Trivia: Swedish actor Warner Oland was educated in Boston, but proudly retained his Scandinavian roots throughout his life, even devoting time to translating the works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen into English for the benefit of theatrical scholars. Trained at Dr. Curry's Acting School, Oland took on a theatrical career, ultimately tackling the movie industry in 1915 with an appearance in Sin opposite Theda Bara. Oland's curious facial features enabled the occidental actor to specialize in oriental roles, most often as a villain. While his silent film appearances ranged from Cesar Borgia in Don Juan (1926) to Al Jolson's Jewish cantor father in The Jazz Singer (1927), Oland's oriental roles gained him the widest popularity, especially his portrayal as the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in three early talking pictures. In 1931, Oland was cast as the wily, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan Carries On for the Fox studios (later 20th Century-Fox). He would make annual appearances as Chan until 1934, when Fox decided to use the Earl Derr Biggers character as the focal point of a regular B-movie series; Oland would now be seen as Charlie Chan three times per year, and ultimately the actor would make a total of sixteen Chan pictures. From 1934 onward, Warner Oland was Charlie Chan - and vice versa. He remained in character on the set even when giving an interview or flubbing a line, and during a 1935 visit to China, Oland was mobbed by his enthusiastic Chinese movie fans, some of whom were so enchanted by his performance that (it is said) they actually believed Oland was genuinely Asian. During production of Charlie Chan at the Arena in 1938, Warner Oland died, and the movie was rearranged as a Peter Lorre vehicle, Mr. Moto's Gamble. The movie role of Charlie Chan was inherited by Sidney Toler, and later by Roland Winters.

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: Born Harold Albershart, he played football and modeled before working as a stage actor in the late '20s. He debuted onscreen in Not Quite Decent (1929), playing the romantic lead; he had similar roles in 25 films made during the '30s at various studios. He began starring in serials in 1940. In 1944 he made his first starring Western, and for almost a decade he was a Western star, twice appearing (1951 and 1953) on the Top Ten Western Money-makers list and appearing in over 100 features and serials, often with his "wonder" horse Blackjack; he portrayed Red Ryder in eight films, then adopted the name "Rocky" Lane in 1947. After B-movie Westerns fizzled out in 1953 his career came to a virtual halt, and he had supporting roles in just three more films. In the '60s he was the dubbed voice of the talking horse on the TV sitcom Mr. Ed.

Trivia: Lean, lightly mustached general purpose actor John Eldredge came to films after several successful seasons with the New York Civic Repertory. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1934, Eldredge became a handy man to have around whenever the script called for a weakling or cad. He played Bette Davis' good-for-nothing husband in Dangerous (1935), and later offered a variation of the theme as Joan Leslie's callow beau in High Sierra (1941). Only rarely, as in Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), was he permitted to play a character with substance and intestinal fortitude. Even after the expiration of his Warners contract, he specialized in such namby-pamby characterizations as Walter W. Walker III in Columbia's Eve Knew Her Apples (1944). As he grew older and grayer, Eldredge's characters often assumed a weary dignity; one of his more rewarding later assignments was the part of Captain Collins in the sci-fi "sleeper" I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958). A busy TV performer in the 1950s, Eldredge could be seen playing slimy villains in virtually every other cop or adventure series of the era; on a more respectable note, he played the heroine's father in the 1954 syndicated sitcom Meet Corliss Archer. John Eldredge is one of the few character actors of Hollywood's Golden Era to be afforded his own Internet website, which can be found under the heading "The Man Without Qualities."

Trivia: After considerable experience on the New York stage, Morgan Wallace entered films at D.W. Griffith's studio in Mamaroneck, Long Island. Wallace's first screen role of note was the lecherous Marquis de Praille in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921). Thereafter, he specialized in dignified character parts such as James Monroe in George Arliss' Alexander Hamilton (1931). A favorite of comedian W.C. Fields (perhaps because he was born in Lompoc, CA, one of Fields' favorite comic targets), Wallace showed up as Jasper Fitchmuller, the customer who wants kumquats and wants them now, in Fields' It's a Gift (1934). Morgan Wallace retired in 1946.

