Trivia: Paris-born actress Claudette Colbert was brought to New York at the age of seven by her banker father. She planned an art career after high school graduation, studying at the Art Student's League. Attending a party with actress Anne Morrison, the 18-year-old was offered a three-line bit in Morrison's new play The Wild Westcotts. That ended her art aspirations, and Colbert embarked on a stage career in 1925, scoring her first big critical success in the 1926 Broadway production of The Barker, in which she played a duplicitous snake charmer. One year later, the actress made her first film at Long Island's Astoria studio, For the Love of Mike (1927), but the film was unsuccessful and she enjoyed neither the experience nor her young director, Frank Capra. So back she went to Broadway, returning to films during the talkie revolution in The Hole in the Wall (1929), which was also the movie-speaking debut of Edward G. Robinson. Once again, Colbert disliked film acting; but audiences responded to her beauty and cultured voice, so she forsook the stage for Hollywood. Colbert's popularity (and salary) skyrocketed after she was cast as "the wickedest woman in history," Nero's unscrupulous wife Poppaea, in the Biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932). Colbert expanded her range as a street-smart smuggler's daughter in I Cover the Waterfront and in the pioneering screwball comedy Three-Cornered Moon (both 1933), but it was for a role she nearly refused that the actress secured her box-office stature. Virtually every other actress in Hollywood had turned down the role of spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews in Columbia's It Happened One Night (1934), and when director Frank Capra approached an unenthusiastic Colbert, she wearily agreed to appear in the film on the conditions that she be paid twice her normal salary and that the film be completed before she was scheduled to go on vacation in four weeks. Colbert considered the experience one of the worst in her life -- until the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony, in which It Happened One Night won in virtually all major categories, including a Best Actress Oscar for her. Colbert spent the next decade alternating between comedy and drama, frequently in the company of her most popular co-star, Fred MacMurray. She gained a reputation of giving 110 percent of her energies while acting, which compensated for her occasional imperviousness and her insistence that only one side of her face be photographed (which frequently necessitated redesigning movie sets just to accommodate her phobia about her "bad side"). Colbert remained a top money-making star until her last big hit, The Egg and I (1947), after which she lost some footing, partly because of producers' unwillingness to meet her demands that (under doctor's orders) she could only film a short time each day (her doctor was her husband). She hoped to jump-start her career in the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve, but those plans were squelched when she injured her back and had to relinquish the character to Bette Davis. Traveling the usual "fading star" route, Colbert made films in Europe and a budget Western in the U.S. before returning triumphantly to Broadway, first in 1956's Janus, then in the long-running 1958 comedy Marriage Go Round. The actress also appeared on television, although reportedly had trouble adjusting to live productions. In 1961, she returned to Hollywood as Troy Donahue's mother in Parrish. It would be her last film appearance until the 1987 TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles -- in which she far outclassed her material. Still a prominent figure in the Hollywood hierarchy, Colbert retired to her lavish home in California, where she frequently entertained her old friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Claudette Colbert died in 1996 in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 92.

