Trivia: James Stewart was the movies' quintessential Everyman, a uniquely all-American performer who parlayed his easygoing persona into one of the most successful and enduring careers in film history. On paper, he was anything but the typical Hollywood star: Gawky and tentative, with a pronounced stammer and a folksy "aw-shucks" charm, he lacked the dashing sophistication and swashbuckling heroism endemic among the other major actors of the era. Yet it's precisely the absence of affectation which made Stewart so popular; while so many other great stars seemed remote and larger than life, he never lost touch with his humanity, projecting an uncommon sense of goodness and decency which made him immensely likable and endearing to successive generations of moviegoers.Born May 20, 1908, in Indiana, PA, Stewart began performing magic as a child. While studying civil engineering at Princeton University, he befriended Joshua Logan, who then headed a summer stock company, and appeared in several of his productions. After graduation, Stewart joined Logan's University Players, a troupe whose membership also included Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. He and Fonda traveled to New York City in 1932, where they began winning small roles in Broadway productions including Carrie Nation, Yellow Jack, and Page Miss Glory. On the recommendation of Hedda Hopper, MGM scheduled a screen test, and soon Stewart was signed to a long-term contract. He first appeared onscreen in a bit role in the 1935 Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man, followed by another small performance the next year in Rose Marie.Stewart's first prominent role came courtesy of Sullavan, who requested he play her husband in the 1936 melodrama Next Time We Love. Speed, one of six other films he made that same year, was his first lead role. His next major performance cast him as Eleanor Powell's paramour in the musical Born to Dance, after which he accepted a supporting turn in After the Thin Man. For 1938's classic You Can't Take It With You, Stewart teamed for the first time with Frank Capra, the director who guided him during many of his most memorable performances. They reunited a year later for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart's breakthrough picture; a hugely popular modern morality play set against the backdrop of the Washington political system, it cemented the all-American persona which made him so adored by fans, earning a New York Film Critics' Best Actor award as well as his first Oscar nomination.Stewart then embarked on a string of commercial and critical successes which elevated him to the status of superstar; the first was the idiosyncratic 1939 Western Destry Rides Again, followed by the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner. After The Mortal Storm, he starred opposite Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in George Cukor's sublime The Philadelphia Story, a performance which earned him the Best Actor Oscar. However, Stewart soon entered duty in World War II, serving as a bomber pilot and flying 20 missions over Germany. He was highly decorated for his courage, and did not fully retire from the service until 1968, by which time he was an Air Force Brigadier General, the highest-ranking entertainer in the U.S. military. Stewart's combat experiences left him a changed man; where during the prewar era he often played shy, tentative characters, he returned to films with a new intensity. While remaining as genial and likable as ever, he began to explore new, more complex facets of his acting abilities, accepting roles in darker and more thought-provoking films. The first was Capra's 1946 perennial It's a Wonderful Life, which cast Stewart as a suicidal banker who learns the true value of life. Through years of TV reruns, the film became a staple of Christmastime viewing, and remains arguably Stewart's best-known and most-beloved performance. However, it was not a hit upon its original theatrical release, nor was the follow-up Magic Town -- audiences clearly wanted the escapist fare of Hollywood's prewar era, not the more pensive material so many other actors and filmmakers as well as Stewart wanted to explore in the wake of battle. The 1948 thriller Call Northside 777 was a concession to audience demands, and fans responded by making the film a considerable hit. Regardless, Stewart next teamed for the first time with Alfred Hitchcock in Rope, accepting a supporting role in a tale based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case. His next few pictures failed to generate much notice, but in 1950, Stewart starred in a pair of Westerns, Anthony Mann's Winchester 73 and Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow. Both were hugely successful, and after completing an Oscar-nominated turn as a drunk in the comedy Harvey and appearing in Cecil B. De Mille's Academy Award-winning The Greatest Show on Earth, he made another Western, 1952's Bend of the River, the first in a decade of many similar genre pieces.Stewart spent the 1950s primarily in the employ of Universal, cutting one of the first percentage-basis contracts in Hollywood -- a major breakthrough soon to be followed by virtually every other motion-picture star. He often worked with director Mann, who guided him to hits including The Naked Spur, Thunder Bay, The Man From Laramie, and The Far Country. For Hitchcock, Stewart starred in 1954's masterful Rear Window, appearing against type as a crippled photographer obsessively peeking in on the lives of his neighbors. More than perhaps any other director, Hitchcock challenged the very assumptions of the Stewart persona by casting him in roles which questioned his character's morality, even his sanity. They reunited twice more, in 1956's The Man Who Knew Too Much and 1958's brilliant Vertigo, and together both director and star rose to the occasion by delivering some of the best work of their respective careers. Apart from Mann and Hitchcock, Stewart also worked with the likes of Billy Wilder (1957's Charles Lindbergh biopic The Spirit of St. Louis) and Otto Preminger (1959's provocative courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, which earned him yet another Best Actor bid). Under John Ford, Stewart starred in 1961's Two Rode Together and the following year's excellent The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 1962 comedy Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation was also a hit, and Stewart spent the remainder of the decade alternating between Westerns and family comedies. By the early '70s, he announced his semi-retirement from movies, but still occasionally resurfaced in pictures like the 1976 John Wayne vehicle The Shootist and 1978's The Big Sleep. By the 1980s, Stewart's acting had become even more limited, and he spent much of his final years writing poetry; he died July 2, 1997.

