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: Strappingly handsome leading man Grant Withers worked as an oil company salesman and newspaper reporter before he turned to acting in 1926. One of the more popular second echelon stars of the early '30s, Withers was unable to sustain his celebrity. By the end of the 1930s, Withers was pretty much limited to character roles and bits, with such notable exceptions as the recurring role of the brash Lt. Street in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. In 1930, Withers eloped with 17-year-old actress Loretta Young, but the marriage was later annulled. Some of Withers' later screen appearances were arranged through the auspices of his friends John Ford and John Wayne. Grant Withers committed suicide in 1959, leaving behind a note in which he apologized to all the people he'd let down during his Hollywood days.

Trivia: As a child actress, Marjorie Goodspeed was featured in such silent films as Scaramouche (1923). As a preteen, she acted and danced under the name Marjorie Moore in musicals like Collegiate (1935). Billed as Marjorie Reynolds from 1937 onward, she played bits in A-pictures like Gone With the Wind (1939) and co-starred in several bread-and-butter epics produced by such minor studios as Monogram and Republic. Her first leading role of consequence was as the dauntless girl reporter in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. Lightening her hair to blonde, Reynolds was signed by Paramount in 1942, getting off to a good start in Holiday Inn as the girl to whom Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas." She was also shown to good advantage in the Fritz Lang thriller Ministry of Fear (1944) before Paramount dropped her option in 1946. Her oddest assignment in her immediate post-Paramount years was as a Revolutionary-era ghost in Abbott and Costello's The Time of Their Lives (1946). In 1953, she replaced Rosemary DeCamp in the role of Mrs. Riley in the popular sitcom The Life of Riley, remaining with the series until its cancellation in 1958. After this lengthy engagement, Marjorie Reynolds was seen in character parts in such TV series as Leave It to Beaver and Our Man Higgins. Reynolds died of congestive heart failure in Manhattan Beach, CA, at the age of 76.

Trivia: American actor James Flavin was groomed as a leading man when he first arrived in Hollywood in 1932, but he balked at the glamour treatment and was demonstrably resistant to being buried under tons of makeup. Though Flavin would occasionally enjoy a leading role--notably in the 1932 serial The Airmail Mystery, co-starring Flavin's wife Lucille Browne--the actor would devote most of his film career to bit parts. If a film featured a cop, process server, Marine sergeant, circus roustabout, deckhand or political stooge, chances are Jimmy Flavin was playing the role. His distinctive sarcastic line delivery and chiselled Irish features made him instantly recognizable, even if he missed being listed in the cast credits. Larger roles came Flavin's way in King Kong (1933) as Second Mate Briggs; Nightmare Alley (1947), as the circus owner who hires Tyrone Power; and Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), as a long-suffering homicide detective. Since he worked with practically everyone, James Flavin was invaluable in later years as a source of on-set anecdotes for film historians; and because he evidently never stopped working, Flavin and his wife Lucille were able to spend their retirement years in comfort in their lavish, sprawling Hollywood homestead.

Trivia: Though he was the personification of the cruel, calculating Japanese military officer in many a wartime propaganda film, Richard Loo was actually born in Hawaii of Chinese parents. The holder of a Business Studies degree from the University of California, Loo ran a successful importing firm until his assets were wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash. He launched his acting career in 1931, first in California-based stock companies, then in films, beginning with Frank Capra's Dirigible (1931). His movie career picked up momentum after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with villainous roles in such films as Wake Island (1942) and The Purple Heart (1944). In all, Richard Loo toted up some 200 film appearances in his five-decade career.

Trivia: Diminutive American actor Angelo Rossitto was a fixture in American movies for more than 50 years, usually in highly visible supporting and extra roles. Born Angelo Salvatore Rossitto, he entered movies in his teens during the height of the silent era, making his first known appearance in The Beloved Rogue, starring John Barrymore, in 1926. Standing less than four feet tall, with dark hair and a grim visage, and billed at various times as Little Angie, Little Mo, and Little Angelo, Rossitto was a natural for pygmies and circus dwarves, often of a sinister appearing nature; his presence could help "dress" a carnival set or the setting for a fantasy film. He played the dwarf Angeleno in Tod Browning's Freaks at MGM, a pygmy in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross at Paramount, and one of the Three Little Pigs in the Laurel & Hardy-starring vehicle Babes in Toyland. Off camera, he was also a stand-in for Shirley Temple in several of her films. Rossitto didn't become a well-known figure, even among movie cultists, until he went to work for Monogram Pictures during the early '40s, in a series of low-budget horror films and horror film spoofs starring Bela Lugosi, often cast in tandem with the Hungarian-born actor as a kind of double act. His presence added to the bizarre, threatening nature of the films and he became as well known to fans of these low-budget movies as Lugosi, George Zucco, or any of the other credited stars. His role in the first of those Monogram productions with Lugosi, Spooks Run Wild, also starring the East Side Kids, deliberately played off of Lugosi's and Rossitto's sinister seeming images. In between his Poverty Row Monogram productions, the actor fit in small parts at Universal, including Preston Sturges' The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, and he was one of the jesters tormenting the blinded Samson in DeMille's Samson and Delilah. Rossitto, along with his younger contemporaries Jerry Maren, Frank Delfino, and Billy Curtis, was one of Hollywood's busier little people in the years after World War II. Rossitto can be spotted in carnival scenes in Carousel, appeared as the smallest of the "Moon Men" in the low-budget Jungle Jim movie Jungle Moon Men, and played the leader of the aliens in the late-'50s sci-fi satire Invasion of the Saucer Men. Many of Rossitto's appearances were in roles without character names, constituting highly specialized, uncredited (but highly visible) extra work, and he may have been in as many as 200 movies.On television in the late '60s and early '70s, he portrayed a life-sized puppet in the series H.R. Pufnstuf and played a hat in Lidsville. Rossitto was a sideshow huckster in the cheap cult horror movie Dracula Vs. Frankenstein, and as late as the mid-'80s was seen in a small role in Something Wicked This Way Comes and in the featured role of the Master-Blaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Although work in 200 movies and television shows sounds like a lot, most of those appearances involved only a single day's or a single week's work, rather than full-time employment. He made his regular living from the 1930s through the 1960s at a newsstand in Hollywood just outside the gate of one of the studios; he joked that when he was needed for a film, they would simply pass the word directly to him on the street and he would report.

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: Canadian actor Huntley Gordon began his film career in 1918, then spent the next two decades alternating between American and British productions. Gordon's Hollywood assignments include the role of jazz-baby Joan Crawford's father in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). His talkie credits include 1935's Daniel Boone, in which he was cast as Sir John Randolph, and 1937's Stage Door, in which he and several other distinguished character actors were seen in the play-within-a-play. Huntley Gordon was also busy in the world of network radio during the 1940s.