Trivia: Golden-voiced character actor O.P. Heggie has sometimes been described as a Scotsman; in truth, he was born in Australia of Scots parents. Trained for a musical career, Heggie began "trodding the boards" at the turn of the century. He had nearly 30 years' worth of stage experience when he made his film debut in 1928. His most notable film roles included Inspector Nayland Smith in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), Louis XI in The Vagabond King (1930), Edmond Dantes' cellmate Abbe Faria in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables (1934). Shortly after completing work on The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), the 56-year old Heggie died, the victim of a brief pneumonia outbreak in Los Angeles. It is a tribute to the artistry of O.P. Heggie that his portrayal of the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) remains powerful and moving even after Gene Hackman's devastating takeoff in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974).

Trivia: Henry Hull, the son of a Louisville drama critic, made his Broadway acting debut in either 1909 or 1911, depending on which "official" biography one reads. After leaving the stage to try his luck as a gold prospector and mining engineer, Hull was back on the boards in 1916, the same year that he made his first film at New Jersey's World Studios. While his place of honor in the American Theater is incontestable (among his many Broadway appearances was Tobacco Road, in which he created the role of Jeeter Lester), Hull's reputation as film actor varies from observer to observer. An incredibly mannered movie performer, Hull was a bit too precious for his leading roles in One Exciting Night (1922) and The Werewolf of London (1935); he also came off as shamelessly hammy in such character parts as the crusading newspaper editor in The Return of Frank James (1940). Conversely, his calculated mannerisms and gratuitous vocal tricks served him quite well in roles like the obnoxious millionaire in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and the Ernie Pyle-like war correspondent in Objective Burma (1945). A playwright as well as an actor, Hull worked on such plays as Congratulations and Manhattan. One of Henry Hull's last film appearances was the typically irritating role of a small-town buttinsky in The Chase (1966).

Trivia: At 15 he quit school to join a Boston stage company; by 21 he had reached Broadway. He went on to a substantial career in theater as an actor, director, and set designer. In the late '30s he enhanced his reputation by working with the Lunts in Theater Guild productions. He appeared in one film in the '30s, then moved to Hollywood in 1940 as a contract player; he was busy onscreen until 1944, when he began a new career as a film director, averaging a film a year through 1951. Later he produced three films, then switched to TV, for which he directed many episodes of a number of different series.

Trivia: On-stage from 1898, British actress Margaret Wycherly toured in English repertory and American stock before making her Broadway premiere. Her biggest commercial stage success was Tobacco Road, but the role which made her a star was the low-born, smarter-than-she-seems phony spirtualist in The Thirteenth Chair, a murder mystery written for the actress by Bayard Veiller. Wycherly re-created the role in a 1919 silent film, then ten years later remade it as a talking picture. Despite the histrionics of Bela Lugosi as a police inspector, Wycherly dominated the 1929 Thirteenth Chair, playing each significant moment full-out, but without the artificiality which afflicated the rest of the cast. She remained active on stage and TV and in films (her last was Olivier's Richard III) for the rest of her life, but Margaret Wycherly would be memorable if only for two of her film appearances: As Gary Cooper's weary backwoods mother in Sergeant York (1941), for which she was Oscar-nominated, and as a far more malevolent parent, James Cagney's gangster "Ma" in White Heat. Though she was killed off midway in this film, audiences had no trouble remembering the hatchet-hard face and marrow-chilling voice of Margaret Wycherly just before the final fadeout, as Cagney blew himself up while screaming "Made it, Ma! Top of the World!"

Trivia: Outgrowing his early career as a jockey, nasal-voiced Lynne Overman became a vaudeville performer, slowly but steadily developing his distinctive, sardonic, sing-song comic technique. After years of stage experience, Overman came to Paramount Pictures in 1934, where he would spend virtually his entire film career. During his nine years before the camera, Overman was sometimes cast in leading roles (1937's Night Club Scandal, 1938's Death of a Champion, 1939's Persons in Hiding); most often, however, he was third-billed as best friend and severest critic of the hero, notably Paramount's earliest Dorothy Lamour sarong epics. Some of Overman's best film work was manifested in his grizzled dialect parts in two Cecil B. DeMille epics, Northwest Mounted Police (1940) and Reap the Wild Wind (1942). Lynne Overman died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 55, not long after completing his comedy-relief work on Warner Bros.' The Desert Song (1944).

