Trivia: American actor Gary Cooper was born on the Montana ranch of his wealthy father, and educated in a prestigious school in England -- a dichotomy that may explain how the adult Cooper was able to combine the ruggedness of the frontiersman with the poise of a cultured gentleman. Injured in an auto accident while attending Wesleyan College, he convalesced on his dad's ranch, perfecting the riding skills that would see him through many a future Western film. After trying to make a living at his chosen avocation of political cartooning, Cooper was encouraged by two friends to seek employment as a cowboy extra in movies. Agent Nan Collins felt she could get more prestigious work for the handsome, gangling Cooper, and, in 1926, she was instrumental in obtaining for the actor an important role in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Movie star Clara Bow also took an interest in Cooper, seeing to it that he was cast in a couple of her films. Cooper really couldn't act at this point, but he applied himself to his work in a brief series of silent Westerns for his home studio, Paramount Pictures, and, by 1929, both his acting expertise and his popularity had soared. Cooper's first talking-picture success was The Virginian (1929), in which he developed the taciturn, laconic speech patterns that became fodder for every impressionist on radio, nightclubs, and television. Cooper alternated between tie-and-tails parts in Design for Living (1933) and he-man adventurer roles in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) for most of the 1930s; in 1941, he was honored with an Oscar for Sergeant York, a part for which he was the personal choice of the real-life title character, World War I hero Alvin York. One year later, Cooper scored in another film biography, Pride of the Yankees. As baseball great Lou Gehrig, the actor was utterly convincing (despite the fact that he'd never played baseball and wasn't a southpaw like Gehrig), and left few dry eyes in the audiences with his fade-out "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech. In 1933, Cooper married socialite Veronica Balfe, who, billed as Sandra Shaw, enjoyed a short-lived acting career. Too old for World War II service, Cooper gave tirelessly of his time in hazardous South Pacific personal-appearance tours. Ignoring the actor's indirect participation in the communist witch-hunt of the 1940s, Hollywood held Cooper in the highest regard as an actor and a man. Even those co-workers who thought that Cooper wasn't exerting himself at all when filming were amazed to see how, in the final product, Cooper was actually outacting everyone else, albeit in a subtle, unobtrusive manner. Consigned mostly to Westerns by the 1950s (including the classic High Noon [1952]), Cooper retained his box-office stature. Privately, however, he was plagued with painful, recurring illnesses, and one of them developed into lung cancer. Discovering the extent of his sickness, Cooper kept the news secret, although hints of his condition were accidentally blurted out by his close friend Jimmy Stewart during the 1961 Academy Awards ceremony, where Stewart was accepting a career-achievement Oscar for Cooper. One month later, and less than two months after his final public appearance as the narrator of a TV documentary on the "real West," Cooper died; to fans still reeling from the death of Clark Gable six months earlier, it seemed that Hollywood's Golden Era had suddenly died, as well.

Trivia: The daughter of a Supreme Court judge, Phyllis Thaxter followed the example of her mother, a former actress. Thaxter made her first stage appearance, at the Ogunquit (Maine) Playhouse. In her teens, she received on-the-job training with the Montreal Repertory. On Broadway from 1938, she appeared in such popular plays as What a Life!, There Shall Be No Night, and Claudia. Signed to an MGM contract in 1944, Phyllis was often wasted in traditional faithful-wife roles, but on occasion was permitted a wider acting range in such parts as the schizophrenic heroine of Arch Oboler's Bewitched (1944). While at MGM, Phyllis married James Aubrey, who later ascended to the presidency of CBS-TV (and still later, took over MGM); the union lasted until 1962, producing a daughter, actress Skye Aubrey. Sidelined by an attack of infantile paralysis in 1952, Thaxter made a slow, steady stage, screen and TV comeback in character parts, frequently accepting roles that would challenge her physical limitations. In 1978, after a long absence from the screen, Phyllis Thaxter was cast as Martha Kent, mother of Clark Kent, in Superman: The Movie. She made her last on-camera appearance in a 1992 episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Trivia: Authoritative leading man David Brian had previously been a musical comedy performer when signed by Warner Bros. in 1949. His first role was as the unbilled "host" of the 1949 reissue of Warners' 1935 G-Men, but within a few months he was starring opposite Joan Crawford (Flamingo Road) and Bette Davis (Beyond the Forest). Loaned out to MGM, Brian delivered one of his finest performances as the civil libertarian lawyer in Intruder in the Dust (1949). In films until the early 1970s, Brian was also a prominent TV actor, starring in the syndicated Mr. District Attorney (1954-1955, repeating his radio role) and appearing as villainous billionaire Arthur Maitland in the Christopher George series The Immortal (1970). David Brian was the husband of actress Adrian Booth, aka Lorna Gray.

