Trivia: Athletic, dashing, and heroic onscreen, and a notorious bon vivant in his personal life, Errol Flynn ranked among Hollywood's most popular and highly paid stars from the mid-'30s through the early '40s, and his costume adventures thrilled audiences around the world. Unfortunately, a combination of hard-living, bad financial investments, and scandal brought Flynn's career to a tragic end in 1959. He was born on the isle of Tasmania, the son of distinguished Australian marine biologist/zoologist Prof. Theodore Thomson Flynn. In school, Flynn was more drawn to athletics than academics and he was expelled from a number of exclusive Australian and British schools. At age 15, he found work as a shipping clerk in Sydney, and the following year he sailed to New Guinea to work in the government service, but the daily grind proved not to the adventuresome Flynn's taste, so he took off to prospect for gold. In 1930, Flynn returned to Sydney and purchased a boat, and he and three friends embarked upon a seven-month voyage to New Guinea. Upon arrival, Flynn became the overseer of a tobacco plantation and also wrote a column for the Sydney Bulletin. Flynn's introduction to acting came via an Australian film producer who happened to see photographs of the extraordinarily good-looking young man and had him cast as Fletcher Christian in the low-budget docudrama In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). After a year of stage repertory acting to hone his dramatic skills, Flynn headed to London for film work. Attaining a contract at Warner Bros. in 1935, Flynn languished in tiny parts until star Robert Donat suddenly dropped out of the big-budget swashbuckler Captain Blood (1935). The studio took a chance on Flynn, and the result was overnight stardom. It was also during this year that Flynn married actress Lili Damita. Although he'd make stabs at modern-dress dramas and light comedies, Flynn was most effective in period costume films, leading his men "into the Valley of Death" in Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), trading swordplay and sarcasm with Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and even making the West safe for women and children in Dodge City (1939). At his romantic best onscreen, Flynn was king of the rouges, egotistically strutting before such damsels as Olivia de Havilland and Alexis Smith, arrogantly taunting them and secretly thrilling them with his sharp, often cynical wit and his muscular legs. But despite such rapscallion behavior, the ladies and his cohorts loved Flynn because, undisguised in his arresting blue eyes, they could see that he was a man of honor, passion, sincerity, and even a little vulnerability. Thus, an Errol Flynn adventure caused female fans to swoon and male fans to imagine themselves in his place.By the early '40s, Flynn ranked among Warner Bros.' most popular and lucrative stars. It should come as no surprise that the actor, with his potent charisma and obvious zest for life onscreen, was no less a colorful character, albeit a less heroic one, offscreen. His antics with booze, young women, and brawling kept studio executives nervous, PR men busy, and fans titillated for years. In 1942, Flynn was brought up on statutory rape charges involving two teenage girls, but was acquitted. Such allegations could easily have destroyed a lesser star's career, but not in Flynn's case. Instead of finding his career in ruins, he found himself more popular than ever -- particularly with female fans. In fact, the matter inspired a new catch phrase: "In like Flynn." That same year, he divorced Damita. (The couple's son, actor Sean Flynn, a dead ringer for his father, worked as a photojournalist and war correspondent in Southeast Asia where he disappeared in 1970 and was presumed dead.)But while Flynn's pictures continued to score at the box office, the actor, himself, was declining; already demoralized by his inability to fight in World War II due to a variety of health problems -- including recurring malaria, tuberculosis, and a bad heart -- Flynn's drinking and carousing increased, and, although he remained a loyal and good friend to his cronies, the actor's overall behavior became erratic. By the time he starred in The Adventures of Don Juan (1949) -- a role he could have done blindfolded ten years earlier -- Flynn was suffering from short-term memory loss and seemed unsure of himself. He divorced his second wife, Nora Eddington, in 1949 and the following year married actress Patrice Wymore. In 1952, Flynn appeared to have regained his former prowess (but for several injuries during production) in Against All Flags, but the success was short-lived. As his box-office appeal lessened and his debts grew larger, the increasingly bitter Flynn left for Europe to make a few films, including The Master of Ballantrae (1953) and Crossed Swords (1954). The latter was poorly received stateside, something Flynn blamed on the distributor's (United Artists) lack of promotion. The final blow for Flynn came when he lost his entire fortune on an ill-fated, never-completed attempt to film the story of William Tell. To cope with his pain and losses, Flynn took to the sea, sailing about for long periods in his 120-foot ocean-going sailboat, the Zaca. Returning to Hollywood in 1956, Flynn made a final bid to recapture his earlier glory, offering excellent performances in The Sun Also Rises (1957), The Roots of Heaven (1958), and Too Much, Too Soon (1958). Ironically, in the latter film, Flynn played another self-destructive matinee idol, John Barrymore. Strapped for cash during this period, Flynn penned his memoirs, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which were published after his death in 1959. It was Flynn's third book; the first two were Beam Ends (1937), a description of his voyage to New Guinea in the Scirocco, and Showdown (1946), a novel. His final film was the grade-Z Cuban Rebel Girls (1958), in which he appeared with his girlfriend at the time, 17-year-old Beverly Aadland. Four months after turning 50, Flynn's years of hard living caught up with him and he died of heart failure. According to the coroner's report, his body was so afflicted by various ailments that it looked as if it belonged to a much older man.

Trivia: Born in Japan to a British patent attorney and his actress wife, Olivia de Havilland succumbed to the lure of Thespis while attending high school in Los Gatos, CA, where she played Hermia in an amateur production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The older sister of actress Joan Fontaine, de Havilland was spotted by famed director Max Reinhardt, who cast her in his legendary Hollywood Bowl production of the play. This led to her part in the Warner Bros. film adaptation of Midsummer in 1935, and being signed to a long-term contract wiht the company. Considering herself a classical actress, de Havilland tried to refuse the traditional ingenue roles offered her by the studio, which countered by telling her she'd be ruined in Hollywood if she didn't cooperate. Loaned out to David O. Selznick, de Havilland played Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind (1939), earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the process. Although she didn't come out on top that year, she would later win two Best Actress Oscars, the first for 1946's To Each His Own, and then again for 1949's The Heiress. De Havilland also made news when she sued Warner Bros. for extending her seven-year contract by tacking on the months she'd been on suspension for refusing to take a part. The actress spent three long years off the screen, but she ultimately won her case, and the "De Havilland Law," as it would become known, effectively destroyed the studios' ability to virtually enslave their contractees by unfairly extending their contract time. After completing The Heiress, de Havilland spent several years on Broadway, cutting down her subsequent film appearances to approximately one per year. In 1955, she moved to France with her second husband, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante; she later recalled her Paris years with the semiautobiographical Every Frenchman Has One. De Havilland showed up in a brace of profitable fading-star horror films in the '60s: Lady in a Cage (1964) and Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965), in which she replaced Joan Crawford. During the next decade, she appeared in a number of TV productions and in such all-star film efforts as Airport '77 (1977) and The Swarm (1978). After a number of TV appearances (if not always starring roles) in the '80s, de Havilland once more found herself in the limelight in 1989, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Gone With the Wind. As one of the only surviving stars from this film, she was much sought after for interviews and reminiscences, but graciously refused almost every request.

