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

Trivia: Reportedly a great-niece of novelist Vicente Blasco Ibanez of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fame, brunette Ruth Hall had been an extra prior to playing Zeppo Marx's girlfriend in Monkey Business (1931). The comedy earned her a berth as one of the 1932 Wampas Baby Stars and a host of leading lady chores opposite silver screen cowboys such as John Wayne (with whom she also did the serial The Three Musketeers in 1933), Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix. Hall recalled being termed "the girl" on these cheaply made program Westerns. "The Girl," she told Western historian Jon Tuska, "had to play her scene right because there were no second takes and, horrors, of course no retakes. The main stars were coached but not the girls." It may have been arduous work, especially on dusty locations with few if any conveniences -- especially for The Girl -- but the always game Hall would remain a favorite of both Wayne and Ken Maynard, who felt the loss when she left films to marry one of the industry's best cinematographers, Lee Garmes, a union that would last a lifetime.

Trivia: Born in Mexico City, actor Donald Reed was frequently cast as a lover or gigolo and appeared in a few Hollywood features during the late '20s. When sound films became popular, he was relegated to supporting roles. By the late '30s, his career was over.

Trivia: White-haired Lafe McKee (real name, Lafayette McKee) was seemingly born old, dignified, and kind. Already playing old codgers by the mid-1910s, McKee delivered one of the funniest and most improbable moments in B-Western history, when, disguised as a bedraggled señorita, he sprang Ken Maynard from prison in Range Law (1931). "The Grand Old Man of Westerns," as film historian William K. Everson called him, retired in the early '40s after more than three decades of yeoman work opposite every cowboy hero on the Hollywood range, from Franklyn Farnum to Gary Cooper.

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

Trivia: One of the great villainesses of the early silent era, Lillian Leighton played the hissable Wicked Witch of the West in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) and forced poor blind Kathlyn Williams out into the frozen streets of Paris in a three-part version of The Two Orphans (1911). She was much subdued in the 1920s, however, where she usually played kind mothers in such Westerns as Tim McCoy's The Thundering Herd (1926).

Trivia: Spanish-born character actor Luis Alberni spent most of his Hollywood career playing excitable Italians: waiters, janitors, stagehands, and shop proprietors. A short, elfish man usually decked out in a string tie and frock coat, Alberni worked on stage in Europe before heading for Broadway (and the movies) in 1921. He was busiest in the early-talkie era, appearing twice in large, juicy supporting roles opposite John Barrymore. In Svengali, Alberni is Barrymore's long-suffering assistant, while in Mad Genius, he's a dope-addicted stage manager who murders Barrymore in a baroque climax. During World War II, Alberni kept busy playing Italian mayors and peasants, both fascist and partisan. Luis Alberni's final film appearance was as the great-uncle of a "compromised" French peasant girl in John Ford's remake of What Price Glory? (1952)

Trivia: Mainly remembered for offering younger brother John Ford his first opportunities in the movie business, Francis Ford (born Feeney) was a touring company actor before entering films with Thomas Edison in 1907. In the early 1910s, he served a tumultuous apprenticeship as a director/star for producer Thomas Ince -- who in typical Ince fashion presented many of Ford's accomplishments as his own -- before moving over to Carl Laemmle's Universal in 1913. A true auteur, Ford would direct, write, and star in his own Westerns and serials, often opposite Grace Cunard, the studio's top action heroine. Contrary to popular belief they never married, but their onscreen partnership resulted in such popular action serials as Lucille Love -- Girl of Mystery (1914), The Broken Coin (1915), and The Adventures of Peg o' the Ring (1916). Both Ford's and Cunard's careers declined in the 1920s, with Ford directing mostly poverty row productions. He kept working in films as a supporting actor through the early '50s, mainly due to the influence of John, who often made Francis Ford and Victor McLaglen supply the corny Irish humor for which he exhibited a lifelong fondness. Francis Ford's son, Philip Ford, also became a director of Westerns, and also like his father, mainly of the poverty row variety.

Trivia: Although a New Yorker of Italian parentage, Nena Quartaro spent her entire screen career playing feisty Latin senoritas. Quartaro's career began well enough with The Red Mark (1928), a red-blooded action melodrama in which she played an innocent girl involved with inmates at a penal colony, and some suggested she might become a new Dolores Del Rio. But another newcomer, Lupe Velez, got the choice assignments while Quartaro was relegated to supporting the likes of Bob Steele and Rin-Tin-Tin. By the mid-'30s, she mainly portrayed Mexican types in B-Westerns and her career was over by the early '40s.

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