Trivia: Marlon Brando was quite simply one of the most celebrated and influential screen and stage actors of the postwar era; he rewrote the rules of performing, and nothing was ever the same again. Brooding, lusty, and intense, his greatest contribution was popularizing Method acting, a highly interpretive performance style which brought unforeseen dimensions of power and depth to the craft; in comparison, most other screen icons appeared shallow, even a little silly. A combative and often contradictory man, Brando refused to play by the rules of the Hollywood game, openly expressing his loathing for the film industry and for the very nature of celebrity, yet often exploiting his fame to bring attention to political causes and later accepting any role offered him as long as the price was right. He is one of the screen's greatest enigmas, and there will never be another quite like him. Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, NE, Brando's rebellious streak manifested itself early, resulting in his expulsion from military school. His first career was as a ditch digger, but his father ultimately grew so frustrated with his son's seeming lack of ambition that he offered to finance whatever more meaningful path the young man chose to pursue. Brando opted to become an actor -- his mother operated a local theatrical group -- and he soon relocated to New York City to study the Stanislavsky method under Stella Adler. He later worked at the Actors' Studio under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, and his dedication to the principles of Method acting was to become absolute. After making his professional debut in 1943's Bobino, Brando bowed on Broadway a year later in I Remember Mama; for 1946's Truckline Cafe, the critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising Actor.Brando's groundbreaking star turn in the 1947 production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire delivered on all of that promise and much, much more; as the inarticulate brute Stanley Kowalski, Brando stunned audiences with a performance of remarkable honesty, sexuality, and intensity, and overnight he became the rage of Broadway. Hollywood quickly came calling, but he resisted the studios' overtures with characteristic contempt -- he was a new breed of star, an anti-star, really, and he refused to play ball, dismissing influential critics and making no concessions toward glamour or decorum. It all only served to make Hollywood want him more, of course, and in 1950 Brando agreed to star in the independent Stanley Kramer production The Men as a paraplegic war victim; in typical Method fashion, he spent a month in an actual veteran's hospital in preparation for the role.While The Men was not a commercial hit, critics tripped over themselves in their attempts to praise Brando's performance, and in 1951 it was announced that he and director Elia Kazan were set to reprise their earlier work for a screen adaptation of Streetcar. The results were hugely successful, the picture winning an Academy Award for Best Film; Brando earned his first Best Actor nomination, but lost despite Oscars for his co-stars, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter. Again with Kazan, he next starred in the title role of 1952's Viva Zapata! After walking out of the French production Le Rouge et le Noir over a dispute with director Claude Autant-Lara, Brando portrayed Mark Antony in the 1953 MGM production of Julius Caesar, sparking considerable controversy over his idiosyncratic approach to the Bard and earning a third consecutive Oscar bid. In 1954, The Wild One was another curve ball, casting Brando as the rebellious leader of a motorcycle gang and forever establishing him as a poster boy for attitude, angst, and anomie. That same year, he delivered perhaps his definitive screen performance as a washed-up boxer in Kazan's visceral On the Waterfront. On his fourth attempt, Brando finally won an Academy Award, and the film itself also garnered Best Picture honors. However, his next picture, Desiree, was his first disappointment. Despite gaining much publicity for his portrayal of Napoleon, the project made a subpar showing both artistically and financially. Brando continued to prove his versatility by co-starring with Frank Sinatra in a film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. Another Broadway-to-screen adaptation, The Teahouse of the August Moon, followed in 1956 before he began work on the following year's Sayonara, for which he garnered yet another Oscar nomination.In 1958's The Young Lions, Brando co-starred for the first and only time with Montgomery Clift, another great actor of his generation; it was a hit, but his next project, 1960's The Fugitive Kind, was a financial disaster. He then announced plans to mount his own independent production. After both Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah both walked off the project, Brando himself grabbed the directorial reins. The result, the idiosyncratic 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks, performed respectably at the box office, but was such a costly proposition that it could hardly be expected ever to earn a profit. In 1962, Mutiny on the Bounty underwent a similarly troubled birthing process; Brando rejected numerous screenplay revisions, and MGM spent a record 19 million dollars to bring the picture to the screen. When it too failed, his diminishing box-office stature, combined with his increasingly temperamental