Trivia: The son of a barber, Richard Conte held down jobs ranging from truck driver, to Wall Street clerk before finding his place as an actor. In 1935, Conte became a waiter/entertainer in a Connecticut resort, which led to stage work when he was spotted by Group Theatre's Elia Kazan and John Garfield. Through Kazan's help, Conte earned a scholarship to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His first Broadway appearance was in the fast-flop Moon Over Mulberry Street. In 1939, still billed as Nicholas Conte, the actor made his first film, 20th Century-Fox's Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). It was Fox which would build up the intense, brooding Conte as the "New John Garfield" upon signing him to a contract in 1943. His best parts during his Fox years included the wrongly imprisoned man who is exonerated by crusading reporter James Stewart in Call Northside 777 (1947), and the lead role as a wildcat trucker in Thieves' Highway (1949). Among Conte's many TV assignments was a co-starring stint with Dan Dailey, Jack Hawkins and Vittorio De Sica on the 1959 syndicated series The Four Just Men. Appearing primarily in European films in his last years, Conte directed the Yugoslavian-filmed Operation Cross Eagles. Richard Conte's most important Hollywood role in the 1970s was as rival Mafia Don Barzini in the Oscar-winning The Godfather (1972).

Trivia: American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood. Unable to find film work there, he returned to New York and acted in radio dramas while going to night school at CCNY to learn accounting. Returning to California in 1931, he made his stage debut with the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York in 1935, he joined the celebrated Group Theater and appeared in several plays with them, including Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. He began his film career in 1937, going on to star and play supporting roles in dozens of films straight through to the end of his life. Cobb was most frequently cast as menacing villains, but sometimes appeared as a brooding business executive or community leader. His greatest triumph on stage came in the 1949 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which he played the lead role, Willy Loman (he repeated his performance in a 1966 TV version). Between 1962-66, he also appeared on TV in the role of Judge Garth in the long-running series The Virginian. He was twice nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" Oscars for his work in On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958).

Trivia: "A beauty with brains" was the demeaning tag once attached to such actresses as Claudette Colbert, Madeline Carroll and Irene Dunne (it was assumed by some thick-eared publicists that individual qualities of beauty and brains normally cancelled each other out). In 1942, Helen Walker, fresh from her Broadway triumph in a play called Jason, was added to the intelligent-beauty categorization thanks to her impressive film debut in Lucky Jordan. Walker continued impressing fans and critics alike with her work in The Man in Half Moon Street (1944) and Murder He Says (1945). Just as her career was gaining momentum, Helen was seriously injured in a 1946 auto accident. She made a courageous comeback in roles calling for sophisticated shrewery -- 1947's Nightmare Alley was probably her best post-accident film -- but neither she nor her career ever completely recovered. In 1955, she retired from the screen; five years later, a group of her actress friends staged a benefit for her when her house burned to the ground. Helen Walker died of cancer at the age of 47.

Trivia: American actress Betty Garde, is best known for playing the original Aunt Eller in the Broadway production of Oklahoma! (1943). During the 1930s, she appeared often on Broadway and frequently acted in radio productions such as "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch." Beginning in 1930, she appeared in a few films through the early 1960s and also worked on television.

Trivia: An imposing presence in films of the late '40s, as well as early television shows such as The Aldrich Family (1949), New York stage actor Howard I. Smith actually made his screen debut as far back as 1918, in Young America. Relocating to Hollywood in 1946, Smith usually played overbearing politicos or other figures of authority, but is perhaps best remembered today as Uncle Charley in the 1951 screen version Death of a Salesman.

