Trivia: American actress Paulette Goddard, born Pauline Marion Levy, spent her teen years as a Broadway chorus girl, gaining attention when she was featured reclining on a prop crescent moon in the 1928 Ziegfeld musical Rio Rita. In Hollywood as early as 1929, Goddard reportedly appeared as an extra in several Hal Roach two-reel comedies, making confirmed bit appearances in a handful of these short subjects wearing a blonde wig over her naturally raven-black hair. Continuing as a blonde, she appeared as a "Goldwyn Girl" in the 1932 Eddie Cantor film Kid From Spain, where she was awarded several close-ups. Goddard's career went into full gear when she met Charlie Chaplin, who was looking for an unknown actress to play "The Gamin" in his 1936 film Modern Times. Struck by the actress's breathtaking beauty and natural comic sense, Chaplin not only cast her in the film, but fell in love with her. It is still a matter of contention in some circles as to whether or not Chaplin and Goddard were ever legally married (Chaplin claimed they were; it was his third marriage and her second), but whatever the case, the two lived together throughout the 1930s. Goddard's expert performances in such films as The Young in Heart (1938) and The Cat and the Canary (1939) enabled her to ascend to stardom without Chaplin's sponsorship, but the role she truly craved was that of Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 epic Gone With the Wind. Unfortunately, that did not work out, and Vivien Leigh landed the part.After working together in The Great Dictator (1940), Goddard and Chaplin's relationship crumbled; by the mid-1940s she was married to another extremely gifted performer, Burgess Meredith. The actress remained a box-office draw for her home studio Paramount until 1949, when (presumably as a result of a recent flop titled Bride of Vengeance) she received a phone call at home telling her bluntly that her contract was dissolved. Goddard's film appearances in the 1950s were in such demeaning "B" pictures as Vice Squad (1953) and Babes in Baghdad (1953). Still quite beautiful, and possessed of a keener intellect than most movie actors, she retreated to Europe with her fourth (or third?) husband, German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front). This union was successful, lasting until Remarque's death. Coaxed out of retirement for one made-for-TV movie in 1972 (The Snoop Sisters), Goddard preferred to remain in her lavish Switzerland home for the last two decades of her life.

Trivia: Welsh actor Ray Milland spent the 1930s and early 1940s playing light romantic leads in such films as Next Time We Love (1936); Three Smart Girls (1936); Easy Living (1937), in which he is especially charming opposite Jean Arthur in an early Preston Sturges script; Everything Happens at Night (1939); The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940); and the major in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor opposite Ginger Rogers. Others worth watching are Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Forever and a Day (1943), and Lady in the Dark (1944). He made The Uninvited in 1944 and won an Oscar for his intense and realistic portrait of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Unfortunately, it was one of his last good films or performances. With the exception of Dial M for Murder (1954), X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1953), Love Story (1970), and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), his later career was made up of mediocre parts in mostly bad films. One of the worst and most laughable was the horror film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), which paired him with football player Rosie Grier as the two-headed monster. Milland was also an uninspired director in A Man Alone (1955), Lisbon (1956), The Safecracker (1958), and Panic in Year Zero (1962).

Trivia: The daughter of a British Shakespearean actor, Gladys George was born while her parents' touring stock company was playing an engagement in Patten, Maine. On stage from age three, Gladys toured with her parents in a vaudeville act called The Three Clares. She won her first Broadway role in the 1914 production The Betrothal. Six years later she tried to launch a film career in Red Hot Dollars (1920), but her incipient stardom was halted when she was severely burned in an accident. She went back into stock, returning to Broadway in the early 1930s through the influence of her wealthy second husband Edward H. Fowler. Screen-tested by Paramount in 1934, George was signed by MGM instead; ironically, it was while on loan-out to Paramount that she scored her biggest film hit, 1936's Valiant is the Word for Carrie. For the next several years, George alternated between "weepers" and truculent roles in films: the title role in Madame X (1937), Madame DuBarry in Marie Antoinette (1938), the Texas Guinan counterpart in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and the unfaithful Iva Archer in The Maltese Falcon (1941). She didn't really like Hollywood much, but the money was better than on Broadway. She essayed character parts in her last years in Hollywood, culminating with a good comedy role in It Happens Every Thursday (1953) and a smattering of television. Gladys George's relatively early death may have been the result of a barbiturate overdose, though she'd been suffering from throat cancer for quite some time.