behavior, made him a target of scorn for the first time in his career. The downward spiral continued: Brando himself remained compulsively watchable, but suddenly the material itself, like 1963's The Ugly American, 1966's The Chase, and 1967's A Countess From Hong Kong, was self-indulgent and far beneath his abilities. His mysterious career choices, as well as his often inscrutable personal and professional behavior -- he was quoted as declaring acting a "neurotic, unimportant job" -- became the topic of much discussion throughout the industry. He continued to push himself in risky projects like 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye, an adaptation of a Carson McCullers novel in which he portrayed a closeted homosexual, but the end result lacked the old magic. While Brando still commanded respect from the media and his fellow performers, much of Hollywood began to perceive him as a bad and unnecessary risk, a perception which features like 1968's Candy, 1969's Queimada!, and 1971's The Nightcomers did little to alter. The Brando renaissance began with 1972's The Godfather; against the objections of Paramount, director Francis Ford Coppola cast him to play the aging head of a Mafia crime family, and according to most reports, his on-set behavior was impeccable. Onscreen, Brando was brilliant, delivering his best performance in well over a decade. He won his second Academy Award, but became the subject of much controversy when he refused the honor, instead sending one Sacheen Littlefeather -- supposedly a Native American spokeswoman, but later revealed to be a Hispanic actress -- to the Oscar telecast podium to deliver a speech attacking the U.S. government's history of crimes against the native population. Controversy continued to dog Brando upon the release of 1973's Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci's masterful examination of a sexual liaison between an American widower and a young Frenchwoman; though critically acclaimed, the picture was denounced as obscene in many quarters.Despite his resurrection, Brando did not reappear onscreen for three years, finally resurfacing in The Missouri Breaks opposite Jack Nicholson. Although he had by now long maintained that he continued to act only for the money, the eccentricity of his career choices allowed many fans to shrug off such assertions; however, never before had Brando appeared in so blatantly commercial a project as 1978's Superman, earning an unprecedented 3.7 million dollars for what essentially amounted to a cameo performance. His next appearance, in Coppola's 1979 Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, was largely incoherent, while for 1980's The Formula, he appeared in only three scenes. And for a decade, that was it: Brando vanished, living in self-imposed exile on his island in the Pacific, growing obese, and refusing the few overtures producers made for him to come back to Hollywood. Only in 1989 did a project appeal to Brando's deep political convictions, and he co-starred in the anti-Apartheid drama A Dry White Season, earning an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role as an attorney. A year later, he headlined The Freshman, gracefully parodying his Godfather performance. Tragedy struck in 1990 when his son, Christian, killed the lover of Brando's pregnant daughter, Cheyenne; a long legal battle ensued, and Christian was found guilty of murder and imprisoned. Even more tragically, Cheyenne later committed suicide. The trial placed a severe strain on Brando's finances, and he reluctantly returned to performing, appearing in the atrocious Christopher Columbus: The Discovery in 1992. He also wrote an autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me. Don Juan DeMarco, co-starring Johnny Depp, followed in 1995, and after 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brando starred in Depp's directorial debut The Brave. In 1998, he appeared in Yves Simoneau's Free Money, headlining a cast that included Donald Sutherland, Mira Sorvino, Martin Sheen, and Charlie Sheen.Again absent from the public eye for a spell, Brando made news again in 2001 as health problems forced him out of a cameo role in director Keenan Ivory Wayans' horror spoof sequel Scary Movie 2 (he was replaced on short notice by actor James Woods). Brando made his first film appearance in three years with a considerably more prestigous role in director Frank Oz's one-last-heist thriller The Score (2001). Though the film's production was plagued with the by-then de rigeur rumors of Brando's curious on-set tirades and bizarre behavior, filmgoers remained eager to see the actor re-teamed with former Godfather cohort Robert DeNiro, with Edward Norton and Angela Bassett rounding out the cast. Later that year, director Francis Ford Coppola added to Brando's legend by lengthening his infamously slurred speeches for the director's recut Apocalypse Now Redux.Absent from the screen for the next three years, Brando passed away suddenly in 2004 of pulmonary fibrosis. While The Score was his last onscreen performance, shortly before his death he recorded voice parts for an animated film called Big Bug Man and a Godfather videogame. Marking an increasingly popular trend, the visage of Brando was even resurrected for a "new" performance in director Bryan Singer's big-budget Superman Returns in the summer of 2006. Culled from old outtakes from the first two films, the digitally manipulated clips added to the film's passing-of-the-torch feel.

