Trivia: Few would argue with the opinion that American entertainer Fred Astaire was the greatest dancer ever seen on film. Born to a wealthy Omaha family, young Astaire was trained at the Alvienne School of Dance and the Ned Wayburn School of Dancing. In a double act with his sister Adele, Fred danced in cabarets, vaudeville houses, and music halls all over the world before he was 20. The Astaires reportedly made their film bow in a 1917 Mary Pickford vehicle, same year of their first major Broadway success, Over the Top. The two headlined one New York stage hit after another in the 1920s, their grace and sophistication spilling into their social life, in which they hobnobbed with literary and theatrical giants, as well as millionaires and European royalty. When Adele married the British Lord Charles Cavendish in 1931, Fred found himself soloing for the first time in his life. As with many other Broadway luminaries, Astaire was beckoned to Hollywood, where legend has it his first screen test was dismissed with "Can't act; slightly bald; can dance a little." He danced more than a little in his first film, Dancing Lady (1933), though he didn't actually play a role and was confined to the production numbers. Later that year, Astaire was cast as comic/dancing relief in the RKO musical Flying Down to Rio, which top-billed Dolores Del Rio and Gene Raymond. Astaire was billed fifth, just below the film's female comedy relief Ginger Rogers. Spending most of the picture trading wisecracks while the "real" stars wooed each other, Astaire and Rogers did a very brief dance during a production number called "The Carioca." As it turned out, Flying Down to Rio was an enormous moneymaker -- in fact, it was the film that saved the studio from receivership. Fans of the film besieged the studio with demands to see more of those two funny people who danced in the middle of the picture. RKO complied with 1934's The Gay Divorcee, based on one of Astaire's Broadway hits. Supporting no one this time, Fred and Ginger were the whole show as they sang and danced their way through such Cole Porter hits as "Night and Day" and the Oscar-winning "The Continental." Astaire and Rogers were fast friends, but both yearned to be appreciated as individuals rather than a part of a team. After six films with Rogers, Astaire finally got a chance to work as a single in Damsel in Distress (1937), which, despite a superb George Gershwin score and top-notch supporting cast, was a box-office disappointment, leading RKO to re-team him with Rogers in Carefree (1938). After The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Astaire decided to go solo again, and, after a few secondary films, he found the person he would later insist was his favorite female co-star, Rita Hayworth, with whom he appeared in You'll Never Get Rich (1942) and You Were Never Lovelier (1946). Other partners followed, including Lucille Bremer, Judy Garland, Betty Hutton, Jane Powell, Cyd Charisse, and Barrie Chase, but, in the minds of moviegoers, Astaire would forever be linked with Ginger Rogers -- even though a re-teaming in The Barkeleys of Broadway (1949) seemed to prove how much they didn't need each other. Astaire set himself apart from other musical performers by insisting that he be photographed full-figure, rather than have his numbers "improved" by tricky camera techniques or unnecessary close-ups. And unlike certain venerable performers who found a specialty early in life and never varied from it, Astaire's dancing matured with him. He was in his fifties in such films as The Band Wagon (1953) and Funny Face (1957), but he had adapted his style so that he neither drew attention to his age nor tried to pretend to be any younger than he was. Perhaps his most distinctive characteristic was making it look so easy. One seldom got the impression that Astaire worked hard to get his effects, although, of course, he did. To the audience, it seemed as though he was doing it for the first time and making it up as he went along. With the exceptions of his multi-Emmy-award-winning television specials of the late '50s and early '60s, Astaire cut down on his dancing in the latter stages of his career to concentrate on straight acting. While he was superb as a troubled, suicidal scientist in On the Beach (1959) and was nominated for an Oscar for his work in The Towering Inferno (1974), few of his later films took full advantage of his acting abilities. (By 1976, he was appearing in such films as The Amazing Dobermans.) In 1981, more than a decade after he last danced in public, Astaire was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. While this award was usually bestowed upon personalities who had no work left in them, Astaire remained busy as an actor almost until his death in 1987. The same year as his AFI prize, Astaire joined fellow show business veterans Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman in the movie thriller Ghost Story.