Trivia: Born and educated in Utah, tall, piercing-eyed actor Moroni Olsen learned how to entertain an audience as a Chautaqua tent-show performer. In the 1920s, he organized the Moroni Olsen Players, one of the most prestigious touring stock companies in the business. After several successful seasons on Broadway, Olsen came to films in the role of Porthos in the 1935 version of The Three Musketeers. Though many of his subsequent roles were not on this plateau, Olsen nearly always transcended his material: In the otherwise middling Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Mummy's Boys (1936), for example, Olsen all but ignites the screen with his terrifying portrayal of a lunatic. Thanks to his aristocratic bearing and classically trained voice, Olsen was often called upon to play famous historical personages: he was Buffalo Bill in Annie Oakley (1935), Robert E. Lee in Santa Fe Trail (1940), and Sam Houston in Lone Star (1952). Throughout his Hollywood career, Moroni Olsen was active as a director and performer with the Pasadena Playhouse, and was the guiding creative force behind Hollywood's annual Pilgrimage Play.

Trivia: A versatile, commanding, leathery character actor, he learned to raise and ride broncos on his family's ranch during his youth. He attended college for two years, became a seaman, then began his performing career as a radio announcer; he became nationally known as an announcer on the "March of Time" broadcasts. Onscreen from the late '40s, he often portrayed law officers; he was also convincing as a villain. He was well-known for his TV work; he starred in the series Naked City and Wagon Train. He was married to actress Jeanette Nolan, with whom he appeared in Saddle Tramp (1950) and Two Rode Together (1961); they also acted together on radio, and in the late '60s they joined the cast of the TV series The Virginian, portraying a married couple. Their son was actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the popular radio commentator of the same name, American stage actor Paul Harvey made his first film in 1917. Harvey appeared in a variety of character roles, ranging from Sheiks (Kid Millions [34]) to Gangsters (Alibi Ike [35]) before settling into his particular niche as one of Hollywood's favorite blowhard executives. Looking for all the world like one of those old comic-strip bosses who literally blew their tops (toupee and all), Harvey was a pompous target ripe for puncturing by such irreverent comics as Groucho Marx (in A Night in Casablanca [46]) and such down-to-earth types as Doris Day (April in Paris [54]). Paul Harvey's final film role was a typically imperious one in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (55); Harvey died of thrombosis shortly after finishing this assignment.

Trivia: American actor/director George Tyne began his performing career under his own name, Martin "Buddy" Yarus, in films as varied as Errol Flynn's Objective Burma (1945) and Laurel and Hardy's Dancing Masters (1943). Under the new soubriquet George Tyne, the actor had sizable roles in a multitude of films from 1946 to the late '70s. One of his better parts during this period was as Pfc. Harris in the splashy John Wayne war epic Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); he could also be seen in Thieves' Highway (1949), No Way Out (1950), Marlowe (1969) and I Will, I Will...For Now (1976). Turning increasingly to TV directing in the '60s, George Tyne worked extensively behind the camera on such situation comedies as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-70), Love American Style (1969-72) and Sanford and Son (1972-77).

Trivia: With his learned countenance and a correct Germanic manner that could be avuncular or threatening, Otto Waldis was one of the more familiar European character actors in Hollywood and on television in the years after World War II. Born Otto Brunn in Vienna, Austria, in 1901, he turned to acting in his twenties and made his screen debut in an uncredited role in Fritz Lang's M in 1931. He worked in one more movie that year -- Kinder Vor Gericht -- and then was unseen in films until after the war. Waldis' career resumed in 1947 in Hollywood under the aegis of his fellow European expatriate, director Max Ophüls, in the latter's The Exile. He was fully employed over the next decade, working constantly in television and movies, his performances covering a wide swath of entertainment. In 1948 alone, before he'd even made the jump to television, Waldis worked in popular, big studio productions like Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777, Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express, and independent films such as Ophüls' Letter From an Unknown Woman. He went on to play character roles in lighter fare, including the comedies I Was a Male War Bride and Love Happy (both 1949). With his wizened, bespectacled presence and correct Austrian bearing, Waldis was suited to roles ranging from valets to scientists; in The Whip Hand (1951), he played an unrepentant Nazi germ-warfare expert, while in Unknown World (1951) and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), he played more benign scientists. But in 5 Fingers (1952), he was a Pullman porter, and in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Whistling Bird," he was part of a criminal conspiracy. He would occasionally play much more offbeat parts, such as Patch-Eye in Prince Valiant (1954). He closed out the 1950s portraying a police officer in Edward Dmytryk's disastrous remake of The Blue Angel (1959). Waldis' activity slackened considerably in the '60s, a period in which he made his first appearances in German films since the '30s. He was back in Hollywood during the '70s and had just been signed to appear in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein at the time of his death from a heart attack in early 1974.

