Trivia: American actor Gary Cooper was born on the Montana ranch of his wealthy father, and educated in a prestigious school in England -- a dichotomy that may explain how the adult Cooper was able to combine the ruggedness of the frontiersman with the poise of a cultured gentleman. Injured in an auto accident while attending Wesleyan College, he convalesced on his dad's ranch, perfecting the riding skills that would see him through many a future Western film. After trying to make a living at his chosen avocation of political cartooning, Cooper was encouraged by two friends to seek employment as a cowboy extra in movies. Agent Nan Collins felt she could get more prestigious work for the handsome, gangling Cooper, and, in 1926, she was instrumental in obtaining for the actor an important role in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Movie star Clara Bow also took an interest in Cooper, seeing to it that he was cast in a couple of her films. Cooper really couldn't act at this point, but he applied himself to his work in a brief series of silent Westerns for his home studio, Paramount Pictures, and, by 1929, both his acting expertise and his popularity had soared. Cooper's first talking-picture success was The Virginian (1929), in which he developed the taciturn, laconic speech patterns that became fodder for every impressionist on radio, nightclubs, and television. Cooper alternated between tie-and-tails parts in Design for Living (1933) and he-man adventurer roles in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) for most of the 1930s; in 1941, he was honored with an Oscar for Sergeant York, a part for which he was the personal choice of the real-life title character, World War I hero Alvin York. One year later, Cooper scored in another film biography, Pride of the Yankees. As baseball great Lou Gehrig, the actor was utterly convincing (despite the fact that he'd never played baseball and wasn't a southpaw like Gehrig), and left few dry eyes in the audiences with his fade-out "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech. In 1933, Cooper married socialite Veronica Balfe, who, billed as Sandra Shaw, enjoyed a short-lived acting career. Too old for World War II service, Cooper gave tirelessly of his time in hazardous South Pacific personal-appearance tours. Ignoring the actor's indirect participation in the communist witch-hunt of the 1940s, Hollywood held Cooper in the highest regard as an actor and a man. Even those co-workers who thought that Cooper wasn't exerting himself at all when filming were amazed to see how, in the final product, Cooper was actually outacting everyone else, albeit in a subtle, unobtrusive manner. Consigned mostly to Westerns by the 1950s (including the classic High Noon [1952]), Cooper retained his box-office stature. Privately, however, he was plagued with painful, recurring illnesses, and one of them developed into lung cancer. Discovering the extent of his sickness, Cooper kept the news secret, although hints of his condition were accidentally blurted out by his close friend Jimmy Stewart during the 1961 Academy Awards ceremony, where Stewart was accepting a career-achievement Oscar for Cooper. One month later, and less than two months after his final public appearance as the narrator of a TV documentary on the "real West," Cooper died; to fans still reeling from the death of Clark Gable six months earlier, it seemed that Hollywood's Golden Era had suddenly died, as well.

Trivia: Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theater, made most of her infrequent film appearances after an allergy to theater dust forced her to retire from the stage. Her stage career began when she was five; at age nine, she made her first Broadway appearance. By 1918, she was a star. When she married playwright Charles MacArthur in 1928, the couple came to Hollywood briefly, where she won her first Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Other memorable roles during that time included her role as a nurse in A Farewell to Arms (1932) with a very young Gary Cooper, and What Every Woman Knows (1934). Unhappy in Hollywood, she returned to the stage, where she reigned as one of the outstanding American stage actresses. One of her most famous roles was Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina. She won a Tony Award the first year they were presented, in 1947, for Happy Birthday, and another in 1958 for Time Remembered. Throughout the '40s, '50s, '60s and into the '70s, Hayes made numerous television appearances, winning an Emmy as Best Actress in 1952 and starring in the short-lived comic mystery series The Snoop Sisters with Mildred Natwick in 1971. She returned to films in the 1950s, making an impressive showing as the Dowager Empress in Anastasia (1956) and winning another Oscar for her role in Airport (1970). In her later years, she often played kind but mischievous old ladies. Her son is actor James MacArthur. Hayes wrote several memoirs, prompted to write originally by the death of her daughter.