Trivia: In step with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers was one half of the most legendary dancing team in film history; she was also a successful dramatic actress, even winning a Best Actress Oscar. Born Virginia McMath on July 16, 1911, in Independence, MO, as a toddler, she relocated to Hollywood with her newly divorced mother, herself a screenwriter. At the age of six, Rogers was offered a movie contract, but her mother turned it down. The family later moved to Fort Worth, where she first began appearing in area plays and musical revues. Upon winning a Charleston contest in 1926, Rogers' mother declared her ready for a professional career, and she began working the vaudeville circuit, fronting an act dubbed "Ginger and the Redheads." After marrying husband Jack Pepper in 1928, the act became "Ginger and Pepper." She soon traveled to New York as a singer with Paul Ash & His Orchestra, and upon filming the Rudy Vallee short Campus Sweethearts, she won a role in the 1929 Broadway production Top Speed.On Broadway, Rogers earned strong critical notice as well as the attention of Paramount, who cast her in 1930's Young Man of Manhattan, becoming typecast as a quick-witted flapper. Back on Broadway, she and Ethel Merman starred in Girl Crazy. Upon signing a contract with Paramount, she worked at their Astoria studio by day and returned to the stage in the evenings; under these hectic conditions she appeared in a number of films, including The Sap From Syracuse, Queen High, and Honor Among Lovers. Rogers subsequently asked to be freed of her contract, but soon signed with RKO. When her Broadway run ended, she went back to Hollywood, starring in 1931's The Tip-Off and The Suicide Fleet. When 1932's Carnival Boat failed to attract any interest, RKO dropped her and she freelanced around town, co-starring with Joe E. Brown in the comedy The Tenderfoot, followed by a thriller, The Thirteenth Guest, for Monogram. Finally, the classic 1933 musical 42nd Street poised her on the brink of stardom, and she next appeared in Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of 1933.Rogers then returned to RKO, where she starred in Professional Sweetheart; the picture performed well enough to land her a long-term contract, and features like A Shriek in the Night and Sitting Pretty followed. RKO then cast her in the musical Flying Down to Rio, starring Delores Del Rio; however, the film was stolen by movie newcomer Astaire, fresh from Broadway. He and Rogers did not reunite until 1934's The Gay Divorcee, a major hit. Rogers resisted typecasting as strictly a musical star, and she followed with the drama Romance in Manhattan. Still, the returns from 1935's Roberta, another musical venture with Astaire, made it perfectly clear what kinds of films audiences expected Rogers to make, and although she continued tackling dramatic roles when the opportunity existed, she rose to major stardom alongside Astaire in classics like Top Hat, 1936's Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance? Even without Astaire, Rogers found success in musical vehicles, and in 1937 she and Katharine Hepburn teamed brilliantly in Stage Door.After 1938's Carefree, Rogers and Astaire combined for one final film, the following year's The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, before splitting. She still harbored the desire to pursue a dramatic career, but first starred in an excellent comedy, Bachelor Mother. In 1940, Rogers starred as the titular Kitty Foyle, winning an Academy Award for her performance. She next appeared in the 1941 Garson Kanin comedy Tom, Dick and Harry. After starring opposite Henry Fonda in an episode of Tales of Manhattan, she signed a three-picture deal with Paramount expressly to star in the 1944 musical hit Lady in the Dark. There she also appeared in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor and Leo McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon. Rogers then made a series of films of little distinction, including 1945's Weekend at the Waldorf (for which she earned close to 300,000 dollars, making her one of the highest-paid women in America), the following year's Magnificent Doll, and the 1947 screwball comedy It Had to Be You. Rogers then signed with the short-lived production company Enterprise, but did not find a project which suited her. Instead, for MGM she and Astaire reunited for 1949's The Barkleys of Broadway, their first color collaboration. The film proved highly successful, and rekindled her sagging career. She then starred in a pair of Warner Bros. pictures, the 1950 romance Perfect Strangers and the social drama Storm Warning. After 1951's The Groom Wore Spurs, Rogers starred in a trio of 1952 Fox comedies -- We're Not Married, Monkey Business, and Dreamboat -- which effectively halted whatever momentum her reunion with Astaire had generated, a situation remedied by neither the 1953 comedy Forever Female nor by the next year's murder mystery Black Widow. In Britain, she filmed Beautiful Stranger, followed by 1955's lively Tight Spot. With 1957's farcical Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, Rogers' Hollywood career was essentially finished, and she subsequently appeared in stock productions of Bell, Book and Candle, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Annie Get Your Gun.In 1959, Rogers traveled to Britain to star in a television musical, Carissima. A few years later, she starred in a triumphant TV special, and also garnered good notices, taking over for Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! She also starred in Mame in London's West End, earning over 250,000 pounds for her work -- the highest sum ever paid a performer by the London theatrical community. In 1965, Rogers entered an agreement with the Jamaican government to produce films in the Caribbean; however, shooting there was a disaster, and the only completed film to emerge from the debacle was released as Quick, Let's Get Married. That same year, she also starred as Harlow, her final screen performance. By the 1970s, Rogers was regularly touring with a nightclub act, and in 1980 headlined Radio City Music Hall. A tour of Anything Goes was among her last major performances. In 1991, she published an autobiography, Ginger: My Story. Rogers died April 25, 1995.