Trivia: Paul Kelly was one of the few actors who not only played killers, but also had first-hand experience in this capacity! On stage from age 7, "Master" Paul Kelly entered films at 8, performing on the sunlight stages of Flatbush's Vitagraph Studios. His first important theatrical role was in Booth Tarkington's Seventeen; he later appeared in Tarkington's Penrod, opposite a young Helen Hayes. Star billing was Kelly's from 1922's Up the Ladder onwards. In films from 1926, Kelly alternated between stage and screen until his talkie debut in 1932's Broadway Through A Keyhole. The actor's career momentum was briefly halted with a two-year forced hiatus. On May 31, 1927, Kelly was found guilty of manslaughter, after killing actor Ray Raymond in a fistfight. The motivating factor of the fatal contretemps was Raymond's wife, Dorothy MacKaye, who married Kelly in 1931, after he'd served prison time for Raymond's death (MacKaye herself died in an automobile accident in 1940). This unfortunate incident had little adverse effect on Kelly's acting career, which continued up until his death in 1956. Returning to Broadway in 1947, Paul Kelly won the Donaldson and Tony awards for his performance in Command Decision; three years later, he starred in the original stage production of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl.

Trivia: Beefy, muscular leading man Philip Carey entered films in 1951, shortly after his hitch in the Marines was up. Cutting quite a dashing figure in a 19th-century military uniform, Carey was most often cast as an American cavalry officer. In a similar vein, he appeared as Canadian-born Lt. Michael Rhodes on the 1956 TV series Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers. Curiously, he never appeared in any of director John Ford's cavalry films, though he did co-star in Ford's Mister Roberts (1955) and The Long Gray Line (1955). In 1959, Carey starred in a TV series based on Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. While no one could fault his performance in the role, the Philip Marlowe series survived but a single season. He is best known for his four subsequent TV assignments: as spokesperson for the regionally aired Granny Goose potato chips commercials, as forever-flustered Lt. Parmalee on the comedy Western Laredo (1966-1968), as narrator of the documentary series Untamed World (1968-1975), and, from 1980-2007, as eternally scheming patriarch Asa Buchanan on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. One of Philip Carey's least typical TV appearances was on a 1971 All in the Family episode, in which he played Archie Bunker's macho-man bar buddy -- who turns out to be a homosexual.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: Signed up by MGM's dramatic school directly after graduating from the University of Southern California, American actor James Millican was groomed for that studio's stable of young leading men. Instead, he made his first film, Sign of the Cross (1932), at Paramount, then moved on to Columbia for his first important role in Mills of the Gods (1934). Possessor of an athletic physique and Irish good looks, Millican wasn't a distinctive enough personality for stardom, but came in handy for secondary roles as the hero's best friend, the boss' male secretary, and various assorted military adjutants. According to his own count, Millican also appeared in 400 westerns; while such a number is hard to document, it is true that he was a close associate of cowboy star "Wild Bill" Elliott, staging a number of personal-appearance rodeos on Elliott's behalf. Fans of baseball films will recall James Millican's persuasive performance as Bill Killefer in the Grover Cleveland Alexander biopic The Winning Team.

Trivia: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: Nicknamed "Big Boy" by his friend and frequent coworker Will Rogers, beefy Western star Guinn Williams was the son of a Texas congressman. After attending North Texas State College, Williams played pro baseball and worked as a rodeo rider before heading to Hollywood in his teens to try his luck in films. While he starred in several inexpensive silent and sound Westerns, Williams is better known for his comedy relief work in such films as Private Worlds (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Professor Beware (1938), and Santa Fe Trail (1940). "Big Boy" Williams is also a familiar name to devotees of Orson Welles; it was Williams who once accosted Welles in a parking lot and cut off the "boy wonder's" necktie.