Trivia: Jovial, twinkly-eyed character actor Cecil Kellaway resembled a full-grown leprechaun, so it's not surprising that he'd play such a role in the 1948 film Luck of the Irish -- and win an Oscar nomination in the bargain. Before coming to Hollywood to play Mr. Earnshaw in the 1939 filmization of Wuthering Heights, the South African-born Kellaway spent nearly two decades as an actor, writer and director of British and Australian films and stage plays. Even when he played a villainous part like the eternally drunken warlock in I Married a Witch (1942) or an unsympathetic role like the cold-blooded psychiatrist Mr. Chumley in Harvey (1950), it was impossible for Kellaway to be completely dislikable. In 1967, Kellaway won a second Oscar nomination for his performance as the tippling priest in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Cecil Kellaway was the cousin of veteran British actor Edmund Gwenn.

Trivia: Although he went on to play a variety of street-wise working-class louts, William Bendix was the son of the conductor of the New York Metropolitan Orchestra. He appeared in one film as a child, then went on to a variety of jobs (including time spent as a minor league baseball player) before joining the New York Theater Guild. His first Broadway appearance was as a cop in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939); he then began a healthy film career in 1942 with Woman of the Year; the same year, he appeared in Wake Island, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. With his thick features, broken nose and affected Brooklyn accent, Bendix often played the time-weathered meanie with a heart of gold; eventually he was typecast as dumb and brutish characters. He is best known for his role on the radio show The Life of Riley, which he reprised in the film of the same name (1949) and into a television series in 1953. He played Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story (1948), and generally worked for Paramount.

Trivia: Actress Mary Field kept her private life such a well-guarded secret that not even her most devoted fans (including several film historians who've attempted to write biographies of the actress) have ever been able to find out anything about her background. So far as anyone can ascertain, she entered films around 1937; her first important assignment was the dual role of the mothers of the title characters in The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Viewers may not know the name but they have seen the face: too thin and sharp-featured to be beautiful, too soft and kindly to be regarded as homely. Mary Field is the actress who played Huntz Hall's sister in the 1941 Universal serial Sea Raiders; the spinsterish sponsor of Danny Kaye's doctoral thesis in A Song of Born (1947); the nice lady standing in Macy's "Santa Claus" line with the little Dutch girl in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); the long-suffering music teacher in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950); and Harold Peary's bespectacled vis-a-vis in The Great Gildersleeve (1942)--to name just four films among hundreds.

Trivia: American actor Ernest Truex fulfilled the dream of many a performer by playing Hamlet--at age six, in a kiddie talent show. A professional from adolescence onward, Truex appeared in several plays produced by the legendary David Belasco, including a "character juvenile" in The Good Little Devil, in which he supported Mary Pickford. Good Little Devil served as Truex's film debut in 1914, though it would be at least fifteen years and numerous plays later before he'd tackle the movies on a fulltime basis. During the '20s, Truex gained so much popularity in light domestic comedies that several writers concocted vehicles especially for him. Usually cast in wistful, milquetoast roles, Truex in real life was fiercely competitive, much to the chagrin of directors and writers who had to fight tooth and nail to keep Truex from hogging every scene he was in. Talking pictures allowed Truex a few leading roles, as in the first version of the comedy melodrama Whistling in the Dark (1933) (a role played in the remake by Red Skelton), but soon found his weight was more effectively felt in supporting parts. Many of these recycled his "downtrodden little man" routine, with such spectacular exceptions as The Warrior's Husband (1933), in which he played an outrageously campy "nance," and Roadblock (1939), where the actor went against the mild-mannered grain to play a scheming, demonic gang boss. Truex continued his stage work in the '30s and '40s, notably as the "back to the farm" homeowner in Kaufman and Hart'sGeorge Washington Slept Here (Jack Benny did the movie version). Becoming slightly more precious as he got older, Truex portrayed any number of "sly grandpop" roles in the '50s, with television providing fresh new outlets for the actor's talent. He had recurring roles in such sitcoms as Mr. Peepers, Jamie, Pete and Gladys; a potential long-lasting 1958 stint as a hotel manager on The Ann Sothern Show came to an abrupt end because Ms. Sothern, some say, was a tad intolerant of inveterate scene stealers. Like many veteran performers, Ernest Truex was given ample opportunity to shine on Rod Serling's anthology Twilight Zone, first as a prescient peddler in the 1959 episode "What You Need," then more memorably as a nursing home resident desperate to recapture his youth in 1962's "Kick the Can." Ernest Truex was married to actress Sylvia Field, herself an early-'60s TV favorite as Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace.

