Trivia: He debuted onstage in stock in 1921, and reached Broadway three years later. He entered films in 1929, going on to a busy screen career through the '30s; his screen work after 1940 was infrequent. He often played fast-talking, scoop-chasing reporters and other dynamic types. After 17 years with no film appearances, he came back to the screen in Gore Vidal's The Best Man (1964), reprising his stage role as a Harry Truman-like politico; for his work he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He did much work on TV, including the lead role in the series Martin Kaye, Private Eye.

Trivia: Tom Brown was the "boy next door" type in many films, playing ideal, clean-cut, all-Americans youths in many films of the '30s. The son of vaudevillian Harry Brown and musical comedy star Marie (Francis) Brown, he was on radio and stage from infancy, Broadway from age nine. Brown began appearing in silent movies at age ten in 1923. Pleasantly baby-faced, in the thirties he acquired his typecast image, playing students, sons, sweethearts, military cadets, brothers. His first talkie was The Lady Lies (1929), playing Walter Huston's son; he appeared in more than 100 other films. After service in World War Two (as a paratrooper), he attempted to shed his image by playing heavies, without much success; his career was further derailed when he was called up for service in Korea, from where he returned as a lieutenant colonel. After that Brown did little film work but became a familiar face on TV; now bald-headed, he had continuing roles on the TV series Gunsmoke (as rancher Ed O'Conner) and on the soap operas General Hospital (as Al Weeks) and Days of Our Lives (as Nathan Curtis).

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: 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: Tall, handsome, golden-throated leading man Ian Keith became a Broadway favorite in the 1920s. He also pursued a sporadic silent film career, appearing opposite the illustrious likes of Gloria Swanson and Lon Chaney Sr. A natural for talkies, Keith appeared in such early sound efforts as Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) and D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) (in which he played John Wilkes Booth). A favorite of Cecil B. DeMille, Keith stole the show as the cultured, soft-spoken Saladin in DeMille's The Crusades (1935). A rambunctious night life and an inclination towards elbow-bending reduced Keith's stature in Hollywood, and by the mid-1940s he was occasionally obliged to appear in such cheapies as the 1946 "Bowery Boys" epic Mr. Hex. His final screen appearance was a cameo as Rameses I in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Among Ian Keith's wives was stage luminary Blanche Yurka and silent-film leading lady Ethel Clayton.

Trivia: Stage and vaudeville alumnus John Sheehan joined the American Film Company in 1914. After a handful of starring roles, Sheehan went back to the stage, returning to films in 1930. For the next 20 years, he played scores of minor roles, usually as raffish tuxedoed types in speakeasy and gambling-parlor scenes. As a loyal member of the Masquers' Club, a theatrical fraternity, John Sheehan starred in the Masquers' two-reel comedy Stout Hearts and Willing Hands (1931), then went on to appear in support of such short-subject stars as Charley Chase and Clark McCullough.

Trivia: Slightly built, snowy-haired American actor Harry C. Bradley had a long career on stage before his film bow in 1931's The Smiling Lieutenant. Usually sporting a well-tailored suit and a pair of rimless spectacles, Bradley played dozens of bookkeepers, court clerks, conductors and pharmacists. Two of his more visible screen roles were the justice of the peace in the 1936 comedy classic Libelled Lady and Keedish in the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. He was also a member in good standing of the Frank Capra stock company, showing up fleetingly in such Capra productions as It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Harry C. Bradley's last film assignment included a pair of Henry Aldrich "B"-pictures, in which he was cast as a tweedy high school teacher named Tottle.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: Round-faced, roly-poly Pat Costello is best remembered today as the older brother of comic Lou Costello, and it was in association with his brother that he had his biggest onscreen acting role, of Detective Tim Williams in the Abbott & Costello film Mexican Hayride (1948). The elder Costello sibling proved funny in his own right in that movie, as a straight-man foil for the younger Costello; one of their best bits together played off of their physical similarities. Pat Costello -- born Anthony Sebastian Cristillo three and a half years before his brother Lou -- started out in performing a long way from comedy; his interest was in music, and he was a bandleader in his twenties, doing Dixieland jazz in the 1920s and '30s. He also spent a fair amount of time in New Orleans during this period. It was only when Lou Costello went to Hollywood, and got a long-term contract, that Pat Costello abandoned music and headed there as well. Pat was a stunt-double for his brother in Buck Privates and Keep 'Em Flying (both 1941), Rio Rita (1942), and It Ain't Hay (1943), but during this period he also piled up a fair number of comic acting credits in various East Side Kids movies, produced by Sam Katzman. He was the boxing coach in Bowery Blitzkrieg and the navy recruiter in Let's Get Tough!, among other movies, and also made it into such low-budget horror movies as Voodoo Man and The Brute Man. According to his daughter, Pat Costello treated his onscreen work as a delightful lark to fill time, rather than as a real career; behind the scenes, however, he worked hard as the producer of The Abbott & Costello Show and the Abbott & Costello film vehicle Jack and the Beanstalk. He kept working in movies until his brother's death, and gradually slipped into retirement, playing golf and cards, including poker and gin. He outlived his more famous brother by more than 30 years, and lived to see the Abbott & Costello movies and television show find several generations of new fans.

Trivia: Actor/writer Robert Middlemass was most closely associated with George M. Cohan during his Broadway years, appearing in such Cohan productions as Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Tavern. Before the 1920s were over, Middlemass had written or co-written several plays and one-act sketches, the most famous of which was The Valiant. Though he appeared in the 1918 feature film 5000 a Week, his screen career proper didn't begin in 1934, when he showed up as a foil for the Ritz Brothers in the New York-filmed comedy short Hotel Anchovy. For the next decade, Middlemass was based in Hollywood, essaying various authority figures in approximately two dozen films. Robert Middlemass' better screen roles include the flustered sheriff in the Marx Bros. Day at the Races (1937) and impresario Oscar Hammerstein in The Dolly Sisters (1945).