Trivia: Born in Italy, Henry Armetta stowed away on an American-bound boat in 1902. While employed as a pants-presser at New York's Lambs Club, Armetta befriended Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock, who secured Armetta a small role in his stage play A Yankee Consul. A resident of Hollywood from 1923, the hunch-shouldered, mustachioed Armetta gained fame in the 1930s in innumerable roles as excited, gesticulating Italians. Often cast as barbers or restaurateurs, Armetta was so popular that he was frequently awarded with extraneous bit roles that were specially written for him (vide 1933's Lady for a Day). Laurel and Hardy fans will remember Armetta as the flustered innkeeper who is kept awake nights trying to emulate Laurel's "kneesie-earsie-nosie" game in The Devil's Brother (1933). In the late 1930s, Armetta was briefly starred in a series of auto-racing films, bearing titles like Road Demon and Speed to Burn. He also headlined several short-subject series, notably RKO's "Nick and Tony" comedies of the early 1930s. Henry Armetta died of a sudden heart attack shortly after completing his scenes in 20th Century-Fox's A Bell for Adano (1945).

Trivia: Immense, sad-eyed character actor George Humbert made his first film appearance in 1921. Humbert almost always played an Italian restaurateur, waiter, chef or street vendor. His screen characters usually answered to such names as Tony, Luigi, Mario, and Giueseppi. A rare digression from this pattern was his portrayal of "Pancho" in Fiesta (1947). George Humbert made his last appearance as Pop Mangiacavallo (his name was longer than his part!) in The Rose Tattoo (1955).

Trivia: A tall, exotic-looking character actor from Naples, Fred Malatesta is today best remembered for a bit as a waiter in Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a distinctive case of typecasting. Educated in Rome, Malatesta performed a stint in the Italian army prior to embarking on a worldwide stage career that would eventually lead to Broadway. The strapping actor went on to appear in countless action-melodramas and serials throughout the silent era, more often than not playing an exotic villain or a foppish foreigner. His roles grew increasingly smaller after the changeover to sound and he later moonlighted as a set decorator.

Trivia: Born on New Year's Day in 1883 (some sources say 1880), British actress Mary Forbes was well into her stage career when she appeared in her first film, 1916's Ultus and the Secret of the Night. By the time she made her first Hollywood film in 1919, the thirtysomething Forbes was already matronly enough for mother and grande-dame roles. Her most prolific movie years were 1931 through 1941, during which time she appeared in two Oscar-winning films. In Cavalcade (1933), she had the small role of the Duchess of Churt, while in You Can't Take It With You (1938) she was assigned the more substantial (and funnier) part of James Stewart's society dowager mother. Mary Forbes continued in films on a sporadic basis into the '40s, making her screen farewell in another Jimmy Stewart picture, You Gotta Stay Happy (1948).

Trivia: Born in New York and raised in England, character actor Gilbert Emery thrived as a stage actor, director and playwright on both sides of the Atlantic in the teens and twenties. In British films from 1929, Emery made his American movie debut (and his talkie debut as well) in Behind That Curtain (1929). Briefly parting company with Hollywood in 1932 and 1933 to concentrate on stage work, he returned to films on a permanent basis in 1934. His better-known roles include the pipe-smoking police inspector in Dracula's Daughter (1936), Mae West's business manager in Goin' to Town (1937), Thomas Jefferson in The Remarkable Andrew (1942) and the self-effacing Mr. Cliveden-Banks in Between Two Worlds (1944). As a screenwriter, he worked on such films as Cuban Love Song (1931), Mata Hari (1932) and Gallant Lady (1934). Gilbert Emery's credits are sometimes combined with those of American bit player Gilbert C. Emery, who died in 1934.

Trivia: A former opera singer in his native Sicily, bull-necked, waxed-moustached character actor Paul Porcasi made his screen bow in 1917's Fall of the Romanoffs. Porcasi flourished in the talkie era, playing innumerable speakeasy owners, impresarios, chefs, and restaurateurs. The nationalities of his screen characters ranged from Italian to French to Greek to Spanish; most often, however, he played Greeks with such onomatopoeic monikers as Papapopolous. Porcasi's best-remembered film roles include Nick the Greek in Broadway (1929), the obsequious garment merchant in Devil in the Deep (1932), dour border guard Gonzalez in Eddie Cantor's The Kid From Spain (1932), and the apoplectic apple vendor ("Hey! You steal-a!") in King Kong (1933). Paul Porcasi was also starred in the first three-strip Technicolor short subject, La Cucaracha (1934), wherein his face turned a deep crimson after he ingested one too many hot chili peppers.

