Trivia: The jury is still out as to whether or not curly haired Shirley Temple was the most talented child star in movie history; there is little doubt, however, that she was the most consistently popular. The daughter of non-professionals, she started taking singing and dancing classes at the age of three, and the following year began accompanying her mother on the movie audition circuit. Hired by the two-reel comedy firm of Educational Pictures in 1933, she starred in an imitation Our Gang series called the Baby Burlesks, performing astonishingly accurate impressions of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; she was also featured in the films of Educational's other stars, including Andy Clyde and Frank Coghlan Jr. In 1934 she was signed by Fox Pictures, a studio then teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. After a handful of minor roles she created a sensation by stopping the show with her rendition of "Baby Take a Bow" in Fox's Stand Up and Cheer. She was promptly promoted to her own starring features, literally saving Fox (and its successor 20th Century Fox) from receivership, and earned a special Oscar in 1934 "in grateful recognition to her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment." With such tailor-made vehicles as Bright Eyes (1934), Curly Top (1935), The Little Colonel (1935), Dimples (1936), and Heidi (1937), Temple was not only America's number one box-office attraction, but a merchandising cash cow, inspiring an unending cascade of Shirley Temple dolls, toys, and coloring books. She also prompted other studios to develop potential Shirley Temples of their own, such as Sybil Jason and Edith Fellows (ironically, the only juvenile actress to come close to Temple's popularity was 20th Century Fox's own Jane Withers, who got her start playing a pint-sized villain in Temples' Bright Eyes). Though the Fox publicity mill was careful to foster the myth that Temple was just a "typical" child with a "normal" life, her parents carefully screened her friends and painstakingly predetermined every move she made in public. Surprisingly, she remained an unspoiled and most cooperative coworker, though not a few veteran character actors were known to blow their stacks when little Temple, possessed of a photographic memory, corrected their line readings. By 1940, Temple had outgrown her popularity, as indicated by the failure of her last Fox releases The Blue Bird and Young People. The following year, MGM, who'd originally wanted Temple to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, cast her in Kathleen, another box-office disappointment which ended her MGM association almost before it began. Under the auspices of producers Edward Small and David O. Selznick, Temple enjoyed modest success as a teenaged actress in such productions as 1942's Miss Annie Rooney (in which Dickie Moore gave her first screen kiss) and 1944's Since You Went Away. Still, the public preferred to remember the Shirley Temple that was, reacting with horror when she played sexually savvy characters in Kiss and Tell (1945) and That Hagen Girl (1947). Perhaps the best of her post-child star roles was spunky army brat Philadelphia Thursday in John Ford's Fort Apache (1947), in which she co-starred with her first husband, actor John Agar (the union broke up after four years when Agar began to resent being labeled "Mr. Shirley Temple"). She returned to 20th Century Fox for her last film, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), in which played second fiddle to star Clifton Webb. Retiring on her trust fund in 1950, she wed a second time to business executive Charles Black, a marriage that would endure for several decades and produce a number of children. In 1958 she made a comeback as host of The Shirley Temple Storybook, a well-received series of children's TV specials. Her final show business assignment was the weekly 1960 anthology The Shirley Temple Show, which though not a success enabled her to play a variety of character roles -- including a toothless old witch in an hour-long adaptation of Babes in Toyland! The staunchly Republican Temple went into an entirely different field of endeavor when she entered politics in the mid-'60s. The bitter taste of an unsuccessful congressional bid was dissipated in 1968 when she was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ghana (1974-1976) and Czechoslovakia (1989), and during the Ford and Carter years kept busy as the U.S. Chief of Protocol. In the 1980s, she went public with information about her mastectomy, providing hope and inspiration for other victims of breast cancer. Still one of the most beloved figures in the world, Temple seemingly went to great pains to dispel her goody two-shoes image in her candid 1988 autobiography Child Star, in which she cast a frequently jaundiced eye on her lifelong celebrity status, revealing among other things that several well-known Hollywood moguls had tried and failed to force their manhood upon her once she was of legal age (and even before!). Temple received several lifetime achievement awards towards the end of her life, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the SAG life achievement award in 2005. She died in 2014, at the age of 85.

Trivia: An ingenue of the 1930s, Rochelle Hudson insisted to interviewers that her career was due to a "friend of a friend of a friend" of her mother's, who happened to have connections with Fox film studios. Signed to a Fox contract in 1930, Hudson studied with the studio's voice coach, who farmed the girl out for singing work on radio and in cartoons; Hudson was briefly the voice of Honey in Warner Bros.' "Bosko" cartoons. Her first on-camera appearance, on loanout to RKO, was in Fanny Foley Herself. Though often stuck in girl-next-door parts, Hudson was also effectively cast as tomboys and slatterns. She appeared in several Will Rogers pictures, mainly because Rogers liked sharing the spotlight with actors from his home state of Oklahoma. Her career dwindling into "B"-picture leads at Columbia and PRC, Hudson left Hollywood in 1942, spending the war years working in Naval Intelligence with her first husband, reserve officer (and former Disney story editor) Hal Thompson. She returned to films in 1955 to play the mother of Natalie Wood in Rebel Without A Cause. Though her subsequent movie appearances were infrequent, she kept busy on television, co-starring on the 1954 sitcom That's My Boy and showing up on many an anthology series. Retiring from show business for good in 1967, Rochelle Hudson spent her last years as a successful real estate agent.