Trivia: Once Canadian-born actor Jonathan Hale became well known for his portrayal of well-to-do businessmen, he was fond of telling the story of how he'd almost been a man of wealth in real life--except for an improvident financial decision by his father. A minor diplomat before he turned to acting, Hale began appearing in minor film roles in 1934, showing up fleetingly in such well-remembered films as the Karloff/Lugosi film The Raven (1935), the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935) and the first version of A Star is Born (1937). In 1938, Hale was cast as construction executive J. C. Dithers in Blondie, the first of 28 "B"-pictures based on Chic Young's popular comic strip. Though taller and more distinguished-looking than the gnomelike Dithers of the comics, Hale became instantly synonymous with the role, continuing to portray the character until 1946's Blondie's Lucky Day (his voice was heard in the final film of the series, Beware of Blondie, though that film's on-camera Dithers was Edward Earle). During this same period, Hale also appeared regularly as Irish-brogued Inspector Fernack in RKO's "The Saint" series. After 1946, Hale alternated between supporting roles and bits, frequently unbilled (e.g. Angel on My Shoulder, Call Northside 777 and Son of Paleface); he had a pivotal role as Robert Walker's hated father in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), though the part was confined to a smidgen of dialogue and a single long-shot. Hale worked prolifically in television in the '50s, with substantial guest roles in such series as Disneyland and The Adventures of Superman. In 1966, after a long illness, Jonathan Hale committed suicide at the age of 75, just months before the TV release of the Blondie films that had won him prominence in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: A cabaret artist in his native Holland, Frederick (or Fredrik) Vogedink spent the early years of his screen career in Germany. In 1920, he married American actress Florence Roberts (1871-1927) and co-starred with Dorothy Dalton in Behind Masks (1921), a routine crime drama from Paramount. He appeared in a few other silent films in Hollywood, but Vogedink's screen career began in earnest in 1933, when he made an indelible impression as the grim U-boat captain in Below the Sea. With his stern visage, Vogedink later excelled at playing Nazis and was memorable as the nasty Captain Richter in one of the earliest Hollywood films to openly criticize Hitler's Germany, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Vogedink's death was attributed to the aftereffects of a heart attack.

Trivia: Excelling in baseball while at Phillips-Exeter academy, American comic actor Andrew Tombes determined he'd make a better living as an actor than as a ballplayer. By the time he became a headliner in the Ziegfeld Follies, Tombes had performed in everything from Shakespeare to musical comedy. He received star billing in five editions of the Follies in the '20s, during which time he befriended fellow Ziegfeldite Will Rogers. It was Rogers who invited Tombes to Hollywood for the 1935 Fox production Doubting Thomas. An endearingly nutty farceur in his stage roles, Tombes' screen persona was that of an eternally befuddled, easily aggravated business executive. The baldheaded, popeyed actor remained at Fox for several years after Doubting Thomas, playing an overabundance of police commissioners, movie executives, college deans, and Broadway "angels." Tombes' problem was that he arrived in talkies too late in the game: most of the larger roles in which he specialized usually went to such long-established character men as Walter Catlett and Berton Churchill, obliging Tombes to settle for parts of diminishing importance in the '40s. Most of his later screen appearances were unbilled, even such sizeable assignments as the would-be musical backer in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941) and the royal undertaker's assistant in Hope and Crosby's Road to Morocco (1942). Still, Tombes was given ample opportunity to shine, especially as the secretive, suicidal bartender in the 1944 "film noir" Phantom Lady. Andrew Tombes last picture was How to Be Very Very Popular (1955), which starred a colleague from his busier days at 20th Century-Fox, Betty Grable.

Trivia: Stately stage leading man Howard C. Hickman entered films through the auspices of producer Thomas H. Ince. Hickman starred as Count Ferdinand, the Messianic protagonist of Ince's Civilization (1916). He co-starred with his actress wife Bessie Barriscale in several productions before returning to the theatre. In the talkie era, he accepted innumerable featured and bit roles as doctors, judges, ministers, senators, and executives. Generations of filmgoers will remember Howard Hickman for his brief appearance as John Wilkes, father of Ashley Wilkes and father-in-law of Melanie Hamilton, in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Trivia: Thomas Beck was but one of a legion of pleasant, unassuming young men who were signed to 20th Century-Fox contracts in the mid-1930s. Beck was afforded romantic-lead assignments in several of Fox's "B" productions, including four "Charlie Chans," two "Mr. Motos" and a brace of the "Jones Family" comedies. He also played featured roles in a handful of "A"s: a dying legionnaire in Under Two Flags (1937), Brissac in Seventh Heaven (1937) and the village priest in Heidi (1938). Beck might have gone on to stardom had not his fervent political activities with the Screen Actors Guild prompted Fox to "punish" the actor by cutting his salary. Turning his back on films at age 30, Thomas Beck successfully pursued a number of business ventures before retiring to Florida in the early 1970s.