Trivia: The son of Yugoslav immigrants, Karl Malden labored in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana before enrolling in Arkansas State Teachers College. While not a prime candidate for stardom with his oversized nose and bullhorn voice, Malden attended Chicago's Goodman Dramatic School, then moved to New York, where he made his Broadway bow in 1937. Three years later he made his film debut in a microscopic role in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), which also featured another star-to-be, Tom Ewell. While serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Malden returned to films in the all-serviceman epic Winged Victory (1944), where he was billed as Corporal Karl Malden. This led to a brief contract with 20th Century-Fox -- but not to Hollywood, since Malden's subsequent film appearances were lensed on the east coast. In 1947, Malden created the role of Mitch, the erstwhile beau of Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire; he repeated the role in the 1951 film version, winning an Oscar in the process. For much of his film career, Malden has been assigned roles that called for excesses of ham; even his Oscar-nominated performance in On the Waterfront (1954) was decidedly "Armour Star" in concept and execution. In 1957, he directed the Korean War melodrama Time Limit, the only instance in which the forceful and opinionated Malden was officially credited as director. Malden was best known to TV fans of the 1970s as Lieutenant Mike Stone, the no-nonsense protagonist of the longrunning cop series The Streets of San Francisco. Still wearing his familiar Streets hat and overcoat, Malden supplemented his income with a series of ads for American Express. His commercial catchphrases "What will you do?" and "Don't leave home without it!" soon entered the lexicon of TV trivia -- and provided endless fodder for such comedians as Johnny Carson. From 1989-92, Malden served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: A leading lady of Mexican cinema, Katy Jurado also found fame in Hollywood in the 1950s as a sultry supporting actress in such films as High Noon (1952) and Broken Lance (1954). Rather than abandoning her native country, however, Jurado remained a star of Mexican film as well as an esteemed character actress north and south of the border until she retired from movies in 1998.Born into a wealthy family, Jurado spent her early childhood in luxury until the family's lands were confiscated during the revolution. Nevertheless, her domineering grandmother continued to adhere to "aristocratic ideals," including staunch disapproval of Jurado's desire to become an actress after director Emilio Fernandez discovered her at age 16. Marrying actor/writer Victor Velazquez to escape her family's control, Jurado made her movie debut in No Maturas (1943). The talented sloe-eyed beauty quickly made her mark in the Mexican movie industry, winning three Ariels (Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar), including one for Luis Buñuel's El Bruto (1952). A divorced mother of two by her twenties, Jurado worked as a radio reporter, bullfight critic, and movie columnist between acting jobs to support her family. Spotted by Budd Boetticher and John Wayne at a bullfight, Jurado was subsequently cast in her first American film while on a trip to Hollywood, Boetticher's matador drama The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). Though her English was still limited, and she learned her lines phonetically, Jurado garnered great critical acclaim for her second Hollywood picture, High Noon (1952). As upstanding marshal Gary Cooper's fiery ex-girlfriend, Jurado unforgettably locked horns onscreen with Cooper's prim bride Grace Kelly, and won a Golden Globe award.Refusing to be pigeonholed by signing a Hollywood studio contract, Jurado went home to Mexico between American roles, and continued to star in such Mexican fare as melodrama Nosotros Los Pobres (1957) during the 1950s. Nevertheless, she was still a frequent presence in Hollywood movies, particularly in Westerns. Jurado earned a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her performance as cattle baron Spencer Tracy's Indian wife in Broken Lance (1954) -- and lived up to her sexy image when she noted on the red carpet that her underwear was the same color as her crimson Oscar gown. She also appeared in Man From Del Rio (1956), Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1960), courtroom drama The Trial (1955), and Burt Lancaster's circus extravaganza Trapeze (1955). Jurado's life became Hollywood tabloid fodder when her relationship with her Badlanders (1958) co-star Ernest Borgnine blossomed into a brief, rocky marriage. Married in 1959, Jurado had separated and reconciled with Borgnine amid accusations of spousal abuse by 1961; after wrangling over alimony, the divorce became final in 1964. Having moved to the U.S. to be with Borgnine, Jurado acted less often during the 1960s, including roles in the glossy Barabbas (1961), the Spanish film Un Hombre Solo (1964), the TV Western series Death Valley Days (1964), and the Elvis Presley flick Stay Away, Joe (1968). After attempting suicide in 1968, Jurado moved back home to Mexico for good.Although she worked occasionally in American films shot in Mexico, including co-starring with John Huston in The Bridge in the Jungle (1970) and a supporting role Sam Peckinpah's Western elegy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Jurado focused on Mexican movies, including El Elegido (1977) and Arturo Ripstein's La Seducción (1980), aging gracefully into a prominent character actress. After appearing alongside her former mentor Fernandez in Huston's somber drama Under the Volcano (1984), Jurado began to work behind the scenes in the Mexican industry, promoting her home state of Morelos to filmmakers. Even as she started garnering career laurels from the Santa Fe Western Festival in 1981 and the Mexican Film Promotion Trust in 1992, Jurado remained active, albeit infrequently, onscreen. After winning a special Ariel for lifetime achievement in 1997, Jurado made her last film, playing the leader of a religious cult in Ripstein's Buñuel-ian satire El Evangelico de Las Maravillas (1998). Still the pride of the Mexican film industry, Jurado passed away in 2002. She was survived by her daughter; her son was killed in a car accident in 1981.

