Trivia: Born Janet Cole, American actress Kim Hunter trained at the Actors Studio. At age 17, she debuted onscreen in The Seventh Victim (1943) before appearing in several subpar films. Her popularity was renewed with her appearance in the British fantasy A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and, in 1947, she created the role of Stella Kowalski on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, reprising the role in the 1951 film version, for which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. But her career was dealt a terrible blow when her name appeared without cause in Red Channels, a Red-scare pamphlet during the McCarthy Era, and she was blacklisted. Several years later, she was called as the star witness in a court case instigated by another Red Channels victim, and her testimony discredited the publication and made it possible for dozens of other performers to reclaim their careers. She returned to films sporadically after this, and also did much work on stage and television; among her roles was appearing as a female ape in three Planet of the Apes films. She also wrote Loose in the Kitchen, a combination autobiography-cookbook. Hunter was married to writer Robert Emmett from 1951 until her death in 2002.

Trivia: The hauntingly beautiful devil worshiper in Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943), Texas-born, Costa Rica-reared Jean Brooks began her professional career singing at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She was discovered there, or so the story goes, by Erich Von Stroheim, who secured the former Ruby Kelly a stint as the nominal leading lady in Obeah (1935), a very low-budget independent thriller dealing with voodoo curses. In order not to be confused with Ruby Keeler, the novice actress billed herself Jeanne Kelly. She was Jeanne Kelly again opposite Von Stroheim in the equally obscure The Crime of Dr. Crespi (1935) -- which, according to Von Stroheim himself, was also the "crime of the screenwriter and director" -- while under contract to Universal 1940-1941. That studio cast her, briefly, as one of Ming the Merciless' handmaidens in the second Flash Gordon chapterplay, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), and as the leading lady in the all-star "super serial" The Riders of Death Valley (1941).Having married tyro screenwriter Richard Brooks and changed her name to Jean Brooks, the still novice actress had much better luck at RKO, where she would appear in five of the studio's popular Falcon thrillers and as the nightclub chanteuse in the atmospheric The Leopard Man (1943). As the cynical Kiki, Brooks quite innocently causes all the ensuing mayhem when a leopard used in her act (and which she leads around on a leash) escapes. Producer Val Lewton obviously liked what he saw and cast Jean Brooks in the relatively small but pivotal and quite unforgettable role as the suicidal Jacqueline Gibson in The Seventh Victim. Caught up in a satanic cult, the morbid Jacqueline finally kills herself with the noose she had left hanging in her room for that very purpose.RKO's resident neurotic, as film historian Doug McClelland has called her, Jean Brooks should in a perfect world have gone on to true stardom after two such eye-opening performances. A bitter and very public divorce from Brooks and rumored alcoholism prevented that, however, and her remaining films were potboilers. Leaving Hollywood after 1948's Women in the Night, the actress' subsequent life remained a mystery for years, to the point, in fact, that as late as 1990, a fan posted a "wanted" ad in a Hollywood trade paper. As more recent research has revealed, however, following her brief fling with stardom Jean Brooks married a printer for the San Francisco Examiner and worked for a while as a solicitor of classified ads for the same daily. Her death in November 1963 was given as cirrhosis of the liver.Although she appeared only fleetingly in what at the time were dismissed as mere programmers, Jean Brooks' haunting face, her large, soulful eyes, and her Cleopatra wig (in The Seventh Victim) remain some of the more startling impressions of World War II Hollywood. In many ways, her paranoid and bewildered Jacqueline Gibson presages Mia Farrow's equally ill-fated heroine in Rosemary's Baby. That Brooks' later life was bedeviled by alcoholism and near total oblivion only adds to the poignancy of her best-remembered performance.

Trivia: Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tom Conway was the son of a British rope manufacturer. After the Bolshevik revolution, Conway's family returned to England, where he attended a succession of boarding schools before graduating from Brighton college. Aimlessly wandering from job to job, Conway was working as a rancher when his older brother, George Sanders, achieved success as a film actor. Deciding this might be suitable work for himself, Conway gleaned some stage experience in a Manchester repertory company. Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1940, Conway was taken under the wing of brother George, who helped him find film work. When George quit the Falcon "B"-picture series at RKO in 1941, he recommended Tom as his replacement; the transition was cleverly handled in The Falcon's Brother (1942), with Tom taking over after George had been "killed." Achieving popularity as the Falcon, Conway continued in private-detective roles, playing Sherlock Holmes on radio and Mark Sabre on television. Though he reportedly amassed a fortune in excess of one million dollars during his Hollywood years, personal problems sent Conway into a downward spiral. Tom Conway died in 1967 at the age of 63; his brother George Sanders committed suicide five years later.

