Trivia: One of the cinema's most enduring actors, Henry Fonda enjoyed a highly successful career spanning close to a half century. Most often in association with director John Ford, he starred in many of the finest films of Hollywood's golden era. Born May 16, 1905, in Grand Island, NE, Fonda majored in journalism in college, and worked as an office boy before pursuing an interest in acting. He began his amateur career with the Omaha Community Playhouse, often performing with the mother of Marlon Brando. Upon becoming a professional performer in 1928, Fonda traveled east, tenuring with the Provincetown Players before signing on with the University Players Guild, a New England-based ensemble including up-and-comers like James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, and Joshua Logan. Fonda's first Broadway appearance followed with 1929's The Game of Life and Death. He also worked in stock, and even served as a set designer. In 1931, Fonda and Sullavan were married, and the following year he appeared in I Loved You Wednesday. The couple divorced in 1933, and Fonda's big break soon followed in New Faces of '34. A leading role in The Farmer Takes a Wife was next, and when 20th Century Fox bought the film rights, they recruited him to reprise his performance opposite Janet Gaynor, resulting in his 1935 screen debut. Fonda and Gaynor were slated to reunite in the follow-up, Way Down East, but when she fell ill Rochelle Hudson stepped in. In 1936 he starred in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (the first outdoor Technicolor production), the performance which forever defined his onscreen persona: Intense, insistent, and unflappable, he was also extraordinarily adaptable, and so virtually impossible to miscast. He next co-starred with Sullavan in The Moon's Our Home, followed by Wings of the Morning (another Technicolor milestone, this one the first British feature of its kind). For the great Fritz Lang, Fonda starred in 1937's You Only Live Once, and the following year co-starred with Bette Davis in William Wyler's much-celebrated Jezebel. His next critical success came as the titular Young Mr. Lincoln, a 1939 biopic directed by John Ford. The film was not a commercial sensation, but soon after Fonda and Ford reunited for Drums Along the Mohawk, a tremendous success. Ford then tapped him to star as Tom Joad in the 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a casting decision which even Steinbeck himself wholeheartedly supported. However, 20th Century Fox's Darryl Zanuck wanted Tyrone Power for the role, and only agreed to assign Fonda if the actor signed a long-term contract. Fonda signed, and Zanuck vowed to make him the studio's top star -- it didn't happen, however, and despite the success of The Grapes of Wrath (for which he scored his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination), his tenure at Fox was largely unhappy and unproductive.The best of Fonda's follow-up vehicles was the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve, made at Paramount on loan from Fox; his co-star, Barbara Stanwyck, also appeared with him in You Belong to Me. After a number of disappointing projects, Fox finally assigned him to a classic, William Wellman's 1943 Western The Ox-Bow Incident. Studio executives reportedly hated the film, however, until it won a number of awards. After starring in The Immortal Sergeant, Fonda joined the navy to battle in World War II. Upon his return, he still owed Fox three films, beginning with Ford's great 1946 Western My Darling Clementine. At RKO he starred in 1947's The Long Night, followed by Fox's Daisy Kenyon. Again at RKO, he headlined Ford's The Fugitive, finally fulfilling his studio obligations with Ford's Fort Apache, his first unsympathetic character. Fonda refused to sign a new contract and effectively left film work for the next seven years, returning to Broadway for lengthy runs in Mister Roberts, Point of No Return, and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Outside of cameo roles in a handful of pictures, Fonda did not fully return to films until he agreed to reprise his performance in the 1955 screen adaptation of Mister Roberts, one of the year's biggest hits. Clearly, he had been greatly missed during his stage exile, and offers flooded in. First there was 1956's War and Peace, followed by Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. In 1957, Fonda produced as well as starred in the Sidney Lumet classic Twelve Angry Men, but despite a flurry of critical acclaim the film was a financial disaster. In 1958, after reteaming with Lumet on Stage Struck, Fonda returned to Broadway to star in Two for the Seesaw, and over the years to come he alternated between projects on the screen (The Man Who Understood Women, Advise and Consent, The Longest Day) with work on-stage (Silent Night, Lonely Night, Critic's Choice, Gift of Time). From 1959 to 1961, he also starred in a well-received television series, The Deputy.By the mid-'60s, Fonda's frequent absences from the cinema had severely hampered his ability to carry a film. Of his many pictures from the period, only 1965's The Battle of the Bulge performed respectably at the box office. After 1967's Welcome to Hard Times also met with audience resistance, Fonda returned to television to star in the Western Stranger on the Run. After appearing in the 1968 Don Siegel thriller Madigan, he next starred opposite Lucille Ball in Yours, Mine and Ours, a well-received comedy. Fonda next filmed Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West; while regarded as a classic, the actor so loathed the experience that he refused to ever discuss the project again. With his old friend, James Stewart, he starred in The Cheyenne Social Club before agreeing to a second TV series, the police drama Smith, in 1971. That same year, he was cast to appear as Paul Newman's father in Sometimes a Great Notion.After a pair of TV movies, 1973's The Red Pony and The Alpha Stone, Fonda began a series of European productions which included the disastrous Ash Wednesday and Il Mio Nome è Nessuno. He did not fare much better upon returning to Hollywood; after rejecting Network (the role which won Peter Finch an Oscar), Fonda instead appeared in the Sensurround war epic Midway, followed by The Great Smokey Roadblock. More TV projects followed, including the miniseries Roots -- The Next Generation. Between 1978 and 1979, he also appeared in three consecutive disaster movies: The Swarm, City on Fire, and Meteor. Better received was Billy Wilder's 1978 film Fedora. A year later, he also co-starred with his son, Peter Fonda, in Wanda Nevada. His final project was the 1981 drama On Golden Pond, a film co-starring and initiated by his daughter, Jane Fonda; as an aging professor in the twilight of his years, he finally won the Best Actor Oscar so long due him. Sadly, Fonda was hospitalized at the time of the Oscar ceremony, and died just months later on August 12, 1982.