Trivia: Though he spoke most of his movie dialogue in a slow Western drawl, actor Slim Pickens was a pure-bred California boy. An expert rider from the age of four, Pickens was performing in rodeos at 12. Three years later, he quit school to become a full-time equestrian and bull wrangler, eventually becoming the highest-paid rodeo clown in show business. In films since 1950's Rocky Mountain, Pickens specialized in Westerns (what a surprise), appearing as the comic sidekick of Republic cowboy star Rex Allen. By the end of the 1950s, Pickens had gained so much extra poundage that he practically grew out of his nickname. Generally cast in boisterous comedy roles, Pickens was also an effectively odious villain in 1966's An Eye for an Eye, starting the film off with a jolt by shooting a baby in its crib. In 1963, director Stanley Kubrick handed Pickens his greatest role: honcho bomber pilot "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove. One of the most unforgettable of all cinematic images is the sight of Pickens straddling a nuclear bomb and "riding" it to its target, whooping and hollering all the way down. Almost as good was Pickens' performance as Harvey Korman's henchman in Mel Brooks' bawdy Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Slim Pickens was also kept busy on television, with numerous guest shots and regular roles in the TV series The Legend of Custer, B.J. and the Bear, and Filthy Rich.

Trivia: Born in Oklahoma of Cherokee-Irish stock, Ben Johnson virtually grew up in the saddle. A champion rodeo rider in his teens, Johnson headed to Hollywood in 1940 to work as a horse wrangler on Howard Hughes' The Outlaw. He went on to double for Wild Bill Elliot and other western stars, then in 1947 was hired as Henry Fonda's riding double in director John Ford's Fort Apache (1948). Ford sensed star potential in the young, athletic, slow-speaking Johnson, casting him in the speaking role of Trooper Tyree in both She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). In 1950, Ford co-starred Johnson with another of his protégés, Harry Carey Jr., in Wagonmaster (1950). Now regarded as a classic, Wagonmaster failed to register at the box office; perhaps as a result, full stardom would elude Johnson for over two decades. He returned periodically to the rodeo circuit, played film roles of widely varying sizes (his best during the 1950s was the pugnacious Chris in George Stevens' Shane [1953]), and continued to double for horse-shy stars. He also did plenty of television, including the recurring role of Sleeve on the 1966 western series The Monroes. A favorite of director Sam Peckinpah, Johnson was given considerable screen time in such Peckinpah gunfests as Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch (1969). It was Peter Bogdanovich, a western devotee from way back, who cast Johnson in his Oscar-winning role: the sturdy, integrity-driven movie house owner Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show (1971). When not overseeing his huge horse-breeding ranch in Sylmar, California, Ben Johnson has continued playing unreconstructed rugged individualists in such films as My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991) and Radio Flyer (1992), in TV series like Dream West (1986, wherein Johnson was cast as frontier trailblazer Jim Bridger), and made-for-TV films along the lines of the Bonanza revivals of the 1990s.

