Trivia: Sidney Sommers Toler was born in Warrensburg, MO, the son of a renowned horse-breeder, Col. H.G. Toler, in 1874; three weeks later, the family moved to a stock farm near Wichita, KS, where he grew up. From an early age, he showed an interest in acting, and got his start at seven when he played Tom Sawyer in an adaptation written by his mother (this in a period in which the author Samuel Clemens was very much alive and the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a popular contemporary work). Toler enrolled in the University of Kansas but abandoned his studies in favor of pursuing a career as an actor after receiving some words of encouragement during a brief encounter with actress Julia Marlowe. At 18, he headed to New York. He did a stint in the Corse Payton stock company, based in Brooklyn, where he became a leading man specializing in romantic parts over a period of four years.Toler later had his own stock company, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for five years, and became a successful playwright, authoring The Dancing Masters, The Belle of Richmond, The House on the Sands, Ritzy, and The Golden Age, among many other plays. One of his works, The Man They Left Behind, was a major hit regionally and was being performed simultaneously by 18 different companies, and Toler himself once had a dozen different acting companies on the road performing his work. Two of his plays, Golden Days and The Exile, were also produced on Broadway. But it was during his 14 years with producer David Belasco that Toler became a Broadway star, culminating with his portrayal of Kelly the iceman in A Wise Child. Following a run of the play in Boston, Hollywood beckoned; with the full arrival of sound, the film mecca was suddenly desperate for experienced stage actors -- and in 1929 he made the move into films. Over the next nine years, he worked in 50 movies, in everything from comedies to Westerns, including Madame X, White Shoulders, Tom Brown of Culver, Our Relations (playing the belligerent ship's captain in the Laurel and Hardy comedy), and The Phantom President. In 1938, fate took a hand when Warner Oland, the Swedish actor who had portrayed Honolulu-based police detective Charlie Chan in 16 movies for Fox, passed away. Toler was selected by the studio to succeed him in the role, and he immediately began receiving the largest amount of mail he had ever gotten in connection with his screen career, from fans of the Chan movies offering him encouragement and advice, which mostly consisted of urgings to mimic Oland was much as possible. Instead, with the support of the director, he went back to the six Chan novels written by Biggers (who had died in 1933) and reconstructed the character based on what he took out of those pages. Toler, who stood six feet and was a solid 190 pounds, created the illusion of being smaller and heavier in the role. The first two of his Chan movies, Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) and Charlie Chan in Reno (1939), proved so popular at the box office that Toler was signed to a long-term contract in August of 1939. Toler brought a good deal of warmth and wry humor to the role of the police detective, and had excellent interaction with Victor Sen Yung, who played the detective's number-two son, Jimmy. The Chan pictures, which usually clocked in at under 80 minutes and occasionally under 70 by the mid-'30s, were studio programmers, essentially classy B-pictures made on reasonable but fixed budgets; they were also bread-and-butter revenue pictures, guaranteed money-makers and perennially popular. When Toler took over the role, they remained in this category, and if they were never opulent, they were good-looking productions whose mysteries and twists were ever-teasing and enticing to audiences. The revenue stream that they generated helped pay the bills for such large-scale productions as Suez. The Charlie Chan movies remained popular right into 1941, but the entry of the United States into the Second World War at the end of the year, coupled with the uncertainty of international distribution -- and the Chan movies were enormously popular overseas -- caused Fox to drop the series. The last of the Fox Chan movies was Castle in the Desert, released in early 1942, which holds up very well as a representative of the series. Over the next year, Toler worked in other roles, including portraying one of the villains in Edgar G. Ulmer's two-fisted adventure yarn Isle of Forgotten Sins. The years 1942-1943 were not good for Toler, however. In addition to seemingly losing the Chan role in early 1942, his wife of 18 years, Vivian, passed away in 1943; he also underwent surgery that year from which, it was revealed after his death, he never fully recovered. According to his second wife, Viva Tattersall (who had worked with him on-stage in his play Ritzy), whom he married in 1943, Toler was never told that he had intestinal cancer or that he was terminally ill. Accounts vary somewhat as to what happened next. According to most historians, it was Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row studio with a special interest in film series (they had the East Side Kids, and would soon have the Bowery Boys), that picked up the screen rights to the Chan character from the Biggers estate, and then selected Toler to star in a new round of movies. But others maintain that it was Toler himself, recognizing that there was still an audience for the movies, who bought the screen rights and then sold them to Monogram, with the provision that he star in the movies. Given his previously demonstrated business acumen on the stage, one can see where the second scenario was not only possible but likely, especially as onlookers (including Toler) would have recognized that Fox had handed away a gold mine with the screen character of Sherlock Holmes, which Universal grabbed up and with which they were making a small fortune by late 1942 -- the whole truth is buried somewhere in the Monogram business records.In any case, Toler was back in the lead role in the revived series when it commenced in 1944 with Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, in which the renowned sleuth joins the war effort in Washington, turning his skills to the hunting down of spies, saboteurs, and other enemies of freedom. This new twist to the character -- possibly inspired by Universal's success in bringing the character of Sherlock Holmes (as portrayed by Basil Rathbone) into stories built on World War II's events -- gave Charlie Chan a new lease on life and added a fresh, contemporary edge to the movies. That new element in the plotting also helped to compensate for the threadbare production values of the Monogram Chan films, which looked nowhere near as good as the Fox films in terms of casting, sets, or costuming. Toler's acting was more important than ever and although he was in an ever-weakening physical state, he kept up the portrayal convincingly and also engaged in some surprisingly strenuous scenes in some of the 1944-1945 Monogram pictures. Though neither the actor himself, nor anyone around him (except his wife and physician), nor any of the audience knew it, those movies were the last testament of a dying man. Looked at in the decades since, whatever their production flaws, they're a powerful statement of fortitude, professionalism, and dedication to the acting profession in the face of horrendous physical toll. By the summer of 1946, Toler was almost too weak to work, and it was clear in his final two movies -- Dangerous Money and The Trap, shot simultaneously in August of that year -- that he could barely walk. He retired to his home in Beverly Hills and spent the next seven months bedridden, before he passed away in February of 1947.