Trivia: Actor E. G. Marshall started out on radio in his native Minnesota, then headed for New York and Broadway. After several years' solid stage service, Marshall began accepting small roles in such films as 13 Rue Madeline (1945) and Call Northside 777 (1947). A mainstay of television's so-called Golden Age, Marshall excelled in incisive, authoritative roles. Long before winning two Emmy awards for his portrayal of lawyer Lawrence Preston on TV's The Defenders (1961-65), Marshall was associated with fictional jurisprudence as the military prosecutor in The Caine Mutiny (1954) and as Juror #4 in Twelve Angry Men (1957). In contrast to his businesslike demeanor, Marshall is one of Hollywood's most notorious pranksters; he was never more impish than when he ad-libbed profanities and nonsequiturs while his lips were hidden by a surgical mask in the 1969-73 TV series The Bold Ones. The best of E.G. Marshall's work of the 1970s and 1980s includes the role of the straying husband in Woody Allen's Interiors (1977), the U.S. President in Superman II (1978) and General Eisenhower in the 1985 TV miniseries War and Remembrance. Continuing to flourish into the 1990s, Marshall was seen in the 1993 TV adaptation of Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, and was cast as Arthur Thurmond on the 1994 medical series Chicago Hope. Radio fans will remember E.G. Marshall as the unctuous host ("Pleasant dreeeaaammms") of the 1970s anthology The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre.

Trivia: Polish-born actor John Bleifer was often seen as skulking, sinister European types in the prewar films of 20th Century Fox. Bleifer had no trouble impersonating an Ivan in Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937), a Ludwig in Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo (1938), and a Pedro in The Mark of Zorro (1940), utilizing essentially the same accent in all three roles. During the war, Bleifer alternated between fascist villains and hapless refugees. Active until the early '80s, John Bleifer essayed such fleeting roles as Ben-Dan in QB VII (1974) and a rabbi in The Frisco Kid (1979).

Trivia: An alumnus of both Washington State University and Pomona College, Addison Richards began acting on an amateur basis in California's Pilgrimage Play, then became associate director of the Pasadena Playhouse. In films from 1933, Richards was one of those dependable, distinguished types, a character player of the Samuel S. Hinds/Charles Trowbridge/John Litel school. Like those other gentlemen, Richards was perfectly capable of alternating between respectable authority figures and dark-purposed villains. He was busiest at such major studios as MGM, Warners, and Fox, though he was willing to show up at Monogram and PRC if the part was worth playing. During the TV era, Addison Richards was a regular on four series: He was narrator/star of 1953's Pentagon USA, wealthy Westerner Martin Kingsley on 1958's Cimarron City, Doc Gamble in the 1959 video version of radio's Fibber McGee and Molly, and elderly attorney John Abbott on the short-lived 1963 soap opera Ben Jerrod.

Trivia: Supporting actor Richard Rober came to films in 1947 most often playing character bits, frequently unbilled, at 20th Century-Fox. His one-and-only film starring role was as Sheriff Ben Kellogg in United Artists' The Well (1950), a low-budget but well-intentioned plea for racial tolerance. Richard Rober was 46 years old when he was killed in an automobile accident in 1952; he made his last screen appearance five years later, when producer Howard Hughes finally released his 1950 production Jet Pilot.

Trivia: In the '30s, tall, sandy-haired, deep-voiced American actor Eddie Dunn was frequently cast as a laconic police officer in the 2-reelers of comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. The actor's feature-film roles consisted mainly of small-town bullies, prison guards, bartenders, military policemen and private detectives. Eddie Dunn was last seen in a fleeting role as a sheriff in the 1950 MGM musical Summer Stock.