Trivia: After attending the University of the South in Tennessee, Bruce Cabot bounced around from job to job: working on a tramp steamer, selling insurances, even hauling away the bones of dead animals. While attending a Hollywood party, Cabot met RKO producer David O. Selznick, which resulted in Cabot's first film appearance in Roadhouse Murder. His most famous role while at RKO was as the heroic Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933), rescuing Fay Wray from the hairy paws of the 50-foot ape. Thereafter, Cabot was most often seen in villainous, brutish roles. It is hard to imagine anyone more venomous or vicious than Bruce Cabot in such roles as the scarred gangster boss in Let 'Em Have It (1936), the treacherous Magua in Last of the Mohicans (1936), or the thick-skulled lynch-mob instigator in Fury (1936). During World War II, Cabot worked in army intelligence and operations in Africa, Sicily and Italy. A good friend of John Wayne, Cabot was frequently cast in "The Duke's" vehicles of the 1960s, including The Green Berets (1968). Among Bruce Cabot's three wives were actresses Adrienne Ames and Francesca de Scaffa.

Trivia: Ann Sheridan was born Clara Lou Sheridan, the name under which she was billed in 1934 and part of 1935. At 18 she won a "Search for Beauty" contest, and was rewarded with a bit part in a film by that name (1934). Signed to a contract, she appeared in small roles in more than 20 films throughout the next two years. She changed her first name and, in 1936, switched studios to Warner Bros., which launched a publicity campaign hyping her as the sexy "Oomph Girl." Sheridan went on to a very busy career in better roles, usually cast as a wise, practical girl; her work in King's Row (1942) best demonstrated her acting ability and opened the door to a wider variety of parts. She remained popular and busy through the early '50s, when available roles began drying up for her; by the mid '50s her screen career was over. She later starred in the TV soap opera "Another World" and on "live" TV dramatic shows, and also worked in stock. At the time of her death from cancer she was starring in the TV series Pistols 'n' Petticoats. She was married three times: to actors Edward Norris, George Brent, and Scott McKay.

Trivia: At age ten, Frank McHugh began performing in his parent's stock company, side by side with his siblings Matt and Kitty. By age 17, McHugh was resident juvenile with the Marguerite Bryant stock company. Extensive vaudeville experience followed, and in 1925 McHugh made his first Broadway appearance in The Fall Guy; three years later, he made his movie debut in a Vitaphone short. Hired by Warner Bros. for the small role of a motorcycle driver in 1930's The Dawn Patrol, McHugh appeared in nearly 70 Warners films over the next decade. He was often cast as the hero's best pal or as drunken comedy relief; his peculiar trademark was a lightly braying laugh. Highlight performances during his Warners tenure included Jimmy Cagney's pessimistic choreographer in Footlight Parade (1933), "rude mechanical" Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), an erstwhile poet and horserace handicapper in Three Men on a Horse (1936) and a friendly pickpocket in One Way Passage (1932) -- a role he'd repeat word-for-word in Till We Meet Again, 1940 remake of Passage. He continued showing up in character roles in such films as Going My Way (1944) and A Tiger Walks (1964) until the late 1960s. McHugh was also a regular on the 1960s TV series The Bing Crosby Show and F Troop.

Trivia: Wisconsinite John Litel was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. When World War I broke out in Europe, Litel didn't feel like waiting until America became officially involved and thus joined the French army, serving valiantly for three years. Returning to America, Litel studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and entered into the peripatetic world of touring stock companies. His first film was the 1929 talkie The Sleeping Porch, which starred top-hatted comedian Raymond Griffith. He settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1937, spending the next three decades portraying a vast array of lawyers, judges, corporate criminals, military officers, and even a lead or two. Litel was a regular in two separate "B"-picture series, playing the respective fathers of Bonita Granville and James Lydon in the Nancy Drew and Henry Aldrich series. On television, John Litel was appropriately ulcerated as the boss of Bob Cummings on the 1953 sitcom My Hero.

Trivia: After a rough-and-tumble adolescence, Victor Jory attended high school in California, studying acting with Gilmor Brown at the Pasadena Playhouse. Jory's subsequent tenure at the University of California lasted all of one year before he was bitten by wanderlust; he joined the coast guard, where he distinguished himself as a champion in several contact sports. Sharp-featured, muscular, and possessed of a rich theatrical voice, Jory made his New York stage bow in 1929, and one year later co-starred in the original Broadway production of Berkeley Square. Inaugurating his film career with Renegades (1930), Jory spent the next five decades in roles ranging from romantic leads to black-hearted villains. Highlights in his screen career include a sinister but strangely beautiful performance as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); the vicious Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); white-trash carpetbagger Jonas Wilkerson in Gone With the Wind (1939); Texas patriot William Travis in Man of Conquest (1939); the hissable, crippled patriarch in The Fugitive Kind (1960); the taciturn father of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962); and the ancient South American Indian chief in Papillon (1973). In 1940, Jory starred in the Columbia serial The Shadow (1940), essaying the dual role of the mind-clouding Shadow and his alter ego Lamont Cranston (with several disguise sequences along the way). The outspoken Jory was supremely confident of his talents, remarking on several occasions that he was "damn good" -- though he was tougher than any movie critic in assessing his lesser performances. He was also more than generous with young up-and-coming actors (except for self-involved "method" performers), and was a veritable fountain of Broadway and Hollywood anecdotes, some of which were actually true. An occasional theatrical director and playwright, Jory wrote the Broadway production Five Who Were Mad. On TV, Jory starred in the popular syndicated detective series Manhunt (1959-1960) and guested on dozens of other programs. Long married to actress Jean Innes, Victor Jory was the father of Jon Jory, who for many years was artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Trivia: A stage actor in the British Isles from 1894, Henry Travers settled permanently in America in 1901. Even as a comparative youngster, the pudding-faced, wispy-voiced Travers specialized in portraying befuddled old men. He was brought to Hollywood in 1933 to recreate his stage role as Father Krug in Robert E. Sherwood's Reunion in Vienna. Though often cast in amiable, self-effacing roles, Travers was perfectly capable of meatier stuff: as a downtrodden Chinese farmer in Dragon Seed (1944), he delivers a terse monologue describing how he has regained his self respect by beating his shrewish wife! Travers' best-remembered movie assignments included his Oscar-nominated portrayal of British postman Mr. Ballard in Mrs. Miniver (1942); his amusing turn as bank clerk and mystery-magazine fanatic Joseph Newton in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943); and, of course, his matchless performance as wingless guardian angel Clarence Oddbody in the Yuletide perennial It's a Wonderful Life (1946). After several years in retirement, Henry Travers died of arteriosclerosis at the age of 91.

Trivia: New Jersey-born Henry O'Neill was a year into his college education when he dropped out to join a traveling theatrical troupe. His career interrupted by WWI, O'Neill returned to the stage in 1919, where his prematurely grey hair and dignified demeanor assured him authoritative roles as lawyers, doctors, and business executives (though his first stage success was as the rough-and-tumble Paddy in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape). In films from 1933, O'Neill spent the better part of his movie career at Warner Bros. and MGM, usually playing parts requiring kindliness and understanding, but he was equally as effective in villainous assignments. Age and illness required Henry O'Neill to cut down on his film commitments in the 1950s, though he frequently showed up on the many TV anthology series of the era.