Trivia: Mabel Paige was virtually "born in a trunk"; both her parents were busy stock company actors. Paige made her own stage bow at age four, in a production of Van the Virginian. When Paige was 11, she was headlining her own Southern stock company; upon reaching adulthood, she established the Paige Theater in Jacksonville, FL. During her stay in Jacksonville, Paige appeared in a quartet of silent comedies, co-starring with her husband, Charles Ritchie, and up-and-coming Oliver Hardy. Retiring from show business in the 1920s to raise her family, Paige returned to acting on radio and on Broadway in the late '30s. In 1941, she was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role as an eccentric theatrical boarding house landlady in Out of the Frying Pan, which wouldn't be released until 1943, under the title Young and Willing. Because of the delayed release of this film, Paige's "official" talkie debut was as the Runyon-esque street peddler in Paramount's Lucky Jordan (1942). Usually heading the supporting cast, and generally cast as a tart-tongued "swinging senior," Paige was given one top-billed starring role in Republic's Someone to Remember (1943), playing a feisty old lady who resides in a college dormitory in hopes of being reunited with her long lost son. After completing her final film, Houdini (1953), Mabel Paige accepted brief roles in such TV series as Racket Squad and I Love Lucy, but illness and age had eroded her comic gifts.

Trivia: Actor Donald Douglas came to Hollywood in 1934 to play the small role of "Mac" in the film version of Sidney Kingsley's Men in White (1934). Though occasionally a villain, the Scottish-born Douglas was usually cast in bland good-guy roles (e.g. his portrayal of the dull detective at odds with Dick Powell's Philip Marlowe in 1944's Murder My Sweet). One of his few leading roles in film was the title character in the Columbia serial Deadwood Dick (1940). Douglas was given more of a chance to shine on radio; in the 1943 Mutual network mystery anthology Black Castle, Douglas played all the parts, including the announcer. Donald Douglas died suddenly at the age of 40, not long after completing work on Gilda (1946), in which he played Thomas Langford.

Trivia: Nestor Paiva had the indeterminate ethnic features and gift for dialects that enabled him to play virtually every nationality. Though frequently pegged as a Spaniard, a Greek, a Portuguese, an Italian, an Arab, an even (on radio, at least) an African-American, Paiva was actually born in Fresno, California. A holder of an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Paiva developed an interest in acting while performing in college theatricals. Proficient in several languages, Paiva made his stage bow at Berkeley's Greek Theatre in a production of Antigone. His subsequent professional stage career was confined to California; he caught the eye of the studios by appearing in a long-running Los Angeles production of The Drunkard, which costarred another future film player of note, Henry Brandon. He remained with The Drunkard from 1934 to 1945, finally dropping out when his workload in films became too heavy. Paiva appeared in roles both large and small in so many films that it's hard to find a representative appearance. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby can take in a good cross-section of Paiva's work via his appearances in Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1945) and Road to Rio (1947); he has a bit as a street peddler in Morocco, is desperado McGurk in Utopia, and plays the Brazilian theatre manager who isn't fooled by the Wiere Brothers' attempt to pass themselves off as Americans ("You're een the groove, Jackson") in Rio. During his busiest period, 1945 through 1948, Paiva appeared in no fewer than 117 films. The familiar canteloupe-shaped mug and hyperactive eyebrows of Nestor Paiva graced many a film and TV program until his death in 1966; his final film, the William Castle comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967), was released posthumously.