Trivia: Educated at the University of Kentucky and the University of Indiana, Marjorie Weaver was a band singer, model, and stock-company actress before making her first film appearance in Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round. From 1936 to 1942, Weaver was under contract to 20th Century-Fox, where she played any number of nice but no-nonsense leading ladies. Her co-stars during this period ranged from Henry Fonda to the Ritz Brothers. Her most notable assignment was the role of Mary Todd in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). After serving as Lloyd Nolan's vis-a-vis in the first two "Michael Shayne" B mysteries, Marjorie Weaver free-lanced; she made her last starring appearance at Republic in 1945, re-emerging seven years later to play an unbilled supporting role in Fox's We're Not Married.

Trivia: American actress Alice Brady first came to prominence in the silent films produced by World Studios, which was owned and operated by Brady's father, the influential theatrical producer William H. Brady. A star from her first film, As Ye Sow (1914), onward, she was applauded for her acting skills, though critics at the time noted that her somewhat offbeat facial features would be better suited to character roles than to ingenues. Brady devoted the 1920s to motherly and matronly portrayals on stage - which, as it turned out, were far more rewarding professionally than the heroines she'd played at World. Making her talking-picture debut in 1933's When Ladies Meet, Brady rapidly became one of Hollywood's most prolific portrayers of addlebrained society matrons and world-weary matriarchs. Her comic skills won her roles in such classics as My Man Godfrey (1936) and Three Smart Girls, but it was for her dramatic portrayal of the resilient, much-maligned Mrs. O'Leary in In Old Chicago (1938) that she won an Academy Award. Shortly after completing her work on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Brady passed away at the age of 46.

Trivia: A former manicurist, Arleen Whelan had been playing movie bits for nearly a year when she was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1938. Largely confined to programmers and "B"-pictures, Whelan managed to cop the plum role of pioneer wife Hannah Clay in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Her career peaked in the mid-1940s; by the 1950s, she had to make do with Republic westerns, though Young Mr. Lincoln director John Ford did secure her a good part in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Married three times, Arleen Whelan's first husband was Egyptian leading man Alex D'Arcy.