Trivia: The quintessential tough guy, Humphrey Bogart remains one of Hollywood's most enduring legends and one of the most beloved stars of all time. While a major celebrity during his own lifetime, Bogart's appeal has grown almost exponentially in the years following his death, and his inimitable onscreen persona -- hard-bitten, cynical, and enigmatic -- continues to cast a monumental shadow over the motion picture landscape. Sensitive yet masculine, cavalier yet heroic, his ambiguities and contradictions combined to create a larger-than-life image which remains the archetype of the contemporary antihero. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born December 25, 1899, in New York City. Upon expulsion from Andover, Massachusetts' Phillips Academy, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a ship's gunner. While roughhousing on the vessel's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, a splinter becoming lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became among his most distinctive onscreen qualities. (For years his injuries were attributed to wounds suffered in battle, although the splinter story is now more commonly accepted.) After the war, Bogart returned to New York to accept a position on Broadway as a theatrical manager; beginning in 1920, he also started appearing onstage, but earned little notice within the performing community. In the late '20s, Bogart followed a few actor friends who had decided to relocate to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance opposite Helen Hayes in the 1928 short The Dancing Town, followed by the 1930 feature Up the River, which cast him as a hard-bitten prisoner. Warner Bros. soon signed him to a 550-dollars-a-week contract, and over the next five years he appeared in dozens of motion pictures, emerging as the perfect heavy in films like 1936's The Petrified Forest, 1937's Dead End, and 1939's The Roaring Twenties. The 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory, on the other hand, offered Bogart the opportunity to break out of his gangster stereotype, and he delivered with a strong performance indicative of his true range and depth as a performer. The year 1941 proved to be Bogart's breakthrough year, as his recent success brought him to the attention of Raoul Walsh for the acclaimed High Sierra. He was then recruited by first-time director John Huston, who cast him in the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; as gumshoe Sam Spade, Bogart enjoyed one of his most legendary roles, achieving true stardom and establishing the archetype for all hardboiled heroes to follow. A year later he accepted a lead in Michael Curtiz's romantic drama Casablanca. The end result was one of the most beloved films in the Hollywood canon, garnering Bogart his first Academy Award nomination as well as an Oscar win in the Best Picture category. Bogart then teamed with director Howard Hawks for his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, appearing for the first time opposite actress Lauren Bacall. Their onscreen chemistry was electric, and by the time they reunited two years later in Hawks' masterful film noir The Big Sleep, they had also married in real life. Subsequent pairings in 1947's Dark Passage and 1948's Key Largo cemented the Bogey and Bacall pairing as one of the screen's most legendary romances. His other key relationship remained his frequent collaboration with Huston, who helmed 1948's superb The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In Huston, Bogart found a director sympathetic to his tough-as-nails persona who was also capable of subverting that image. He often cast the actor against type, to stunning effect; under Huston's sure hand, he won his lone Oscar in 1951's The African Queen.Bogart's other pivotal director of the period was Nicholas Ray, who helmed 1949's Knock on Any Door and 1950's brilliant In a Lonely Place for the star's production company Santana. After reuniting with Huston in 1953's Beat the Devil, Bogart mounted three wildly different back-to-back 1954 efforts -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tearful The Barefoot Contessa, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina, and Edward Dmytryk's historical drama The Caine Mutiny -- which revealed new, unseen dimensions to his talents. His subsequent work was similarly diffuse, ranging in tone from the grim 1955 thriller The Desperate Hours to the comedy We're No Angels. After completing the 1956 boxing drama The Harder They Fall, Bogart was forced to undergo cancer surgery and died in his sleep on January 14, 1957.

Trivia: Owl-faced Granville Bates began scowling his way through films in 1929. At one juncture in the mid-1930s, it was virtually impossible not to see Bates on screen; between 1936 and 1939, he appeared in 46 films-an average of 11 per year! Most often cast as dyspeptic grandpops and truculent storekeepers, he was particularly well-served in two of director Garson Kanin's RKO productions. In 1939's The Great Man Votes, Bates played the corrupt, bird-brained incumbent mayor; and in 1940's My Favorite Wife he was seen as the bewildered judge. Granville Bates continued working right up to his fatal heart attack in the summer of 1940.

Trivia: Cora Witherspoon began her 50-year career as a character actress at age 17, playing a septuagenarian in the New York production In Concert. She spent the better part of her Hollywood years portraying imperious society matrons, domineering maiden aunts, and henpecking hausfraus. Most filmgoers closely associate Witherspoon with her portrayal of W. C. Fields' slatternly wife in The Bank Dick (1940); despite their on camera animosity, Witherspoon and Fields were friends in real life, frequently exchanging complimentary correspondence. Though she preferred to work in New York, Cora Witherspoon continued commuting to Hollywood into the 1950s to maintain a decent standard of living.

Trivia: New Jersey-born Henry O'Neill was a year into his college education when he dropped out to join a traveling theatrical troupe. His career interrupted by WWI, O'Neill returned to the stage in 1919, where his prematurely grey hair and dignified demeanor assured him authoritative roles as lawyers, doctors, and business executives (though his first stage success was as the rough-and-tumble Paddy in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape). In films from 1933, O'Neill spent the better part of his movie career at Warner Bros. and MGM, usually playing parts requiring kindliness and understanding, but he was equally as effective in villainous assignments. Age and illness required Henry O'Neill to cut down on his film commitments in the 1950s, though he frequently showed up on the many TV anthology series of the era.