilted backward and with a spent cigarette or wad of gum in his mouth. This is because Newell was usually cast as a wise-lipped reporter or news photographer. One of his largest assignments in this vein was as news-hound Speed Martin in the 1940 Republic serial Mysterious Dr. Satan. William Newell also essayed countless functional bit roles, such as the liquor-store proprietor in the 1945 Oscar-winner The Lost Weekend. Hal Erickson, Rovi

Trivia: Most of character actress Fern Emmett's early appearances were in westerns, where she played scores of maiden aunts, hillbilly wives, town spinsters, ranch owners and stagecoach passengers. When she moved into contemporary films, she was most often seen as a landlady or gossip. She enjoyed a rare breakaway from this established screen persona when she played a screaming murder victim in the 1943 Universal thriller Captive Wild Women. Seldom given more than a few lines in "A" features, Emmett was better-served in programmers and 2-reel comedies. Emmett so closely resembled "Wicked Witch of the West" Margaret Hamilton that some historians have lumped their credits together, even though Emmett began her film career in 1930, three years before Hamilton ever stepped before a camera. Fern Emmett was the wife of actor Henry Rocquemore.

Trivia: Affectionately described by film historian William K. Everson as "That lovable old wreck of a busybody," actress Vera Lewis was indeed quite lovable in person, even though most of her screen characters were sharp-tongued and spiteful in the extreme. Lewis first appeared in films in 1915, playing bits in such historical spectacles as D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) and the privately-funded Argonauts of California. By the 1920s, she was well-established in such venomous characterizations as the remonstrative stepmother in the 1926 Colleen Moore starrer Ella Cinders. She continued playing small-town snoops, gimlet-eyed landladies, irksome relatives and snobbish society doyennes well into the talkie era. Even when unbilled, Lewis was unforgettable: in 1933's King Kong, she's the outraged theater patron who mercilessly browbeats an usher upon finding out that the mighty Kong will be appearing in person instead of on film. When all is said and done, Vera Lewis was never better than when she was playing a gorgon-like mother-in-law, as witness her work as Mrs. Nesselrode in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and as Andy Clyde's vituperative mom-by-marriage in the 1947 2-reeler Wife to Spare.

Trivia: After a tentative movie debut in the New York-filmed 1929 musical Glorifying the American Girl, stately character actress Sarah Edwards settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1935. Another of those performers who evidently jumped directly from birth to old age, Edwards portrayed many a kindly grandmother, imperious dowager, hardy pioneer wife, ill-tempered teacher and strict governess. She played peripheral roles in films like The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Shadow of the Doubt (1942), and enjoyed larger assignments in films like Hal Roach's Dudes are Pretty People (1942, as "The Colonel") and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Sarah Edwards is not related to the 1980s TV personality of the same name.

Trivia: Willowy blonde actress Virginia Sale was seen on stage and screen from the mid-1920s. Sale was usually cast as either an efficient secretary or a well-coiffed socialite, appearing in such 1930s films as Her Majesty Love (1931), Man With Two Faces (1934) and Topper. In all, she was in some 200 films, not to mention her 1000-plus live appearances in her own one-woman show. For fifteen years, Ms. Sale offered this tour-de-force (a combination lecture on theatrical arts and demonstration of the actress' versatility) to schools, nightclubs and legitimate theatres, retiring only when the infirmities of age caught up with her in her 80s. Equally active on television, Sale showed up on innumerable anthologies and sitcoms; in 1964, she was the first actress to portray busybody Selma Plout on the long-running Petticoat Junction. The sister of vaudeville headliner Chic Sale, Virginia Sale was long married to Broadway actor Sam Wren, with whom she co-starred in the pioneering TV domestic comedy Wren's Nest (1949).

Trivia: While still a high schooler in her Texas home town, Josephine Cottle won a "Gateway to Hollywood" contest sponsored by film producer Jesse Lasky. Cottle was rechristened "Gale Storm" at the suggestion of a movie-magazine fan, and was promptly cast in 1940's Tom Brown's School Days. A brief RKO contract led nowhere, and soon Gale Storm was the sweetheart of Monogram Pictures, starring in several of that low-budget studio's musical "specials." Towards the end of the 1940s, Gale appeared in a number of Republic westerns opposite Roy Rogers. When actress Wanda Hendrix turned down the opportunity to star in the upcoming TV sitcom My Little Margie in 1951, Gale Storm jumped at the chance; like Hendrix, Gale didn't think much of the project at first, but was convinced that it could only get better. Whether or not My Little Margie ever truly evinced signs of improvement is a moot point: Storm became a bonafide star in the role of spunky 21-year-old Margie Belmont. The series' popularity increased tenfold when it left prime time in 1954 and entered the syndicated-rerun market. Capitalizing on her new-found celebrity, she pursued a successful nightclub career, and in 1955 cut a pair of Top Ten record singles, "Teenage Prayer" and "I Hear You Knocking." One year later, she launched a second successful TV series, Oh, Susanna (aka The Gale Storm Show) in which, for four seasons, she filled the role of Susanna Pomeroy, scatterbrained social director on the luxury liner S.S. Ocean Queen. Following her series' cancellation in 1960, Storm returned to nightclubs and played the straw-hat circuit in such musicals as Annie Get Your Gun and then went into semi-retirement, devoting her time to her husband Lee Bonnell (a fellow "Gateway to Hollywood" winner who had long since abandoned acting for the insurance business) and her children. In the late 1970s, Storm re-emerged in the public's consciousness when she announced that she'd been an alcoholic for several years; this was followed by a return to TV as spokesperson for a substance-abuse rehabilitation center in the Northwest. In 1981, Gale Storm published her biography, I Ain't Down Yet.

Trivia: Best known as an actor during the '30s, Slim Summerville led a knockabout life before coming to motion pictures -- born in New Mexico, he was raised in Canada and Oklahoma, but ran away from home as a teenager, working at various jobs. Actor Edgar Kennedy gave him an introduction to Mack Sennett, and Summerville quickly became one of the top members of Sennett's resident slapstick company, the Keystone Kops, and was moved into solo appearances as well. His long, lanky body and innocent demeanor made him a natural for silent comedy, and Summerville soon had a respectable career as a screen comedian. He moved to Fox studios at the end of the teens, and became a director of comedy shorts in the '20s. He moved to Universal later in the '20s, and continued to direct. He returned to acting with the arrival of sound, and turned in a notable dramatic performance in Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) -- he also appeared in the groundbreak musical King of Jazz (1930), The Front Page (1931), The Road Back (1937 -- the abortive sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front), and Tobacco Road (1941), among numerous other films, principally in character roles.