Trivia: The winsome loveliness and Jean Arthur-esque voice of American actress Pauline Moore graced the screen from 1932 to 1941. After a handful of bit roles, Moore landed a 20th Century Fox contract in 1937. Her career shifted into gear in 1938, when she played one of the title characters in the "looking for rich husbands" opus Three Blind Mice (the other two were Loretta Young and Marjorie Weaver). She went on to such plum roles as Ann Rutledge in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Constance de Winter in The Three Musketeers (1939), and, best of all, psychic Eve Cairo in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939). For reasons best known to Darryl F. Zanuck, Fox summarily dropped Moore from their payroll in 1940. She spent the next year in such less-than-impressive efforts as the Republic serial King of the Texas Rangers (1940) and the PRC meller Double Cross (1941). The last-named film proved to be the last for Pauline Moore, save for a brief appearance as a nurse in 1958's The Littlest Hobo.

Trivia: American actor Richard Cromwell started on so high a plane at age 19 that he virtually had nowhere to go but down. Trained as an artist, Cromwell became fascinated with sketching the faces of Hollywood's elite. He wangled an extra job in 1930's King of Jazz, then won the coveted role of the kid brother who brings the mail in on time in Tol'able David (1930). Cromwell's subsequent film roles took advantage of his extreme youth, his air of callowness and his rough edges as a performer. He was frequently cast as a sensitive teenager--few more sensitive than the civic-minded hero of DeMill's This Day and Age (1933), who was so upset by his do-nothing government that he organized his friends into a vigilante group and stalked every gangster in town! Cromwell's best-known role was as the son of a martinet British officer in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; in the course of the film, Cromwell breaks under torture and betrays his regiment, then spends the closing reels redeeming himself. Few of Cromwell's remaining film performances were as memorable; he has a few good moments as an innocent murder suspect in Young Mr. Lincoln, but the film belongs to Henry Fonda in the title role. By the time he starred in the low-budget Baby Face Morgan (1942) Cromwell's baby face had begun to erode and his appeal had diminished. He left movies to join the Coast Guard, returned to make one more film (the disposable murder mystery Bungalow 13 [1948]), then pursued non-show business endeavors until his death from cancer at age 50. The latter-day reputation of Richard Cromwell rests upon his first five years of moviemaking--and, perhaps, his brief marriage in the mid '40s to actress Angela Lansbury.

Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: For nearly two decades in Hollywood, Scottish-born actor Donald Meek lived up to his name by portraying a series of tremulous, shaky-voiced sycophants and milquetoasts -- though he was equally effective (if not more so) as nail-hard businessmen, autocratic schoolmasters, stern judges, compassionate doctors, small-town Babbitts, and at least one Nazi spy! An actor since the age of eight, Meek joined an acrobatic troupe, which brought him to America in his teens. At 18 Meek joined the American military and was sent to fight in the Spanish-American War. He contracted yellow fever, which caused him to lose his hair -- and in so doing, secured his future as a character actor. Meek made his film bow in 1928; in the early talkie era, he starred with John Hamilton in a series of New York-filmed short subjects based on the works of mystery writer S. S. Van Dyne. Relocating to Hollywood in 1933, Meek immediately found steady work in supporting roles. So popular did Meek become within the next five years that director Frank Capra, who'd never worked with the actor before, insisted that the gratuitous role of Mr. Poppins be specially written for Meek in the film version of You Can't Take It With You (1938) (oddly, this first association with Capra would be the last). Meek died in 1946, while working in director William Wellman's Magic Town; his completed footage remained in the film, though he was certainly conspicuous by his absence during most of the proceedings.

Trivia: Burly, puffy-cheeked American actor Spencer Charters entered films in 1923, after decades of stage experience. In his first talkie appearances (Whoopee [1930], The Bat Whispers [1931], etc.), Charters was often seen as an ill-tempered authority figure. Traces of this characterization continued into such mid-'30s efforts as Wheeler and Woolsey's Hips Hips Hooray, but before the decade was over Charters was firmly locked into playing such benign types as rustic sheriffs, bucolic hotel clerks and half-asleep justices of the peace. Advancing age and the attendant infirmities made it difficult for Charters to play anything other than one-scene bits by the early '40s. At the age of 68, he ended his life by downing an overdose of sleeping pills and then inhaling the exhaust fumes of his car.