Trivia: Few actors were more beloved of audiences across multiple generations -- and from more different fields of entertainment -- than Edward Everett Horton. For almost 70 years, his work delighted theatergoers on two coasts (and a lot of the real estate in between) and movie audiences, first in the silents and then in the talkies, where he quickly became a familiar supporting player and then a second lead, often essaying comically nervous "fuddy-duddy" parts, and transcended the seeming limitations of character acting to rival most of the leading men around him in popularity; he subsequently moved into television, both as an actor and narrator, and gained a whole new fandom for his work as the storyteller in the animated series "Fractured Fairy Tales." Edward Everett Horton was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1886 -- when it was a separate city from New York City -- the son of Edward Everett Horton and Isabella Diack Horton. His grandfather was Edward Everett Hale, the author of the story The Man Without a Country. He attended Boys High School and later studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Columbia University in Manhattan. His path to graduation was thwarted when he joined the university's drama club -- despite his 6'2" build, his first role had him cast as a woman. He never did graduate from Columbia, but he embarked on a performing career that was to keep him busy for more than six decades. In those days, he also sang -- in a baritone -- and joined the Staten Island-based Dempsey Light Opera Company for productions of Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. His singing brought him to the Broadway stage as a chorus member, and he subsequently spent three years with the Louis Mann company honing his acting skills while playing in stock -- Horton made his professional acting debut in 1908 with a walk-on role in The Man Who Stood Still. By 1911, he was working steadily and regularly, and often delighting audiences with his comedic talents, and remained with the Mann company for another two years. He was a leading man in the Crescent Theatre stock company, based in Brooklyn, and spent the remainder of the teens playing leading roles in theater companies across the United States, eventually basing himself in Los Angeles. Horton entered movies in 1918, and became well known to screen audiences with his performance in the 1923 version of Ruggles of Red Gap. He was identified almost entirely with comedic work after that, and by the end of the '20s had starring roles in a string of comedic shorts. It was after the advent of sound, however, that he fully hit his stride on the big screen. Horton's first talking feature was The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, in which he played fidgety reporter Roy Bensinger. Starting in the early '20s, Horton based most of his stage work on the West Coast, producing as well as acting. He leased the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles and found success with works such as The Nervous Wreck, in which he worked with Franklin Pangborn, a character actor who would also -- like Horton -- specialize in nervous, fidgety roles (though Pangborn, unlike Horton, never rose beyond character actor and supporting player status in features). In 1932, he leased the Hollywood Playhouse, which he subsequently operated for a season starring in Benn Wolfe Levy's Springtime for Henry, in which he performed more than 3000 times, making enough money from that play alone to buy his summer home in the Adirondacks. Horton fit in his movie work in between productions of Springtime for Henry (which was filmed in 1934, without Horton), and was always in demand. Amid his many roles over the ensuing decade, Horton worked in a half-dozen of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO. His other notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, and a neurotic paleontologist (who first appears disguised as a woman) in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). He worked in at least six movies a year from the early '30s through the end of the 1940s, and there were occasional serious variations in his roles -- Horton played an unusually forceful part in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), and he delivered a comedic tour de force (highlighted by a delightful scene with Carmen Miranda) in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943). Horton kept busy for more than 60 years, and not just in acting -- along with his brother George he bought up property in the San Fernando Valley from the 1920s onward, eventually assembling Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his mother (who passed