Trivia: Blonde, Brooklyn-born model and chorus girl Adele Jergens gained national fame when she was elected "Miss World's Fairest" at the 1939 World's Fair; if one chose to believe her "official" birth date, she was 13 years old at the time. Signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1944, Jergens showed up in that studio's "A" and "B" product in a succession of hard-boiled and "loose" roles. Her most curious assignment at Columbia was 1949's Ladies of The Chorus, wherein 27-year-old Jergens played the mother of 23-year-old Marilyn Monroe. Evidently, Jergens was possessed of a good nature, else she wouldn't have seemed so comfortable playing the foil to such comedians as Red Skelton, Abbott & Costello, Alan Young and even the Bowery Boys. Mostly consigned to programmers in the 1950s, Jergens enjoyed a rare "A" part in MGM's psychological melodrama The Cobweb. Adele Jergens was the widow of actor Glenn Langan, whom she married in 1949.

Trivia: Truly a single-note man, American actor Arthur Lake spent most of his adult life portraying only one screen role: Dagwood Bumstead. The son of circus acrobats and the brother of character actress Florence Lake (famed for her ongoing portrayal of Mrs. Edgar Kennedy in nearly 100 two-reel comedies), Lake began his professional career as one of the "Fox Kiddies" in a series of silent-film takeoffs of famous fairy tales, featuring casts comprised completely of children. Lake graduated to a succession of collegiate and office boy roles in feature films, gaining a degree of stardom in the late 1920s and early 1930s after appearing in the title role of Harold Teen (1928). The actor's high-pitched voice and Mama's boy features were amusing for a while, but audiences became bored with Lake by 1934, and the actor found himself shunted to supporting parts and bits. An amusing role as a flustered bellboy in Topper (1937) rejuvenated his career, but Lake's comeback wouldn't be complete until Columbia Pictures cast him as woebegone suburbanite Dagwood Bumstead in Blondie (1938), based on Chic Young's internationally popular comic strip. The strip's characterizations were altered to fit the personalities of Lake and his costar Penny Singleton; in the films, Dagwood was the dope and Blondie the brains of the family, precisely the opposite of the comic-strip situation. A few scattered "straight" performances aside, Lake was nothing other than Dagwood in films from 1938 through 1950; he not only starred in 28 "Blondie" pictures, but repeated the role on radio and starred in an unsuccessful 1954 TV series based on the property. Not at all the blithering idiot that he played on screen, Lake was a sagacious businessman in real life, his wise investments increasing the fortune he'd already accumulated by playing Dagwood -- and also bolstering the moneys inherited by his socialite wife, Patricia Van Cleve. Though he often remarked that it would be wonderful to play Dagwood forever, Lake parted company with the role in the mid-1950s; when another Blondie TV series appeared briefly in 1968, it starred Will Hutchins. Appearing publicly only rarely in the 1960s and 1970s (usually in summer theatres and revivals of 1920s musicals like No, No Nanette), Lake retired before his 70th birthday, a far more prosperous and secure man than his alter ego Dagwood Bumstead -- who's still being fired regularly by boss Mr. Dithers in the funny papers - ever would be.

Trivia: The daughter of a journalist and the niece of former U.S. Postmaster General James Farley, Penny Singleton spent a good portion of her childhood singing "illustrated" songs at Philadelphia movie theaters. After briefly attending Columbia University, Singleton -- billed under her given name, Dorothy McNulty -- made her Broadway debut as the energy-charged soubrette in the popular 1927 musical Good News. She repeated this vivacious performance in the 1930 film version, then settled into "other woman" and gold digger parts, the best of which was in 1936's After the Thin Man. Upon her marriage to dentist Lawrence Singleton, Singleton changed her professional name. When Shirley Deane was unable to play the title role in Columbia's 1938 filmization of Chic Young's comic strip Blondie, Singleton dyed her hair blonde to qualify for the part. She ended up starring in 28 Blondie B-pictures between 1928 and 1950, with Arthur Lake co-starring as hubby Dagwood Bumstead. During this period, she married for the second time to Blondie producer Robert Sparks. When Blondie folded, Singleton returned to the nightclub singing and dancing work that she'd been doing in the mid-'30s. As an officer in the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), Singleton lobbied for better and more equitable treatment of professional chorus dancers, a stance that earned her several powerful enemies in management (and the Mob). Inactive as a performer for several years, Singleton returned to acting in the early '60s, playing a supporting part in The Best Man (1964) and providing the voice of Jane Jetson on the prime-time animated TV series The Jetsons. Penny Singleton later revived her Jane Jetson characterization for several theatrical and made-for-TV animated features, and also appeared in a cameo role on the weekly Angela Lansbury series Murder She Wrote.