Trivia: The son of actors, Percy Helton began his own career at age two in a Tony Pastor revue in which his parents were performing. The undersized Helton was a valuable juvenile player for producer David Belasco, making his film debut in a 1915 Belasco production, The Fairy and the Waif. Helton matured into adult roles under the stern guidance of George M. Cohan. After serving in the Army during World War I, Helton established himself on Broadway, appearing in such productions as Young America, One Sunday Afternoon and The Fabulous Invalid. He made his talkie debut in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, playing the inebriated Macy's Santa Claus whom Edmund Gwenn replaces. Perhaps the quintessential "who is that?" actor, Helton popped up, often uncredited, in over one hundred succinct screen characterizations. Forever hunched over and eternally short of breath, he played many an obnoxious clerk, nosey mailman, irascible bartender, officious train conductor and tremulous stool pigeon. His credits include Fancy Pants (1950), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Rally Round the Flag Boys (1959), The Music Man (1962) and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965), as well as two appearances as sweetshop proprietor Mike Clancy in the Bowery Boys series. Thanks to his trademarked squeaky voice, and because he showed up in so many "cult" films (Wicked Woman, Kiss Me Deadly, Sons of Katie Elder), Helton became something of a high-camp icon in his last years. In this vein, Percy Helton was cast as the "Heraldic Messenger" in the bizarre Monkees vehicle Head (he showed up at the Monkees' doorstep with a beautiful blonde manacled to his wrist!), the treacherous Sweetieface in the satirical western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and the bedraggled bank clerk Cratchit on the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Hatchet-faced character actor Charles Lane has been one of the most instantly recognizable non-stars in Hollywood for more than half a century. Lane has been a familiar figure in movies (and, subsequently, on television) for 60 years, portraying crotchety, usually miserly, bad-tempered bankers and bureaucrats. Lane was born Charles Levison in San Francisco in 1899 (some sources give his year of birth as 1905). He learned the ropes of acting at the Pasadena Playhouse during the middle/late '20s, appearing in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Noel Coward before going to Hollywood in 1930, just as sound was fully taking hold. He was a good choice for character roles, usually playing annoying types with his high-pitched voice and fidgety persona, encompassing everything from skinflint accountants to sly, fast-talking confidence men -- think of an abrasive version of Bud Abbott. His major early roles included the stage manager Max Jacobs in Twentieth Century and the tax assessor in You Can't Take It With You. One of the busier character men in Hollywood, Lane was a particular favorite of Frank Capra's, and he appeared in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, It's a Wonderful Life -- with a particularly important supporting part in the latter -- and State of the Union. He played in every kind of movie from screwball comedy like Ball of Fire to primordial film noir, such as I Wake Up Screaming. As Lane grew older, he tended toward more outrageously miserly parts, in movies and then on television, where he turned up Burns & Allen, I Love Lucy, and Dear Phoebe, among other series. Having successfully played a tight-fisted business manager hired by Ricky Ricardo to keep Lucy's spending in line in one episode of I Love Lucy (and, later, the U.S. border guard who nearly arrests the whole Ricardo clan and actor Charles Boyer at the Mexican border in an episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), Lane was a natural choice to play Lucille Ball's nemesis on The Lucy Show. Her first choice for the money-grubbing banker would have been Gale Gordon, but as he was already contractually committed to the series Dennis the Menace, she hired Lane to play Mr. Barnsdahl, the tight-fisted administrator of her late-husband's estate during the first season of the show. Lane left the series after Gordon became available to play the part of Mr. Mooney, but in short order he moved right into the part that came very close to making him a star. The CBS country comedy series Petticoat Junction needed a semi-regular villain and Lane just fit the bill as Homer Bedloe, the greedy, bad-tempered railroad executive whose career goal was to shut down the Cannonball railroad that served the town of Hooterville. He became so well-known in the role, which he only played once or twice a season, that at one point Lane found himself in demand for personal appearance tours. In later years, he also turned up in roles on The Beverly Hillbillies, playing Jane Hathaway's unscrupulous landlord, and did an excruciatingly funny appearance on The Odd Couple in the mid-'70s, playing a manic, greedy patron at the apartment sale being run by Felix and Oscar. Lane also did his share of straight dramatic roles, portraying such parts as Tony Randall's nastily officious IRS boss in the comedy The Mating Game (1959), the crusty River City town constable in The Music Man (1962) (which put Lane into the middle of a huge musical production number), the wryly cynical, impatient judge in the James Garner comedy film The Wheeler-Dealers (1963), and portraying Admiral William Standley in The Winds of War (1983), based on Herman Wouk's novel. He was still working right up until the late '80s, and David Letterman booked the actor to appear on his NBC late-night show during the middle of that decade, though his appearance on the program was somewhat disappointing and sad; the actor, who was instantly recognized by the studio audience, was then in his early nineties and had apparently not done live television in many years (if ever), and apparently hadn't been adequately prepped. He seemed confused and unable to say much about his work, which was understandable -- the nature of his character parts involved hundreds of roles that were usually each completed in a matter or two or three days shooting, across almost 60 years. Lane died at 102, in July 2007 - about 20 years after his last major film appearance.

