Trivia: American actor Joel McCrea came from a California family with roots reaching back to the pioneer days. As a youth, McCrea satiated his fascination with movies by appearing as an extra in a serial starring Ruth Roland. By 1920, high schooler McCrea was a movie stunt double, and by the time he attended USC, he was regularly appearing at the Pasadena Playhouse. McCrea's big Hollywood break came with a part in the 1929 talkie Jazz Age; he matriculated into one of the most popular action stars of the 1930s, making lasting friendships with such luminaries as director Cecil B. DeMille and comedian Will Rogers. It was Rogers who instilled in McCrea a strong business sense, as well as a love of ranching; before the 1940s had ended, McCrea was a multi-millionaire, as much from his land holdings and ranching activities as from his film work. Concentrating almost exclusively on westerns after appearing in The Virginian (1946), McCrea became one of that genre's biggest box-office attractions. He extended his western fame to an early-1950s radio series, Tales of the Texas Rangers, and a weekly 1959 TV oater, Wichita Town, in which McCrea costarred with his son Jody. In the late 1960s, McCrea increased his wealth by selling 1200 acres of his Moorpark (California) ranch to an oil company, on the proviso that no drilling would take place within sight of the actor's home. By the time he retired in the early 1970s, McCrea could take pride in having earned an enduring reputation not only as one of Hollywood's shrewdest businessmen, but as one of the few honest-to-goodness gentlemen in the motion picture industry.

Trivia: Fresh out of the University of Chicago, brunette actress Frances Dee began securing extra roles in Hollywood, and by 1930 was co-starring with Maurice Chevalier (at his personal request) in Playboy in Paris. No winsome lass she, Frances truly came to life in parts calling for headstrong, uninhibited behavior. She was at her all-time best in Blood Money (1933), playing a thrill-seeking socialite with a pronounced masochistic streak. Hollywood saw Frances differently, and persisted in casting her in sedate roles that anyone could have played; it was disheartening, for example, to watch her play straight woman to Clifton Webb in Mister Scoutmaster (1953). Offscreen, Frances Dee was, for nearly sixty years, the wife of film star Joel McCrea, and the mother of actor Jody McCrea. In 2004, Dee passed away due to complications from a stroke.

Trivia: Hard-fighting, strong, durable redhead Charles Bickford graduated from MIT before he began appearing in burlesque in 1914. After serving in World War I, he started a career on Broadway in 1919. He didn't come to Hollywood until the birth of the Sound Era in 1929. His first film was Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite, during the production of which, he punched out DeMille. He became a star after playing Greta Garbo's lover in Anna Christie (1930), but didn't develop into a romantic lead, instead becoming a powerful character actor whose screen appearances commanded attention throughout a career spanning almost four decades, in films such as Duel in the Sun (1946) and Johnny Belinda (1948). His craggy, intense features lent themselves to roles as likable fathers, businessmen, captains, etc. He sometimes played stubborn or unethical roles, but more often projected honesty or warmth. He co-authored a play, The Cyclone Lover (1928) and wrote an autobiography, Bulls, Balls, Bicycles, and Actors (1965). He was Oscar-nominated three times but never won the award. Late in his life he starred in the TV show The Virginian.

Trivia: Maltese-born character actor Joseph Calleila first came to prominence as a concert singer in England and Europe. He made his screen bow in 1935's Public Hero Number 1, playing the first of many gangsters. Usually a villain, Calleila often leavened his screen perfidy with a subtle sense of humor, notably as the masked bandit who motivates the plot of the Mae West/W.C. Fields comedy My Little Chickadee (1940). In 1936, Calleila tried his hand at screenwriting with Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), a fanciful western based on the criminal career of Joaquin Murietta. Joseph Calleila delivered some of his best and most varied screen performances in the last years of his film career, especially as the kindly Mexican priest in Disney's The Littlest Outlaw (1955) and the weary border-town detective in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).

Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: His European/Scandinavia heritage notwithstanding, actor Martin Garralaga was most effectively cast in Latin American roles. Many of his screen appearances were uncredited, but in 1944 he was awarded co-starring status in a series of Cisco Kid westerns produced at Monogram. Duncan Renaldo starred as Cisco, with Garralaga as comic sidekick Pancho. In 1946, Monogram producer Scott R. Dunlap realigned the Cisco Kid series; Renaldo remained in the lead, but now Garralaga's character name changed from picture to picture, and sometimes he showed up as the villain. Eventually Garralaga was replaced altogether by Leo Carrillo, who revived the Pancho character. Outside of his many westerns, Martin Garralaga could be seen in many wartime films with foreign settings; he shows up as a headwaiter in the 1942 classic Casablanca.

Trivia: In films from 1939, character actor Dan White trafficked in small-town blowhards and rustic constables. Often unbilled in bit roles, White was occasionally afforded such larger roles as Deputy Elmer in Voodoo Man (1944), Millwheel in The Yearling (1946) and Abel Hatfield in Roseanna McCoy (1949). He remained active until the early 1960s. The "Dan White" who appeared in 1977's Alien Factor is a different person.

Trivia: From 1931's Vice Squad onward, American character actor Davison Clark could be seen onscreen as scores of lawyers, doctors and big-city officials. One of Clark's meatier assignments (albeit still a minor one) was as Horace Greeley in The Mighty Barnum. As an member of Cecil B. DeMille's unofficial stock company, Clark essayed bits in DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), The Buccaneer (1938), Union Pacific (1939), The Story of Dr. Wassell (1947), Unconquered (1948) and Samson and Delilah (1949). Davison Clark made his last film appearance in the 1951serial Zombies of the Stratosphere.

Trivia: The father of actors Houseley Stevenson Jr. and Onslow Stevens, Houseley Stevenson Sr. was one of the founders and principal directors of the famed Pasadena Playhouse. After a four-decade-plus stage career, Stevenson came to films in 1936. At first, he played bits, but as he moved into his sixties the size of his roles increased. The hollow-cheeked, stubble-chinned actor was especially adept at playing elderly derelicts whose dialogue usually ran along the lines of "Whatsa matter, son? Hidin' from the law?" Houseley Stevenson was at his very best in two Humphrey Bogart films: In Dark Passage (1947), he played the seedy plastic surgeon Dr. Coley, while in Knock on Any Door he was seen as the philosophical rummy "Junior."

Trivia: Eva Novak played the love interest of cowboy star Tom Mix in many of his films. The sister of actress Jane Novak, she got her start in the early '20s as one of Mack Sennett's bathing beauties. At the suggestion of Mix, Novak learned to perform her own stunts. Later she appeared opposite William S. Hart and continued doing her own stuntwork until 1921 when she married director/stuntman William Reed. The couple finished the 1920s in Australia where they made a few films until returning to the States in the 1930s. Novak continued appearing in films through the late '50s.

Trivia: Chances are when a doctor made a house call in a '40s movie, that doctor was portrayed by Sam Flint. Silver-haired, authoritative, and distinguished by an executive-style moustache, Flint entered films in the early '30s after a long stage career. Though his movie roles were usually confined to one or two scenes per picture, Flint was always instantly recognizable in his characterizations of businessmen, bankers, chairmen of the board, politicians, publishers, fathers of the bride--and, as mentioned before, doctors. In addition to his prolific feature-film work, Sam Flint was always welcome in short subjects, appearing in support of everyone from Our Gang to the Three Stooges.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.