Trivia: Eddie Quillan made his performing debut at age seven in his family's vaudeville act. By the time he was in his teens, Quillan was a consummate performer, adept at singing, dancing, and joke-spinning. He made his first film, Up and At 'Em, in 1922, but it wasn't until 1925, when he appeared in Los Angeles with his siblings in an act called "The Rising Generation," that he began his starring movie career with Mack Sennett. At first, Sennett tried to turn Quillan into a new Harry Langdon, but eventually the slight, pop-eyed, ever-grinning Quillan established himself in breezy "collegiate" roles. Leaving Sennett over a dispute concerning risqué material, Quillan made his first major feature-film appearance when he co-starred in Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929). This led to a contract at Pathé studios, where Quillan starred in such ebullient vehicles as The Sophomore (1929), Noisy Neighbors (1929), Big Money (1930), and The Tip-Off (1931). He remained a favorite in large and small roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s; he faltered only when he was miscast as master sleuth Ellery Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1936). Among Quillan's more memorable credits as a supporting actor were Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Abbott and Costello's It Ain't Hay (1943). From 1948 through 1956, Quillan co-starred with Wally Vernon in a series of 16 two-reel comedies, which showed to excellent advantage the physical dexterity of both men. Quillan remained active into the 1980s on TV; from 1968 through 1971, he was a regular on the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia. In his retirement years, Eddie Quillan became a pet interview subject for film historians thanks to his ingratiating personality and uncanny total recall.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

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.

Trivia: Leading man Robert Lowery came to Hollywood on the strength of his talent as a band vocalist. He was signed to a movie contract in 1937 by 20th Century-Fox, a studio that seemed to take a wicked delight in shuttling its male contractees from bits to second leads to bits again. Freelancing from 1942 onward, Lowery starred in a few low-budget films at Universal and Monogram. In 1949, he portrayed the Caped Crusader in the Columbia serial Batman and Robin. On television, Robert Lowery co-starred as Big Tim Champion on the kiddie series Circus Boy (1956-1958), and played smooth-talking villain Buss Courtney on the Anne Sheridan sitcom Pistols and Petticoats (1967).

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.

Trivia: Mainly remembered for offering younger brother John Ford his first opportunities in the movie business, Francis Ford (born Feeney) was a touring company actor before entering films with Thomas Edison in 1907. In the early 1910s, he served a tumultuous apprenticeship as a director/star for producer Thomas Ince -- who in typical Ince fashion presented many of Ford's accomplishments as his own -- before moving over to Carl Laemmle's Universal in 1913. A true auteur, Ford would direct, write, and star in his own Westerns and serials, often opposite Grace Cunard, the studio's top action heroine. Contrary to popular belief they never married, but their onscreen partnership resulted in such popular action serials as Lucille Love -- Girl of Mystery (1914), The Broken Coin (1915), and The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (1916). Both Ford's and Cunard's careers declined in the 1920s, with Ford directing mostly poverty row productions. He kept working in films as a supporting actor through the early '50s, mainly due to the influence of John, who often made Francis Ford and Victor McLaglen supply the corny Irish humor for which he exhibited a lifelong fondness. Francis Ford's son, Philip Ford, also became a director of Westerns, and also like his father, mainly of the poverty row variety.

Trivia: The son of famed movie villain Fred Kohler and actress Maxine Marshall, American actor Fred Kohler Jr.'s own film career began in 1930. Big and brawny, the younger Kohler was a natural for outdoor films, westerns in particular. In 1935, producer William Berke starred Kohler in a brace of "B" horse operas, Toll of the Desert and The Pecos Kid. But like his father before him, Fred seemed more at home on the wrong side of the law. He played minor heavies and utility roles at several studios, mainly Paramount and RKO. He frequently showed up in the films of directors Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford; in Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, he played small-town lout Scrub White, whose murder sets in motion the film's classic courtroom finale. He remained active until 1968, nearly always in westerns. On two occasions, Kohler and his father appeared in the same film: the more memorable of the two was RKO's Lawless Valley, in which they played father-and-son outlaws. In a priceless scene, Fred Kohler Jr. responds to one of his father's wicked schemes by shouting "Aw, that's crazy!," whereupon Fred Sr. growls "Careful, son, you're talkin' to your dad, ya know!"