Trivia: Actor William A. Post Jr. appeared in many films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. He has also worked on Broadway and frequently appeared on daytime and nighttime television.

Trivia: A stage actor, Melford began appearing in films in 1909 and was directing by the early teens. Notable among his silent films are the Rudolph Valentino vehicles The Sheik and Moran of the Lady Letty; the standout among his talkies is the Spanish-language version of Dracula, which he shot on the sets of Tod Browning's 1931 film. In the late '30s Melford left directing and returned to acting, and appeared in several major films of the '40s, including the comedy My Little Chickadee with W.C. Fields and Mae West; Preston Sturges' classic farces The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero; and Elia Kazan's debut feature A Tree Grows in Brookly.

Trivia: American actor Charles Miller's screen credits are often lumped together with those of silent film director Charles C. Miller, but the actor Miller didn't start appearing in films until 1939. Generally cast in functionary roles -- jurors, cops, and the like -- he was allotted more screen time than usual as Senator Bromfield in Wilson and as the Burgomeister of Visaria in House of Frankenstein (both 1944). Retired since 1948, Miller was shot to death in 1955.

Trivia: Actor Dick Ryan made his first movie appearance in Monogram's Smark Alecks (1942), and his last in Paramount's Summer and Smoke (1961), an artistic stretch if ever there was one. Ryan usually plays doctors, judges, and prison wardens, with a few beat cops and bartenders thrown in. Accordingly, most of his screen characters were identified by their professions rather than by proper names. One of Dick Ryan's larger assignments was in the 1957 Rowan and Martin vehicle Once Upon a Horse, which nostalgically featured several Hollywood old-timers in choice roles.

Trivia: Once Canadian-born actor Jonathan Hale became well known for his portrayal of well-to-do businessmen, he was fond of telling the story of how he'd almost been a man of wealth in real life--except for an improvident financial decision by his father. A minor diplomat before he turned to acting, Hale began appearing in minor film roles in 1934, showing up fleetingly in such well-remembered films as the Karloff/Lugosi film The Raven (1935), the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935) and the first version of A Star is Born (1937). In 1938, Hale was cast as construction executive J. C. Dithers in Blondie, the first of 28 "B"-pictures based on Chic Young's popular comic strip. Though taller and more distinguished-looking than the gnomelike Dithers of the comics, Hale became instantly synonymous with the role, continuing to portray the character until 1946's Blondie's Lucky Day (his voice was heard in the final film of the series, Beware of Blondie, though that film's on-camera Dithers was Edward Earle). During this same period, Hale also appeared regularly as Irish-brogued Inspector Fernack in RKO's "The Saint" series. After 1946, Hale alternated between supporting roles and bits, frequently unbilled (e.g. Angel on My Shoulder, Call Northside 777 and Son of Paleface); he had a pivotal role as Robert Walker's hated father in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), though the part was confined to a smidgen of dialogue and a single long-shot. Hale worked prolifically in television in the '50s, with substantial guest roles in such series as Disneyland and The Adventures of Superman. In 1966, after a long illness, Jonathan Hale committed suicide at the age of 75, just months before the TV release of the Blondie films that had won him prominence in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: Fred Steele went from being World Middleweight Boxing champion in 1937 to having a movie career that put him into some of Hollywood's most inventive comedies for a decade. In a ring career lasting more than 15 years, Steele only lost two fights before becoming middleweight champion in 1936. Two years later, he relinquished the title and he had his last professional fight three years later. In that same year, 1941, he made his screen debut portraying himself in a picture called The Pittsburgh Kid. He did some small, uncredited roles in 1942, and then writer/director Preston Sturges saw the potential in Steele's muscular physique and strong, angular features and gave him serious acting parts in Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Those films elevated Steele to the front ranks of working character men, and he next turned up in William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe, and from there to the comedy Duffy's Tavern, adapted from the hit radio series, and Roy William Neill's film noir masterpiece Black Angel (1946). Steele closed out his acting career in 1948 with work in a quartet of notable films: Byron Haskin's violent gangster drama I Walk Alone, Henry Hathaway's suspense thriller Call Northside 777, Lewis Seiler's psychological chiller Whiplash, and Billy Wilder's comedy A Foreign Affair.