Trivia: Not to be confused with African-American action star Jim Brown or with the "Godfather of Soul" of the same name, American actor James Brown was a tennis pro before entering films in 1941. Clearly a man of unlimited athletic prowess, Brown appeared in such rugged Hollywood productions as The Forest Rangers (1942), Air Force (1943), Objective Burma (1945) and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). He had more sedate roles in Going My Way (1944), as nominal romantic lead Ted Haines (Bing Crosby, the star of the film, was a priest and therefore out of the running with the leading lady), and in Pride of St. Louis (1952), a biopic about baseball star Dizzy Dean wherein Brown played sidelines ballplayer "Moose." Few of his later movies were worth mentioning, though Brown had a few telling moments as the stern, rifle-toting father of the serial killer "protagonist" in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968). Brown, sometimes billed as Jim L. Brown, is best known to aging baby boomers for his continuing role as Lt. Rip Masters on the enormously popular 1950s TV series Rin Tin Tin. He retired from acting in the late 1960s to manage his successful body-building equipment concern, then was appointed head of customer relations at Faberge, a cosmetics firm. When Faberge's filmmaking division, Brut Productions, put together a 1975 comedy titled Whiffs, the producers persuaded Brown to return to acting in a supporting role. And in 1976, James Brown redonned his 19th century cavalry uniform to film new wraparounds for a syndicated Rin Tin Tin rerun package.

Trivia: The son of a patent medicine manufacturer, American actor Alan Hale chose a theatrical career at a time when, according to his son Alan Hale Jr., boarding houses would post signs reading "No Dogs or Actors Allowed." Undaunted, Hale spent several years on stage after graduating from Philadelphia University, entering films as a slapstick comedian for Philly's Lubin Co. in 1911. Bolstering his acting income with odd jobs as a newspaperman and itinerant inventor (at one point he considered becoming an osteopath!), Hale finally enjoyed a measure of security as a much-in-demand character actor in the 1920s, usually as hard-hearted villains. One of his more benign roles was as Little John in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922), a role he would repeat opposite Errol Flynn in 1938 and John Derek in 1950. Talkies made Hale more popular than ever, especially in his many roles as Irishmen, blusterers and "best pals" for Warner Bros. Throughout his career, Hale never lost his love for inventing things, and reportedly patented or financed items as commonplace as auto brakes and as esoteric as greaseless potato chips. Alan Hale contracted pneumonia and died while working on the Warner Bros. western Montana (1950), which starred Hale's perennial screen cohort Errol Flynn.

Trivia: Vince Barnett was the son of Luke Barnett, a well-known comedian who specialized in insulting and pulling practical jokes on his audiences (Luke's professional nickname was "Old Man Ribber"). Vince remained in the family business by hiring himself out to Hollywood parties, where he would insult the guests in a thick German accent, spill the soup and drop the trays--all to the great delight of hosts who enjoyed watching their friends squirm and mutter "Who hired that jerk?" The diminutive, chrome-domed Barnett also appeared in the 1926 edition of Earl Carroll's Vanities. He began appearing in films in 1930, playing hundreds of comedy bits and supporting parts until retiring in 1975. Among Vince Barnett's more sizeable screen roles was the moronic, illiterate gangster "secretary" in Scarface (1931).

Trivia: An actor indelibly associated with classic Americana given his iconic portrayals of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, tall, tousle-haired Fess Parker began life in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in nearby San Angelo, where his parents farmed peanuts and watermelons, and raised cattle. Following service in the military during WWII (where he participated in "clean-up" operations in the Philippines), Parker returned to the United States, and attended both the University of Texas and the University of California. He soon discovered a flair for acting and hit the stage in the touring company of Mister Roberts, then entered films in 1952, enjoying his first sizeable role -- a Southern-accented ballplayer -- in The Kid From Left Field (1953). It was his one-scene bit as a terrified witness to an "alien close encounter" in the 1954 horror classic Them! (1954), however, that brought Parker to the attention of Walt Disney, and somewhat ironically. Disney had considered casting a major Hollywood star as Crockett (such as Glenn Ford or Sterling Hayden), but gave up on this idea and, it is said, briefly considered future Gunsmoke headliner James Arness. Walt went to see the Arness-starrer Them! for this reason, and passed on Arness for Crockett but felt instantly convinced (and supposedly shouted out "There's our Crockett!") when Parker appeared on the screen. The actor began by portraying Crockett on ABC's Disneyland television series, and the rest is history: during the period of 1954-6, Davy Crockett mania swept through the country, first with the smash single "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," then with a blizzard of Crockett-themed merchandise aimed squarely at small children - everything from lunchboxes, to action figures, to the quintessential Davy Crockett coonskin cap.Disney and Parker parlayed the Crockett success into features in 1955 and 1956, but two years after the Crockett popularity began, it fizzled. Parker remained on the Disney lot until 1958, starring in such films as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1957), Old Yeller (1957), and Light in the Forest (1958). His relationship with Disney more or less ended, however, when he refused to appear in the studio's Native American drama Tonka (1958) (a revisionist version of Custer's Last Stand) opposite Sal Mineo - and was promptly suspended for doing so.His film stardom leveling off after 1959, Parker started a family by marrying Marcella Rinehart in 1960, with whom he had numerous children and grandchildren. He began a television comeback in 1962 with an indifferent sitcom version of the old Capra drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962). He was more successful, though, with his five-year tenure in the title role of the weekly NBC adventure-fest Daniel Boone, which lasted six seasons (1964-70), running consistently on Thursday nights from 7:30-8:30pm; at its peak, the program's popularity even topped that of Crockett. Parker signed for his last dramatic role in the 1972 Climb An Angry Mountain.In the years that followed, Parker bowed out of the limelight, and entered an entirely unrelated field: that of real estate. He became an entrepreneur in the mid-1970s, and built his holdings into a small yet phenomenally lucrative empire that included a mobile home park, luxury hotels, and a sprawling vineyard with a gift shop that sold Crockett memorabilia. Parker died of natural causes at the age of 85 in March 2010, at his home in California's Santa Ynez Valley.