Trivia: American actor Hugh Beaumont originally studied for the clergy, remaining busy as a lay minister throughout his acting career. After stage experience, Beaumont arrived in Hollywood in 1940. While most of the draftable leading men were away during World War II, Beaumont enjoyed a brief spell of stardom; his faint resemblance to actor Lloyd Nolan enabled Beaumont to inherit Nolan's screen role of detective Michael Shayne in a series of inexpensive programmers. After the war, Beaumont returned to character parts, contributing memorable moments to such films as The Blue Dahlia (1946) and The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947). He also played quite a few villains during this period; fans of Beaumont's later television work are in for a jolt as they watch the affable Hugh connive and murder his way through 1948's Money Madness. During the early 1950s, Beaumont frequently popped up in uncredited featured roles at 20th Century-Fox, most prominently in Phone Call From a Stranger (1952) as the doctor killed by drunken driver Michael Rennie, and in The Revolt of Mamie Stover as the Honolulu cop who advises goodtime girl Jane Russell to get out of town. In 1957, Beaumont was cast as philosophy-dispensing suburban dad Ward Cleaver on the popular sitcom Leave It to Beaver (he replaced Casey Adams, who played Ward in the 1955 pilot). While he despaired that the series might ruin his chances for good film roles, Beaumont remained with Beaver until its cancellation in 1963. Hugh Beaumont retired from show business in the late 1960s, launching a second career as a successful Christmas tree farmer.

Trivia: Erford Gage was one of the more promising young stage actors in the Northeast of the late '30s and one of the best young players signed by RKO during the early '40s. Born in Massachusetts in 1912, he entered performing as a drummer and part-time singer with the Brookfield, MA, Summer Dance band in the late '20s, before he drifted into acting, starting out in juvenile roles in the early '30s. From 1932 onward, he was employed almost continuously on stage throughout the eastern United States. He kept busy through the Great Depression and eventually joined the Federal Theatre Project of the government's Works Progress Administration. Among the productions in which he appeared through the Federal Theatre in the late '30s were: Prologue to Glory, in which he portrayed a young Abraham Lincoln; Shakespeare's Coriolanus; George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion; and Clyde Fitch's comedy of late 19th century New York, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, in which Gage played Captain Jinks (the play included in its cast future star John Randolph). He also directed in summer stock at Kennebunkport, ME, and in 1940 had his own stock comedy, which did a season at the Copley Theatre in Boston. Gage's last major stage work was in Maurice Evans' Broadway production of Macbeth, after which he went out to Hollywood and signed a contract with RKO. Gage appeared in supporting roles in various movies spread among different genres, beginning with the wartime thriller Seven Miles From Alcatraz and the topical drama Hitler's Children, both directed by Edward Dmytryk. Sandwiched in between these and such enduring box-office hits as H.C. Potter's Mr. Lucky (starring Cary Grant) were a number of very successful B-pictures, among them the comedy Adventures of a Rookie, in which Gage played against type, as a tough sergeant (which he reprised in a sequel Rookies In Burma); the exciting mystery thriller The Falcon Strikes Back; and the topical morale-boosting drama Gangway for Tomorrow. Gage's best single film role, however, was as Jason Hoag in producer Val Lewton's psychological suspense thriller The Seventh Victim. Portraying a poet who has lost his muse and seems content to live quietly, unproductively, in Greenwich Village, Gage imparts a subtle but profound sense of hurt to the character's every nuance, which rises nearer to the surface in the scene where he confronts Tom Conway's glib psychiatrist at a party (they joust verbally while a Brahms piano piece plays softly in the background) and when he shows young ingenue Kim Hunter his apartment, where he would like to work, hoping he has found a companion but instead finding himself rejected. Gage worked in another Falcon movie and played an uncredited role in Days of Glory, Jacques Tourneur's patriotic tribute to the Soviet struggle against the Nazis, before closing out his career in Curse of the Cat People, another Val Lewton production. He left RKO to join the armed forces in 1943. Gage served in the Pacific and his promising career was cut short when he was killed in fighting on Iwo Jima in March 1945, one of more than 8000 Americans who lost their lives in the fighting.

