Trivia: Hearty American character actor Edward Arnold was born in New York to German immigrant parents. Orphaned at 11, Arnold supported himself with a series of manual labor jobs. He made his first stage appearance at 12, playing Lorenzo in an amateur production of The Merchant of Venice at the East Side Settlement House. Encouraged to continue acting by playwright/ journalist John D. Barry, Arnold became a professional at 15, joining the prestigious Ben Greet Players shortly afterward. After touring with such notables as Ethel Barrymore and Maxine Elliot, he did bit and extra work at Chicago's Essanay Film Studios and New Jersey's World Studios during the early 'teens. Hoping to become a slender leading man, Arnold found that his fortune lay in character parts, and accordingly beefed up his body: "The bigger I got, the better character roles I received," he'd observe later. Following several seasons on Broadway, Arnold made his talking picture debut as a gangster in 1933's Whistling in the Dark. He continued playing supporting villains until attaining the title role in Diamond Jim (1935), which required him to add 25 pounds to his already substantial frame; he repeated this characterization in the 1940 biopic Lillian Russell. Other starring roles followed in films like Sutter's Gold (1936), Come and Get It (1936) and Toast of New York (1937), but in 1937 Arnold's career momentum halted briefly when he was labelled "box office poison" by a committee of film exhibitors (other "poisonous" performers were Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn!) Undaunted, Arnold accepted lesser billing in secondary roles, remaining in demand until his death. A favorite of director Frank Capra (who frequently chided the actor for the "phony laugh" that was his trademark), Arnold appeared in a trio of Capra films, playing Jimmy Stewart's millionaire father in You Can't Take It With You (1938), a corrupt political boss in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and a would-be fascist in Meet John Doe (1941). Despite the fact that he was not considered a box-office draw, Arnold continued to be cast in starring roles from time to time, notably Daniel Webster in 1941's The Devil and Daniel Webster and blind detective Duncan Maclain in Eyes in the Night (1942) and The Hidden Eye (1945). During the 1940s, Arnold became increasingly active in politics, carrying this interest over into a radio anthology, Mr. President, which ran from 1947 through 1953. He was co-founder of the "I Am an American Foundation," an officer of Hollywood's Permanent Charities Committee, and a president of the Screen Actors Guild. Though a staunch right-wing conservative (he once considered running for Senate on the Republican ticket), Arnold labored long and hard to protect his fellow actors from the persecution of the HUAC "communist witch-hunt." Edward Arnold's last film appearance was in the "torn from today's headlines" potboiler Miami Expose (1956).

Trivia: American actress Ann Harding, born Dorothy Walton Gatley, spent her childhood as an "army brat" constantly moving around the U.S. and Cuba. In her late teens, she worked as a freelance script reader for the Famous Players-Lasky company. In 1921 she made her stage acting debut with the Provincetown Players of Greenwich Village; later that year she appeared on Broadway. Soon she was a well-respected leading lady on Broadway and in stock, and as a result, was signed to a movie contract with Pathe in 1929. She was a Hollywood star within a year. Especially popular with women, she was usually cast as a gentle, refined heroine. For her work in Holiday (1930) she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. For several years she remained a top star, but her career was hurt by typecasting; again and again she appeared in sentimental tearjerkers in which she played the noble woman who makes a grand sacrifice. After marrying symphony conductor Warner Janssen, she quit making films in 1937. Five years later she returned to the screen as a character actress, going on to make a number of films over the next decade, followed by another break of several years and then one last spurt of film acting in 1956. Later she went on to star on Broadway and appear in guest-star roles on TV. Her first husband was actor Harry Bannister.

Trivia: Reed was elected beauty queen of her high school and Campus Queen of her college. The latter honor resulted in her photo making the L.A. papers, and as a result she was invited to take a screen test with MGM, which signed her in 1941. She played supporting roles in a number of minor films (at first being billed as "Donna Adams"), then in the mid '40s she began getting leads; with rare exceptions, she portrayed sincere, wholesome types and loving wives and girlfriends. She went against type playing a prostitute in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Rarely getting rewarding roles, she retired from the screen in 1958 to star in the TV series "The Donna Reed Show," which was a great success and remained on the air through 1966. After 1960 she appeared in only one more film. In the mid '80s she emerged from retirement to star in "Dallas;" Barbara Bel Geddes returned to the show in 1985, and Reed won a $1 million settlement for a breach of contract suit against the show's producers. She died of cancer several months later.