Trivia: The son of an Ohio oil driller and farmer, American actor Clark Gable had a relatively sedate youth until, at age 16, he was talked into traveling to Akron with a friend to work at a tire factory. It was in Akron that Gable saw his first stage play, and, from that point on, he was hooked. Although he was forced to work with his father on the oil fields for a time, Gable used a 300-dollar inheritance he'd gotten on his 21st birthday to launch a theatrical career. Several years of working for bankrupt stock companies, crooked theater managers, and doing odd jobs followed, until Gable was taken under the wing of veteran actress Josephine Dillon. The older Dillon coached Gable in speech and movement, paid to have his teeth fixed, and became the first of his five wives in 1924. As the marriage deteriorated, Gable's career built up momentum while he appeared in regional theater, road shows, and movie extra roles. He tackled Broadway at a time when producers were looking for rough-hewn, down-to-earth types as a contrast to the standard cardboard stage leading men. Gable fit this bill, although he had been imbued with certain necessary social graces by his second wife, the wealthy (and, again, older) Ria Langham. A 1930 Los Angeles stage production of The Last Mile starring Gable as Killer Mears brought the actor to the attention of film studios, though many producers felt that Gable's ears were too large for him to pass as a leading man. Making his talkie debut in The Painted Desert (1931), the actor's first roles were as villains and gangsters. By 1932, he was a star at MGM where, except for being loaned out on occasion, he'd remain for the next 22 years. On one of those occasions, Gable was "punished" for insubordination by being sent to Columbia Studios, then a low-budget factory. The actor was cast by ace director Frank Capra in It Happened One Night (1934), an amiable comedy which swept the Academy Awards in 1935, with one of those Oscars going to Gable. After that, except for the spectacular failure of Gable's 1937 film Parnell, it seemed as though the actor could do no wrong. And, in 1939, and despite his initial reluctance, Gable was cast as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, leading him to be dubbed the "King of Hollywood." A happy marriage to wife number three, Carole Lombard, and a robust off-camera life as a sportsman and athlete (Gable enjoyed a he-man image created by the MGM publicity department, and perpetuated it on his own) seemed to bode well for the actor's future contentment. But when Lombard was killed in a 1942 plane crash, a disconsolate Gable seemed to lose all interest in life. Though far beyond draft age, he entered the Army Air Corps and served courageously in World War II as a tail-gunner. But what started out as a death wish renewed his vitality and increased his popularity. (Ironically, he was the favorite film star of Adolf Hitler, who offered a reward to his troops for the capture of Gable -- alive). Gable's postwar films for MGM were, for the most part, disappointing, as was his 1949 marriage to Lady Sylvia Ashley. Dropped by both his wife and his studio, Gable ventured out as a freelance actor in 1955, quickly regaining lost ground and becoming the highest paid non-studio actor in Hollywood. He again found happiness with his fifth wife, Kay Spreckels, and continued his career as a box-office champ, even if many of the films were toothless confections like Teacher's Pet (1958). In 1960, Gable was signed for the introspective "modern" Western The Misfits, which had a prestigious production lineup: co-stars Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach; screenwriter Arthur Miller; and director John Huston. The troubled and tragic history of this film has been well documented, but, despite the on-set tension, Gable took on the task uncomplainingly, going so far as to perform several grueling stunt scenes involving wild horses. The strain of filming, however, coupled with his ever-robust lifestyle, proved too much for the actor. Clark Gable suffered a heart attack two days after the completion of The Misfits and died at the age of 59, just a few months before the birth of his first son. Most of the nation's newspapers announced the death of Clark Gable with a four-word headline: "The King is Dead."

Trivia: Rotund American character actor Walter Connolly cornered the market on film portrayals of exasperated businessmen and newspaper men in the 1930s. A successful stage actor, Connolly refused all entreaties by Hollywood producers to enter films. His resistance was broken down a little by an appearance in the 1930 short Many Happy Returns, then he gave in altogether to Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. Connolly made his feature-film debut in Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932), then appeared in The Bitter Tea of General Yen(1933), wherein he worked for Columbia's premiere director, Frank Capra. Connolly was featured in Capra's next two films, Broadway Bill (1934) and the Award-winning It Happened One Night (1934), then spent the rest of the 1930s bouncing between Columbia and the other major studios in meaty supporting roles--most enjoyably as the volcanic newspaper editor in David O. Selznick's Nothing Sacred (1937). Generally billed just below the title, Connolly was awarded star status when he essayed the title role in his final film, The Great Victor Herbert (1939).