Trivia: Of Norwegian descent, brunette Kay Linaker had graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and appeared in a couple of short-lived Broadway plays -- including Henry Rosendahl's Yesterday's Orchids (1934) with fellow Hollywood hopefuls Carleton Young and Richard Reeves -- prior to signing with Warner Bros. and later Fox, where she mainly played supporting roles in Grade-A production while earning leading assignments in programmers. With Paramount in the 1940s, Linaker usually played society women, often rather cold-hearted, but left the screen to marry writer-turned-television executive Howard Phillips. As Kate Phillips, she co-wrote (with Theodore Simonson) the screenplay to the sci-fi classic The Blob (1958) and, later still, taught courses at a university in New Hampshire.

Trivia: American actor Russell Simpson is another of those character players who seemed to have been born in middle age. From his first screen appearance in 1910 to his last in 1959, Simpson personified the grizzled, taciturn mountain man who held strangers at bay with his shotgun and vowed that his daughter would never marry into that family he'd been feudin' with fer nigh on to forty years. It was not always thus. After prospecting in the 1898 Alaska gold rush, Simpson returned to the States and launched a career as a touring actor in stock -- most frequently cast in romantic leads. This led to a long association with Broadway impresario David Belasco. Briefly flirting with New York-based films in 1910, Simpson returned to the stage, then chose movies on a permanent basis in 1917. Of his hundreds of motion picture and TV appearances, Russell Simpson is best known for his participation in the films of director John Ford, most memorably as Pa Joad in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath.

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: American actor Charles Halton was forced to quit school at age 14 to help support his family. When his boss learned that young Halton was interested in the arts, he financed the boy's training at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next three decades, Halton appeared in every aspect of "live" performing; in the '20s, he became a special favorite of playwright George S. Kaufman, who cast Halton in one of his most famous roles as movie mogul Herman Glogauer in Once in a Lifetime. Appearing in Dodsworth on Broadway with Walter Huston, Halton was brought to Hollywood to recreate his role in the film version. Though he'd occasionally return to the stage, Halton put down roots in Hollywood, where his rimless spectacles and snapping-turtle features enabled him to play innumerable "nemesis" roles. He could usually be seen as a grasping attorney, a rent-increasing landlord or a dictatorial office manager. While many of these characterizations were two-dimensional, Halton was capable of portraying believable human beings with the help of the right director; such a director was Ernst Lubitsch, who cast Halton as the long-suffered Polish stage manager in To Be or Not to Be (1942). Alfred Hitchcock likewise drew a flesh and blood portrayal from Halton, casting the actor as the small-town court clerk who reveals that Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are not legally married in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1942). Charles Halton retired from Hollywood after completing his work on Friendly Persuasion in 1956; he died three years later of hepatitis.

Trivia: Actor Robert Emmett Homans seemingly had the map of Ireland stamped on his craggy face. As a result, Homans spent the better part of his film career playing law enforcement officers of all varieties, from humble patrolmen to detective chiefs. After a lengthy stage career, Homans entered films in 1923. A break from his usual microscopic film assignments occured in Public Enemy (1931), where Homans is given an opportunity to deliver reams of exposition (with a pronounced brogue) during a funeral sequence. And in the 1942 Universal horror programmer Night Monster, Robert Emmett Homans is alotted a sizeable role as the ulcerated detective investigating the supernatural goings-on at the home of seemingly helpless invalid Ralph Morgan.

Trivia: The son of actress Nan Kelly Yorke, Jack Kelly was the younger brother of stage and film star Nancy Kelly. Like Nancy, Jack was a professional from an early age, acting in radio and on stage before the age of 10, and in films from 1937 (he is quite prominent in a brace of 1939 20th Century-Fox films, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell). He reemerged as a leading man in the early 1950s, appearing in such films as Forbidden Planet (1956, as the ill-fated Lieutenant Farnam). Signed by Warner Bros. in 1955, Kelly starred as Dr. Paris Mitchell in the weekly TV version of the 1942 film King's Row. He went on to play gamblin' man Bart Maverick on the longer-running Warners western series Maverick. Though his popularity never matched that of his co-star James Garner, Kelly still developed a fan following as Bart; he remained with the series from 1957 until its cancellation in 1962, appearing opposite such Garner successors as Roger Moore and Robert Colbert. Kelly dabbled in a little bit of everything after that: hosting the anthology series NBC Comedy Playhouse (1973), emceeing the game show Sale of the Century (1969-71), and playing hard-nosed Lt. Ryan on the Teresa Graves series Get Christie Love (1974) and Harry Hammond on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-79). He revived the Bart Maverick character on 1978's The New Maverick and the 1990 TV movie The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw. Chances are that, had he lived, Jack Kelly would have been invited to co-star again with Garner in the 1994 Mel Gibson theatrical-feature version of Maverick.

