Trivia: The son of an Ohio oil driller and farmer, American actor Clark Gable had a relatively sedate youth until, at age 16, he was talked into traveling to Akron with a friend to work at a tire factory. It was in Akron that Gable saw his first stage play, and, from that point on, he was hooked. Although he was forced to work with his father on the oil fields for a time, Gable used a 300-dollar inheritance he'd gotten on his 21st birthday to launch a theatrical career. Several years of working for bankrupt stock companies, crooked theater managers, and doing odd jobs followed, until Gable was taken under the wing of veteran actress Josephine Dillon. The older Dillon coached Gable in speech and movement, paid to have his teeth fixed, and became the first of his five wives in 1924. As the marriage deteriorated, Gable's career built up momentum while he appeared in regional theater, road shows, and movie extra roles. He tackled Broadway at a time when producers were looking for rough-hewn, down-to-earth types as a contrast to the standard cardboard stage leading men. Gable fit this bill, although he had been imbued with certain necessary social graces by his second wife, the wealthy (and, again, older) Ria Langham. A 1930 Los Angeles stage production of The Last Mile starring Gable as Killer Mears brought the actor to the attention of film studios, though many producers felt that Gable's ears were too large for him to pass as a leading man. Making his talkie debut in The Painted Desert (1931), the actor's first roles were as villains and gangsters. By 1932, he was a star at MGM where, except for being loaned out on occasion, he'd remain for the next 22 years. On one of those occasions, Gable was "punished" for insubordination by being sent to Columbia Studios, then a low-budget factory. The actor was cast by ace director Frank Capra in It Happened One Night (1934), an amiable comedy which swept the Academy Awards in 1935, with one of those Oscars going to Gable. After that, except for the spectacular failure of Gable's 1937 film Parnell, it seemed as though the actor could do no wrong. And, in 1939, and despite his initial reluctance, Gable was cast as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, leading him to be dubbed the "King of Hollywood." A happy marriage to wife number three, Carole Lombard, and a robust off-camera life as a sportsman and athlete (Gable enjoyed a he-man image created by the MGM publicity department, and perpetuated it on his own) seemed to bode well for the actor's future contentment. But when Lombard was killed in a 1942 plane crash, a disconsolate Gable seemed to lose all interest in life. Though far beyond draft age, he entered the Army Air Corps and served courageously in World War II as a tail-gunner. But what started out as a death wish renewed his vitality and increased his popularity. (Ironically, he was the favorite film star of Adolf Hitler, who offered a reward to his troops for the capture of Gable -- alive). Gable's postwar films for MGM were, for the most part, disappointing, as was his 1949 marriage to Lady Sylvia Ashley. Dropped by both his wife and his studio, Gable ventured out as a freelance actor in 1955, quickly regaining lost ground and becoming the highest paid non-studio actor in Hollywood. He again found happiness with his fifth wife, Kay Spreckels, and continued his career as a box-office champ, even if many of the films were toothless confections like Teacher's Pet (1958). In 1960, Gable was signed for the introspective "modern" Western The Misfits, which had a prestigious production lineup: co-stars Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach; screenwriter Arthur Miller; and director John Huston. The troubled and tragic history of this film has been well documented, but, despite the on-set tension, Gable took on the task uncomplainingly, going so far as to perform several grueling stunt scenes involving wild horses. The strain of filming, however, coupled with his ever-robust lifestyle, proved too much for the actor. Clark Gable suffered a heart attack two days after the completion of The Misfits and died at the age of 59, just a few months before the birth of his first son. Most of the nation's newspapers announced the death of Clark Gable with a four-word headline: "The King is Dead."

Trivia: Born Gretchen Young, her family moved to Hollywood and she began appearing (at age four) as a child extra in movies, as did her sisters (one of whom later became known as actress Sally Blane). At 14, she got a small supporting role in Naughty but Nice (1927), which led to a screen contract. She moved quickly from teenager to ingénue to leading lady roles, appearing in many films and successfully making the transition to the sound era. By the mid-'30s, she was an established star, usually cast in decorative roles in routine programmers. For her work in The Farmer's Daughter (1947) she won the Best Actress Oscar, and was nominated again for Come to the Stable (1949). After a consistently busy screen career of 25 years, she retired from films in 1953 to host the TV series The Loretta Young Show, a weekly half-hour teleplay; she appeared in about half of the show's episodes, winning three Emmy Awards. Since the early '60s, she has devoted most of her energies to Catholic charities. She has been married twice. In 1930, she made headlines when, at age 17, she eloped with actor Grant Withers. However, the marriage was annulled after a year. She later married producer and writer Thomas Lewis, from whom she eventually separated. She authored the memoir The Things I Had to Learn (1961). After NBC unlawfully broadcast her TV shows abroad, she sued the network in 1972 and won 600,000 dollars.

Trivia: The parents of American actor Jack Oakie had hopes that their son would enter the business world, but a spell as telephone clerk in a brokerage house convinced Oakie to look elsewhere for a career. After appearing at an amateur show staged by Wall Street executives for the Cardiac Society, Oakie was encouraged by the show's director to give acting his full attention. Oakie's professional debut was in the chorus of the 1922 George M. Cohan musical Little Nellie Kelly. Several Broadway productions later, Oakie travelled westward to try his luck in films, the first of which was Finders Keepers. Transferring without a hitch to talkies, Oakie found himself much in demand, usually playing a dimwitted braggart (with one of the best "double takes" in the business) who somehow made good and got the girl before fadeout time. By the late 1930s Oakie's career had gone into decline. The experience humbled the bombastic comedian and convinced him take a new approach to his career. After his unforgettable Mussolini take-off in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), Oakie entered a new movie phase as second lead and character actor, which sustained him through many a musical comedy of the 1940s. And when called upon to do so, he could still carry a picture with finesse, as witness the 1945 fantasy That's the Spirit. Stage and TV work took up much of his time in the 1950s and 1960s, with occasional choice character parts in such films as The Rat Race (1960) and Lover Come Back (1962). Unpredictable in his likes and dislikes, Oakie was the sort of fellow who brusquely shooed away autograph seekers, but who also visited ailing comedian Stan Laurel, a man Oakie barely knew, to brighten up Stan's hospital stay at a time when some of Laurel's "close" pals didn't want to show up. Just before his death, Jack Oakie committed his memories to a sometimes fanciful but always entertaining biography, Jack Oakie's Double Takes, which was published posthumously by Jack's widow, actress Victoria Horne.