Trivia: Mainly a chorus girl, blonde Alice Adair played Aphrodite in The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927) and was one of Clara Bow's giddy roommates in The Wild Party (1929). She gained a modicum of fame when her shapely legs stood in for Helen Hayes' presumably less appealing gams in one scene in A Farewell to Arms (1932). The success of her legs, alas, did not lead to stardom, but Adair continued to appear in bit parts and walk-ons in films until at least 1946.

Trivia: American actor Jack LaRue is frequently mistaken for Humphrey Bogart by casual fans. In both his facial features and his choice of roles, LaRue did indeed resemble Bogart, in every respect but one; Bogart became a star, while LaRue remained in the supporting ranks. After stage work in his native New York, LaRue came to Hollywood for his first film, The Mouthpiece, in 1932. For the next few years he played secondary hoodlums (for example, the hot-head hit man in the closing sequences of Night World [1932]) and unsavory lead villains -- never more unsavory than as the sex-obsessed kidnapper in The Story of Temple Drake (1933). LaRue decided to shift gears and try romantic leading roles, but this "new" LaRue disappeared after the Mayfair Studios cheapie, The Fighting Rookie (1934). He was at his most benign as "himself", trading gentle quips with Alice Faye at an outdoor carnival in the MGM all-star short Cinema Circus (1935). Otherwise, it was back to gangsters and thugs, with a few exceptions like his sympathetic role in A Gentleman from Dixie (1941). By the 1940s, LaRue had spent most of his movie savings and was compelled to seek out any work available. Awaiting his cue to appear in a small role on one movie set, LaRue was pointed out to up-and-coming Anne Shirley on a movie set as an example of what happens when a Hollywood luminary doesn't provide for possible future career reverses. Things improved a bit when LaRue moved to England in the late 1940s to play American villains in British pictures. His most memorable appearance during this period was as Slim Grissom in the notorious No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) -- a virtual reprisal of his part in The Story of Temple Drake. LaRue worked often in television during the last two decades of his career; in the early 1950s, he was the eerily-lit host of the spooky TV anthology Lights Out.

Trivia: Also known as Blanche Friderici, this Brooklyn-born actress was generally cast in severe, baleful roles: governesses, matrons, society doyennes and such. Beginning her screen career in 1922, she hit her stride at Paramount in the early 1930s. Her larger roles include one of the three omnipresent maiden aunts in Lubitsch's Love Me Tonight and Madame Si-Si in Madame Butterfly (both 1932). She was also a regular in Paramount's Zane Grey western series, usually as the cast-off wife or mistress of perennial villain Noah Beery. One of Blanche Frederici's last roles was as the wife of motel-court manager Zeke in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (released posthumously in 1934).

Trivia: Formidable stage leading lady Doris Lloyd transferred her activities from British repertory to Hollywood in 1925. She was prominently cast as an alluring spy in George Arliss' first talkie Disraeli (1929); one year later, at the tender age of 30, she was seen as the matronly Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez in Charley's Aunt. Swinging back to younger roles in 1933, Lloyd was cast as the tragic Nancy Sykes in the Dickie Moore version of Oliver Twist. By the late 1930s, Lloyd had settled into middle-aged character roles, most often as a domestic or dowager. Doris Lloyd remained active until 1967, with substantial roles in such films as The Time Machine (1960) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Trivia: Along with such immortals as Percy Helton, Franklin Pangborn and Grady Sutton, Herman Bing is a member of that Valhalla of film character actors. Educated in his native Germany for a musical career, Bing went into vaudeville at 16, and soon after found work as a circus clown. Entering films in the mid-1920s, Bing apprenticed under the great director F. W. Murnau. He accompanied Murnau to Hollywood in 1927, where he worked as a scripter and assistant director on the classic silent drama Sunrise. After several more years assisting the likes of John Ford and Frank Borzage, Bing established himself as a character actor. Nearly always cast as a comic waiter, excitable musician, apoplectic stage manager or self-important official, Bing became famous for his wild-eyed facial expressions and his thick, "R"-rolling Teutonic accent. When the sort of broad comedy for which Herman Bing was renowned became passe in the postwar era, work opportunities dried up; despondent over his fading career, Bing shot himself at the age of 57.