Trivia: Born and raised on a Wyoming ranch, American actress Isabel Jewell would only rarely be called upon to play a "Western" type during her career. For the most part, Isabel -- who made her screen debut in Blessed Event (1932) -- was typecast as a gum-chewing, brassy urban blonde, or as an empty-headed gun moll. Jewell's three best remembered film performances were in Tale of Two Cities (1935), where she was atypically cast as the pathetic seamstress who is sentenced to the guillotine; Lost Horizon (1937), as the consumptive prostitute who finds a new lease on life when she is whisked away to the land of Shangri-La; and Gone with the Wind (1939), where she appears briefly as "poor white trash" Emmy Slattery. In 1946, Isabel finally got to show off the riding skills she'd accumulated in her youth in Wyoming when she was cast as female gunslinger Belle Starr in Badman's Territory. Denied starring roles because of her height (she was well under five feet), Isabel Jewell worked as a supporting player in films until the '50s and in television until the '60s.

Trivia: Born in Florida, Evelyn Brent was raised in New York by her widowed father. A teenaged model, Evelyn began appearing in films at the Popular Plays and Players studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After World War I, she travelled to England, where she worked in films and on stage. Back in the U.S. in 1922, Evelyn established herself in exotic, "dangerous" roles, notably in the late-silent efforts of director Josef Von Sternberg. Luckily, Evelyn's voice matched her screen image perfectly, and she had no trouble adjusting to talkies; unluckily, her earliest talkie starring efforts were box-office failures, and by the mid-1930s Evelyn was consigned to secondary roles. She took occasional sabbaticals from Hollywood to tour in vaudeville, rounding out her acting career in such Monogram cheapies as Bowery Champs (1944) and The Golden Eye (1948). Evelyn Brent worked as an actor's agent in the 1950s, then retired, periodically emerging from her Westwood Village home to appear as guest of honor at theatrical revivals of her best silent films.

Trivia: Seemingly placed on this earth to play hatchet-faced busybodies and spinsters, American actress Ottola Nesmith made her first film appearance in 1915's Still Waters. After a handful of subsequent films, Nesmith returned to the stage, then came back to Hollywood in 1935, where she remained until her retirement in 1965. Her screen roles include Lady Jane in Becky Sharp (1935), Mrs. Robinson in My Name Is Julia Ross (1946), and Mrs. Tugham in Cluny Brown (1946), as well as scores of anonymous nurses, governesses, maids, matrons, and senior-citizen-home residents. Ottola Nesmith's last appearance was in the Natalie Wood starrer Inside Daisy Clover (1967).

Trivia: A kind-looking character actress from the Broadway stage (Salt Water [1929], After Tomorrow [1931], and many others), Edythe Elliott entered films in 1935 and played scores of housekeepers, nurses, housewives, and mothers. Very busy at RKO Radio in the 1940s, Elliott later turned up in a host of television guest spots in the 1950s.

Trivia: In films from 1941, the hauntingly beautiful American actress Elizabeth Russell seemed predestined for psychological horror films. After an unforgettable one-scene appearance as one of the title characters in producer Val Lewton's Cat People, Russell became a fixture of the Lewton unit at RKO until 1946. Her best performance during this period was as the spiteful daughter of genially crazy old recluse Julia Dean in Curse of the Cat People (1944). Outside of her work for Lewton, Elizabeth Russell was seen as Bela Lugosi's wife in The Corpse Vanishes (1942) who, despite being dead for 25 years, gives Lugosi quite a tongue-lashing whenever she sees him and is the model for the portrait of the ghostly Mary Meredith in the Paramount chiller The Uninvited (1944).

Trivia: According to her Rockford, Illinois, high-school yearbook, Barbara Hale hoped to make a career for herself as a commercial artist. Instead, she found herself posing for artists as a professional model. This led to a movie contract at RKO Radio, where she worked her way up from "B"s like The Falcon in Hollywood (1945) to such top-of-the-bill attractions as A Likely Story (1947) and The Boy With Green Hair (1949). She continued to enjoy star billing at Columbia, where among other films she essayed the title role in Lorna Doone (1952). Her popularity dipped a bit in the mid-1950s, but she regained her following in the Emmy-winning role of super-efficient legal secretary Della Street on the Perry Mason TV series. She played Della on a weekly basis from 1957 through 1966, and later appeared in the irregularly scheduled Perry Mason two-hour TV movies of the 1980s and 1990s. The widow of movie leading man Bill Williams, Barbara Hale was the mother of actor/director William Katt. Hale died in 2017, at age 94.

