Trivia: Born Luis Antonio Damaso De Alonso, this Mexican-born Latin lover appeared in silent and sound films. He trained to be a bullfighter (his father's profession) but gave it up for acting after his family moved to the U.S. At age 13 he debuted onscreen as an extra; he made his screen acting debut seven years later in The Plastic Age (1925). In the mid '20s he frequently played dashing romantic leading men, notably in Camille (1927) opposite Norma Talmadge. In the sound era he played leads and then later character and supporting roles in many films; he continued working until the late '70s. He was married to actress Constance Bennett.

Trivia: American actress Glenda Farrell, like so many other performers born around the turn of the century, made her stage debut in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her first adult professional job was with Virginia Brissac's stock company in San Diego, after which she worked up and down the California coast until leaving for Broadway in the late 1920s. Farrell's performance in the stage play Skidding established her reputation, and in 1929 she was wooed to Hollywood along with many other stage actors in the wake of the "talkie" revolution. Uncharacteristically cast as the ingenue in Little Caesar (1930), Farrell would thereafter be cast in the fast-talking, "hard-boiled dame" roles that suited her best. Though her characters had a tough veneer, Farrell was sensitive enough to insist upon script changes if the lines and bits of business became too rough and unsympathetic; still, she seemed to revel in the occasional villainess, notably her acid performance as Paul Muni's mercenary paramour in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang(1932). In 1937, Farrell was assigned by Warner Bros. to portray dauntless news reporter Torchy Blaine in a series of brisk "B" pictures. She was gratified by the positive fan mail she received for Torchy, and justifiably proud of her ability to spout out 390 words per minute in the role, but Farrell decided to leave Warners and free-lance after five "Torchy Blaines." The actress's character roles in the 1940s and 1950s may have been smaller than before, but she always gave 100 percent to her craft. Farrell moved into television with ease, appearing on virtually every major dramatic weekly series and ultimately winning an Emmy for her work on the two-part Ben Casey episode of 1963, "A Cardinal Act of Mercy." Farrell's exit from movies was the 1964 Jerry Lewis farce The Disorderly Orderly, an assignment she plunged into with all the enthusiasm and sheer professionalism that she'd brought to the rest of her screen career.

Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: American actress Barbara Ruick, the daughter of actor Melville Ruick, played leading roles in several musical comedies during the 1950s including Carousel (1956).

Trivia: Canadian-born Gene Lockhart made his first stage appearance at age 6; as a teenager, he appeared in comedy sketches with another fledgling performer, Beatrice Lillie. Lockhart's first Broadway production was 1916's Riviera. His later credits on the Great White Way included Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesmen, in which Lockhart replaced Lee J. Cobb in the role of Willy Loman. In between acting assignments, Lockhart taught stage technique at the Juilliard School of Music. A prolific writer, Lockhart turned out a number of magazine articles and song lyrics, and contributed several routines to the Broadway revue Bunk of 1926, in which he also starred. After a false start in 1922, Lockhart launched his film career in 1934. His most familiar screen characterization was that of the cowardly criminal who cringed and snivelled upon being caught; he also showed up in several historical films as small-town stuffed shirts and bigoted disbelievers in scientific progress. When not trafficking in petty villainy, Lockhart was quite adept at roles calling for whimsy and confusion, notably Bob Cratchit in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol and the beleaguered judge in A Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Extending his activities to television, Lockhart starred in the 1955 "dramedy" series His Honor, Homer Bell. Gene Lockhart was the husband of character actress Kathleen Lockhart, the father of leading lady June Lockhart, and the grandfather of 1980s ingenue Anne Lockhart.

Trivia: Bald, lanky, laconic American actor Hank Worden made his screen debut in The Plainsman (1936), and began playing simpleminded rustics at least as early as the 1941 El Brendel two-reel comedy Love at First Fright. A member in good standing of director John Ford's unofficial stock company, Worden appeared in such Ford classics as Fort Apache (1948) and Wagonmaster (1950). The quintessential Worden-Ford collaboration was The Searchers (1955) wherein Worden portrayed the near-moronic Mose Harper, who spoke in primitive, epigrammatic half-sentences and who seemed gleefully obsessed with the notion of unexpected death. Never a "normal" actor by any means, Worden continued playing characters who spoke as if they'd been kicked by a horse in childhood into the '80s; his last appearance was a recurring role in the quirky David Lynch TV serial Twin Peaks. In real life, Hank Worden was far from addled and had a razor-sharp memory, as proven in his many appearances at Western fan conventions and in an interview program about living in the modern desert, filmed just before Worden's death for cable TV's Discovery Channel.