Trivia: American actor Edward Keane was eminently suitable for roles requiring tuxedos and military uniforms. From his first screen appearance in 1921 to his last in 1952, Keane exuded the dignity and assurance of a self-made man of wealth or a briskly authoritative Armed Services officer. Fortunately his acting fee was modest, enabling Keane to add class to even the cheapest of poverty-row "B"s. Generations of Marx Bros. fans will remember Edward Keane as the ship's captain (he's the one who heaps praise upon the three bearded Russian aviators) in A Night at the Opera (1935).

Trivia: With his shock of snow-white hair and his inevitable pince-nez, Lithuanian-born character actor Maurice Cass was destined to play stage managers, theatrical impresarios, school principals and absent-minded professors. Cass's theatrical voice provided an amusing contrast to his tiny, birdlike frame. Cass's film characters were always well along in years, at least seventy or thereabouts; thus, he was able to keep working until he was really approaching seventy (an age which, alas, he missed by some four months). In his last year on earth, Maurice Cass could be seen on a weekly basis as Professor Newton on the TV serial Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.

Trivia: This callow, mustachioed American actor showed up in utility roles in films beginning in the early 1930s. Usually playing bits in features, Brodie was given a wider range in short subjects, notably as gentleman thief "Baffles" in the 1941 El Brendel 2-reeler Yumpin' Yiminy. Some of his more notable credits include his voiceover work in the Disney cartoon feature Dumbo and his subtly sleazy portrayal of the used car salesman in the noir classic Detour (1946). He also worked off and on as a dialogue director.

Trivia: The embodiment of corporate dignity, British actor Frank Conroy nonetheless gave the impression of being a long-trusted executive who was about to abscond with the company funds. During his Broadway career, Conroy frequently achieved above-the-title billing; he never quite managed this in Hollywood, but neither was he ever without work. Conroy made his first film, Royal Family of Broadway, in 1930; uncharacteristically, he plays the ardent suitor of the leading lady (Ina Claire), and very nearly wins the lady before she decides that her stage career comes first. Conroy's respectable veneer allowed him to play many a "hidden killer" in movie mysteries like Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935). He left films periodically for more varied assignments on stage; in 1939, he originated the role of dying millionaire Horace Giddens in Lillian Hellmans The Little Foxes. Returning to Hollywood in the 1940s, it was back to authoritative villainy, notably his role in The Ox-Bow Incident as a martinet ex-military officer who rigidly supervises a lynching, then kills himself when he realizes he's executed three innocent men. More benign roles came Conroy's way in All My Sons (1948), in which he plays an industrialist serving a prison sentence while the guilty man (Edward G. Robinson) walks free; and in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), wherein Conroy has a lengthy unbilled role as the American diplomat who listens to the demands of outer-space visitor Michael Rennie. Frank Conroy remained a top character player until his retirement in 1960, usually honored with "guest star" billing on the many TV anthologies of the era.

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: Famed for his ratchety voice and cold-fish stare, William Demarest was an "old pro" even when he was a young pro. He began his stage career at age 13, holding down a variety of colorful jobs (including professional boxer) during the off-season. After years in carnivals and as a vaudeville headliner, Demarest starred in such Broadway long-runners as Earl Carroll's Sketch Book. He was signed with Warner Bros. pictures in 1926, where he was briefly paired with Clyde Cook as a "Mutt and Jeff"-style comedy team. Demarest's late-silent and early-talkie roles varied in size, becoming more consistently substantial in the late 1930s. His specialty during this period was a bone-crushing pratfall, a physical feat he was able to perform into his 60s. While at Paramount in the 1940s, Demarest was a special favorite of writer/director Preston Sturges, who cast Demarest in virtually all his films: The Great McGinty (1940); Christmas in July (1940); The Lady Eve (1941); Sullivan's Travels (1942); The Palm Beach Story (1942); Hail the Conquering Hero (1944); Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), wherein Demarest was at his bombastic best as Officer Kockenlocker; and The Great Moment (1944). For his role as Al Jolson's fictional mentor Steve Martin in The Jolson Story (1946), Demarest was Oscar-nominated (the actor had, incidentally, appeared with Jolie in 1927's The Jazz Singer). Demarest continued appearing in films until 1975, whenever his increasingly heavy TV schedule would allow. Many Demarest fans assumed that his role as Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons (66-72) was his first regular TV work: in truth, Demarest had previously starred in the short-lived 1960 sitcom Love and Marriage.