Trivia: The screen's premier "comic gangster," Allen Jenkins studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked several years in regional stock companies and on Broadway before talking pictures created a demand for his talents in Hollywood. One of his first films was Blessed Event (1932), in which Jenkins played the role he'd originated in the stage version. This and most subsequent Allen Jenkins films were made at Warner Bros., where the actor made so many pictures that he was sometimes referred to as "the fifth Warner Brother." As outspoken and pugnacious off screen as on, Jenkins was a member in good standing of Hollywood's "Irish Mafia," a rotating band of Hibernian actors (including James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Matt McHugh and Jimmy Gleason) who palled around incessantly. Popular but undisciplined and profligate with his money, Jenkins was reduced to "B" films by the 1940s and 1950s, including occasional appearances in RKO's Falcon films and the Bowery Boys epics at Monogram; still, he was as game as ever, and capable of taking any sort of physical punishment meted out to his characters. TV offered several opportunities for Jenkins in the 1950s and 1960s, notably his supporting role on 1956's Hey Jeannie, a sitcom starring Scottish songstress Jeannie Carson, and 30 weeks' worth of voice-over work as Officer Dibble on the 1961 animated series Top Cat. Going the dinner theater and summer stock route in the 1960s, Jenkins was as wiry as ever onstage, but his eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he had to memorize where the furniture was set. Making ends meet between acting jobs, Jenkins took on work as varied as tool-and-die making for Douglas Aircraft and selling cars for a Santa Monica dealer. Asked in 1965 how he felt about "moonlighting", Jenkins (who in his heyday had commanded $4000 per week) growled, "I go where the work is and do what the work is! Moonlighting's a fact. The rest is for the birds." Towards the end of his life, Jenkins was hired for cameo roles by directors who fondly remembered the frail but still feisty actor from his glory days; one of Jenkins' last appearances was as a telegrapher in the final scene of Billy Wilder's The Front Page (1974).

Trivia: The last in a long line of British actors, Reginald Denny left school at 16 to enter the family trade. His first important assignment was the role of Prince Danilo in a travelling company of The Merry Widow. He first came to the U.S. in a 1912 production of Quaker Girl, then returned to England to star in musical productions. After World War I service as a Lieutenant in the 112th squadron of the British Flying Corps, Denny appeared in several Broadway productions and made his film bow at the New Jersey-based world film studios. Hired on the basis of his finely tuned physiques, Denny starred in Universal's boxing short-subject series The Leather Pushers before being promoted to features. During the 1920s, Denny was one of Universal's most popular stars, headlining a series of frothy domestic comedies, most of which co-starred Laura LaPlante and were directed by William A. Seiter. In talkies, Denny's British accent made it difficult for him to continue in the "all-American" roles he'd been playing at Universal, but he continued to flourish as a character actor, showing up in everything from Romeo and Juliet (1936) to Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1937). He also played the "silly ass" second lead of Algy in several Bulldog Drummond "B" pictures. Since his World War I experience, Denny remained active in aviation; he was a pioneer in the field of radio-controlled aircraft. In fact, the U.S. Navy prototype radio aircraft TDD was named in his honor (the initials stood for Target Drone Denny). A busy actor on films and television into the 1960s, Reginald Denny returned to Broadway in 1958 to replace Robert Coote as Col. Pickering in My Fair Lady.

Trivia: From her earliest stage work onward, American actress Rosemary DeCamp played character roles that belied her youth and fresh-scrubbed attractiveness. On radio, DeCamp developed the vocal timbre that enabled her to portray a rich variety (and age-range) of characters. A peripheral performer on One Man's Family at 21, DeCamp showed up on several radio soap operas and anthologies before settling into the role of secretary Judy Price on the Dr. Christian series in 1937. DeCamp made her film bow in Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), in which she and most of the cast were required to "age" several decades. With The Jungle Book (1941), the actress played the first of her many mother roles. The most famous examples of DeCamp's specialized film work are Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which she was the Irish-American mother of George M. Cohan (James Cagney, who was 14 years her senior), and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), in which she played George Gershwin's Jewish mother (Gershwin was impersonated by Robert Alda, who was one year younger than DeCamp). Even when playing a character close to her own age, such as the Red Cross worker in Pride of the Marines (1945), DeCamp's interest in the leading man (in this case the same-aged John Garfield) was strictly maternal. On television, DeCamp was Peg Riley to Jackie Gleason's Chester A. Riley on the original 1949 run of The Life of Riley. She also played rakish Bob Cummings' levelheaded sister Margaret in Love That Bob (1955-59), and later was seen as Marlo Thomas' mother on That Girl (1966-70). In 1965, Rosemary subbed for her old friend Ronald Reagan as host on Death Valley Days; FCC rules of the time compelled the removal of Reagan's scenes when the show was telecast in California, where he was running for governor. Upon Reagan's election, Robert Taylor took over as host, but DeCamp was installed as permanent commercial spokesperson for 20 Mule Team Borax. Semi-retired for several years, DeCamp reemerged in 1981 for a "de-campy" cameo part in the horror spoof Saturday the 14th.