Trivia: A child model from age two, Larry Simms was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout when he appeared in a 1937 Saturday Evening Post advertisement. The three-year-old, curly haired Simms made his screen debut as the infant son of Jimmy Stewart and Rose Stradner in MGM's The Last Gangster. He was then hired by Columbia to play Baby Dumpling in the 1938 cinemadaptation of Chic Young's comic strip Blondie. Simms remained with the Blondie series until its cessation in 1950, billed onscreen as Baby Dumpling until his character name was formalized as Alexander Bumstead. During this period, he also made a few "outside" appearances in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Madame Bovary (1949). Though his career as a child star was a pleasant experience (and, at 750 dollars per week, a lucrative one), Simms wasn't all that interested in acting; the technical end of moviemaking was more fascinating to him. In 1950, he quit show business to join the Navy, then studied aeronautical engineering at California Polytech. Larry Simms was then hired as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he remained until his retirement.

Trivia: From vaudeville and stock companies, actor Jerome Cowan graduated to Broadway in the now-forgotten farce We've Gotta Have Money. While starring in the 1935 Broadway hit Boy Meets Girl, Cowan was spotted by movie producer Sam Goldwyn, who cast Cowan as a sensitive Irish rebel in 1936's Beloved Enemy. Most of Cowan's subsequent films found him playing glib lawyers, shifty business executives and jilted suitors. A longtime resident at Warner Bros., the pencil-mustached Cowan appeared in several substantial character parts from 1940 through 1949, notably the doomed private eye Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. Warners gave Cowan the opportunity to be a romantic leading man in two "B" films, Crime By Night (42) and Find the Blackmailer (43). As the years rolled on, Cowan's air of slightly unscrupulous urbanity gave way to respectability, and in this vein he was ideally suited for the role of Dagwood Bumstead's new boss Mr. Radcliffe in several installments of Columbia's Blondie series; he also scored in such flustered roles as the hapless district attorney in Miracle on 34th Street. Cowan briefly left Hollywood in 1950 to pursue more worthwhile roles on stage and TV; he starred in the Broadway play My Three Angels and was top-billed on the 1951 TV series Not for Publication. In his fifties and sixties, Cowan continued essaying roles calling for easily deflated dignity (e.g. The Three Stooges' Have Rocket Will Travel [59] and Jerry Lewis' Visit to a Small Planet [60]) and made regular supporting appearances on several TV series, among them Valiant Lady, The Tab Hunter Show, Many Happy Returns and Tycoon.

Trivia: The son of a general and a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Ohioan Grant Mitchell was a lawyer (he certainly looked the part) for several years before going into acting. He made his stage bow at the age of 27, and spent the next quarter of a century as a leading player, often billed above the title of the play. Mitchell was a special favorite of showman George M. Cohan, who wrote a vehicle specifically tailored to Mitchell's talents, The Baby Cyclone, in 1927. Though he reportedly appeared in a 1923 film, Mitchell's movie career officially began in 1932, first in bits (the deathhouse priest in If I Had a Million), then in sizeable supporting roles at Warner Bros. Often cast as the father of the heroine, Mitchell socked across his standard dyspeptic-papa lines with a delivery somewhat reminiscent of James Cagney (leading one to wonder if the much-younger Cagney didn't take a few pointers from Mitchell during his own formative years). While he sparkled in a variety of secondary roles as businessmen, bank clerks and school principals, Mitchell was occasionally honored with a B-picture lead, as in 1939's Father is a Prince. With years of theatrical experience behind him, Mitchell was shown to best advantage in Warners' many adaptations of stage plays, notably A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). Freelancing in the mid '40s, Grant Mitchell occasionally showed up in unbilled one-scene cameos (Leave Her to Heaven [1945]) and in reprises of his small-town bigwig characterizations in such B-films as Blondie's Anniversary (1947) and Who Killed Doc Robbin? (1948).