Trivia: Charismatic character actor Sam Gilman first appeared onscreen in the '50s after much stage experience.

Trivia: In films since 1952, character actor Timothy Carey gained a cult following for his uncompromising portrayals of sadistic criminals, drooling lechers, and psycho killers. His definitive screen moment occurred in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1955), in which, as two-bit hoodlum Nikki Arane, he gleefully shot down a race horse. Kubrick used Carey again in Paths of Glory (1957), this time in the sympathetic role of condemned prisoner Private Ferol. Equally impressed by Carey's work was director John Cassavetes, who gave the actor a leading role in Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). In 1963, Carey spoofed his unsavory screen image in Beach Blanket Bingo, playing leather-jacketed cyclist South Dakota Slim, who expresses his affection for leading lady Linda Evans by strapping her to a buzzsaw. He went on to menace the Monkees in Head (1968), bellowing out incomprehensible imprecations as Davy, Mike, Micky, and Peter cowered in confused terror. One of his juiciest film roles was as a rock-singing evangelist in The World's Greatest Sinner (1962), which he also produced, directed, and wrote. In his later years, Timothy Carey occasionally occupied his time as an acting teacher.

Trivia: American actor Elisha Cook Jr. was the son of an influential theatrical actor/writer/producer who died early in the 20th Century. The younger Cook was in vaudeville and stock by the time he was fourteen-years old. In 1928, Cook enjoyed critical praise for his performance in the play Her Unborn Child, a performance he would repeat for his film debut in the 1930 film version of the play. The first ten years of Cook's Hollywood career found the slight, baby-faced actor playing innumerable college intellectuals and hapless freshmen (he's given plenty of screen time in 1936's Pigskin Parade). In 1940, Cook was cast as a man wrongly convicted of murder in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and so was launched the second phase of Cook's career as Helpless Victim. The actor's ability to play beyond this stereotype was first tapped by director John Huston, who cast Cook as Wilmer, the hair-trigger homicidal "gunsel" of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941). So far down on the Hollywood totem pole that he wasn't billed in the Falcon opening credits, Cook suddenly found his services much in demand. Sometimes he'd be shot full of holes (as in the closing gag of 1941's Hellzapoppin'), sometimes he'd fall victim to some other grisly demise (poison in The Big Sleep [1946]), and sometimes he'd be the squirrelly little guy who turned out to be the last-reel murderer (I Wake Up Screaming [1941]; The Falcon's Alibi [1946]). At no time, however, was Cook ever again required to play the antiseptic "nerd" characters that had been his lot in the 1930s. Seemingly born to play "film noir" characters, Cook had one of his best extended moments in Phantom Lady (1944), wherein he plays a set of drums with ever-increasing orgiastic fervor. Another career high point was his death scene in Shane (1953); Cook is shot down by hired gun Jack Palance and plummets to the ground like a dead rabbit. A near-hermit in real life who lived in a remote mountain home and had to receive his studio calls by courier, Cook nonetheless never wanted for work, even late in life. Fans of the 1980s series Magnum PI will remember Cook in a recurring role as a the snarling elderly mobster Ice Pick. Having appeared in so many "cult" films, Elisha Cook Jr. has always been one of the most eagerly sought out interview subjects by film historians.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: An economics major at the Brown University and the University of Chicago, cadaverous character actor John Dierkes spent the 1930s as an ad-copy writer and as head of an independent polling service. After serving with the Red Cross in World War II, Dierkes worked for the U.S. Treasury; it was in this capacity that he was sent to Hollywood in 1946 to act as technical advisor for MGM's To the Ends of the Earth. A talent scout for Orson Welles spotted Dierkes and convinced him to audition for the part of Ross in Welles' upcoming film version of MacBeth. Dierkes won the part, and remained in Hollywood for the next two decades. He went on to critical acclaim as the Tall Soldier in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), topping this assignment with his best screen role, that of "Morgan" in George Stevens' Shane (1953). Suffering from emphysema, John Dierkes gradually cut down on his film and TV appearances in the 1970s; he was last seen in a fleeting role in the Stanley Kramer production Oklahoma Crude (1973).