Trivia: With the possible exceptions of fellow character players Fritz Feld and Gino Corrado, German-born actor Sig Arno played more waiters and maitre d's than any other film actor. A prominent stage comedian in his native Germany, Arno made his first film, Pandora's Box, in 1925. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis precipitated Arno's exit from Germany in 1933, but he had no trouble establishing himself professionally in the rest of Europe. In 1939, Arno settled in the United States, becoming one of Hollywood's favorite "funny Europeans." Sig Arno devoted what little time off he had from his motion picture activity to his second-favorite activity as a successful portrait painter.

Trivia: Her cultured Mayfair accent notwithstanding, frosty blonde actress Hillary Brooke was born on Long Island. After attending Columbia University, Hillary launched a modelling career, which led to film work in 1937. Though a handful of her screen portrayals were sympathetic, Hillary's talents were best utilized in roles calling for sophisticated truculence: "other women," murderesses, wealthy divorcees and the like. She is also known for her extensive work with the comedy team of Abbott and Costello. First appearing with the team in 1949's Africa Screams, she was briefly nonplused by their ad-libs and prankishness, but soon learned to relax and enjoy their unorthodox working habits. Retiring in 1960 upon her marriage to MGM general manager Ray Klune, Hillary Brooke has devoted much of her time since to religious and charitable work.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer by Marge Champion's father Ernest Belcher, Iris Adrian began her performing career at age 13 by winning a "beautiful back" contest. Working as a New York chorus girl (she briefly billed herself as "Jimmie Joy"), Iris's big break came with the 1931 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, which led to featured nightclub and comedy revue work in the U.S. and Europe. In the Kaufman/Hart Broadway play The Fabulous Invalid, Adrian raised the temperatures of the tired businessmen in the audiences by performing a strip-tease--this at a time (the late 1930s) when the standard burlesque houses had been banned from New York by Mayor LaGuardia. Brought to films by George Raft, Adrian made her first screen appearance in Raft's 1934 vehicle Rhumba. This led to dozens of supporting roles in subsequent feature films; Iris' standard characterization at this time was the brassy, gold-digging dame who never spoke below a shout. Often appearing in one-scene bits, Adrian received more sizeable roles in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936), Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948), Milton Berle's Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) and Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1961). Through the auspices of director William Wellman, who had a fondness for elevating character actors to larger roles, Adrian gave a rollicking performance as Bonnie Parker wannabe Two Gun Gertie in 1942's Roxie Hart. She launched her TV career in 1949 on Buster Keaton's LA-based weekly comedy series. Some of her most memorable work for the small screen was on the various TV programs of Jack Benny, Adrian's favorite comedian and co-worker. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Iris Adrian kept very active in the comedy films of the Walt Disney studio, including That Darn Cat (1965) and The Love Bug (1968); and in 1978, she was superbly cast in the regular role of the sarcastic secretary for a New York escort service on The Ted Knight Show.

Trivia: A delightful comedienne, rotund Babe London reportedly began her screen career as a teenager after purchasing a makeup kit. She played a switchboard operator in Douglas Fairbanks' When the Clouds Roll By (1919) but hit her stride for comedy companies Christie and Educational in the 1920s. Scrambled Eggs (1925), from the latter studio, is extant and features London as a correspondence bride, who has used the oldest trick in the book and substituted her own portrait with that of glamorous friend Helen Marlowe. Today, however, London is best remembered for her onetime-only partnership with Oliver Hardy, in the 1931 Laurel and Hardy two-reeler Our Wife. London plays Hardy's equally hefty fiancée and the comedy's absolute highlight has Stan Laurel attempting to squeeze the hefty couple, as well as himself, into a tiny automobile. According to London, the sequence took two days and quite a bit of bruising to complete, mainly because of the mirth it generated among the crew. Continuing to appear in minor roles on screen until 1970, Babe London was also an accomplished artist, whose series of paintings depicting various silent stars is housed at the University of Wyoming.