Trivia: The face of American actor Myron Healey was not in and of itself villainous. But whenever Healey narrowed his eyes and widened that countenance into a you-know-what-eating grin and exposed those pointed ivories, the audience knew that he was about to rob a bank, hold up a stagecoach, or burn out a homesteader, which he did with regularity after entering films in the postwar years. Still, Healey could temper his villainy with a marvelous sense of humor: for example, his hilarious adlibs while appearing in stock badguy roles in such TV series as Annie Oakley and Gene Autry. With 1949's Colorado Ambush Healey broadened his talents to include screenwriting. Usually heading the supporting cast, Myron Healey was awarded a bonafide lead role in the 1962 horror film Varan the Unbelievable (a Japanese film, with scattered English-language sequences), though even here he seemed poised to stab the titular monster in the back at any moment.

Trivia: Whether in vaudeville, burlesque, "legit" theatre or radio, Emmet "Pop" Lynn played variations on the toothless-old-reprobate roles that brought him screen fame. Though he'd made a tentative foray into films as a teenager in 1913, Lynn truly came into his own after 1940, playing the cantankerous sidekick to such western heroes as Don Barry and Allan "Rocky" Lane. In non-westerns, he could usually be spotted as a janitor, night watchman or rural rustic. He enjoyed a longtime association with Columbia Pictures' short-subject unit, where he was harmoniously teamed with such comics as Andy Clyde and Slim Summerville. Emmet Lynn made his final screen appearance as a downtrodden Hebrew peasant in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956).

Trivia: Wide-eyed little Bobby Blake began his acting career as an Our Gang kid and eventually matured into one of Hollywood's finest actors. Born Michael Gubitosi, the boy was two years old when he joined his family vaudeville act, "The Three Little Hillbillies." The act was doomed to failure, as were most of the pipe dreams of the Gubitosi family. Relocating from New Jersey to California, Michael's mom found work for her kids as extras at the MGM studios. The young Gubitosi impressed the producers of the Our Gang series, and as a result the six-year-old was elevated to star status in the short subjects series. Little Mickey Gubitosi whined and whimpered his way through 40 Our Gang shorts, reaching an artistic low point with the execrable All About Hash (1940). During his five-year tenure with the series, the boy anglicized his professional name to Bobby Blake. Freelancing after 1944, Blake's performing skills improved immeasurably, especially when he was cast as Indian sidekick Little Beaver in Republic's Red Ryder series. He also registered well in his appearances in Warner Bros. films, playing such roles as the younger John Garfield in Humoresque (1946) and the Mexican kid who sells Bogart the crucial lottery ticket in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Though sporadically happy in his work (one of his most pleasurable assignments was the otherwise forgettable Laurel and Hardy feature The Big Noise, 1944), Bobby Blake was an unhappy child, weighed down by a miserable home life. At 16, Blake dropped out of sight for a few years, a reportedly difficult period in his life. Upon claiming a 16,000-dollar nest egg at age 21, however, Blake began turning his life around, both personally and professionally. He matriculated into a genuine actor rather than a mere "cute" personality, essaying choice dramatic roles in both films and TV. He starred in the Allied Artists gangster flick The Purple Gang (1960), played featured roles in such films as PT 109 (1963), Ensign Pulver (1964), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and guest starred on dozens of TV shows. In 1963, he was one of 12 character actors amalgamated into the "repertory company" on the weekly anthology series The Richard Boone Show; he spent the next 26 weeks playing everything from agreeable office boys to fevered dope addicts. His true breakthrough role came in 1967, when he was cast as real-life multiple murderer Perry Smith in Richard Brooks' filmization of In Cold Blood. Even after this career boost, Blake often found the going rough in Hollywood, due as much to his own pugnacious behavior as to typecasting. He did, however, star in such worthwhile efforts as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Electra Glide in Blue (1973). Blake achieved full-fledged stardom at last with his three-year (1975-1978) starring stint on the TV cop series Baretta, adding to his already sizeable fan following via several lively, tell-all guest appearances on The Tonight Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and several other video chat fests. Despite his never-ending battles with the ABC executives during the Baretta run, Blake stuck out the series long enough to win an Emmy, and even got to direct an episode or two.Forming his own production company, Blake made several subsequent tries at TV-series success: Hell Town (1985), in which he starred as a barrio priest, lasted 13 weeks, while the private-eye endeavor Jake Dancer never got past its three pilot films. He has been more successful with such one-shots as the TV miniseries Hoffa (1983), in which he played the title character with chilling accuracy, and the 1993 TV biopic Judgment Day: The John List Story, which earned him another Emmy. His later film appearances were in hard-nosed character parts, such as 1995's The Money Train, and he landed a plum (albeit terminally odd) lead role in David Lynch's postmodern thriller Lost Highway (1997), as a clown-faced psychopath who plays bizarre mind games with a suburban couple. Though he's managed to purge some of his personal demons over the years, Robert Blake remains as feisty, outspoken, and unpredictable as ever, especially when given an open forum by talk show hosts. In 2001, Blake generated headlines once again, though this time off-camera and in an extremely negative vein. The mysterious murder of wife Bonnie Lee Bakely sent the tabloids into a furious frenzy of speculation and accusation. Arrested for the murder of Bakely in April 2002, Blake's future looked increasingly grim as evidence continued to mount against him. Nevertheless, in March 2005 the actor was completely exonerated of all accusations surrounding Bakely's death and narrowly escaped a life sentence in prison. His on-camera activity remained extremely infrequent, however. Late in 2005, the press reported the outcome of a civil trial involving Bakely's homicide, in which Blake was required to pay an estimated $30 million to her children.