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

Trivia: Though often cast as a Japanese or Chinese character, LA-born actor Philip Ahn was of Korean extraction. In films from 1936, Ahn spent the war years portraying dozens of heartless Japanese spies and military officers; ironically, the actor's father was a Korean diplomat who died in a Japanese concentration camp. After the war, Ahn was occasionally permitted to play a sympathetic role, minus stereotypical accent and mannerisms; cast as a lab technician in 1950's The Big Hangover, he has almost as much screen time as nominal star Van Johnson. One of his most substantial roles was as Chinese businessman Po Chang, foster father of young Caucasian tycoon Frank Garlund (Charles Quinlivan) on the brief 1960 TV weekly The Garlund Touch. At the time of his death from lung cancer at age 66, Philip Ahn was best known to American TV addicts as Master Kan on the TV series Kung Fu.

Trivia: Baby boomers will recall silver-maned actor William Forrest as Major Swanson, the brusque but fair-minded commander of Fort Apache in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. This character was but one of many military officers portrayed by the prolific Forrest since the late 1930s. Most of his film appearances were fleeting, and few were billed, but Forrest managed to pack more authority into 30 seconds' film time than many bigger stars were able to manage in an hour and a half. Outside of Rin Tin Tin, William Forrest is probably most familiar as the sinister fifth-columnist Martin Crane in the 1943 Republic serial The Masked Marvel.

Trivia: American stunt man Henry Wills made his first recorded film appearances around 1940. Wills has shown up in scores of westerns, often in utility roles as stagecoach drivers and villainous henchmen. He commandeered chariots in several Biblical epics, including Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Henry Wills also served as stunt coordinator for such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Beastmaster (1982).

Trivia: Mexican-born utility actor Joe Dominguez claimed to have entered films in 1913, and to have appeared in over 300 pictures. Primarily a bit player, Dominguez usually showed up in Westerns, serials, and historical films with South-of-the-Border settings. Among Joe Dominguez' larger roles were Gonzalez in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) and the Grandfather in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1970), his last film.

Trivia: Unique among the major Hollywood composers of the 1940s, most of whom were foreign born, Hugo Friedhofer was a California boy through and through. The son of a cello player, Friedhofer became a symphony cellist himself, after briefly pursuing painting as a vocation. He entered films in 1929 as orchestrator of such early-talkie Fox musicals as Sunny Side Up. His first credit as a full composer was for the 1937 Samuel Goldwyn production The Adventures of Marco Polo. Nominated for six Academy Awards during his five-decade movie career, Hugo Friedhofer took home the Oscar for his brilliant work on Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

Trivia: Farciot Edouart was a pioneer in the field of movie special effects and, more specifically, the preeminent expert in process-screen photography. The son of a portrait photographer, Edouart was born in California in 1897 and became an assistant cameraman at the Realart Studios in Hollywood before reaching his twentieth birthday. When World War I arrived, Edouart enlisted in the Signal Corps, but, due to a bureaucratic tangle, was not (contrary to expectation) assigned to use his photographic skills on the battlefield. He then attended the Signal Corps' cinematographers course at Columbia University, and was so gifted with his craft that the university administrators invited him to stay on board as an instructor after he graduated. After teaching for a time, Edouart worked as war photographer in France both during and after The Great War. At Paramount in the 1920s, Edouart became adept at lining up "glass shots" (scenes in which small-scale models were seamlessly blended with life-size sets), then worked on the development of the blue-backing process, which allowed actors to be "matted" in front of an artificial background. As mentioned, however, the "process screen" became the crowning achievement of his career. This was a rear-projection technique creating the illusion of stationary actors driving, running, flying, etc... in front of a moving background. While others turned out plenty of bad or unconvincing process work in movies, Edouart was a master of the technique, and few of his films look blatantly "faked". To improve the technique, Edouart developed a triple-head process projector, which improved and sharpened the background image. Remaining as head of Paramount's "Transparency Department" until his retirement in the late '60s, Farciot Edouart won Academy Awards for I Wanted Wings (41) and Reap the Wild Wind (42), the latter film lensed in Technicolor. He earned one of his final credits as a special effects technician on the classic Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Trivia: A producer of television and film who was responsible for such features as The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953) and Marlon Brando's One Eyed Jacks (1961), Frank P. Rosenberg also served as a writer of both Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) and Gray Lady Down (1977). Rosenberg died October 18, 2002, in Thousand Oaks, CA, following a short illness.