Trivia: Character actor Emmett Vogan appeared in films from 1934 through 1956. A peppery gentleman with steel-rimmed glasses and an executive air, Vogan appeared in hundreds of films in a variety of small "take charge" roles. Evidently he had a few friends in the casting department of Universal Pictures, inasmuch as he showed up with regularity in that studio's comedies, serials and B-westerns. Comedy fans will recognize Emmett Vogan as the engineer partner of nominal leading man Charles Lang in W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and as the prosecuting attorney in the flashback sequences of Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945).

Trivia: Early in her acting career, Katherine DeMille occasionally received reviews in which critics noted the strong determination of her looks and bearing--traits which, the critics suggested, she obviously "inherited" from her father, film director Cecil B. DeMille. First appearing before the cameras in her father's Madam Satan (1930), Ms DeMille managed to do quite well for herself in films without her father's influence. She was most often cast in supporting roles, usually playing disgruntled cast-off lovers or exotic villainesses. One of her best screen scenes was a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barbara Stanwyck in Banjo on My Knee (1936). Katherine DeMille was for many years the wife of actor Anthony Quinn, with whom she co-starred in the praiseworthy "B" picture Black Gold (1947).

Trivia: Actress Minerva Urecal claimed that her last name was an amalgam of her family home town of Eureka, California. True or not, Urecal would spend the balance of her life in California, specifically Hollywood. Making the transition from stage to screen in 1934, Ms. Urecal appeared in innumerable bits, usually as cleaning women, shopkeepers and hatchet-faced landladies. In B-pictures and 2-reelers of the 1940s, she established herself as a less expensive Marjorie Main type; her range now encompassed society dowagers (see the East Side Kids' Mr. Muggs Steps Out) and Mrs. Danvers-like housekeepers (see Bela Lugosi's The Ape Man). With the emergence of television, Minerva Urecal entered the "guest star" phase of her career. She achieved top billing in the 1958 TV sitcom Tugboat Annie, and replaced Hope Emerson as Mother for the 1959-60 season of the weekly detective series Peter Gunn. Minerva Urecal was active up until the early '60s, when she enjoyed some of the most sizeable roles of her career, notably the easily offended Swedish cook in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962) and the town harridan who is turned to stone in Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (1964).

Trivia: American actress Charlotte Henry played leading juvenile roles in many films during the early to mid-'30s and later played leads in numerous B movies through the early '40s. The Brooklyn-born-and-raised Henry made her stage debut at age five. She debuted on Broadway in 1930 and later that year appeared in her first film On Your Back. She got her first starring role in 1933's all-star version of Alice in Wonderland. Henry retired from films in 1942.