Trivia: Appropriately nicknamed "Google Eyes" by his childhood friends, African-American actor Mantan Moreland joined a carnival at 14 and a medicine show a year later - and both times was dragged home by juvenile authorities. Most of Moreland's early adult years were spent on the "Chitlin Circuit," the nickname given by performers to all-black vaudeville. After a decade of professional ups and downs, Moreland teamed with several comics (notably Benny Carter) in an act based on the "indefinite talk" routine of Flournoy and Miller, wherein each teammate would start a sentence, only to be interrupted by the other teammate ("Say, have you seen...?" "I saw him yesterday. He was at..." "I thought they closed that place down!"). Moreland's entered films in 1936, usually in the tiny porter, waiter and bootblack roles then reserved for black actors. Too funny to continue being shunted aside by lily-white Hollywood, Moreland began getting better parts in a late-'30s series of comedy adventures produced at Monogram and costarring white actor Frankie Darro. The screen friendship between Mantan and Frankie was rare for films of this period, and it was this series that proved Moreland was no mere "Movie Negro." Moreland stayed with Monogram in the '40s as Birmingham Brown, eternally frightened chauffeur of the Charlie Chan films. The variations Moreland wrought upon the line "Feets, do your duty" were astonishing and hilarious, and though the Birmingham role was never completely free of stereotype, by the end of the Chan series in 1949 Monogram recognized Moreland's value to the series by having Charlie Chan refer to "my assistant, Birmingham Brown" - not merely "my hired man." Always popular with black audiences (he was frequently given top billing in the advertising of the Chan films by Harlem theatre owners), Moreland starred in a series of crude but undeniably entertaining comedies filmed by Toddy Studios for all-black theatres. The actor also occasionally popped up in A-pictures like MGM's Cabin in the Sky, and worked steadily in radio. Changing racial attitudes in the '50s and '60s lessend Moreland's ability to work in films; in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, a frightened black man was no longer considered amusing even by Mantan's fans. Virtually broke, Moreland suffered a severe stroke in the early '60s, and it looked as though he was finished in Hollywood. Things improved for Moreland after 1964, first with a bit in the oddly endearing horror picture Spider Baby (1964), then with a pair of prominent cameos in Enter Laughing (1968) and The Comic (1969), both directed by Carl Reiner. With more and more African Americans being hired for TV and films in the late '60s, Moreland was again in demand. He worked on such TV sitcoms as Love American Style and The Bill Cosby Show, revived his "indefinite talk" routine for a gasoline commercial, and enjoyed a solid film role was as a race-conscious counterman in Watermelon Man (1970). In his last years, Mantan Moreland was a honored guest at the meetings of the international Laurel and Hardy fan club "The Sons of the Desert," thanks to his brief but amusing appearance in the team's 1942 comedy A-Haunting We Will Go (1942).

Trivia: The story goes that Benson Fong was a California grocer when, in 1943, he was asked by a talent scout if he'd like to be in a movie (Asian types were, of course, highly sought after during the War years). Actually, Fong had been accepting occasional movie bit parts as early as 1937. After his requisite wartime appearances as hateful Japanese soldiers and courageous Chinese freedom fighters, Fong showed up as Charlie Chan's "number three son" Tommy in four Monogram-produced "Chan" programmers. On the advice of his friend Gregory Peck, Fong added to his acting income by becoming a successful restaurateur, with several top eateries in the southern California region to his name. Active in films into the 1980s, Benson Fong also showed up from time to time on TV, notably as "The Old One" on Kung Fu.

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: 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: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: A confirmed teetotaller, mustachioed American actor Jack Norton nonetheless earned cinematic immortality for his innumerable film appearances as a comic drunk. A veteran vaudevillian - he appeared in a comedy act with his wife Lillian - and stage performer, Norton entered films in 1934, often playing stone-cold sober characters; in one Leon Errol two-reeler, One Too Many, he was a stern nightcourt judge sentencing Errol on a charge of public inebriation! From Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934) onward, however, the Jack Norton that audiences loved began staggering his way from one film to another; it seemed for a while that no film could have a scene in a nightclub or salloon without Norton, three sheets to the wind and in top hat and tails, leaning precariously against the bar. To perfect his act, Norton would follow genuine drunks for several city blocks, memorizing each nuance of movement; to avoid becoming too involved in his roles, the actor drank only ginger ale and bicarbonate of soda. Though his appearances as a drunk could fill a book in themselves, Norton could occasionally be seen sober, notably in You Belong to Me (1940), The Fleet's In (1941) and Harold Lloyd's Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946); he also "took the pledge" in such short comedies as Our Gang's The Awful Tooth (1938), Andy Clyde's Heather and Yon (1944) and the Three Stooges' Rhythm and Weep (1946). One of Norton's oddest roles was as a detective in the Charlie Chan thriller Shadows over Chinatown (1947), in which he went undercover by pretending to be a souse. Retiring from films in 1948 due to illness, Norton occasionally appeared on live TV in the early '50s. Jack Norton's final appearance would have been in a 1955 episode of Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners, but age and infirmity had so overwhelmed him that he was literally written out of the show as it was being filmed - though Jackie Gleason saw to it that Norton was paid fully for the performance he was ready, willing, but unable to give.