Trivia: American actor and (sometimes) screenwriter William Halligan first appeared before the cameras in 1930. Halligan enjoyed a brief flurry of prominent film roles until 1932, then he returned to the stage. He came back in the 1940s in small parts, mostly at RKO and Paramount. The next time the ubiquitous Til the Clouds Roll By (1946) shows up on television, sharp-eyed viewers should try to spot William Halligan as Captain Andy in the opening Show Boat medley.

Trivia: In films from 1929, mustachioed, businesslike actor Wheaton Chambers could frequently be found in serials, including Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1939), The Adventures of Red Ryder (1940), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) and The Crimson Ghost (1946). In bigger budgeted pictures, he played more than his share of bailiffs, guards and desk clerks. In the 1951 sci-fi masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still, Chambers plays the jeweller who appraises Klaatu's (Michael Rennie) extraterrestrial diamonds. When he was afforded screen billing, which wasn't often, Wheaton Chambers preferred to be identified as J. Wheaton Chambers.

Trivia: Diminutive character actor Lou Lubin enjoyed a career of about a dozen years in movies and early television, as well as radio work. As is the case with most character players, he usually got small roles in big pictures and more substantial roles in small-scale productions. Lubin's short stature and distinctly urban accent made him ideal for playing henchmen and other shady, disreputable characters, although he also turned up on the side of the angels from time to time -- his most memorable part was in Val Lewton's production of The Seventh Victim (1943), as a seedy private eye who loses his life trying to do something decent and then turns up as a corpse on a subway. That same year, he was also given a fair amount of screen time in William Wellman's Lady of Burlesque as Moey the candy butcher. And in 1945, he was seen in Max Nosseck's Dillinger as the luckless waiter who gets on the wrong side of Lawrence Tierney's John Dillinger and receives savage vengeance for his trouble. Lubin's had been out of pictures for 20 years at the time of his death in 1973, at age 77.

Trivia: In films from 1935, American character actor Bud Geary showed up in fleeting roles as chauffeurs, sailors and cops at a variety of studios. Geary was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1942, but nothing really came of it. He finally blossomed as an actor when he hitched up with Republic in the mid-1940s. One of the best "action" heavies in the business, Geary convincingly menaced everyone in sight in such Republic serials as Haunted Harbor (1944), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) and King of the Texas Rangers (1946). Bud Geary was on the verge of bigger things when he was killed in a car accident at the age of 47.

Trivia: Kernan Cripps was recruited from the Broadway stage to play Trask in the early talkie melodrama Alibi (1929). This proved to be Cripps' most extensive screen role; thereafter, he was consigned to bits and minor roles, usually as muscle-bound cops, bodyguards and bartenders. Looking quite comfortable in uniform, he essayed such roles as the umpire in the baseball comedy Ladies Day (1943) and the train conductor in the noir classic Double Indemnity (1944). Kernan Cripps also proved to be a handy man to have around in such action-packed fare as the Republic serial Federal Operator 99.

Trivia: Howard M. Mitchell's screen acting career got off to a good start with a pair of silent serials, Beloved Adventurer (1914) and The Road of Strife (1915). Mitchell kept busy as a director in the 1920s, returning to acting in 1935. His roles were confined to bits and walk-ons as guards, storekeepers, judges, and especially police chiefs. Howard M. Mitchell closed out his career playing a train conductor in the classic "B" melodrama The Narrow Margin (1952).

Trivia: An important screen director in the 1910s, Illinois-born Lloyd Ingraham had been a stock manager for California entrepreneur Oliver Morosco prior to entering films directing Broncho Billy Westerns for Essanay in the early 1910s. He went on to direct some of the silent era's biggest stars, including Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and would specialize in robust outdoor adventures and Westerns. An equally busy supporting player who appeared in scores of silent films ranging from Intolerance (1916) to Scaramouche (1923), the white-haired, ascetic-looking veteran became an actor for hire after the advent of sound, appearing mostly in low-budget Westerns and almost always playing the heroine's father or a lawman. Spending his final years as a resident of the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, Ingraham's death was attributed to pneumonia.

Trivia: Barrel-chested American actor Dewey Robinson was much in demand during the gangster cycle of the early '30s. Few actors could convey muscular menace and mental vacuity as quickly and as well as the mountainous Mr. Robinson. Most of his roles were bits, but he was given extended screen time as a polo-playing mobster in Edward G. Robinson's Little Giant (1933), as a bored slavemaster in the outrageously erotic "No More Love" number in Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933) and as a plug-ugly ward heeler at odds with beauty contest judge Ben Turpin in the slapstick 2-reeler Keystone Hotel (1935). Shortly before his death in 1950, Dewey Robinson had a lengthy unbilled role as a Brooklyn baseball fan in The Jackie Robinson Story, slowly metamorphosing from a brainless bigot to Jackie's most demonstrative supporter.