Trivia: The long-reigning king of Hollywood horror, Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt on November 23, 1887, in South London. The youngest of nine children, he was educated at London University in preparation for a career as a diplomat. However, in 1909, he emigrated to Canada to accept a job on a farm, and while living in Ontario he began pursuing acting, joining a touring company and adopting the stage name Boris Karloff. His first role was as an elderly man in a production of Molnar's The Devil, and for the next decade Karloff toiled in obscurity, traveling across North America in a variety of theatrical troupes. By 1919, he was living in Los Angeles, unemployed and considering a move into vaudeville, when instead he found regular work as an extra at Universal Studios. Karloff's first role of note was in 1919's His Majesty the American, and his first sizable part came in The Deadlier Sex a year later. Still, while he worked prolifically, his tenure in the silents was undistinguished, although it allowed him to hone his skills as a consummate screen villain.Karloff's first sound-era role was in the 1929 melodrama The Unholy Night, but he continued to languish without any kind of notice, remaining so anonymous even within the film industry itself that Picturegoer magazine credited 1931's The Criminal Code as his first film performance. The picture, a Columbia production, became his first significant hit, and soon Karloff was an in-demand character actor in projects ranging from the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Cracked Nuts to the Edward G. Robinson vehicle Five Star Final to the serial adventure King of the Wild. Meanwhile, at Universal Studios, plans were underway to adapt the Mary Shelley classic Frankenstein in the wake of the studio's massive Bela Lugosi hit Dracula. Lugosi, however, rejected the role of the monster, opting instead to attach his name to a project titled Quasimodo which ultimately went unproduced. Karloff, on the Universal lot shooting 1931's Graft, was soon tapped by director James Whale to replace Lugosi as Dr. Frankenstein's monstrous creation, and with the aid of the studio's makeup and effects unit, he entered into his definitive role, becoming an overnight superstar. Touted as the natural successor to Lon Chaney, Karloff was signed by Universal to a seven-year contract, but first he needed to fulfill his prior commitments and exited to appear in films including the Howard Hawks classic Scarface and Business or Pleasure. Upon returning to the Universal stable, he portrayed himself in 1932's The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood before starring as a nightclub owner in Night World. However, Karloff soon reverted to type, starring in the title role in 1932's The Mummy, followed by a turn as a deaf-mute killer in Whale's superb The Old Dark House. On loan to MGM, he essayed the titular evildoer in The Mask of Fu Manchu, but on his return to Universal he demanded a bigger salary, at which point the studio dropped him. Karloff then journeyed back to Britain, where he starred in 1933's The Ghoul, before coming back to Hollywood to appear in John Ford's 1934 effort The Lost Patrol. After making amends with Universal, he co-starred with Lugosi in The Black Cat, the first of several pairings for the two actors, and in 1936 he starred in the stellar sequel The Bride of Frankenstein. Karloff spent the remainder of the 1930s continuing to work at an incredible pace, but the quality of his films, the vast majority of them B-list productions, began to taper off dramatically. Finally, in 1941, he began a three-year theatrical run in Arsenic and Old Lace before returning to Hollywood to star in the A-list production The Climax. Again, however, Karloff soon found himself consigned to Poverty Row efforts, such as 1945's The House of Frankenstein. He also found himself at RKO under Val Lewton's legendary horror unit. A few of his films were more distinguished -- he appeared in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Unconquered, and even Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer -- and in 1948 starred on Broadway in J.B. Priestley's The Linden Tree, but by and large Karloff delivered strong performances in weak projects. By the mid-'50s, he was a familiar presence on television, and from 1956 to 1958, hosted his own series. By the following decade, he was a fixture at Roger Corman's American International Pictures. In 1969, Karloff appeared in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets, a smart, sensitive tale in which he portrayed an aging horror film star; the role proved a perfect epitaph -- he died on February 2, 1969.

Trivia: Ohio-born Fred Kelsey was so firmly typed as a comedy cop in Hollywood films that in the 1944 MGM cartoon classic Who Killed Who?, animator Tex Avery deliberately designed his detective protagonist to look like Kelsey -- mustache, heavy eyebrows, derby hat and all. In films from 1909, Kelsey started out as a director (frequently billed as" Fred A. Kelcey"), but by the '20s he was well into his established characterization as the beat cop or detective who was forever falling asleep on the job or jumping to the wrong conclusion. Often Kelsey's dialogue was confined to one word: "Sayyyyy....!" He seemed to be busiest at Warner Bros. and Columbia, appearing in fleeting bits at the former studio (butchers, bartenders, house detectives), and enjoying more sizeable roles in the B-films, short subjects and serials at the latter studio. From 1940 through 1943, Kelsey had a continuing role as dim-witted police sergeant Dickens in Columbia's Lone Wolf B-picture series. Seldom given a screen credit, Fred Kelsey was curiously afforded prominent featured billing in 20th Century-Fox's O. Henry's Full House (1952), in which he was barely recognizable as a street-corner Santa Claus.

Trivia: Stocky, officious American actor Guy Usher made a spectacular film debut in The Penguin Pool Murder (1932), playing the drowned victim of the titular crime. Many of Usher's subsequent roles required a great deal of fluster and bluster: As land-developer Harry Payne Bosterly in It's a Gift (1934), he dismissed W.C. Fields by bellowing, "You're drunk!," whereupon Fields put him in his place by responding, "And you're crazy. But tomorrow I'll be sober, and you'll always be crazy." Usher also appeared as D.A. Hamilton Burger in the 1934 Perry Mason adaptation The Case of the Black Cat. In the late '30s-early '40s, Guy Usher was a mainstay at Monogram Pictures, again specializing in murder victims.