Trivia: General-purpose actor Larry Blake made his screen debut playing a young Adolf Hitler in James Whale's troubled The Road Back (1937), only to see his scenes end up on the cutting room floor. A difficult actor to pigeonhole, Blake went on to play everything from cops to robbers in a long career that lasted through the late '70s and included such television shows as The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Superman, Yancy Derringer, Perry Mason, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, Ironside, Little House on the Prairie, and Kojak. His son is Michael F. Blake, a well-known makeup artist and the biographer of silent screen star Lon Chaney.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1937.

Trivia: A slightly built, often mustachioed, supporting actor who usually played professional men (dentists, fingerprint experts, druggists, bookkeepers, etc.), Perry Ivins had been in the original 1924 production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. He entered films as a dialogue director in 1929 (The Love Parade [1929], The Benson Murder Case [1930]) before embarking on a long career as a bit part player. Among Ivins' more notable roles were the copy editor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the assistant home secretary in Charlie Chan in London, and the mysterious but ultimately benign Crenshaw in the serial Devil Dogs of the Air (1937). Ivins' acting career lasted well into the television era and included guest roles on such programs as Gunsmoke and Perry Mason.

Trivia: A rotund, balding supporting actor, Henry Kulky began his show business career wrestling professionally under the alarming name of "Bomber Kulkovich." Fellow wrestler-turned-screen actor Mike Mazurki arranged for Kulky to make his acting debut in Call Northside 777 (1947), and the die was cast. Because of his rather off-putting appearance, Kulky became typecast as thugs, gangsters, and bartenders, who were at times quite lovable characters. He even showed up in a Western or two, including a 1949 Durango Kid entry. Like many supporting players of his generation, Kulky would enjoy his greatest popularity on television, including a five-year stint on Life of Riley and as Chief Curly Jones on The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The latter was his final role; he died of a heart attack while studying a script during the show's second season.

Trivia: Cyrus W. Kendall was eight years old when he made his acting debut at the fabled Pasadena Playhouse. As an adult, the portly Kendall became a charter member of the Playhouse's Eighteen Actors Inc., acting in and/or directing over 100 theatrical productions. In films from 1936, he was usually typecast as an abrasive, cigar-chomping detective, gangster or machine politician. He showed up in roles both large and small in feature films, and was prominently cast in several of MGM's Crime Does Not Pay short subjects. Typical Kendall assignments of the 1940s included Jumbo Madigan in Alias Boston Blackie (1941) and "Honest" John Travers in Outlaw Trail (1944). Remaining active into the early years of live television, Cyrus W. Kendall essayed several guest spots on the 1949 quiz show/anthology Armchair Detective, and co-starred with Robert Bice, Spencer Chan and Herb Ellis on the Hollywood-based ABC weekly Mysteries of Chinatown (1949-50).

Trivia: Actress Wanda Perry was a child model before making her 1934 film debut in Murder of the Vanities. Her film career lasted until the late '40s.

Trivia: Bald, moon-faced character actor George Cisar kept busy in a 22-year Hollywood career with roles in well over 100 film and television productions, starting in 1948 with an uncredited bit as a policeman in Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777. Perhaps it was his rough-hewn yet genial features, coupled with an unaffected working-class accent and demeanor, but he was frequently put into police uniforms; and, in fact, many baby boomers may instantly recognize Cisar's face, if not his name, for his recurring role as the long-suffering Sgt. Mooney on the series Dennis the Menace, a part he portrayed in over two dozen episodes between 1960 and 1963. He worked in every genre from romantic comedies to Westerns, horror, and science fiction. In 1956 alone, Cisar was a barfly in Fred F. Sears' Teenage Crime Wave; a bartender in Sears' The Werewolf; and the somewhat disingenuous father of a vengeful teenager, who tries to sponsor and then derail a controversial rock & roll show, in Sears' Don't Knock the Rock. Cisar was obviously reliable, as director Sears and producer Sam Katzman -- who made those three movies -- were known for efficient filmmaking on a notoriously low budget.Cisar worked a lot for them at Columbia Pictures (which also produced Dennis the Menace), but he also did a lot of work at Ziv TV, on series such as Highway Patrol and Bat Masterson, in addition to regular appearance in Dragnet, where Jack Webb apparently liked keeping him busy and employed. Cisar could be funny or sinister, and some of his appearances were limited to a single line or two of dialogue, as in The Giant Claw (1957), where he provided a moment of comic relief (indeed, in that movie, his scene was one of the rare intentionally amusing moments). He also turned up in tiny roles in high-profile pictures such as Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Some Came Running (1958). Typically, Cisar would go from a co-starring part in a low-budget exploitation picture, such as Bernard Kowalski's Attack of the Giant Leeches, to a bit in, say, Don Siegel's Edge of Eternity, and then right on to an episode of The Untouchables (all 1959). Cisar retired at the start of the 1970s and passed away in 1979.