Trivia: Best-selling author and highly respected screenwriter Calder Willingham was behind several important films of the '60s and '70s. His best-known hits include The Graduate (1967), co-written with Buck Henry, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), and Little Big Man (1970). Willingham was born and raised in the American South, the setting of many of his subsequent novels. After receiving his education from the Citadel and the University of Virginia, Willingham headed north to New York to launch his writing career. The year was 1943, and the talented Willingham found himself running with a circle of similarly talented writers, including Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. As an author, Willingham made an auspicious debut in 1947 with his novel End as a Man. A graphic and sometimes shocking exposé of life in a military college, it generated considerable controversy and at one time obscenity charges were launched against the publisher, but these were later dropped. In 1953, he adapted his first novel into a successful off-Broadway play and in 1957 he adapted it into a feature film, called The Strange One, starring Ben Gazzara and other members of the stage version. That year, Willingham collaborated with director David Lean on the script of Bridge on the River Kwai; an argument between Willingham and producer Sam Spiegel, however, resulted in Willingham's name being removed from the credits, something the author looked back upon with no rancor. Instead, he later claimed that he was glad to have had the opportunity to work on the film. In 1991, he adapted his 1972 novel Rambling Rose into a film starring Laura Dern, Robert Duval and John Heard.

Trivia: Mexican actor Rodolpho Acosta first became known to North American audiences by way of his appearance in John Ford's The Fugitive (1948). Frequently typecast as a bandit or indigent peasant, Acosta held out for less stereotypical roles once he was established in Hollywood. In 1957, he was top-billed in The Tijuana Story, playing a courageous Mexican journalist who wages a one-man war against a vicious narcotics ring. Depending on the role, Rodolpho Acosta was sometimes billed as Rudy Acosta.

Trivia: Breaking into show business with the Australian vaudeville troupe Pollard's Lilliputians, Harold Fraser adopted the name "Pollard" professionally when the group broke up during an American tour. Variously billed as Harry Pollard and Snub Pollard, he entered films at Essanay in 1911, then worked briefly at Keystone before settling down in 1915 at the fledgling Hal Roach studios. Adopting an inverted Kaiser Wilhelm moustache as his comic escutcheon, he co-starred with Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels in a series of knockabout slapstick comedies, moving into his own starring series in 1919. Pollard's one- and two-reelers of the early '20s, many of them directed by Charley Chase, were chock full of delightful sight gags and clever gimmickry, and had the added advantage of an unusually attractive leading lady, Marie Mosquini (later the wife of television pioneer Lee DeForrest). Alas, Pollard himself was a very limited performer, a fact that became painfully obvious when he left Roach to set up his own production company in 1926. By the end of the silent era he was working for the Poverty Row firm of Weiss-Artcraft, appearing opposite fat comedian Marvin Loback in a series of cheap comedies "inspired" by Roach's Laurel and Hardy films. Reduced to bit-part status when talkies came, Pollard flourished briefly in the late '30s as the comic sidekick of Western star Tex Ritter, and as a supporting player in the Columbia two-reelers of the 1940s. Like many other film veterans, he remained on call for such "nostalgic" silent movie tributes as The Perils of Pauline (1947) and The Man of 1000 Faces (1957), appearing in the latter film in a pie fight sequence with James Cagney. Active in films and TV right up to his death, Snub Pollard continued appearing in such fleeting roles as a tattoo artist in Who Was That Lady (1960) and a superannuated bellboy in William Castle's Homicidal (1961).