Trivia: American actor William Frawley had hopes of becoming a newspaperman but was sidetracked by a series of meat-and-potatoes jobs. At 21, he found himself in the chorus of a musical comedy in Chicago; his mother forced him to quit, but Frawley had already gotten greasepaint in his veins. Forming a vaudeville act with his brother Paul, Frawley hit the show-business trail; several partners later (including his wife Louise), Frawley was a headliner and in later years laid claim to having introduced the beer-hall chestnut "Melancholy Baby." Entering films in the early 1930s (he'd made a few desultory silent-movie appearances), Frawley became typecast as irascible, pugnacious Irishmen, not much of a stretch from his off-camera personality. Though he worked steadily into the late 1940s, Frawley's drinking got the better of him, and by 1951 most producers found him virtually unemployable. Not so Desi Arnaz, who cast Frawley as neighbor Fred Mertz on the I Love Lucy TV series when Gale Gordon proved unavailable. Frawley promised to stay away from the booze during filming, and in turn Arnaz promised to give Frawley time off whenever the New York Yankees were in the World Series (a rabid baseball fan, Frawley not only appeared in a half dozen baseball films, but also was one of the investors of the minor-league Hollywood Stars ball team). Frawley played Fred Mertz until the last I Love Lucy episode was filmed in 1960, then moved on to a five-year assignment as Bub, chief cook and bottle-washer to son-in-law Fred MacMurray's all male household on My Three Sons.

Trivia: Muscular American general-purpose actor Edmund MacDonald entered films in 1933. MacDonald was briefly a 20th Century-Fox contractee in the early 1940s; his best role under the Fox banner was the antagonistic Sgt. Hippo in Laurel & Hardy's Great Guns (1941). At other studios, he was usually cast as plainclothes detectives or minor gangsters. Aficionados of "film noir" will remember Edmund MacDonald as Charles Haskell Jr., the foredoomed motorist who gives Tom Neal a lift in Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945).

Trivia: After attending Boston College, Fred F. Sears entered the regional-theatre talent pool as an actor, director and producer. Sears created the famed Little Theatre of Memphis and taught dramatic arts at Southwestern University before being hired by Columbia Pictures as a dialogue coach in 1947. He played supporting parts in several Columbia features before being promoted to director on the studio's Charles Starrett "B" western series. Sears remained at Columbia for the rest of his career, generally working with the ultra-economical Sam Katzman unit. His output consisted of westerns, crime dramas, low-budget musicals (Rock Around the Clock, Cha-Cha-Cha Boom!) and science-fiction flicks. Most observers consider Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) as Sears' finest effort, though credit for most of that film's success must go to special- effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. Fred F. Sears also directed several half-hour playlets for Columbia's TV subsidiary Screen Gems, sometimes lensing as many as three episodes of three different series simultaneously!

Trivia: It is quite probable that, in real life, Jack Rice was an all-around good friend and stout fellow. In films, however, the shifty-eyed, weak-chinned Rice was forever typecast as malingerers, wastrels, back-stabbers, and modern-day Uriah Heeps. He was particularly well cast as Edgar Kennedy's shiftless brother-in-law in a series of RKO two-reel comedies produced between 1934 and 1948. Rice also appeared as the snivelly Ollie in 11 entries of Columbia's Blondie series. Jack Rice remained active until 1963, five years before his death.

Trivia: American actor Frank Wilcox had intended to follow his father's footsteps in the medical profession, but financial and personal circumstances dictated a redirection of goals. He joined the Resident Theater in Kansas City in the late '20s, spending several seasons in leading man roles. In 1934, Wilcox visited his father in California, and there he became involved with further stage work, first with his own acting troupe and then with the Pasadena Playhouse. Shortly afterward, Wilcox was signed to a contract at Warner Bros., where he spent the next few years in a wide range of character parts, often cast as crooked bankers, shifty attorneys, and that old standy, the Fellow Who Doesn't Get the Girl. Historian Leslie Haliwell has suggested that Wilcox often played multiple roles in these Warners films, though existing records don't bear this out. Frank Wilcox was still working into the 1960s; his most popular latter-day role was as Mr. Brewster, the charming banker who woos and wins Cousin Pearl Bodine (Bea Benaderet) during the inaugural 1962-1963 season of TV's The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: The brother of country/western singer Roy Acuff, actor Eddie Acuff drifted to Hollywood in the early 1930s, where he almost immediately secured day-player work at Warner Bros. studios. From his 1934 debut in Here Comes the Navy onward, Acuff showed up in film after film as reporters, photographers, delivery men, sailors, shop clerks, and the occasional western comical sidekick. Acuff's most memorable acting stint occured after actor Irving Bacon left Columbia's Blondie series. From 1946 through 1949, Eddie Acuff made nine Blondie appearances as the hapless postman who was forever being knocked down by the eternally late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake).

Trivia: A tall, dark-haired, often elegant silent screen actor, Larry Steers had appeared with the famous Bush Temple Stock Company and opposite matinee idol Robert Edeson prior to making his film debut with Paramount in 1917. Extremely busy in the 1920s, Steers usually played professional men, doctors, lawyers, and politicians, typecasting that continued well into the sound era, albeit in much diminished circumstances. By the mid-'30s, the veteran actor had become a Hollywood dress extra.