Trivia: Educated at California's Harvard Military academy and USC, Roscoe Karns was acting from age 15 with Marjorie Rambeau's stock company. By 1922, he was playing leads at LA's Morosco theatre, which led to film work at the Christie comedy studios. He showed up in several silent features, including the historic part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927) and the very first Academy Award winner, Wings (1927). In the early talkie era, Karns returned to the stage, then made a movie comeback playing fast-lipped reporters and press agents, most often at Columbia studios. He was awarded strong supporting roles in such Columbias as It Happened One Night (1934) ("Shapely's my name, and shapely's the way I like 'em"), Twentieth Century (1934) (working with his idol, John Barrymore) and His Girl Friday (1939); he also starred in a brace of Columbia 2-reelers, Black Eyes and Blues and Half Shot at Sunrise (both 1941). His film assignments dwindling in the late 1940s, Karns wrote a letter to the DuMont TV network, asking if they had any work handy. The result was a five-year starring stint on Rocky King, Detective, one of the most popular weekly series of the early 1950s. Karns' last TV assignment was the role of the crusty Admiral Walter Shafer on the Jackie Cooper sitcom Hennessey (1959-62). Roscoe Karns was the father of actor/recording executive Todd Karns, who starred in TV's first filmed comedy series, Jackson and Jill (1949).

Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: American actor Henry Wadsworth played juvenile roles in films of the late '20s through the 1930s. He received his education at the University of Kentucky and at Carnegie Tech Drama School. He got his start in vaudeville and the legitimate theater. He retired from films in the early '40s and became a union administrator. He was also the president of the AFL's Film Council and helped administer the Motion Picture Health and Welfare Plan.

Trivia: Descended from an old, well-established performing family, American actress Claire McDowell was one of those weathered character players who seemed to have been born at the age of 50. Only 32 years old when she first stepped before Billy Bitzer's camera at Biograph studios in 1910, Ms. McDowell almost immediately found herself playing everyone's mother. She spent the next four years working for D.W. Griffith before retiring to raise a family; her husband was fellow Griffith player Charles Hill Mailes. Back in films in 1917, McDowell continued her celluloid maternal career. Perhaps her most celebrated matriarchal role was as John Gilbert's mother in The Big Parade (1924), in which she has an unbearably poignant scene as she embraces her amputee son, recalling in flashback when her infant boy took his first steps. Ms. McDowell also has some potent sequences as Ramon Novarro's mother in Ben-Hur; stricken with leprosy, she dares not embrace her sleeping son, but instead kisses the stones upon which he lies. Semi-retired when talkies came in, Claire McDowell occasionally emerged to play bits, often in the company of her husband (as in Murder By Television [1935]). One of her last last notable roles, albeit unbilled, was as the ailing mother (again!) who faints on the bus in It Happened One Night (1934).

Trivia: Stage actor/director Arthur Hoyt first stepped before the movie cameras in 1916. During the silent era, Hoyt played sizeable roles in such major productions as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Lost World (1925). In sound films, he tended to be typecast as a henpecked husband or downtrodden office worker. One of his mostly fondly remembered talkie performances was as befuddled motel-court manager Zeke in It Happened One Night (1934). Despite advancing age, he was busy in the late 1930s, appearing in as many as 12 pictures per year. In his last active decade, Arthur Hoyt was a member of writer/director Preston Sturges' unofficial stock company, beginning with The Great McGinty (1940) and ending with The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947).

Trivia: British actor Wallis Clark was a fixture of American films from at least 1916, when he played Pencroft in the first cinemazation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In talkies, Clark busied himself in utility roles as lawyers, city commissioners, foreign noblemen and doctors (he's the medico who warns Warner Baxter that he's courting heart failure in 1933's 42nd Street. During the mid-1930s, he was most often found in the "B" product of Columbia Pictures. In 1939, he was briefly seen as the poker-playing Yankee captain in Gone with the Wind. Wallis Clark's resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt enabled him to portray old Rough 'n' Ready in several films, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Jack London (1943).

Trivia: Sometimes he was Hal Price, other times he was Harry Price. Sometimes (in fact, much of the time) he wasn't billed at all. Whatever the case, Hal Price was one of the more ubiquitous performers in the field of B-Westerns and serials. He was the bald, mustachioed frontiersman who usually said something like, "We got a nice, quiet town here, stranger...and we aim to keep it that way."