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: British-born Gloria Holden came to the U.S. early on, where she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and worked as a model. The sad-faced beauty made her film debut in the title role of Dracula's Daughter (1936); this and her subsequent appearance as the title-character's wife in The Life of Emile Zola (1937) would remain her most memorable screen roles. Adept at portraying icy society matrons, Holden provided the "loyal opposition" to the sugary sweetness of Shirley Temple in Miss Annie Rooney (1942) and A Kiss For Corliss (1949). Gloria Holden's last film was 1958's This Happy Feeling.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: American actor William Lundigan launched his show business career working as an adolescent announcer for a Syracuse radio station, which was housed in a building owned by his father. Abandoning a planned law career, Lundigan spent thirteen years as an announcer before being discovered by a Universal film executive in 1937. Appearing as a lightweight leading man in such films as Armored Car (1937) and Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1938), and in featured roles in the bigger-budgeted Dodge City and The Old Maid (both 1939), Lundigan worked steadily in the major studios before being drafted into the Marines for World War II service in 1942. Like many other second-echelon Hollywood actors, Lundigan found the going rough after the war, though as a Fox contractee he managed to land occasional good parts in such pictures as Pinky (1949) and I'll Get By (1950). When prospects dried up for Lundigan in the mid-1950s, he returned to announcing as the host of the popular CBS dramatic anthology Climax. Science fiction fans will remember Lundigan for his role in Riders to the Stars (1954), and for his portrayal of TV's first true astronaut, Col. MacCauley, in the 1959 weekly adventure series Men Into Space.

Trivia: Georgia Caine is best remembered today by film buffs for her work in most of Preston Sturges's classic films for Paramount Pictures, as well as the movies he subsequently made independently and at 20th Century Fox. She was practically born on stage, the daughter of George Caine and the former Jennie Darragh, both of whom were Shakespearean actors. As an infant and toddler, she was kept in the company of her parents as they toured the United States. Bitten by the theatrical bug, she left school before the age of 17 to become an actress and she started out in Shakespearean repertory. Caine quickly shifted over to musical comedy, however, and became a favorite of George M. Cohan, appearing in his plays Mary, The O'Brien Girls, and The Silver Swan, among others. In 1914, she also starred in a stage production of The Merry Widow in London. Caine was a favorite subject of theater columnists during the teens and '20s. By the end of that decade, however, after 30 years on stage, her star had begun to fade, and that was when Hollywood beckoned. The advent of talking pictures suddenly created a demand for actors and actresses who could handle spoken dialogue. She moved to the film Mecca at the outset of the 1930s, and Caine worked in more than 60 films over the next 20 years, usually playing mothers, aunts, and older neighbors. She also occasionally broke out of that mold to do something strikingly different, most notably in Camille (1937), in which she portrayed a streetwalker. Starting with Christmas in July in 1940, she was a regular member of Preston Sturges' stock company of players (even portraying a bearded lady in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), appearing in most of his movies right up to his directorial swan song, The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949).

Trivia: American actor Charles Halton was forced to quit school at age 14 to help support his family. When his boss learned that young Halton was interested in the arts, he financed the boy's training at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next three decades, Halton appeared in every aspect of "live" performing; in the '20s, he became a special favorite of playwright George S. Kaufman, who cast Halton in one of his most famous roles as movie mogul Herman Glogauer in Once in a Lifetime. Appearing in Dodsworth on Broadway with Walter Huston, Halton was brought to Hollywood to recreate his role in the film version. Though he'd occasionally return to the stage, Halton put down roots in Hollywood, where his rimless spectacles and snapping-turtle features enabled him to play innumerable "nemesis" roles. He could usually be seen as a grasping attorney, a rent-increasing landlord or a dictatorial office manager. While many of these characterizations were two-dimensional, Halton was capable of portraying believable human beings with the help of the right director; such a director was Ernst Lubitsch, who cast Halton as the long-suffered Polish stage manager in To Be or Not to Be (1942). Alfred Hitchcock likewise drew a flesh and blood portrayal from Halton, casting the actor as the small-town court clerk who reveals that Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are not legally married in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1942). Charles Halton retired from Hollywood after completing his work on Friendly Persuasion in 1956; he died three years later of hepatitis.

Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: American actor Bobs Watson was born into a family of show people in Hollywood, CA. He made his film debut as an infant and later became a popular child star in Fox and MGM films during the '30s. He was notable for his ability to cry on cue and is perhaps best remembered as little Pee Wee in Boys Town (1938). Watson left films in the early '40s. He later infrequently returned to play character roles until 1967 when he became an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church.

Trivia: American actor Russell Simpson is another of those character players who seemed to have been born in middle age. From his first screen appearance in 1910 to his last in 1959, Simpson personified the grizzled, taciturn mountain man who held strangers at bay with his shotgun and vowed that his daughter would never marry into that family he'd been feudin' with fer nigh on to forty years. It was not always thus. After prospecting in the 1898 Alaska gold rush, Simpson returned to the States and launched a career as a touring actor in stock -- most frequently cast in romantic leads. This led to a long association with Broadway impresario David Belasco. Briefly flirting with New York-based films in 1910, Simpson returned to the stage, then chose movies on a permanent basis in 1917. Of his hundreds of motion picture and TV appearances, Russell Simpson is best known for his participation in the films of director John Ford, most memorably as Pa Joad in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath.

Trivia: The screen's premiere "Old Codger," American actor Clem Bevans didn't make his movie debut until he was 55 years old. His acting career was launched in 1900 with a vaudeville boy-girl act costarring Grace Emmett. Bevans moved on to burlesque, stock shows, Broadway and light opera. In 1935, Bevans first stepped before the movie cameras as Doc Wiggins in Way Down East. It was the first of many toothless, stubble-chinned geezers that Bevans would portray for the next 27 years. On occasion, producers and directors would use Bevans' established screen persona to throw the audience off the track. In Happy Go Lucky (1942), he unexpectedly shows up as a voyeuristic millionaire with a fondness for female knees; in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), he is a likeable old desert rat who turns out to be a Nazi spy! Clem Bevans continued playing farmers, hillbillies, and "town's oldest citizen" roles into the early 1960s. The octogenarian actor could be seen in a 1962 episode of Twilight Zone ("Hocus Pocus and Frisby") looking and sounding just the same as he had way back in 1935.

Trivia: Cora Witherspoon began her 50-year career as a character actress at age 17, playing a septuagenarian in the New York production In Concert. She spent the better part of her Hollywood years portraying imperious society matrons, domineering maiden aunts, and henpecking hausfraus. Most filmgoers closely associate Witherspoon with her portrayal of W. C. Fields' slatternly wife in The Bank Dick (1940); despite their on camera animosity, Witherspoon and Fields were friends in real life, frequently exchanging complimentary correspondence. Though she preferred to work in New York, Cora Witherspoon continued commuting to Hollywood into the 1950s to maintain a decent standard of living.

Trivia: American actor Joseph Crehan bore an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant and appeared as Grant in a number of historical features, notably They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944). Appearing in hundreds of other films as well, the short, snappish actor's field-commander personality assured him authoritative roles as police chiefs, small-town mayors and newspaper editors. Because he never looked young, Joseph Crehan played essentially the same types of roles throughout his screen career, even up until 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. Perhaps Joseph Crehan's oddest appearance is in a film he never made; in West Side Story (1961), it is Crehan's face that appears on those ubiquitous political campaign posters in the opening Jets vs. Sharks sequences.