Trivia: A protégé of musical comedy star Beatrice Lillie in his native England, actor Stanley Ridges made his London stage debut in O' Boy. He went on to star as a romantic lead in several Broadway plays, and was cast in a similar capacity in his first film, the New York-lensed Crime of Passion (1934). Thereafter, the grey-templed Ridges excelled in dignified, underplayed, and distinctly non-British character roles. His best film assignments included the schizophrenic professor-turned-criminal in Black Friday (1940) (it would be unfair to say that he "stole" the picture from official star Boris Karloff, but he did have the best part), and the treacherous Professor Seletzky in Ernst Lubitsch's matchless black comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942). One of Stanley Ridges' last movie performances was as the kindly mentor of young doctor Sidney Poitier in the race-relations melodrama No Way Out (1950).

Trivia: Of Scandinavian stock, Barry Nelson was no sooner graduated from the University of California-Berkeley than he was signed to an MGM contract. Most of his MGM feature-film assignments were supporting roles, though he was given leads in the 1942 "B" A Yank in Burma and the 1947 "Crime Does Not Pay" short The Luckiest Guy in the World. While serving in the Army, Nelson made his Broadway debut in the morale-boosting Moss Hart play Winged Victory, repeating his role (and his billing of Corporal Barry Nelson) in the 1944 film version. Full stardom came Nelson's way in such Broadway productions of the 1950s and 1960s as The Rat Race, The Moon is Blue and Cactus Flower. He repeated his Broadway role in the 1963 film version of Mary Mary, and both directed and acted in Frank Gilroy's two-character play The Only Game in Town (1968). Nelson starred in a trio of 1950s TV series: the 1952 espionager The Hunter, the 1953 sitcom My Favorite Husband, and the unjustly neglected Canadian-filmed 1958 adventure series Hudson's Bay (1959). Oh, and did you know that Nelson was the first actor ever to play Ian Fleming's secret agent James Bond on television? Yep: Barry Nelson portrayed American spy Jimmy Bond on a 1954 TV adaptation of Fleming's Casino Royale. Nelson died of unspecified causes on April 7, 2007, while traveling through Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was 84.

Trivia: Czech character actor Steven Geray was for many years a member in good standing of the Hungarian National Theater. He launched his English-speaking film career in Britain in 1935, then moved to the U.S. in 1941. His roles ranged from sinister to sympathetic, from "A" productions like Gilda (1946) to potboilers like El Paso (1949). He flourished during the war years, enjoying top billing in the moody little romantic melodrama So Dark the Night (1946), and also attracting critical praise for his portrayal of Dirk Stroeve in The Moon and Sixpence (1942). Many of Geray's film appearances in the 1950s were unbilled; when he was given screen credit, it was usually as "Steve Geray." Geray's busy career in film and television continued into the 1960s. Steven Geray worked until he had obviously depleted his physical strength; it was somewhat sad to watch the ailing Geray struggle through the western horror pic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1965).

Trivia: A busy child actor in his native London, Reginald Sheffield was 12 years old when he made his film debut in 1913. Sheffield's later movie credits included the starring role in the 1923 version of David Copperfield. Moving to Hollywood in 1929, he was unable to secure leading parts, but kept active as a character actor until his death in 1957. His more memorable Hollywood roles included Secretary of War Newton Baker in Wilson (1945), President Ulysses S. Grant in Centennial Summer (1946), and Julius Caesar in The Story of Mankind (1957); he also essayed small roles in both versions of De Mille's The Buccaneer. Reginald Sheffield was the father of Johnny Sheffield, who rose to fame as Boy in the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s, and who later starred in Monogram's Bomba the Jungle Boy series.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