Trivia: During the '30s, Ewing Mitchell was a popular Broadway performer and singer. In the '50s, Mitchell was known for appearing regularly on the TV Westerns Sky King and The Adventures of Champion. He also appeared in big-screen Westerns and adventures.

Trivia: In films from 1945, Wilton Graff carved a screen career out of playing judges, doctors, DAs and the like. Graff's movie assignments ranged from bits in "A" pictures to sizeable supporting roles in programmers. He could be seen as the maitre d' in the crucial Gregory Peck-John Garfield restaurant scene in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and as Baron Fitzwalter, Robin Hood's father-in-law, in Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950). Wilton Graff's only starring role was as Dr. Belleau, the crazed sportsman who hunted human quarry in the 1961 Most Dangerous Game knock-off Bloodlust.

Trivia: From his first film appearance in 1946 until his retirement sometime in the late 1960s, the wizened, rusty-voiced actor William Fawcett specialized in cantankerous farmers, grizzled old prospectors and Scroogelike millionaires. He worked frequently at Columbia, appearing in that studio's quota of "B" westerns and Arabian Nights quickies, as well as such serials as The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), in which he played the juicy bad-guy role of Merlin the Magician. Though occasionally seen in sizeable parts in "A" pictures--he played Andy Griffith's septuagenarian father in No Time For Sergeants (1957)--Fawcett's appearances in big-budgeters frequently went unbilled, as witness The Music Man (1962) and What a Way to Go (1964). Baby boomers will fondly recall William Fawcett as ranch-hand Pete ("who cut his teeth on a brandin' iron") in the Saturday-morning TV series Fury (1956-60).

Trivia: A onetime opera singer, wizened, glowering American character actor Richard Hale spent most of his screen time playing small-town sourpusses. Many of his movie appearances were small and unbilled: he enjoyed larger assignments as outlaw patriarch Basserman in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949), the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar (1953), and the father of the retarded Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He also showed up with regularity on television, often cast as a taciturn farmer or hard-hearted banker on the many western series of the 1950s and 1960s. One of Hale's showier parts was in the Oscar-winning All The King's Men, as the father of the girl killed in an auto accident caused by the drunken son (John Derek) of demagogic Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), his character name: Richard Hale.

Trivia: A diminutive, pot-bellied supporting player in B-Westerns, Ben Corbett had enjoyed some success at the famous rodeo at Pendleton, OR, and at New York's Madison Square Garden, where his roping and "Roman" riding skills reportedly won him several trophies. Entering films as a riding double for William Desmond and Antonio Moreno in Vitagraph Westerns and action melodramas in the 1910s, Corbett later became a member of Western star Hoot Gibson's stock company at Universal. That studio saw enough comedic potential in the former stunt man to team him with the equally diminutive Gilbert "Pee Wee" Holmes as Magpie and Dirtshirt in a series of rural comedy shorts set in the fictive community of Piperock. The series, which was released on Universal's "Mustang Brand" in the mid-'20s, counted among its leading ladies such future stars as Janet Gaynor and Fay Wray. In the 1930s, Corbett's character of Magpie returned in several independently produced "Bud 'n Ben" western shorts and the now veteran supporting player later became Tim McCoy's sidekick at low-budget Victory Pictures. He seems to have popped up in every other low-budget Western thereafter, usually appearing unbilled. B-Western compiler Les Adams has verified Corbett's presence in about 185 Westerns and half a dozen serials between 1930 and the actor's retirement in the early '50s, but there may actually have been many more. History, alas, has not been kind to the rustic B-Western perennial, whose arcane comedy relief, most fans of the genre agree, often seems more a hindrance than a help in keeping a plot moving.