Trivia: The living image of the man on the Monopoly cards, Thurston Hall began his six-decade acting career on the New England stock-company circuit. Forming his own troupe, Hall toured America, Africa and New Zealand. On Broadway, he was starred in such venerable productions as Ben-Hur and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. In films from 1915, Hall appeared in dozens of silents, notably the 1917 Theda Bara version of Cleopatra, in which he played Mark Antony. After 15 years on Broadway, Hall returned to films in 1935, spending the next 20 years portraying many a fatuous businessman, pompous politician, dyspeptic judge or crooked "ward heeler." From 1953 through 1955, Hall was seen as the choleric bank president Mr. Schuyler on the TV sitcom Topper. Towards the end of his life, a thinner, goateed Thurston Hall appeared in several TV commercials as the Kentucky-colonel spokesman for a leading chicken pot pie manufacturer.

Trivia: For two decades, the diminutive American actor ChesterClute played a seemingly endless series of harassed clerks, testy druggists, milquetoast husbands, easily distracted laboratory assistants and dishevelled streetcar passengers. A New York-based stage actor, Clute began his movie career at the Astoria studios in Long Island, appearing in several early-talkie short subjects. He moved to the West Coast in the mid '30s, remaining there until his final film appearance in Colorado Territory (1952). While Chester Clute seldom had more than two or three lines of dialogue in feature films, he continued throughout his career to be well-served in short subjects, most notably as Vera Vague's wimpish suitor in the 1947 Columbia 2-reeler Cupid Goes Nuts.

Trivia: A product of the Indiana orphanage system, the part-Cherokee-Indian Monte Blue held down jobs ranging from stevedore to reporter before offering his services as a movie-studio handyman in the early 1910s. Pressed into service as an extra and stunt man, Blue graduated to featured parts in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Thanks to his work with Griffith and (especially) Cecil B. DeMille, Blue became a dependable box-office attraction of the 1920s, playing everything from lawyers to baseball players. He was a mainstay of the fledgling Warner Bros. studios, where the profits from his films frequently compensated for the expensive failures starring John Barrymore. In 1928 he was cast in his finest silent role, as the drink-sodden doctor in White Shadows on the South Seas. After making a successful transition to talkies, Blue decided to retire from filmmaking, taking a tour around the world to celebrate his freedom. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1931, Blue found that he had lost his fortune through bad investments, and that the public at large had forgotten him. By now too heavy-set to play romantic leads, Blue rebuilt his career from the bottom up, playing bits in "A" pictures and supporting roles in "B"s. He was busiest in the bread-and-butter westerns produced by such minor studios as Republic, Monogram and PRC; he also showed up in several serials, notably as "Ming the Merciless" clone Unga Khan in 1936's Undersea Kingdom. Movie mogul Jack Warner, out of gratitude for Blue's moneymaking vehicles of the 1920s, saw to it that Monte was steadily employed at Warner Bros., and that his name would appear prominently in the studio's advertising copy. While many of his talkie roles at Warners were bits, Blue was given choice supporting roles in such films as Across the Pacific (1942), Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and especially Key Largo (1948). Extending his activities into TV, Blue continued accepting character roles until retiring from acting in 1954. During the last years of his life, Monte Blue was the advance man for the Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus; it was while making his annual appearance in this capacity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that Blue suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 73.

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: Actor Robert Emmett Homans seemingly had the map of Ireland stamped on his craggy face. As a result, Homans spent the better part of his film career playing law enforcement officers of all varieties, from humble patrolmen to detective chiefs. After a lengthy stage career, Homans entered films in 1923. A break from his usual microscopic film assignments occured in Public Enemy (1931), where Homans is given an opportunity to deliver reams of exposition (with a pronounced brogue) during a funeral sequence. And in the 1942 Universal horror programmer Night Monster, Robert Emmett Homans is alotted a sizeable role as the ulcerated detective investigating the supernatural goings-on at the home of seemingly helpless invalid Ralph Morgan.

Trivia: A master of the delayed, dull-witted double take, American actor George Guhl spent several decades in vaudeville as a member of the Guhl Brothers and Guhl and Adams comedy teams. He entered films in 1935, remaining active until his death eight years later. Fans of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies will remember Guhl as gimlet-eyed truant officer Smithers in Arbor Day (1936). George Guhl's best feature-film assignment was the recurring role of dim-bulbed desk sergeant Graves in Warner Bros.' "Torchy Blane" series.

Trivia: Burly, puffy-cheeked American actor Spencer Charters entered films in 1923, after decades of stage experience. In his first talkie appearances (Whoopee [1930], The Bat Whispers [1931], etc.), Charters was often seen as an ill-tempered authority figure. Traces of this characterization continued into such mid-'30s efforts as Wheeler and Woolsey's Hips Hips Hooray, but before the decade was over Charters was firmly locked into playing such benign types as rustic sheriffs, bucolic hotel clerks and half-asleep justices of the peace. Advancing age and the attendant infirmities made it difficult for Charters to play anything other than one-scene bits by the early '40s. At the age of 68, he ended his life by downing an overdose of sleeping pills and then inhaling the exhaust fumes of his car.

Trivia: One of the most popular, and recognizable, character actors in B-Western history, pudgy, mustachioed Bud Osborne (real name Leonard Miles Osborne) was one of the many Wild West show performers who parlayed their experiences into lengthy screen careers. Especially noted for his handling of runaway stagecoaches and buckboards, Osborne began as a stunt performer with Thomas Ince's King-Bee company around 1912, and by the 1920s he had become one of the busiest supporting players in the business. Rather rakish-looking in his earlier years, the still slender Osborne even attempted to become a Western star in his own right. Produced by the Bud Osborne Feature Film Company and released by low-budget Truart Pictures, The Prairie Mystery (1922) presented Osborne as a romantic leading man opposite B-movie regular Pauline Curley. Few saw this little clunker, however, and Osborne quickly returned to the ranks of supporting cowboys, often portraying despicable villains with names like Satan Saunders, Piute Sam, or Bull McKee. Playing an escaped convict masquerading as a circuit rider in both the 1923 Leo Maloney short Double Cinched and Shootin' Square, a 1924 Jack Perrin feature Western, Osborne even demonstrated an affinity for comedy. The now veteran Bud Osborne continued his screen career into the sound era and became even busier in the 1930s and 1940s. As he grew older and his waistline expanded, Osborne's roles became somewhat smaller and instead of calling the shots himself, as he often had in the silent era, he now answered to the likes of Roy Barcroft and Charles King. But he seems to pop up in every other B-Western and serial released in those years, appearing in more than 65 productions for Republic Pictures alone. By the 1950s, the now elderly Osborne became one of the many veteran performers courted by maverick filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr., for whom he did Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1954), an unsold television pilot, Jailbait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Night of the Ghouls (1958). When all is said and done, it was a rather dismal finish to a colorful career.

Trivia: Vaudeville and stage performer Pat O'Malley was a mere lad of seventeen (or thereabouts) when he inaugurated his film career at the Edison company in 1907. A dependable "collar-ad" leading man possessed of an athlete's physique, O'Malley rose to stardom at the Kalem Studios during the teens. From 1918 to 1927, O'Malley hopscotched around Hollywood, appearing at Universal, First National, Vitagraph and Paramount; he starred in war films (Heart of Humanity [1918]), westerns (The Virginian [1922]) and adaptations of bestsellers (Brothers Under the Skin [1922]). His talkie debut in 1929's Alibi would seem to have heralded a thriving sound career, but O'Malley had aged rather suddenly, and could no longer pass as a romantic lead. He worked in some 400 films in bits and supporting roles, frequently showing up in "reunion" films in the company of his fellow silent screen veterans (Hollywood Boulevard [1936], and A Little Bit of Heaven [1941]). O'Malley remained "on call" into the early '60s for such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and such films as The Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Pat O'Malley's film credits are often confused with those of Irish comedian/dialectian J. Pat O'Malley (1901-1985) and Australian performer John P. O'Malley (1916-1959).