Trivia: Silver-tongued actor Douglas Dumbrille played just about every type in his long screen career, but it was as a dignified villain that he is best remembered. Born in Canada, Dumbrille did most of his stage work in the United States, breaking into films with His Woman in 1931. He bounced between supporting parts and unbilled bits in the early 1930s, usually at Warner Bros., where his sleek brand of skullduggery fit right in with the gangsters, shysters and political phonies popping up in most of the studio's 1930s product. Superb in modern dress roles, Dumbrille also excelled at costume villainy: it is claimed that, in Lives of the Bengal Lancers (1935), he was the first bad guy to growl, "We have ways of making you talk." The actor's pompous demeanor made him an ideal foil for such comedians as the Marx Brothers, with whom he appeared twice, and Abbott and Costello, who matched wits with Dumbrille in four different films. Sometimes, Dumbrille's reputation as a no-good was used to lead the audience astray; he was frequently cast as red-herring suspects in such murder mysteries as Castle in the Desert (1942), while in the Johnny Mack Brown western Flame of the West (1945), Dumbrille piqued the viewer's interest by playing a thoroughly honest, decent sheriff (surely he'd turn bad by the end, thought the audience -- but he didn't). In real life a gentle man whose diabolical features were softened by a pair of spectacles, Dumbrille mellowed his image as he grew older, often playing bemused officials and judges who couldn't make head nor tails of Gracie Allen's thought patterns on TV's The Burns and Allen Show. Late in life, a widowed Douglas Dumbrille married Patricia Mobray, daughter of his close friend -- and fellow screen villain -- Alan Mowbray.

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: While maintaining his whole life that he was part Cree and part Cherokee, actor Iron Eyes Cody was in fact born Espera DeCorti, a second generation Italian-American. He started out as a Wild-West-show performer, like his father before him. His earliest recognizable film appearances date back to 1919's Back to God's Country. While his choice of film roles was rather limited in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Cody made himself a valuable Hollywood commodity by offering his services as a technical advisor on Indian lore, customs, costuming and sign language. In between his TV work and personal appearances with the Ringling Bros. Circus and other such touring concerns, Iron Eyes continued accepting supporting roles in Hollywood westerns of the 1950s; he played Chief Crazy Horse twice, in Sitting Bull (1954) and The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). Far more erudite and well-read than most of his screen characters, Iron Eyes has in recent years become a popular interview subject and a fixture at western-movie conventions and film festivals. His famous appearance as the tear-shedding Indian in the "Keep America Beautiful" TV campaign of the 1970s recently enjoyed a "revival" on cable television. In 1982, Cody wrote his enjoyably candid autobiography, in which several high-profile movie stars were given the "emperor has no clothes" treatment. As well as being an actor, Cody owns an enormous collection of Indian artifacts, costumes, books and artwork; has written several books with Indian themes; is a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Indian Center, the Southwest Museum and the Los Angeles Library Association; is vice-president of the Little Big Horn Indian Association; is a member of the Verdugo Council of the Boy Scouts of America; and has participated as Grand Marshal of Native American pow-wows throughout the U.S.

Trivia: The aptly nicknamed Chubby Johnson didn't give up his journalism career for the movies until he was nearly 50. After a brief tenure as comical sidekick to Republic cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane, Johnson became a freelance character actor, appearing opposite practically everyone from Randolph Scott to Ronald Reagan to Will Rogers Jr. Extremely active on television, he was seen on a regular basis as Concho in the 1963 TV Western Temple Houston. Chubby Johnson remained in films until 1969.