Trivia: A busy child actor in his native London, Reginald Sheffield was 12 years old when he made his film debut in 1913. Sheffield's later movie credits included the starring role in the 1923 version of David Copperfield. Moving to Hollywood in 1929, he was unable to secure leading parts, but kept active as a character actor until his death in 1957. His more memorable Hollywood roles included Secretary of War Newton Baker in Wilson (1945), President Ulysses S. Grant in Centennial Summer (1946), and Julius Caesar in The Story of Mankind (1957); he also essayed small roles in both versions of De Mille's The Buccaneer. Reginald Sheffield was the father of Johnny Sheffield, who rose to fame as Boy in the Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s, and who later starred in Monogram's Bomba the Jungle Boy series.

Trivia: Canadian character actress Maude Eburne studied elocution in Toronto, gleaning a talent for dialects. She carried over this skill into her earliest stage work in Ontario and upstate New York. Eburne's first Broadway appearance was as a love-hungry cockney maid in the 1914 stage farce A Pair of Sixes; she spent the next fifteen years specializing in comic servants on stage. She came to films in 1931, as the eternally frightened companion of mystery authoress Grayce Hampton in The Bat Whispers (1931). Most of her film roles can best be described as "eccentric," ranging from dotty aristocrats to pipe-smoking harridans. Among her more prominent roles were Fay Wray's tremulous aunt in Vampire Bat (1933), a rambunctious frontierswoman in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), half-mad recluse Borax Betty in Glamour Boy (1941), Susan Hayward's slatternly mother in Among the Living (1942), and Jean Hersholt's housekeeper in six Dr. Christian (all "B "films of the 1930s and 1940s). Maude Eburne retired from the screen after appearing in the religious semi-epic The Prince of Peace (1951).

Trivia: Born Peggy Yvonne Middleton, Yvonne De Carlo began studying dance in childhood, and in her teens appeared in nightclubs and on-stage. She debuted onscreen in 1942, going on to a number of secondary roles. Finally she was cast in the title role of Salome -- Where She Danced (1945) and played leads in The Song of Scheherazade and Slave Girl (both 1947), after which she was typecast as an Arabian Nights-type temptress in harem attire; she also appeared frequently in Westerns, and occasionally showed talent in comedies. De Carlo was a co-star of the '60s TV sitcom The Munsters. In 1971 she appeared on Broadway in the musical Follies. She married and divorced stuntman and actor Robert Morgan. She continued appearing in occasional films through the '90s and authored Yvonne: An Autobiography (1987). De Carlo died of unspecified causes at age 84 on January 8, 2007.

Trivia: An auburn-haired starlet of the 1940s, whose slight resemblance to Rita Hayworth was much commented upon, Lorraine Miller had been voted Rodeo Queen prior to making her screen debut as one of the Goldwyn Girls. After a couple of years of mostly cheesecake layouts, Miller performed in a skit with Bob Hope in Paramount's Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and then settled in as a popular B-Western heroine, appearing opposite such low-budget cowboys as Eddie Dew, Jimmy Wakely, and the constellation of Tex Ritter, Dave O'Brien, and Guy Wilkerson, aka PRC's Texas Rangers. Today, Miller is probably best remembered for playing one of the sexy hatcheck girls in the seminal film noir The Big Sleep (1946).

Trivia: One of Hollywood's great dowagers, long under contract to MGM, May Beatty, from New Zealand, rarely had more than a few moments to make her presence felt. But felt it was, from a silent bit in Dinner at Eight (1933) to the inquisitive Lady Handel in the thriller I Wake Up Screaming (1941).

Trivia: Before turning to films, Irish-born Charles Irwin enjoyed a long career as a music hall and vaudeville monologist. Irwin's talking-picture debut was the appropriately titled 1928 short subject The Debonair Humorist. Two years later, he proved a dapper and agreeable master of ceremonies for Universal's big-budget Technicolor musical The King of Jazz (1930). As the 1930s wore on, his roles diminished into bits and walk-ons; he fleetingly showed up as a green-tinted "Ozite" in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and appeared as the British racetrack announcer describing the progress of "Little Johnny Jones" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Before his retirement in 1959, Charles Irwin essayed such one-scene assignments as territorial representative Andy Barnes in the first few Bomba the Jungle Boy pictures and Captain Orton in The King and I (1956).