Trivia: Virile, dignified Canadian actor Wilfred Lucas was a stage veteran when he joined the Biograph movie company in 1907. He played a variety of leading roles in the films of D.W. Griffith, including the title character in Griffith's two-reel adaptation of Enoch Arden. Occasionally turning director himself, Lucas was especially busy in this capacity at the Keystone studios of Mack Sennett. During the 1920s, Lucas played several character roles in major productions and also kept busy as a director and screenwriter. In the talkie era, Wilfred Lucas played innumerable bit parts at Warner Bros., Hal Roach Studios and Paramount; he could occasionally be seen in sizeable roles in such films as Laurel and Hardy's Pardon Us (1931) and A Chump at Oxford (1940), and director James Cruze's I Cover the Waterfront (1933).

Trivia: Affectionately described by film historian William K. Everson as "That lovable old wreck of a busybody," actress Vera Lewis was indeed quite lovable in person, even though most of her screen characters were sharp-tongued and spiteful in the extreme. Lewis first appeared in films in 1915, playing bits in such historical spectacles as D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) and the privately-funded Argonauts of California. By the 1920s, she was well-established in such venomous characterizations as the remonstrative stepmother in the 1926 Colleen Moore starrer Ella Cinders. She continued playing small-town snoops, gimlet-eyed landladies, irksome relatives and snobbish society doyennes well into the talkie era. Even when unbilled, Lewis was unforgettable: in 1933's King Kong, she's the outraged theater patron who mercilessly browbeats an usher upon finding out that the mighty Kong will be appearing in person instead of on film. When all is said and done, Vera Lewis was never better than when she was playing a gorgon-like mother-in-law, as witness her work as Mrs. Nesselrode in W.C. Fields' Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and as Andy Clyde's vituperative mom-by-marriage in the 1947 2-reeler Wife to Spare.

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: Bearded and scruffy-looking, William Merrill McCormick became one of the busiest character actors in B-Western history. Beginning his screen career in the late 1910s, McCormick excelled at playing unshaven henchmen, rustlers, stage robbers, and a host of other less-than-desirable prairie varmints. Rarely the main villain, he could usually be spotted sneering in the background alongside such fellow bit part players as Jim Corey, Bill Gillis, and Al Ferguson. Taking time out to direct good friend Marin Sais in a couple of very inexpensive oaters in 1923, McCormick kept up a hectic acting schedule that lasted well into the television era. He died of a heart attack right after finishing a scene for the television series The Roy Rogers Show.

Trivia: In films from the early 1930s, Fred Graham was one of Hollywood's busiest stunt men and stunt coordinators. A fixture of the Republic serial unit in the 1940s and 1950s, Graham was occasionally afforded a speaking part, usually as a bearded villain. His baseball expertise landed him roles in films like Death on the Diamond (1934), Angels in the Outfield (1951) and The Pride of St. Louis (1952). He was also prominently featured in several John Wayne vehicles, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Fighting Kentuckian (1949), The Horse Soldiers (1959) and The Alamo (1960). After retiring from films, Fred Graham served as director of the Arizona Motion Pictures Development Office.

Trivia: Distinguished-looking character actor Tom Chatterton was one of early Western star William S. Hart's first directors (His Hour of Manhood [1914], Jim Cameron's Wife [1914]) and was a top supporting star, himself, during the late '10s. After a long stint in vaudeville and legitimate theater, Chatterton returned as a Hollywood bit player in the late '30s, often cast in Western B- movies, usually playing professional men, doctors, lawyers, military officers, and the like. Among his more memorable performances was that of the aged lawman Bat Matson in the Sunset Carson oater Code of the Prairie (1944), a character undoubtedly inspired by Bat Masterson. He also played the sheriff in the 1947 serial Jesse James Rides Again. Chatterton died in Hollywood in 1952.

Trivia: A former professional baseball player, Pat Flaherty was seen in quite a few baseball pictures after his 1934 screen debut. Flaherty can be seen in roles both large and small in Death on the Diamond (1934), Pride of the Yankees (1942), It Happened in Flatbush (1942), The Stratton Story (1949, as the Western All-Stars coach), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Winning Team (1952, as legendary umpire Bill Klem). In 1948's Babe Ruth Story, Flaherty not only essayed the role of Bill Corrigan, but also served as the film's technical advisor. Outside the realm of baseball, he was usually cast in blunt, muscle-bound roles, notably Fredric March's taciturn male nurse "Cuddles" in A Star is Born (1937). One of Pat Flaherty's most unusual assignments was Wheeler and Woolsey's Off Again, On Again (1937), in which, upon finding his wife (Patricia Wilder) in a compromising position with Bert Wheeler, he doesn't pummel the hapless Wheeler as expected, but instead meekly apologizes for his wife's flirtatiousness!

Trivia: Brawny character actor James Farley made his entree into films in 1918. Best-served in roles calling for authority backed by muscle, Farley can be seen as Southern General Thatcher in Buster Keaton's The General (1926) and as the executioner in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). He spent most of the talkie era in small roles as detectives, patrolmen and night watchman. James Farley's credits are sometimes confused with those of another actor by the same name who acted in "regional" productions of the 1960s.

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: A veteran of Selig two-reelers in the early 1910s, burly American character actor Horace B. Carpenter came to the forefront after joining the Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1914. For pioneering director Cecil B. DeMille, Carpenter played Spanish Ed in The Virginian (1914) and Jacques D'Arc in Joan the Woman (1916), both still extant, before striking out on his own, directing and acting in some of the cheapest Westerns and action melodramas ever produced. Returning to acting exclusively after the changeover to sound, Carpenter continued to play his stock-in-trade, kindly fathers and ranchers in scores of B-Westerns. Thus, it came as an unpleasant surprise when the veteran actor, out of sheer poverty one imagines, accepted to play Dr. Meinschultz, devouring a cat's eye in the 1934 exploitation thriller Maniac. Carpenter survived this indiscretion with his career somewhat intact and continued to play scores of supporting roles and bit parts right up to his death of a heart attack.

Trivia: American character actor Earl Dwire was most closely associated with the B-Western movie mills of the 1930s. Dwire frequently played the antagonist in the low-budget vehicles of such cowboy stars as Bob Steele and Johnny Mack Brown. In the early '30s, he was virtually a regular in the John Wayne Westerns produced by the Lone Star outfit. He also occasionally accepted such contemporary minor roles as a priest in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) and a gangster in Accidents Will Happen (1939). Earl Dwire's last known film credit was the Universal serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

Trivia: Howard M. Mitchell's screen acting career got off to a good start with a pair of silent serials, Beloved Adventurer (1914) and The Road of Strife (1915). Mitchell kept busy as a director in the 1920s, returning to acting in 1935. His roles were confined to bits and walk-ons as guards, storekeepers, judges, and especially police chiefs. Howard M. Mitchell closed out his career playing a train conductor in the classic "B" melodrama The Narrow Margin (1952).