Trivia: British actor Reginald Owen was a graduate of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his stage bow in 1905, remaining a highly-regarded leading man in London for nearly two decades before traversing the Atlantic to make his Broadway premiere in The Swan. His film career commenced with The Letter (1929), and for the next forty years Owen was one of Hollywood's favorite Englishmen, playing everything from elegant aristocrats to seedy villains. Modern viewers are treated to Owen at his hammy best each Christmas when local TV stations run MGM's 1938 version of The Christmas Carol. As Ebeneezer Scrooge, Owen was a last-minute replacement for an ailing Lionel Barrymore, but no one in the audience felt the loss as they watched Owen go through his lovably cantankerous paces. Reginald Owen's film career flourished into the 1960s and 1970s. He was particularly amusing and appropriately bombastic as Admiral Boom, the cannon-happy eccentric neighbor in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).

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: 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: 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: A grandson of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo, Charles Stevens (often billed as Charles "Injun" Stevens because of his ethnic background) made his film bow as an extra in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The close friend and "mascot" of cinema idol Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Stevens appeared in all but one of Fairbanks' starring films, beginning with 1915's The Lamb. He was often seen in multiple roles, never more obviously than in Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926). His largest role during his Fairbanks years was Planchet in The Three Musketeers (1921) and its sequel The Iron Mask (1929). In talkies, Stevens was generally cast as a villain, usually an Indian, Mexican, or Arab. Outside of major roles in early sound efforts like The Big Trail and Tom Sawyer (both 1930), he could be found playing menacing tribal chiefs and bandits in serials and B-pictures, and seedy, drunken "redskin" stereotypes (invariably named Injun Joe or Injun Charlie or some such) in big-budget films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). He was also much in demand as a technical adviser on Native American lore and customs. Charles Stevens remained active until 1956, 17 years after the death of his pal and mentor Doug Fairbanks.

Trivia: American actor James Burke not only had the Irish face and brogueish voice of a New York detective, but even his name conjured up images of a big-city flatfoot. In Columbia's Ellery Queen series of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Burke was cast exquisitely to type as the thick-eared Sergeant Velie, who referred to the erudite Queen as "Maestro." Burke also showed up as a rural law enforcement officer in such films as Nightmare Alley (1947), in which he has a fine scene as a flint-hearted sheriff moved to tears by the persuasive patter of carnival barker Tyrone Power. One of the best of James Burke's non-cop performances was as westerner Charlie Ruggles' rambunctious, handlebar-mustached "pardner" in Ruggles of Red Gap (135), wherein Burke and Ruggles engage in an impromptu game of piggyback on the streets of Paris.

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.

Trivia: Thomas Jackson's first stage success was in the role of the non-speaking Property Man in the original 1912 production of Yellow Jacket. He was starring as police detective Dan McCorn in the lavish Broadway production Broadway when he was tapped to repeat his role in the even more spectacular 1929 film version. For the rest of his career, which lasted into the 1960s, Jackson more or less played variations on Dan McCorn, notably as the soft-spoken "copper" Flaherty in 1931's Little Caesar. When he wasn't playing detectives, Thomas Jackson could be seen in dozens of minor roles as newspaper editors, bartenders, doctors and Broadway theatrical agents.

Trivia: A long-nosed character comedian from Australia, in Hollywood from around 1924, John T. Murray was the husband of buxom comedian Vivian Oakland, with whom he appeared in scores of two-reel comedies, including Andy Clyde's Mr. Clyde Goes to Broadway (1940). Earlier, Murray had played the notorious Jack the Kisser, to whom poor Andy was handcuffed in Caught in the Act (1936), and fans of the Three Stooges may remember him as the professor in Violent Is the Word for Curly (1938). Equally busy in feature films, Murray played Talleyrand in Alexander Hamilton (1931), Pilate's servant in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), the city editor in The Golden Arrow (1936), and various bit parts in MGM's venerable Andy Hardy series. Retired since the early '40s, Murray died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Character actor Bob Perry made his film debut as Tuxedo George in 1928's Me Gangster. For the rest of his Hollywood career, Perry popped up in brief roles as bartenders, croupiers, referees, guards, and the like. Many of his characters were on the wrong side of the law, and few of them spoke when shooting or slugging would do. Bob Perry kept busy in films until 1949, when he retired at the reported age of 70.

Trivia: Burly vaudeville monologist/comedian Russell J. Powell made his first film in 1920. It wasn't until the advent of talkies, however, that Powell's gift for dialects and bizarre vocal sound effects could truly be appreciated. His more memorable screen roles included the Afghan Ambassador in Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929) and his blackface turn as the Kingfish in the Amos and Andy vehicle Check and Double Check (1930). So far as many film aficionados are concerned, Russell J. Powell achieved immortality as the dockhand in the opening scene of King Kong (1933), who launches into a stream of fluent exposition with the quizzical "Say, you goin' on this craaazy voyage?"