Trivia: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.

Trivia: According to his publicity, Russian opera singer-turned-Hollywood bit-part player Adia Kuznetzoff could sing full throttle in "all languages." He did so both often and well in films ranging from the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy operetta Maytime (1937) to the 1943 Universal horror flick Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Kuznetzoff was in especially fine fettle in the latter, leading the villagers in a rousing rendition of "Faro-La, Faro-Li," a ditty composed for the occasion by Curt Siodmak and Hans J. Salter and containing the chilly refrain: "For life is short, but death is long, Faro-La, Faro-Li!" In the Paramount musical Rainbow Island (1944), Kuznetzoff, as an executioner, equally memorably joined comedian Gil Lamb in a chorus or two of "Boogie-Woogie-Boogie Man."

Trivia: Character actress Sarah Selby came to films by way of radio. In fact, her first screen assignment was a voice-over as one of the gossiping elephants in Disney's animated feature Dumbo (1941). She continued to play minor roles as nurses, housekeepers, and town gossips until her retirement in 1977; one of her last roles was Aunt Polly in a 1975 TV-movie adaptation of Huckleberry Finn. On television, Sarah Selby was seen on a semi-regular basis as storekeeper Ma Smalley on Gunsmoke (1955-1975).

Trivia: A tough-talking character actress from Missouri, Betty Roadman usually played prison matrons (Trade Winds, 1938 and Passport to Destiny, 1944) but was also effective in Westerns, i.e. as "Buckskin" Liz, the owner of a beleaguered stagecoach in Return of the Durango Kid (1944). Roadman became a special favorite of producer Val Lewton, who cast her as Jane Randolph's cleaning woman in Cat People (1942), Margo's mother in The Leopard Man (1943), and other colorful bit roles. Roadman ended her screen career in 1947.

Trivia: Wally Brown built up his reputation in vaudeville as a fast-talking (albeit low-pressure) monologist. In 1942, Brown decided to settle down in Hollywood with a contract at RKO Radio Pictures, making his movie-debut in Petticoat Larceny (1943). When RKO decided to emulate the success of Universal's Abbott and Costello, the studio teamed Brown with short, stocky Alan Carney for a series of energetic but undistinguished "B" pictures, the first of which was the Buck Privates wannabe Adventures of a Rookie (1943). Brown and Carney used the same character names (Brown played Jerry Miles, while Carney played Mike Strager) in each of their starring films--which is just as well, since the movies are virtually impossible to tell apart. Arguably the team's best film was 1945's Zombies on Broadway. RKO folded Brown and Carney in 1946, after which both actors continued working in films as solo character performers; they would be reunited, after a fashion, in the 1961 Disney film The Absent Minded Professor. Wally Brown spent most of his last decade as a prolific TV guest star; his last performance, telecast posthumously, was an appearance on My Three Sons.

Trivia: Stage actor Ben Bard resettled in Hollywood upon his marriage to serial queen Ruth Roland. In films from 1927, Bard at first specialized in slimy "underworld" roles. Among his early talkie appearances was The Bat Whispers (1930), in which, as "The Unknown," he tied up all the film's loose plot ends. Over at MGM, he played "Sharlie," the erstwhile straight man for radio's Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl), in Meet the Baron (1933) and Hollywood Party (1934). He then left films for nearly a decade, making his living as an acting teacher and vocal coach. Ben Bard returned to films in 1943 as a member of RKO producer Val Lewton's stock company, essaying substantial roles in Lewton's Leopard Man (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943) and Youth Runs Wild (1944).

Trivia: French actor Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. is the son of the world famous operatic bass whose name he bears. Young Chaliapin, tired of living under his father's fame, finally left Paris so he could find his own fortune. In Hollywood, he began as a bit-player in silent films. Soon he became known as an excellent character actor who appeared in such films as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Chaliapin moved to Italy following the end of WW II and began appearing in films there. He later returned to Hollywood and had a comeback when he was cast into the role of a deadly monk in The Name of the Rose (1986). Originally, John Huston was to play the role, but he fell ill. Chaliapin then appeared in Stanley and Iris as Robert De Niro's father, and may be best remembered as the looney dog-walking grandfather in Moonstruck (1987).