Trivia: Silent film star Frank Mayo was in movies as early as 1913 when he began a long association with the World Film Company of New Jersey; later he was most closely linked with Universal Pictures. Equally impressive in a dinner jacket or rugged outdoor garb, Mayo was a dependable strong-and-stalwart hero in such Hollywood films as The Brute Breaker (19), Afraid to Fight (22) and Souls for Sale (23). Toward the end of the silent era, Mayo married actress Dagmar Godowsky, whose star began ascending even as her husband's eclipsed; the marriage was annulled in 1928. Confined to bit and extra roles in the 1930s and 1940s, Frank Mayo was frequently hired by producer Jack Warner and director Cecil B. DeMille, both of whom regularly employed the faded stars of the silent years; Mayo's final appearance was in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (49).

Trivia: "A very funny guy -- funnier than most gave him credit for," as one director described him, lanky, slow-moving Guy Wilkerson is fondly remembered for playing comedy sidekick Panhandle Perkins in the 1942-1945 PRC Texas Rangers film series, a low-rent competition for Republic Pictures' popular Three Mesquiteers Westerns. As Panhandle, Wilkerson's comedy was never intrusive and often used merely as a slow-witted counterpoint to the action. In Hollywood from at least 1937 (some sources claim he appeared onscreen as early as the 1920s), Wilkerson had honed his skills in minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, but away from his sidekick duties at PRC, he was usually seen playing less humorous characters, notably ministers or undertakers. Appearing in hundreds of feature films and television series over three decades, Guy Wilkerson was last seen in the crime thriller The Todd Killings in 1971, the year of his death from cancer.

Trivia: If the heroine's father, the town doctor, or storekeeper wasn't played by Lafe McKee or John Elliott, chances are that he would be portrayed by the equally distinguished-looking, gray-haired Steve Clark, whose B-Western credits reached an impressive 250 and whose career continued well into the 1950s in such television Westerns as The Range Rider, The Cisco Kid, and The Lone Rider. But unlike McKee and Elliott, Clark was just as often to be found on the wrong side of the law and he can be spotted playing "dog heavies" well into his fifties. A well-known actor-manager prior to entering films in the early 1930s, Clark both directed and starred in The Blue Ghost (1930), a Broadway play featuring Leslie King which enjoyed a respectable run of 112 performances.

Trivia: The daughter of a Massachusetts lawyer, American actress Bette Davis matured with a desire to become an actress upon her graduation from Cushing Academy, but was turned away from Eva LeGallienne's Manhattan Civic Repertory in New York. Undaunted, Davis enrolled in John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School, where everyone (including classmate Lucille Ball) regarded her as the star pupil. After a 1928 summer season with director George Cukor's stock company in Rochester, NY (where she worked with future co-star -- and rival -- Miriam Hopkins), Davis went on to Broadway, starring in Broken Dishes and Solid South before Hollywood called. Dazzling on-stage, Davis was signed to a contract by Universal in 1930. After an unimpressive debut in Bad Sister in 1931, however, Davis was out of work, but picked up by Warner Bros. soon thereafter. Davis applied herself with white-hot intensity to becoming a star with that company, and after a major role in the 1932 George Arliss vehicle The Man Who Played God, a star she became. Still, the films at Warner Bros. were uneven, and it wasn't until the studio loaned out Davis to play the bravura role of Mildred in RKO's Of Human Bondage (1934) that the critics began to take notice. An Oscar nomination seemed inevitable for her performance in Bondage, but Davis was let down by Warner Bros., which didn't like the fact that her best appearance had been in a rival's movie, and it failed to get behind her Oscar campaign (although there was a significant write-in vote for the actress). But, in 1935, Davis excelled as a self-destructive actress in the otherwise turgid film Dangerous, and an Oscar was finally hers. And when Warner Bros. subsequently failed to give Davis the top roles she felt she then merited, the actress went on strike and headed for England. She lost a legal battle with the studio and came back, but it acknowledged her grit and talent by increasing her salary and giving her much better roles. In 1939 alone, Davis starred in Dark Victory, Juarez, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Old Maid. But she didn't get the plum role of the season -- Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind -- because Warner Bros. wouldn't loan her to David O. Selznick unless Errol Flynn was chosen to play Rhett Butler (a piece of casting both Selznick and Davis violently opposed). But Davis had already had her turn at playing a Southern belle in Jezebel (1938), which won her second a Oscar. As her star status increased in the 1940s, Davis found that it would have to be at the expense of her private life -- she would be married and divorced four times, admitting toward the end of her life that her career came first, last, and always. A fling at being her own producer in 1946 was disappointing, and her contract with Warner Bros. petered out in 1949 with a string of unsuccessful films. Davis made a spectacular comeback in 1950 when she replaced an ailing Claudette Colbert in the role of Margot Channing in the Oscar-winning All About Eve. Though suffering from a bone disease that required part of her jaw to be removed, Davis continued to work in films throughout the '50s; but, in 1961, things came to a standstill, forcing the actress to take out a famous job-wanted ad in the trade papers. In 1962, Davis began the next phase of her career when she accepted the role of a whacked-out former child star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? This led to a string of gothic horror films that did little to advance Davis' reputation, but kept her in the public eye. It was also in 1962 that Davis penned her thoughtful and honest autobiography The Lonely Life. Working in movies, TV, on-stage and on one-woman lecture tours into the '70s, Davis may have been older but no less feisty and combative; her outspokenness may have unnerved some of her co-stars, but made her an ideal interview subject for young film historians and fans. In 1977, Davis received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, an honor usually bestowed upon performers who were retired or inactive. Not Davis. She kept at her craft into the '80s, even after a stroke imposed serious limitations on her speech and movement. Amidst many TV movies and talk-show appearances, Davis gave one last memorable film appearance in The Whales of August (1987), in which she worked with another venerable screen legend, Lillian Gish. Though plagued with illness, Davis was formidable to the end -- so much so that when she died in France at the age of 82, a lot of her fans refused to believe it.