Trivia: American actor Selmer Jackson first stepped before the cameras in the 1921 silent film Supreme Passion. Silver-haired and silver-tongued, Jackson so closely resembled such dignified character players as Samuel S. Hinds and Henry O'Neill that at times it was hard to tell which actor was which -- especially when (as often happened at Warner Bros. in the 1930s) all three showed up in the same picture. During World War II, Jackson spent most of his time in uniform as naval and military officers, usually spouting declarations like "Well, men...this is it!" Selmer Jackson's final film appearance was still another uniformed role in 1960's The Gallant Hours.

Trivia: Slick-haired utility actor Brooks Benedict held down several odd jobs in Hollywood before turning to acting in the early 1920s. Benedict's first role of note was "The Campus Cad" in Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925), one of several supporting assignments for producer/star Lloyd. In 1926, he shared a memorable scene on a bus with another legendary comedian, Harry Langdon, in The Strong Man. Except for such sizeable early-talkie roles as George Mason in 1932's Girl Crazy, Brooks Benedict was largely confined to bits and extra work until his retirement in the mid-1950s.

Trivia: Wisconsonite actor Stanley Blystone was the brother of director John G. Blystone and assistant director Jasper Blystone. Entering films in 1915, the burly, muscular, mustachioed Blystone excelled in gruff, villainous roles; he was particularly menacing as a crooked ringmaster in Tom Mix's The Circus Ace (1927). In the talkie era, Blystone was busiest at the 2-reel comedy mills of RKO, Columbia and Hal Roach, often cast as brutish authority figures at odds with the comedy leads. In the Three Stooges' Half Shot Shooters (1936), he plays the sadistic Sgt. McGillicuddy, who reacts to the Stooges' ineptness by taking aim with a long-range cannon and blowing the three comedians right out of their boots! Blystone was much in demand as both "action" and "brains" heavies in Columbia's westerns and serials of the 1940s. Extending his activities to television in the 1950s, the 71-year-old Stanley Blystone was en route to Desilu Studios to play a small role on the TV series Wyatt Earp when he collapsed on the sidewalk and died of heart failure.

Trivia: On Broadway in 1932 in the short-running We Are No Longer Children and other plays, tall, solid-looking German actor Walter Bonn became extremely busy in Hollywood films of the 1940s, almost always playing Nazis. Among his countless bit parts, Bonn is affectionately remembered by serial fans as Tala Birell's assistant in Universal's Jungle Queen (1945).

Trivia: Burly American comic actor Glen Cavender is perhaps best remembered for playing the Union spy, Captain Anderson, in Keaton's masterpiece The General (1927), but the ex-vaudevillian began his screen career with the St. Louis Motion Picture Company (which, despite its name, was located in Los Angeles) in the early 1910s. Acknowledged as one of the original Keystone Kops, Cavender later directed the Sennett stock company in such farces as The Lion and the Girl (1916) and The Scoundrel's Toll (1916), as well as The Sheriff (1918) for Joseph Schenck's Comique, starring "Fatty" Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. Returning to acting in the 1920s, Cavender appeared mainly in two-reelers produced by comedy veteran Joe Rock but he did turn up in a few feature films, including the Buck Jones Western Straight from the Shoulder (1921). By the 1930s, however, Cavender was reduced to playing unbilled bit parts. He retired around 1941.

Trivia: It is perhaps superfluous to note that actor Philip Morris was no relation to the cigarette-manufacturing family of the same name. In films from 1935 to 1948, Morris was generally cast as a cop, doorman, cabbie, or truck driver. He can be glimpsed near the end of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as the traffic cop investigating George Minafer's auto accident, and in High, Wide and Handsome (1937) as one of the sweating teamsters. One of Philip Morris' few screen characters to be given a name was Howard Ross in the 1948 Western Whirlwind Raiders.

Trivia: American actress Theresa Harris made her screen debut as one of the sullen "camp followers" in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco. Like most black performers working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, Harris was generally limited to servant roles. One of the more artistically rewarding of these was Josephine, the object of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson's affections in the Jack Benny vehicle Buck Benny Rides Again (1940). Harries and Anderson worked so well together that they were reteamed in the same roles in another Benny comedy, Love Thy Neighbor (1940). Evidently a favorite of RKO producer Val Lewton, Harris was prominently cast in several of Lewton's productions of the 1940s, most entertainingly as the cheerfully sarcastic waitress in Cat People (1943). Theresa Harris remained in films until 1958, her characters slowly moving up the social ladder to include nurses and governesses.