Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: Frail-looking but iron-willed American actor Henry B. Walthall set out to become a lawyer, but was drawn to the stage instead. After several seasons appearing opposite such luminaries as Henry Miller and Margaret Anglin, Walthall was firmly established in New York's theatrical circles by the time he entered films in 1909 at the invitation of director D.W. Griffith. Clearly, both men benefited from the association: Griffith was able to exploit Walthall's expertise and versatility, while Walthall learned to harness his tendency to overact. The best of the Griffith/Walthall collaborations was Birth of a Nation (1915), in which Walthall portrayed the sensitive Little Colonel. Walthall left Griffith in 1915, a move that did little to advance his career. A string of mediocre productions spelled finis to Walthall's stardom, though he continued to prosper in character parts into the 1930s. One of his best showings in the talkie era was a virtual replay of his Little Colonel characterization in the closing scenes of the 1934 Will Rogers vehicle Judge Priest. Henry B. Walthall died while filming the 1936 Warner Bros. film China Clipper; ironically, he passed away just before he was scheduled to film his character's death scene.

Trivia: A blond leading lady of low-budget melodramas of the late '20s, Chicago-born Shirley Palmer also played supporting roles in more upscale surroundings, such as Sam Goldwyn's Ronald Colman-Vilma Banky vehicle The Magic Flame (1927), in which she played the unfaithful wife of a nobleman. She was much more visible in potboilers, however, appearing opposite action hero Charles Hutchison in The Winning Wallop (1926), and as the leading lady of The Eagle of the Night, a ten-chapter serial co-starring stunt pilot Frank Clarke. Retiring from the screen in 1934, Palmer later became the wife of television writer John Collier.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: A titan in the field of low-budget movie-making, Australian-born stage actor J.P. McGowan enjoyed his first major success directing his wife Helen Holmes in the immensely popular and lucrative Hazards of Helen series, in which he also often played the villain. The McGowans left the producer, Kalem, after 30-odd installments to produce their own railroad series and serials under the Signal banner. The venture was reasonably successful until the distributor, Mutual, went out of business in 1919, after which the couple went into an immediate decline professionally and personally. On his own, McGowan spent the 1920s producing, directing, and acting in some of the cheapest professional films ever released, usually budgeting his little action melodramas for less money than MGM would spend on a newspaper add and economizing by incorporating plenty of stock footage that at least offered the illusion of grandeur. A character actor and bit part player in the 1930s, McGowan made his final screen appearance in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939).

Trivia: Balding, long-necked character actor Frank Rice made his earliest screen appearance in 1922. In talkies, Rice often appeared in comic bit roles, many of which -- notably the butler in Laurel and Hardy's Pack up Your Troubles (1932) -- afforded him the opportunity of performing his rolling-eyeballs specialty. From 1931 onward, he successfully pursued a career as a Western comedy sidekick, appearing opposite such sagebrush stars as John Wayne and Buck Jones. Frank Rice died prematurely at age 44 of complications ensuing from nephritis and hepatitis.

Trivia: With his rakish mustache and a bowler jauntily pushed to the back of his head, Chicago-born Billy Franey (sometimes billed William Franey) starred in Universal Joker comedies from 1913. In the 1920s, he became a busy presence at almost every poverty row company, almost always supplying brief comic relief in Westerns. The veteran performer died from a bout of influenza.

Trivia: Someone once called American supporting actor Charles "Slim" Whitaker a "no good yellow-bellied polecat," and that is as good a description as any for this paunchy, mustachioed gent, a former stage manager and stock company actor from Kansas City, MO. Whitaker's screen career was spent almost entirely in B-Westerns, where he would skulk around as lazy ranch hands, tobacco-chewing henchmen, Mexican "half-breeds," and even the occasional corrupt lawman. More versatile than most Western supporting players, Whitaker was adept at comedy as well, and was humorously billed "Slender" Whitaker in 1925's Border Intrigue, in which he played a comedic Mexican bandito. Whitaker, who made his screen bow around 1925, was busiest in the 1930s, appearing in over 25 films in 1935 alone! He continued in pictures through the late '40s, but spent his final years working as a short-order cook in a Hollywood coffee shop.

Trivia: One of the meanest looking denizens of B-Westerns, John "Blackie" Whiteford could also play comedy. He made one of his earliest screen appearances as a fellow inmate in Laurel & Hardy's The Hoose Gow (1929). He was a comedy prisoner again in the boys' Pardon Us (1932), but from then on it was B-Westerns all the way. With his scowling demeanor and hefty physique, Whiteford almost always played a thug and usually his appearance went unbilled. If his character had a name, it was always something like Zeke, Jake, or of course, Blackie. He was billed John P. Whiteford in his final screen appearance, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Trivia: One of the more effective Western thugs of the 1920s and 1930s, hatchet-faced, mustachioed Jim Corey menaced every cowboy hero around, from Art Acord at Universal to Tom Tyler at FBO, but had a special fondness for irritating the good-natured Hoot Gibson. Corey was never the main opposition (he usually left that position to more polished performers like Duke R. Lee or Harry Woods), but the term "henchman" could easily have been coined with him in mind. Usually lurking in the background, Corey is easily identifiable by wearing his gun holster on his left.