Trivia: Arthur Peterson played character and supporting roles on stage, television, and feature films. On television, fans of the series Soap (1977-1981), a funny spoof of soap operas, may remember Peterson for playing the Major. North Dakota born and raised, Peterson first obtained a degree in theater from the University of Minnesota before becoming a professional actor with the first Federal Theater Project. Peterson made his media debut in 1936 with a regular role on the radio serial The Guiding Light. During WWII, Peterson fought within General Patton's third regimen. Upon his discharge, Peterson appeared in the ABC network's first situation comedy, That's O'Toole. Peterson's stage work included appearances in such plays as Inherit the Wind. His film career has been sporadic, including such titles as Born Wild (1968) and the television movie Rollercoaster (1977). Peterson spent 1981 to 1991 touring the country with his wife in a Pasadena Playhouse production of The Gin Game (a play made famous on Broadway by Jessica Tandy and her husband Hume Cronyn). When the play's long run ended, Peterson retired from acting. He passed away on October 31, 1996, of Alzheimer's disease in the Amberwood Convalescent Hospital in Los Angeles at age 83.

Trivia: Canadian-born general-purpose actor George Pembroke is perhaps best remembered as Dr. Saunders, the leader of the fifth columnists in Bela Lugosi's Black Dragons (1942) and as the police inspector posing as an art connoisseur in the semi-classic Bluebeard (1944). In Hollywood from 1937, Pembroke made serials somewhat of a specialty, appearing in Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Perils of Nyoka (1942), Captain Midnight (1942), and Daredevils of the West (1943). He later became a frequent guest star on television's The Lone Ranger and Gene Autry.

Trivia: Irish actor J. M. Kerrigan was a stalwart of Dublin's Abbey Players, though from time to time he'd make the crossing to America to appear in such films as Little Old New York (1923) and Song O' My Heart (1930) (His film debut was 1916's Food of Love). Kerrigan settled in Hollywood permanently in 1935 when he was brought from Ireland with several other Abbey performers to appear in John Ford's The Informer. Kerrigan was given a generous amount of screen time as the barfly who befriends the suddenly wealthy Victor McLaglen, then drops his "pal" like a hot potato when the money runs out. Not all of Kerrigan's subsequent Hollywood performances were this meaty, and in fact the actor did a lot of day-player work, sometimes showing up for only one or two scenes. It was in one of these minor roles that J. M. Kerrigan shone in Gone with the Wind (1939), playing Johnny Gallegher, the seemingly jovial mill owner who whips his convict labor into "cooperation."

Trivia: Raspy-voiced, distinguished-looking actor Samuel S. Hinds was born into a wealthy Brooklyn family. Well-educated at such institutions as Philips Academy and Harvard, Hinds became a New York lawyer. He moved to California in the 1920s, where he developed an interest in theatre and became one of the founders of the Pasadena Playhouse. A full-time actor by the early 1930s, Hinds entered films in 1932. Of his nearly 150 screen appearances, several stand out, notably his portrayal of Bela Lugosi's torture victim in The Raven (1935), the dying John Vincey in She (1935), the crooked political boss in Destry Rides Again (1939) and the doctor father of Lew Ayres in MGM's Dr. Kildare series. He frequently co-starred in the films of James Stewart, playing Stewart's eccentric future father-in-law in You Can't Take It With You (1938) and the actor's banker dad in the holiday perennial It's a Wonderful Life (1946). One of Samuel S. Hinds' final film roles was an uncredited supporting part in the 1948 James Stewart vehicle Call Northside 777.