Trivia: Stocky character actor Eddy Chandler's movie career stretched from 1915 to 1947. In 1930, Chandler was afforded a large (if uncredited) role as Blondell, partner in crime of villain Ralf Harolde, in the RKO musical extravaganza Dixiana. Thereafter, he made do with bit parts, usually playing cops or military officers. His brief appearance in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night as the bus driver who begins singing "The Man on a Flying Trapeze"--and plows his bus into a ditch as a result--assured him choice cameos in all future Capra productions. Chandler can also be seen as the Hospital Sergeant in 1939's Gone with the Wind. One of Eddy Chandler's few billed roles was Lewis in Monogram's Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944).

Trivia: American actor James Burke not only had the Irish face and brogueish voice of a New York detective, but even his name conjured up images of a big-city flatfoot. In Columbia's Ellery Queen series of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Burke was cast exquisitely to type as the thick-eared Sergeant Velie, who referred to the erudite Queen as "Maestro." Burke also showed up as a rural law enforcement officer in such films as Nightmare Alley (1947), in which he has a fine scene as a flint-hearted sheriff moved to tears by the persuasive patter of carnival barker Tyrone Power. One of the best of James Burke's non-cop performances was as westerner Charlie Ruggles' rambunctious, handlebar-mustached "pardner" in Ruggles of Red Gap (135), wherein Burke and Ruggles engage in an impromptu game of piggyback on the streets of Paris.

Trivia: American actor Joseph Crehan bore an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant and appeared as Grant in a number of historical features, notably They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944). Appearing in hundreds of other films as well, the short, snappish actor's field-commander personality assured him authoritative roles as police chiefs, small-town mayors and newspaper editors. Because he never looked young, Joseph Crehan played essentially the same types of roles throughout his screen career, even up until 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. Perhaps Joseph Crehan's oddest appearance is in a film he never made; in West Side Story (1961), it is Crehan's face that appears on those ubiquitous political campaign posters in the opening Jets vs. Sharks sequences.

Trivia: A child star of the early silent era, Matty Roubert was advertised as the "Universal Boy." Often appearing in melodramas produced and/or directed by his real-life father, William L. Roubert, Matty's popularity remained high through the 1910s but waned as he grew into young adulthood. Continuing in films well into the sound era, Matty Roubert made something of a specialty playing newsboys or messengers, usually unbilled. He left the screen in the late '40s.

Trivia: American actor Sherry Hall popped up in innumerable bit roles between 1932 and 1951. Hall was typically cast as reporters, bartenders, court clerks, and occasional pianists. He was particularly busy at 20th Century-Fox in the 1940s, nearly always in microscopic parts. Sherry Hall's larger screen assignments included the "TV Scientist" in Dick Tracy Returns (1938), Robert Buelle in The Shadow Returns (1946), John Gilvray in The Prowler (1951), and Mr. Manners in The Well, a 1951 film populated almost exclusively by small-part players.

Trivia: When actor Charles C. Wilson wasn't portraying a police chief onscreen, he was likely to be cast as a newspaper editor. The definitive Wilson performance in this vein was as Joe Gordon, reporter Clark Gable's apoplectic city editor in the 1934 multi-award winner It Happened One Night. Like many easily typecast actors, Wilson was usually consigned to one-scene (and often one-line) bits, making the sort of instant impression that hundreds of scripted words could not adequately convey. Shortly before his death in 1948, Charles C. Wilson could once more be seen at the editor's desk of a big-city newspaper -- this time as the boss of those erstwhile newshounds the Three Stooges in the two-reel comedy Crime on Their Hands (1948).