Trivia: Actor Edward Hearn's Hollywood career extended from 1916 to 1951. A leading man in the silent era, Hearn was seen in such roles as Philip Nolan, the title character in Man without a Country (1925). His first talkie effort was Frank Capra's The Donovan Affair (1929). Capra never forgot Hearn, securing minor roles for the actor when his star faded in the early 1930s. Edward Hearn spent his last two decades in films playing dozens of cops, jurors, and military officers, essaying bits in features and supporting roles in serials and short subjects.

Trivia: American actor George Eldredge began surfacing in films around 1936. A general hanger-on in the Universal horror product of the 1940s, Eldredge appeared in such roles as the village constable in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the DA in Calling Dr. Death (1943). His bland, malleable facial features enabled him to play everything from tanktown sheriffs to Nazi spies. Devotees of the "exploitation" films of the 1940s will remember Eldredge best as Dan Blake in the anti-syphilis tract Mom and Dad (1949). George Eldredge was once again in uniform as a small-town police chief in his final film, Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

Trivia: Six-foot-tall American actor Rory Mallinson launched his screen career at the end of WW II. Mallinson was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1945, making his first appearance in Price of the Marines. In 1947, he began free-lancing at Republic, Columbia and other "B"-picture mills. One of his larger roles was Hodge in the 1952 Columbia serial Blackhawk. Rory Mallinson made his last film in 1963.

Trivia: Hearty character actor Ralph Sanford made his first screen appearances at the Flatbush studios of Vitaphone Pictures. From 1933 to 1937, Sanford was Vitaphone's resident Edgar Kennedy type, menacing such two-reel stars as Shemp Howard, Roscoe Ates, and even Bob Hope. He moved to Hollywood in 1937, where, after playing several bit roles, he became a semi-regular with Paramount's Pine-Thomas unit with meaty supporting roles in such films as Wildcat (1942) and The Wrecking Crew (1943). He also continued playing featured roles at other studios, usually as a dimwitted gangster or flustered desk sergeant. One of his largest assignments was in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945), in which he plays vengeance-seeking Richard K. Muldoon, who threatens at every opportunity to (literally) skin Stan and Ollie alive; curiously, he receives no screen credit, despite the fact that his character motivates the entire plot line. Busy throughout the 1950s, Ralph Sanford was a familiar presence on TV, playing one-shot roles on such series as Superman and Leave It to Beaver and essaying the semi-regular part of Jim "Dog" Kelly on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: Character actor Holly Bane (who sometimes billed himself as Michael Ragan) specialized in playing bad guys in low-budget Westerns and serials. He made his first film appearance in Wake Island (1942), then appeared frequently in films through 1966, when he worked opposite Elvis Presley in Gunpoint. In the 1970s, Bane became a makeup director and worked on such television series as Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter.

Trivia: Danish-born actor Kit Guard came to prominence in the mid 1920s as a regular in a trio of 2-reel comedy series: "The Go-Getters," "The Pacemakers" and "Bill Grimm's Progress." Guard appeared in at least 200 feature films, usually cast as sailors, barflies and foreign legionnaires. Usually unbilled, he managed to attain screen credit in the 1931 Ronald Colman vehicle The Unholy Garden and as Dinky in the 1940 Columbia serial The Green Archer. Kit Guard made his last fleeting film appearance in Carrie (1952).

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.

Trivia: One look at Alan Hale Jr. and no one could ever assume he was adopted; Hale Jr. so closely resembled his father, veteran character actor Alan Hale Sr., that at times it appeared that the older fellow had returned to the land of the living. In films from 1933, Alan Jr. was originally cast in beefy, athletic good-guy roles (at 6'3", he could hardly play hen-pecked husbands). After the death of his father in 1950, Alan dropped the "Junior" from his professional name. He starred in a brace of TV action series, Biff Baker USA (1953) and Casey Jones (1957), before his he-man image melted into comedy parts. From 1964 through 1967, Hale played The Skipper (aka Jonas Grumby) on the low-brow but high-rated Gilligan's Island. Though he worked steadily after Gilligan's cancellation, he found that the blustery, slow-burning Skipper had typed him to the extent that he lost more roles than he won. In his last two decades, Alan Hale supplemented his acting income as the owner of a successful West Hollywood restaurant, the Lobster Barrel.