Trivia: If the stories about his activities as an Allied spy in Europe and Turkey during World War I can be believed, American actor John Boles had a far more exciting real life than he'd ever have in "reel" life. Whatever the case, the Texas-born Boles abandoned espionage for a stage career as a singer and actor. His screen bow was in the silent film So This is Marriage (1925), but he was shown to better advantage in talking pictures, beginning with his costarring role opposite Bebe Daniels in the 1929 musical blockbuster Rio Rita. A little more appealing and a lot more animated than most movie baritones, Boles was much in demand in the early 1930s, usually in parts originally intended for his Fox Studios coworker (and near-lookalike) Warner Baxter. Freelancing after his Fox contract ended in 1936, Boles experienced a dip in popularity, redeemed somewhat with a strong part as poverty-stricken Barbara Stanwyck's society husband in Stella Dallas (1937). When John Boles' film career wound down in 1943, he went back to the stage, making a somewhat melancholy return to Hollywood in the execrable low-budget farce Babes in Baghdad (1952), wherein he was trapped with fellow faded luminaries Paulette Goddard and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Trivia: American actress Jane Darwell was the daughter of a Missouri railroad executive. Despite her father's disapproval, she spent most of her youth acting in circuses, opera troupes and stock companies, making her film debut in 1912. Even in her early thirties, Darwell specialized in formidable "grande dame" roles, usually society matrons or strict maiden aunts. Making an easy transition to talking pictures, Darwell worked primarily in small character parts (notably as governesses and housekeepers in the films of Shirley Temple) until 1939, when her role as the James Brothers' mother in Jesse James began a new career direction--now she was most often cast as indomitable frontierswomen, unbending in the face of hardship and adversity. It was this quality that led Darwell to be cast in her favorite role as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which she won an Oscar. Darwell continued to work until illness crept upon her in the late 1950s. Even so, Darwell managed to essay a handful of memorable parts on TV and in movies into the 1960s; her last film role was as the "Bird Woman" in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).

Trivia: After establishing herself on the Italian stage, actress Rafaela Ottiano came to American films in 1924. During the talkie era, Ottiano specialized in sinister, spiteful characterizations. As aging trollop Russian Rita in She Done Him Wrong (1933), she meets her well-deserved end at the hands of Mae West, while in The Devil Doll (1935), she makes clear her plans to exploit her scientist husband's "miniaturization" process by hissing malevolently, "We'll make the whole world small!!!!" A somewhat more benign Rafaela Ottiano can be seen in Grand Hotel (1932), in which she plays the overprotective maidservant of ballerina Greta Garbo, and Curly Top (1935), in which her sour severity melts when exposed to the relentless cheeriness of Shirley Temple.

Trivia: American actress Esther Dale concentrated her cinematic efforts on portraying warm-hearted aunts, mothers, nurses, neighbors and shopkeepers--though there were a few domineering dowagers along the way. She began her career on a semi-professional basis with a New England stock troupe operated by her husband, Arthur Beckhard. Esther was the resident character actress in stage productions of the late '20s and early '30s featuring such stars-to-be as Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. She first appeared before the cameras in 1934's Crime Without Passion, filmed in Long Island. Esther then moved to Hollywood, where she popped up with increasing frequency in such films as The Awful Truth (1937) (as Ralph Bellamy's mother), Back Street (1941), Margie (1946) and The Egg and I (1947). Her participation in the last-named film led to a semi-regular stint in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle series as the Kettles' neighbor Birdie Hicks. Esther Dale's last film, made one year before her death, was the John Wayne vehicle North to Alaska (1960), in which she had one scene as "Woman at Picnic."

Trivia: Of Anglo/French parentage, birdlike comic actor Etienne Girardot was an established theatrical favorite long before the turn of the century. One of Girardot's best-loved stage roles was Lord Fancourt Babberly in Charley's Aunt; a production photo of the actor in female drag appeared for years in the Collier's Encyclopedia entry on "Theatre." He entered films in 1912 as star of Vitagraph's The Violin of Monsieur. Then it was back to the stage, where in 1933 he scored a personal success as balmy self-styled millionaire Mr. Clark in Hecht and MacArthur's Twentieth Century. It was this role that brought Girardot back to movies on a full-time basis, where he remained until his death in 1939. Etienne Girardot's film roles included crabby coroner Dr. Doremus in two "Philo Vance" mysteries; orphanage official Wyckoff in Curly Top (1935), who endures the indignity of being imitated (quite well) by star Shirley Temple; and King Louis' senile physician in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).

Trivia: Of the many candidates for the throne of "Hollywood's favorite butler," Brighton-born Arthur Treacher was the undisputed victor. The son of a British lawyer, the tall, hook-nosed Treacher did not settle upon an acting career until he was 25, after serving in WWI. Starting out as a chorus "boy," Treacher rose to popularity as a musical comedy performer. He came to America in 1928 while he was appearing in a revue titled Great Temptations. Entering films in 1933, Treacher quickly established himself in butler or servant roles, notably in several Shirley Temple films. He was awarded top-billing in Thank You, Jeeves (1936) and Step Lively, Jeeves (1937), both based on the gentleman's-gentleman character created by P.G. Wodehouse. Remaining active on Broadway, Treacher was prominently billed in such stage productions as Cole Porter's Panama Hattie and the 1944 revival of The Ziegfeld Follies. After several years away from Hollywood, Treacher returned in 1964 to portray a constable in Disney's Mary Poppins, which turned out to be his final film. Arthur Treacher enjoyed a latter-day popularity in the 1960s as the acerbic sidekick of TV talk show host Merv Griffin, and through the franchising of his name and image for such business concerns as Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips and the Call Arthur Treacher Service System (a household help agency).