Trivia: Paris-born George Breakston moved to the U.S. when he was six. As a child actor, Breakston got in on the ground floor of the Los Angeles radio industry. In films, he played the young Pip in the 1934 Great Expectations, and that same year played the sickliest of the Wiggs children in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and the boy with the ailing bus-passenger mother in It Happened One Night. In the late 1930s, Breakston was seen in the recurring role of Breezy in MGM's Andy Hardy series. Upon reaching adulthood, Breakston retired from acting to become a producer/director. He moved to Kenya, where he set up his own production company, turning out several African-themed films (Urubu, Golden Ivory) and such TV series as African Patrol and Adventures of a Jungle Boy. George Breakston went on to produce and direct films in Europe and Japan before returning to his "home town" of Paris.

Trivia: The faces of most movie extras are unmemorable blurs in the public's memory. Not so the elegant, statuesque Bess Flowers, who was crowned by appreciative film buffs as "Queen of the Hollywood Dress Extras." After studying drama (against her father's wishes) at the Carnegie Inst of Technology, Flowers intended to head to New York, but at the last moment opted for Hollywood. She made her first film in 1922, subsequently appearing prominently in such productions as Hollywood (1922) and Chaplin's Woman of Paris (1923). Too tall for most leading men, Flowers found her true niche as a supporting actress. By the time talkies came around, Flowers was mostly playing bits in features, though her roles were more sizeable in two-reel comedies; she was a special favorite of popular short-subject star Charley Chase. Major directors like Frank Lloyd always found work for Flowers because of her elegant bearing and her luminescent gift for making the people around her look good. While generally an extra, Flowers enjoyed substantial roles in such films as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's Private Worlds and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937). In 1947's Song of the Thin Man, the usually unheralded Flowers was afforded screen billing. Her fans particularly cherish Flowers' bit as a well-wisher in All About Eve (1950), in which she breaks her customary screen silence to utter "I'm so happy for you, Eve." Flowers was married twice, first to Cecil B. DeMille's legendary "right hand man" Cullen Tate, then to Columbia studio manager William S. Holman. After her retirement, Bess Flowers made one last on-camera appearance in 1974 when she was interviewed by NBC's Tom Snyder.

Trivia: The screen's favorite minister, the Rev. Neal Dodd had established his first Hollywood church in a storefront in 1918. Two years later, he was functioning as technical advisor on The Furnace (1920) and, in 1921, became a founding member of a relief fund to aid film workers in need. A lifelong supporter of the industry, Dodd made himself available whenever a film needed a pastor and ended up making more than 300 screen appearances. In 1924, he became a founding member of the Motion Picture Relief Fund of America (later Motion Picture and Television Fund), the charitable organization that today runs the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, a facility catering to retired motion picture and television personnel.

Trivia: Tall, distinguished-looking Eddie Kane was never remotely a star in movies or television, but he played just about every kind of important supporting and bit role that there was to portray in a Hollywood career that stretched over a quarter century. Born in 1889, Kane entered show business by way of vaudeville and rose to the top of that field as a member of the team of Kane & Herman. Hollywood beckoned with the coming of sound and his first role was typical of the kind of work that he would do for the next 25 years. In MGM's The Broadway Melody, although uncredited, Kane played the important supporting role of Francis Zanfield (a thin burlesque of Ziegfeld), the theatrical producer whose interest in one of the two sisters, played by Anita Page and Bessie Love, gets the backstage plot rolling. In later films, the actor's parts varied from anonymous head waiters and hotel managers to essential supporting roles, small but telling in the plot. He was apparently at least a nodding acquaintance of James Cagney, playing important bit parts in two of Cagney's movies: in Something To Sing About, Kane portrayed the San Francisco theater manager who shelters Cagney from the crowds swarming around him on his return from an ocean voyage; in Yankee Doodle Dandy he played the actor in Little Johnny Jones who tells Cagney's George M. Cohan, in the title role of Jones, of the plan to fire a rocket from the ship when the evidence clearing him has been found. Kane's range of roles ran from business executives and impressarios to maitre d's and as he grew older and more distinguished-looking, his delivery grew even sharper onscreen. Kane is probably best known to audiences from the 1950s and beyond for his portrayal (uncredited, as usual) of Mr. Monahan, Ralph Kramden's boss at the Gotham Bus Company, in The Honeymooners' episode in which Kramden impersonates a bus company executive to impress an old rival. Kane retired from movies and television after the 1950s and died in 1969 of a heart attack at his home.