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: WWI-veteran Jack Pennick was working as a horse wrangler when, in 1926, he was hired as a technical advisor for the big-budget war drama What Price Glory? Turning to acting in 1927, Pennick made his screen bow in Bronco Twister. His hulking frame, craggy face, and snaggle-toothed bridgework made him instantly recognizable to film buffs for the next 35 years. Beginning with 1928's Four Sons and ending with 1962's How the West Was Won, Pennick was prominently featured in nearly three dozen John Ford films. He also served as Ford's assistant director on How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Fort Apache (1947), and as technical advisor on The Alamo (1960), directed by another longtime professional associate and boon companion, John Wayne. Though pushing 50, Jack Pennick interrupted his film career to serve in WWII, earning a Silver Star after being wounded in combat.

Trivia: Kentucky-born Louis Mason enjoyed a long stage and screen career playing a vast array of rustic characters. In films from 1933, Mason could often as not be found portraying feuding hillbillies, backwood preachers, moonshiners and other assorted rubes. When he was given a character name, it was usually along the lines of Elmo and Lem. An off-and-on member of John Fords stock company, Mason showed up in Ford's Judge Priest (1934), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), among others. Louis Mason remained active at least until 1953.

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).

Trivia: Moonfaced American actor Frank Orth came to films from vaudeville, where he was usually co-billed with wife Ann Codee. Orth and Codee continued appearing together in a series of two-reel comedies in the early '30s, before he graduated to features with 1935's The Unwelcome Stranger. From that point until his retirement in 1959, Orth usually found himself behind a counter in his film appearances, playing scores of pharmacists, grocery clerks and bartenders. He had a semi-recurring role as Mike Ryan in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, and was featured as a long-suffering small town cop in Warners' Nancy Drew films. Orth was an apparent favorite of the casting department at 20th Century-Fox, where he received many of his credited screen roles. From 1951 through 1953, Frank Orth was costarred as Lieutenant Farraday on the Boston Blackie TV series.

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.

Trivia: Herbert Heywood spent the bulk of his screen career answering to the nicknames "Pop" and "Old Timer." Already well into middle age when he began his film career in 1935, Heywood could be seen as mailmen, doormen, judges, convicts and railroad workers. Most of his films were made at Universal and Fox, two companies historically averse to crediting their minor players. Among the few roles played by Herbert Heywood to be given names rather than descriptions were Hot Cake Joe in Criminals of the Air (1937) and brakeman Arnold Kelly in King's Row (1941).

Trivia: Actor Arthur Aylesworth's first regular film employment was in a series of Paramount "newspaper" short subjects produced between 1932 and 1933. Aylesworth signed a Warner Bros. contract in 1934, appearing in nine films his first year. His roles under the Warners escutcheon included the Chief Censor in Life of Emile Zola (1937), the auto court owner in High Sierra (1941) and the sleigh driver in Christmas in Connecticut (1946). He also showed up at other studios, playing the night court judge in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (Paramount 1935) and essaying minor roles in several of director John Ford's 20th Century-Fox productions. Arthur Aylesworth's last screen assignment was the part of a tenant farmer in Fox's Dragonwyck (1946).

Trivia: American actor Harold Goodwin started performing as a child in Los Angeles community theatre. In 1915 he appeared in his first film, The Little Orphan. Though initially cast as under-fed waifs, Goodwin matured into a strapping, athletic leading man, working in roles of varying sizes and importance at Fox, Universal and other studios during the 1920s. He became a close pal and baseball buddy of comedian Buster Keaton while playing the B.M.O.C. villain in Keaton's College (27). Even when Goodwin descended into small character roles in the 1930s, Keaton saw to it that Goodwin was cast in substantial secondary parts in Buster's Educational Studios two-reelers of the 1930s. By 1955, Goodwin had been around Hollywood so long that he was among the film "pioneers" given prominent billing in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops. In between acting assignments, Goodwin functioned as a dialogue director. When a British actor named Harold Goodwin rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, the American Harold Goodwin changed the spelling of his first name to Herold to avoid confusion.