Trivia: If Donald Crisp had any peer as an actor, it was probably his fellow Scotsman Finlay Currie, who made a virtual star career (albeit mostly in England) playing the same kind of dour roles that Crisp often essayed -- but even that only overlapped with one aspect of Crisp's career. An Oscar-winning character actor whose career spanned three generations, from the 1910s to the 1960s, Crisp was also unique as a director and, before that, an assistant and colleague to such figures as D.W. Griffith -- and none of those activities even touched upon his most influential role in the movie business. Donald Crisp was born in Abberfeldy, Scotland, in 1880, and was educated at Oxford. He served as a trooper in the 10th Hussars in the Boer War, which allowed him to cross paths with a young Winston Churchill, before emigrating to the United States in 1906. While on the boat coming over, he chanced to sing in a ship's concert and impressed John C. Fisher, an opera impresario, sufficiently to offer him a job with his company as both a member of the chorus and a handyman. It was while touring with the company in the United States and Cuba that Crisp became interested in theater. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he was working as a stage manager for George M. Cohan, and soon after that he met D.W. Griffith, a former stage actor who had developed a yen for making movies; Crisp accompanied the legendary director to Hollywood in 1912. After serving as Griffith's assistant and watching him work, Crisp -- who portrayed General Ulysses S. Grant in The Birth of a Nation -- became a director in his own right. He later told an interviewer that he gave up directing because he wearied of being forced to do favors for studio production chiefs by employing their relatives in his films, so he returned to acting. In between working for Griffith and producers such as William H. Clune, Crisp managed to return to England to serve in army intelligence during the First World War. After returning to Hollywood, he went to work for Adolph Zukor at his Famous Players company in 1919, which was later to become Paramount Pictures; Zukor employed Crisp as an executive, charged with setting up the studio's operations in Europe. He later worked as a director for Douglas Fairbanks Sr. on such movies as Son of Zorro. Crisp's most visible role to the public during the silent era, however, may well have come right after his military service, as the brutal villain in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). With the advent of sound, Crisp moved into acting entirely, and across the 1930s and '40s he essayed a wide range of roles, most memorably as the taciturn but loving father in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) (for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), one of the put-upon crew in Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and Doctor Kenneth in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). Crisp was equally good in lovable or sinister roles; during the same period in which he was playing charming old codgers in National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, he was also memorable as Commander Beach, the tormented presumptive grandfather to Gail Russell's Stella Meredith in Lewis Allen's The Uninvited (1944), who dies at the hands of the vengeful spirit of his own daughter. All of this activity, which included as many as nine movies in a single year, didn't prevent Crisp from contributing to the war effort, once the Second World War came along -- by then, he held the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army reserves. What few people outside of the movie community realized during this period was that, beyond his work as an actor, Crisp was also one of the most influential people in Hollywood, wielding more power than most directors and even more than many producers (most of whom were, in the end, just hired executives). He was one of Hollywood's gatekeepers, one of the responsible adults who worked to make the business side of the industry work while stars of the era paraded their egos and vices before the cameras. Specifically, Crisp's long experience as not only an actor but also as a director and a production and studio executive made him ideal as an advisor to Bank of America -- one of the leading sources of working capital for the movie business (whose life-blood was loans) -- on which movies to make. He was on the bank's advisory board for decades, including a stint as its chairman, and had the ear of its directors, and many of the major movies financed by the bank in the 1930s and '40s got their most important approval from Crisp. He was also, not surprisingly, one of the more well-off members of the acting community, his banker's sobriety and clear-headedness allowing Crisp to make good investments, especially in real estate, across the decades that paid off well for him and his wife of 25 years, screenwriter Jane Murfin. Crisp continued acting right up through 1960 and Walt Disney's Pollyanna (he'd worked for Mary Pickford, who'd played in and produced the silent version of the same story 45 years earlier), mostly because he liked to work. Crisp passed away in 1974 at the ripe old age of 93, one of the most revered and beloved senior members of the acting community.

Trivia: Lean, effete, and sinister, Vincent Price was among the movies' greatest villains as well as one of the horror genre's most beloved and enduring stars. Born May 27, 1911, in St. Louis, MO, Price graduated from Yale University, and later studied fine arts at the University of London. He made his theatrical debut in the Gate Theatre's 1935 production of Chicago, followed by work on Broadway, in stock and with Orson Welles' famed Mercury Theater. Under contract to Universal, Price traveled to Hollywood, making his screen debut in 1938's Service de Luxe, before returning to Broadway for a revival of Outward Bound. His tenure at Universal was largely unsuccessful, and the studio kept him confined to supporting roles. Upon completing his contract, Price jumped to 20th Century Fox, starring in a pair of 1940 historical tales, Brigham Young -- Frontiersman and Hudson Bay. Still, fame eluded him, and in 1941 he began a long Broadway run (in Angel Street) that kept him out of films for three years. Price returned to the West Coast to co-star in 1943's The Song of Bernadette and became a prominent supporting player in a series of acclaimed films, including 1944's Wilson and Laura, and 1946's Leave Her to Heaven. His first starring role was in the low-budget Shock!, portraying a murderous psychiatrist. He next played a sadistic husband opposite Gene Tierney in Dragonwyck. Clearly, Price's niche was as a villain -- everything about him suggested malice, with each line reading dripping with condescension and loathing; he relished these roles, and excelled in them. Still, he was not the star Fox wanted; after 1947's The Web, his contract expired and was not renewed. Price spent the next several years freelancing with a variety of studios and by 1952 had grown so disenchanted with Hollywood that he returned to the stage, performing in a San Francisco production of The Cocktail Party before replacing Charles Laughton in the touring company of Don Juan in Hell.Price then signed on to star in 1953's House of Wax, Warners' 3-D update of their Mystery of the Wax Museum. The picture was one of the year's biggest hits, and one of the most successful horror films ever produced. Price's crazed performance as a vengeful sculptor brought him offers for any number of similar projects, and he next appeared in another 3-D feature, Dangerous Mission. He also made a triumphant return to the stage to appear in Richard III, followed by Black-Eyed Susan. The latter was Price's last theatrical performance for 14 years, however, as he began a very busy and eclectic motion picture schedule. Though he essayed many different types of characters, his forays into horror remained by far his most popular, and in 1958 he co-starred in the hit The Fly as well as William Castle's House on Haunted Hill. By the 1960s, Price was working almost exclusively in the horror genre. For producer Roger Corman, he starred in a series of cult classic adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories including 1960's The Fall of the House of Usher, 1963's The Raven, 1964's The Masque of the Red Death, and 1968's The Conqueror Worm. He also appeared in a number of teen movies like 1963's Beach Party, 1965's Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, and the 1969 Elvis Presley vehicle The Trouble With Girls. Price began to cut back on his film activities during the 1970s despite hits like 1971's The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its follow-up Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Instead he frequently lectured on art, and even published several books. For disciple Tim Burton, Price co-starred in the 1990 fantasy Edward Scissorhands; apart from voice-over work, it was his last screen appearance. He died in Los Angeles on October 25, 1993.

Trivia: Like his fellow character actors C. Aubrey Smith and Sir Guy Standing, the dignified Henry Stephenson was seemingly born with a relief map of the British Empire chiseled on his countenance. Born in the British West Indies, Stephenson was educated at England's Rugby College. He turned to acting in his twenties, touring the provinces before settling into leading roles in London and New York. Though he made a smattering of silent film appearances, Stephenson's movie career did not really begin until 1932, with his supporting appearance in The Animal Kingdom. Virtually always cast as an aristocrat or man of means, Stephenson essayed such roles as Mr. Laurence in Little Women (1933), Sir Joseph Banks in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), the Duke of Norfolk in The Prince and the Pauper, and Count Matthieu de Lesseps in Suez (1938). Henry Stephenson acted in films until his mid-seventies; his last film assignments included the part of Mr. Brownlow in the David Lean-directed Oliver Twist (1948).

Trivia: With his haughty demeanor and near-satanic features, British actor Henry Daniell was the perfect screen "gentleman villain" in such major films of the 1930s and 1940s as Camille (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). An actor since the age of 18, Daniell worked in London until coming to America in an Ethel Barrymore play. He co-starred with Ruth Gordon in the 1929 Broadway production Serena Blandish, in which he won critical plaudits in the role of Lord Iver Cream. Making his movie debut in Jealousy (1929)--which co-starred another stage legend, Jeanne Eagels--Daniell stayed in Hollywood for the remainder of his career, most often playing cold-blooded aristocrats in period costume. He was less at home in action roles; he flat-out refused to participate in the climactic dueling scene in The Sea Hawk (1940), compelling star Errol Flynn to cross swords with a none too convincing stunt double. Daniell became something of a regular in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films made at Universal in the 1940s--he was in three entries, playing Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945). Though seldom in pure horror films, Daniell nonetheless excelled in the leading role of The Body Snatcher (1945). When the sort of larger-than-life film fare in which Daniell specialized began disappearing in the 1950s, the actor nonetheless continued to prosper in both films (Man in the Grey Flannel Suit [1956], Witness for the Prosecution [1957]) and television (Thriller, The Hour of St. Francis, and many other programs). While portraying Prince Gregor of Transylvania in My Fair Lady (1964), under the direction of his old friend George Cukor, Daniell died suddenly; his few completed scenes remained in the film, though his name was removed from the cast credits.