Trivia: Rotund, squeaky-voiced American actor Harry Holman forsook vaudeville and the legitimate stage for films in 1929. For the next 18 years, Holman played a vast array of mayors, justices of the peace, attorneys, millionaires and sugar daddies. Sometimes he had no professional designation at all, and was simply a "Jolly Fat Man" (as he was billed in 1935's Dante's Inferno). Equally busy in short subjects as in features, Holman is best remembered by Three Stooges fans as the first of many wealthy professors who tried to turn the Stooges into gentlemen in Hoi Polloi (1935). A fixture of Frank Capra films, Harry Holman showed up as the high school principal in Capra's Yuletide perennial It's a Wonderful Life.

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

Trivia: Born in Italy, Frank Yaconelli emigrated to the U.S. after WWI, where he thrived in vaudeville as a monologist, dialectician, and comic musician. Yaconelli went to Hollywood in 1929, spending the next three decades playing innumerable character bits in such films as W.C. Fields' The Barber Shop (1933) and the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935). In the early '40s, he began showing up as comic relief in Tex Ritter's B-Westerns. Frank Yaconelli later played Pancho opposite Gilbert Roland's Cisco in a series of Cisco Kid Westerns for Monogram.

Trivia: Slightly built, snowy-haired American actor Harry C. Bradley had a long career on stage before his film bow in 1931's The Smiling Lieutenant. Usually sporting a well-tailored suit and a pair of rimless spectacles, Bradley played dozens of bookkeepers, court clerks, conductors and pharmacists. Two of his more visible screen roles were the justice of the peace in the 1936 comedy classic Libelled Lady and Keedish in the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. He was also a member in good standing of the Frank Capra stock company, showing up fleetingly in such Capra productions as It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Harry C. Bradley's last film assignment included a pair of Henry Aldrich "B"-pictures, in which he was cast as a tweedy high school teacher named Tottle.

Trivia: A dark-haired, slick-looking character actor from England, Bert Starkey had spent years in repertory with Henry Savage and toured vaudeville with his own act prior to playing mostly unsympathetic characters in films, first under his real name of Buckley Starkey, then as plain Bert Starkey. A bit player after the changeover to sound, Starkey had several good moments as Epstein, the lawyer in Scarface (1932), and as one of the bus passengers in It Happened One Night (1935).

Trivia: Danish-born actor Kit Guard came to prominence in the mid 1920s as a regular in a trio of 2-reel comedy series: "The Go-Getters," "The Pacemakers" and "Bill Grimm's Progress." Guard appeared in at least 200 feature films, usually cast as sailors, barflies and foreign legionnaires. Usually unbilled, he managed to attain screen credit in the 1931 Ronald Colman vehicle The Unholy Garden and as Dinky in the 1940 Columbia serial The Green Archer. Kit Guard made his last fleeting film appearance in Carrie (1952).

Trivia: A London stage actor from the early 1900s, Jameson Thomas made his film debut in 1923's Chu Chin Chow. With such exceptions as Hitchcock's The Farmer's Wife (1928), Thomas was dissatisfied with the British phase of his film career, though he remained philosophical, observing, "If one wants to live by playing in British films, it is better to be miscast than never to be cast at all." Moving to Hollywood in the early talkie era, he was largely confined to minor roles until his death in 1939. His larger assignments included the role of Claudette Colbert's fortune-hunting husband King Westley in It Happened One Night (1934) and Charles Craig in the 1934 version of Jane Eyre. Jameson Thomas was married to actress Dorothy Dix.