Trivia: In films from 1936, Dorothy Vaughan spent the next 14 years playing scores of bits and featured roles. Vaughan was at one time or another practically everyone's "mom" or "grandma," devoting the rest of the time to playing nurses, maids, governesses, and charwomen. In Westerns, she could be seen playing such no-nonsense matriarchs as the Commodore in Trail to San Antone (1947). From 1939 to 1942, Dorothy Vaughan was a regular in The Glove Slingers, a two-reel comedy series produced at Columbia.

Trivia: Stern-visaged American actress Virginia Brissac was a well-established stage actress in the early part of the 20th century. For several seasons in the 1920s, she headed a travelling stock company bearing her name. Once Brissac settled down in Hollywood in 1935, she carved a niche in authoritative parts, spending the next twenty years playing a steady stream of schoolteachers, college deans, duennas and society matrons. Once in a while, Virginia Brissac was allowed to "cut loose" with a raving melodramatic part: in Bob Hope's The Ghost Breakers, she dons a coat of blackface makeup and screams with spine-tingling conviction as the bewitched mother of zombie Noble Johnson.

Trivia: Evidently weaned on a diet of pickles and vinegar, wizened screen sourpuss Clarence H. Wilson grimaced and glowered his way through over 100 films from 1920 until his death in 1941. Clarence Hummel Wilson was born in Cincinnati, OH. He began his 46-year acting career in Philadelphia in 1895, in a stock company, and spent years touring the United States and Canada in various road shows. On stage in New York, he later played supporting roles to such stars as James K. Hackett, Virginia Harned, Marguerite Clark, Amelia Bingham, Charles Cherry, and Wilton Lackaye. He entered motion pictures in 1920 and ultimately moved to Hollywood. With the coming of sound, his bald, mustachioed, stoop-shouldered persona, topped by a distinctive and annoying high, whining voice, and coupled with his broad approach to acting, made him an ideal villain. Wilson, whose slightly squinty yet hovering gaze seemed to invoke bad fortune upon whomever it landed, played dozens of irascible judges, taciturn coroners, impatient landlords, flat-footed process servers, angry school superintendents, miserly businessmen, and cold-hearted orphanage officials. Whenever he smiled, which wasn't often, one could almost hear the creak of underused facial muscles. Though he generally played bits, he was occasionally afforded such larger roles as the drunken sideshow-impresario father of heroine Helen Mack in Son of Kong (1933), with his pathetic trained animal act. He was the perfect over-the-top villain, a nastier male equivalent to Margaret Hamilton, and indispensable to comedy films, in which he served brilliantly as the humorless foil of such funmakers as W.C. Fields, Wheeler & Woolsey, Charley Chase, and especially the Our Gang kids. Although he appeared in such major films as the 1931 version of The Front Page (playing the corrupt sheriff) and the aforementioned Son of Kong, Wilson's most prominent screen roles for modern audiences were in a pair of short subjects in the Our Gang series of films: first as Mr. Crutch, the greedy orphanage manager who is undone when a pair of adults get transformed into children by a magical lamp in Shrimps for a Day (1934); and, at the other end of the series' history, as nasty schoolboard chairman Alonzo K. Pratt in Come Back, Miss Pipps (1941), his penultimate film release.

Trivia: Eddy Waller's career moved along the same channels as most western comedy-relief performers: medicine shows, vaudeville, legitimate theatre, movie bit parts (from 1938) and finally the unshaven, grizzled, "by gum" routine. During the '40s, Waller was teamed with virtually everyone at Republic studios. He was amusing with his soup-strainer mustache, dusty duds and double takes, but virtually indistinguishable from such other Republic sagebrush clowns as Olin Howlin and Chubby Johnson. Eddy Waller is most fondly remembered for his 26-week stint as Rusty Lee, sidekick to star Douglas Kennedy on the 1952 TV series Steve Donovan, Western Marshal.