Trivia: The son of British actress Mary Forbes, Ralph Forbes followed in his mother's footsteps, appearing in stage productions as a juvenile and in films from the age of 19. His most successful British starring film was the 1922 version of that old chestnut Comin' Thro' the Rye. He came to Hollywood in 1926 to co-star in the Paramount big-budgeter Beau Geste, then settled into a series of dinner-jacketed leading roles. During his long American film career, Forbes found time to marry two of his leading ladies, Ruth Chatterton and Heather Angel. Ralph Forbes' last years before the camera were spent in such supporting roles as Sir Hugo Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Henry Tudor in Tower of London (1939).

Trivia: As a boy growing up in Sacramento, Robert Warwick sang in his church choir. Encouraged to pursue music as a vocation, Warwick studied in Paris for an operatic career. He abandoned singing for straight acting when, in 1903, he was hired by Clyde Fitch as an understudy in the Broadway play Glad of It. Within a few year, Warwick was a major stage star in New York. He managed to retain his matinee-idol status when he switched from stage to screen, starring in such films as A Modern Othello and Alias Jimmy Valentine and at one point heading his own production company. He returned to the stage in 1920, then resumed his Hollywood career in authoritative supporting roles. His pear-shaped tones ideally suited for talkies, Warwick played such characters as Neptune in Night Life of the Gods (1933), Sir Francis Knolly in Mary of Scotland (1936) and Lord Montague in Romeo and Juliet (1936). He appeared in many of the Errol Flynn "historicals" at Warner Bros. (Prince and the Pauper, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex); in more contemporary fare, he could usually be found in a military uniform or wing-collared tuxedo. From The Great McGinty (1940) onward, Warwick was a particular favorite of producer/director Preston Sturges, who was fond of providing plum acting opportunities to veteran character actors. Warwick's best performance under Sturges' guidance was as the brusque Hollywood executive who insists upon injecting "a little sex" in all of his studio's product in Sullivan's Travels (1942). During the 1950s, Warwick played several variations on "Charles Waterman," the broken-down Shakespearean ham that he'd portrayed in In a Lonely Place (1950). He remained in harness until his eighties, playing key roles on such TV series as The Twilight Zone and The Law and Mr. Jones. Robert Warwick was married twice, to actresses Josephine Whittell and Stella Lattimore.

Trivia: Leo G. Carroll was the son of an Irish-born British military officer. The younger Carroll had intended to follow in his father's footsteps, but his World War I experiences discouraged him from pursuing a military career. On the British stage from the age of sixteen, Carroll settled in the U.S. in 1924, playing such plum theatrical roles as the title character in The Late George Apley. In films from 1934, Carroll often portrayed shy, self-effacing Britishers who, in "Uriah-Heep" fashion, used their humility to hide a larcenous or homicidal streak. Reportedly Alfred Hitchcock's favorite actor, Carroll was seen in half a dozen Hithcock films, notably Spellbound (1946) (as the scheming psychiatrist) and North by Northwest (1959) (as the dry-witted CIA agent). A "method actor" before the term was invented, Carroll was known to immerse himself in his roles, frequently confounding strangers by approaching them "in character." Leo G. Carroll was always a welcome presence on American television, starring as Topper in the "ghostly" sitcom of the same name, and co-starring as Father Fitzgibbons in Going My Way (1962) and Alexander Waverly on The Man From UNCLE (1964-68).

Trivia: A distinguished-looking, often bespectacled supporting actor from England, Guy Bellis lent his considerable presence to several well-remembered costume dramas in the 1930s and '40s, appearing as Buckingham in Cardinal Richelieu (1935), as Lord Charles Howard in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and as a host of typically British domestics. Bellis, whose characterizations often went unbilled, continued his screen career well into the 1950s.

Trivia: Diminuitive Irish actor Forrester Harvey was most often cast as cockney tradesmen, family gardeners and pub hangers-on. He entered films in 1922, but only with the advent of talking pictures were his talents exploited to full advantage. Part subservient, part pugnacious, Harvey became a fixture of Hollywood films set in England, Ireland or Scotland. His better-known film stints included Beamish in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) and Meredith the valet in Laurel and Hardy's A Chump at Oxford (1940). So ubiquitous was Forrester Harvey that he managed to appear in a film five years after his death! That film was Frank Capra's Riding High (1950), a remake of Broadway Bill (1934) which utilized extensive footage from the earlier film -- including virtually all of Harvey's scenes as a horse trainer.

Trivia: A former circus and minstrel-show performer, British actor Holmes Herbert toured on the provincial-theatre circuit as a juvenile in the early 1900s. Born Edward Sanger, Herbert adopted his professional first name out of admiration for Sherlock Holmes -- a role which, worse luck, he never got to play. Herbert never appeared in films in his native country; he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, appeared in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1918), and never looked homeward. Talking pictures enabled Holmes Herbert to join such countrymen as Reginald Denny and Roland Young in portraying "typical" British gentlemen. The stately, dynamic-featured Herbert nearly always appeared in a dinner jacket, selflessly comforting the heroine as she pined for the man she really loved. He received some of his best roles in the early-talkie era; he appeared as a soft-spoken police inspector in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), then recreated the role for the 1937 remake. Herbert also appeared as Dr. Lanyon, Henry Jekyll's closest friend and confidante in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). By the '40s, many of Herbert's roles were uncredited, but he was still able to make a maximum impression with a minimum of lines in such roles as the village council head in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Herbert's second wife was another supporting-cast stalwart of the '30s, Beryl Mercer (best remembered as James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy [1931]). Holmes Herbert remained in films until 1952's The Brigand; reportedly, he also appeared in a few early west-coast television productions.

Trivia: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: Formidable stage leading lady Doris Lloyd transferred her activities from British repertory to Hollywood in 1925. She was prominently cast as an alluring spy in George Arliss' first talkie Disraeli (1929); one year later, at the tender age of 30, she was seen as the matronly Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez in Charley's Aunt. Swinging back to younger roles in 1933, Lloyd was cast as the tragic Nancy Sykes in the Dickie Moore version of Oliver Twist. By the late 1930s, Lloyd had settled into middle-aged character roles, most often as a domestic or dowager. Doris Lloyd remained active until 1967, with substantial roles in such films as The Time Machine (1960) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Trivia: In films from 1938, statuesque brunette American actress Maris Wrixon fluctuated from full leads to supporting parts. In many of her films, Wrixon was bumped off in the first or second reel, but in just as many she was permitted to survive to the fadeout. She was starred in several Warner Bros. B-pictures of the 1940s, usually in remakes of earlier Warner A's. Horror fans remember her best as Boris Karloff's daughter in Monogram's The Ape (1941). Maris Wrixon retired in the late '40s following her marriage to film editor Rudi Fehr.

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: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.