Trivia: Appropriately nicknamed "Google Eyes" by his childhood friends, African-American actor Mantan Moreland joined a carnival at 14 and a medicine show a year later - and both times was dragged home by juvenile authorities. Most of Moreland's early adult years were spent on the "Chitlin Circuit," the nickname given by performers to all-black vaudeville. After a decade of professional ups and downs, Moreland teamed with several comics (notably Benny Carter) in an act based on the "indefinite talk" routine of Flournoy and Miller, wherein each teammate would start a sentence, only to be interrupted by the other teammate ("Say, have you seen...?" "I saw him yesterday. He was at..." "I thought they closed that place down!"). Moreland's entered films in 1936, usually in the tiny porter, waiter and bootblack roles then reserved for black actors. Too funny to continue being shunted aside by lily-white Hollywood, Moreland began getting better parts in a late-'30s series of comedy adventures produced at Monogram and costarring white actor Frankie Darro. The screen friendship between Mantan and Frankie was rare for films of this period, and it was this series that proved Moreland was no mere "Movie Negro." Moreland stayed with Monogram in the '40s as Birmingham Brown, eternally frightened chauffeur of the Charlie Chan films. The variations Moreland wrought upon the line "Feets, do your duty" were astonishing and hilarious, and though the Birmingham role was never completely free of stereotype, by the end of the Chan series in 1949 Monogram recognized Moreland's value to the series by having Charlie Chan refer to "my assistant, Birmingham Brown" - not merely "my hired man." Always popular with black audiences (he was frequently given top billing in the advertising of the Chan films by Harlem theatre owners), Moreland starred in a series of crude but undeniably entertaining comedies filmed by Toddy Studios for all-black theatres. The actor also occasionally popped up in A-pictures like MGM's Cabin in the Sky, and worked steadily in radio. Changing racial attitudes in the '50s and '60s lessend Moreland's ability to work in films; in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, a frightened black man was no longer considered amusing even by Mantan's fans. Virtually broke, Moreland suffered a severe stroke in the early '60s, and it looked as though he was finished in Hollywood. Things improved for Moreland after 1964, first with a bit in the oddly endearing horror picture Spider Baby (1964), then with a pair of prominent cameos in Enter Laughing (1968) and The Comic (1969), both directed by Carl Reiner. With more and more African Americans being hired for TV and films in the late '60s, Moreland was again in demand. He worked on such TV sitcoms as Love American Style and The Bill Cosby Show, revived his "indefinite talk" routine for a gasoline commercial, and enjoyed a solid film role was as a race-conscious counterman in Watermelon Man (1970). In his last years, Mantan Moreland was a honored guest at the meetings of the international Laurel and Hardy fan club "The Sons of the Desert," thanks to his brief but amusing appearance in the team's 1942 comedy A-Haunting We Will Go (1942).

Trivia: While still attending U.C.L.A., Frances Rafferty was signed as a stock actress by MGM. Her resemblance to Donna Reed, both physically and in terms of technique, might lead one to believe that MGM was keeping Rafferty on the payroll to play any roles that Ms. Reed might choose to avoid. Outside of her performance as Orchid in Dragon Seed (1944) and her engaging leading lady stint in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945), Rafferty did very little of consequence during her MGM years. Frances Rafferty finally became a star of sorts in the role of Ruth Henshaw on the mid-'50s TV sitcom December Bride and its 1961 sequel, Pete and Gladys.

Trivia: Missouri native Frank M. Thomas cut his professional acting teeth with the Van Dyke Stock Company in St. Louis. Thomas made his Broadway bow in 1913, appearing in at least one production per year for the next 22 years. In 1936, he entered films with an RKO Radio contract, playing an assortment of character roles ranging from trench-coated detectives to shady crooks. During the years 1938-1942, Thomas showed up in more films than any other actor. Long retired, he died in 1989 at the age of 100. Married to actress Mona Bruns, Frank M. Thomas was the father of actor/writer Frankie Thomas, of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet fame.

Trivia: A Utah girl born and bred, actress Marie Windsor attended Brigham Young University and represented her state as Miss Utah in the Miss America pageant. She studied acting under Russian stage and screen luminary Maria Ouspenskaya, supporting herself as a telephone operator between performing assignments. After several years of radio appearances and movie bits, Windsor was moved up to feature-film roles in 1947's Song of the Thin Man. She was groomed to be a leading lady, but her height precluded her co-starring with many of Hollywood's sensitive, slightly built leading men. (She later noted with amusement that at least one major male star had a mark on his dressing room door at the 5'6" level; if an actress was any taller than that, she was out.) Persevering, Windsor found steady work in second-lead roles as dance hall queens, gun molls, floozies, and exotic villainesses. She is affectionately remembered by disciples of director Stanley Kubrick for her portrayal of Elisha Cook's cold-blooded, castrating wife in The Killing (1956). Curtailing her screen work in the late '80s, Windsor, who is far more agreeable in person than onscreen, began devoting the greater portion of her time to her sizeable family. Because of her many appearances in Westerns (she was an expert horsewoman), Windsor has become a welcome and highly sought-after presence on the nostalgia convention circuit.

Trivia: Looking far younger than he really was, American supporting actor Walter Tetley (born Walter Tetzlaff) gained early fame on the NBC radio broadcast The Great Gildersleeve before making his screen debut as one of Freddie Bartholomew's co-conspirators in MGM's Lord Jeff (1938). Memorable as the boy with the candy cane in W.C. Fields' You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), the diminutive Tetley was also in Boy Slaves (1939) and played scores of messengers, elevator operators, and newsboys in films ranging from Horror Island (1941) to Casanova Brown (1944). Tetley later emerged as a popular voiceover artist, most famously supplying the voice of Sherman on television's Bullwinkle Show (1961-1973).