Trivia: Also known as Blanche Friderici, this Brooklyn-born actress was generally cast in severe, baleful roles: governesses, matrons, society doyennes and such. Beginning her screen career in 1922, she hit her stride at Paramount in the early 1930s. Her larger roles include one of the three omnipresent maiden aunts in Lubitsch's Love Me Tonight and Madame Si-Si in Madame Butterfly (both 1932). She was also a regular in Paramount's Zane Grey western series, usually as the cast-off wife or mistress of perennial villain Noah Beery. One of Blanche Frederici's last roles was as the wife of motel-court manager Zeke in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (released posthumously in 1934).

Trivia: The son of a patent medicine manufacturer, American actor Alan Hale chose a theatrical career at a time when, according to his son Alan Hale Jr., boarding houses would post signs reading "No Dogs or Actors Allowed." Undaunted, Hale spent several years on stage after graduating from Philadelphia University, entering films as a slapstick comedian for Philly's Lubin Co. in 1911. Bolstering his acting income with odd jobs as a newspaperman and itinerant inventor (at one point he considered becoming an osteopath!), Hale finally enjoyed a measure of security as a much-in-demand character actor in the 1920s, usually as hard-hearted villains. One of his more benign roles was as Little John in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922), a role he would repeat opposite Errol Flynn in 1938 and John Derek in 1950. Talkies made Hale more popular than ever, especially in his many roles as Irishmen, blusterers and "best pals" for Warner Bros. Throughout his career, Hale never lost his love for inventing things, and reportedly patented or financed items as commonplace as auto brakes and as esoteric as greaseless potato chips. Alan Hale contracted pneumonia and died while working on the Warner Bros. western Montana (1950), which starred Hale's perennial screen cohort Errol Flynn.

Trivia: Scratch a sniveling prison "stoolie" or cowardly henchman and if he were not Paul Guilfoyle or George Chandler, he would be the diminutive Ernie S. Adams, a ubiquitous presence in scores of Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s. Surprisingly, the weasel-looking Adams had begun his professional career in musical comedy -- appearing on Broadway in such shows as Jerome Kern's Toot Toot (1918) -- prior to entering films around 1919. A list of typical Adams characters basically tells the story: "The Rat" (Jewels of Desire, 1927), "Johnny Behind the 8-Ball" (The Storm, 1930), "Lefty" (Trail's End, 1935), "Jimmy the Weasel" (Stars Over Arizona, 1937), "Snicker Joe" (West of Carson City, 1940), "Willie the Weasel" (Return of the Ape Man, 1944) and, of course "Fink" (San Quentin, 1937). The result, needless to say, is that you didn't quite trust him even when playing a decent guy, as in the 1943 Columbia serial The Phantom. One of the busiest players in the '40s, the sad-faced, little actor worked right up until his death in 1947. His final four films were released posthumously.

Trivia: With two solid decades of stage experience to his credit, Charles D. Brown made his talking-picture bow in 1929's The Dance of Life. At first, Brown's bland features and flat voice made him difficult to cast, but by the time he'd reached his fifties, he was very much in demand for authoritative roles. Brown was frequently cast as a detective, though his unruffled demeanor made him a valuable "surprise" killer in more than one murder mystery. Charles D. Brown died in 1948, not long after completing his role in RKO's Follow Me Quietly (1950).

Trivia: The freckled Mickey of the still-popular Our Gang comedies, his trademark toothy grin always quick to turn into a scowl, was signed by Hal Roach in 1927 at the reported salary of 37 dollars, 50 cents per week. By 1929, when he was about to outgrow the Gang, he was earning 175 dollars a week and Roach had enough faith in his abilities to cast him in The Boy Friends series, a sort of adolescent version of the Gang. Daniels continued playing bit parts in feature films and comedy shorts through 1946, usually cast as newsboys, but then quit to become a construction worker. Although appearing in several highly publicized Our Gang reunions, Daniels died in complete obscurity, from cirrhosis of the liver, in a San Diego hotel room in 1970.

Trivia: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.