away at age 102). His hobbies included antiques, and at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection with an estimated value of a half million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s and '60s, not only in onscreen work but also voice-overs for commercials, and he even hosted the Westminster Kennel Club dog show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was a regular cast member on the comedy Western series F Troop, playing Roaring Chicken (also referred to as Running Chicken), the Hekawi indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales," the Jay Ward-produced co-feature to Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. That engagement endeared him to millions of baby boomers and their parents, and his work in those cartoons continues to gain Horton new fans four decades after his death. He grew frail in appearance during the 1960s, and was not averse to playing off of that reality on series such as Dennis the Menace, where he did a guest-star spot in one episode as Uncle Ned, a health-food and physical-culture fanatic. Horton never married, and shared a home later in life with his sister, Hannabelle Grant. He was hospitalized weeks before his death from cancer in September 1970, and was so busy that during that hospitalization he showed up as a guest star in two episodes of the sitcom The Governor and J.J., His final big-screen appearance was in the Bud Yorkin/Norman Lear comedy Cold Turkey, which wasn't released until the following year.

Trivia: Educated by the Philadelphia and Boston school systems, Helen Broderick became a chorus dancer at age 14, despite protests from her parents. After service as a Ziegfeld beauty, Helen toured in vaudeville with her husband, comedian Lester Crawford. Developing a wry, withering comic style, she became a major Broadway performer in such musicals as The Band Wagon and As Thousands Cheer. Her movie career, which began in 1931 and ended in 1946, included memorable supporting stints in two Astaire-Rogers musicals (Top Hat and Swing Time) and the starring role of spinterish sleuth Hildegarde Withers in Murder on the Bridal Path (1936). Helen Broderick was the mother of Oscar-winning actor Broderick Crawford.

Trivia: Most often cast as a snide gentleman's gentleman or dissipated nobleman, British actor Eric Blore abandoned the business world for the theatre when he was in his mid-twenties. Established in both London and New York, Blore began adding movies to his acting achievements with 1920's A Night Out and a Day In(1920); he also appeared in the 1926 silent version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. A scene-stealing role in RKO's Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio (1933) led to Blore's becoming a fixture in such subsequent Astaire-Rogers projects as Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Shall We Dance? (1937). The actor also became a "regular" in the unorthodox film comedies of Preston Sturges, notably The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan's Travels(1942). In addition, Blore found himself in support of several "star" comedians, from Laurel and Hardy to Bob Hope to The Marx Brothers. When pickings became lean for "veddy" British character actors in the mid 1950s, Blore was reduced to co-starring with the bargain-counter Bowery Boys in Bowery to Baghdad (1955); he played an inebriated genie in this, his last film. On a more artistically rewarding note, cartoon fans will recall the pixilated voice of Blore as the automobile-happy Mr. Toad in the 1949 Disney animated feature Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

Trivia: Tall, sharp-featured American comic actor Erik Rhodes made his film debut in the 1934 Astaire/Rogers musical Gay Divorcee, playing genial Italian "professional correspondent" Tonetti ("Your wife is safe with Tonetti: He prefers spaghetti."). Rhodes essayed virtually the same part in Astaire's and Rogers' 1935 vehicle Top Hat, then settled into a short but lively Hollywood career, playing mostly gigolos and sharpers. A master dialectician, Rhodes was at home with the "silly ass Englishman" cadence of his character in Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938) as he was with the Manhattanite intonations of his murder suspect character in The Nitwits (1935). He forsook Hollywood in favor of stage work in 1939, working without interruption (except for wartime service in the Army Air Force) until his retirement in the early '70s.

Trivia: Left fatherless at the age of four, American actress Lucille Ball developed a strong work ethic in childhood; among her more unusual jobs was as a "seeing eye kid" for a blind soap peddler. Ball's mother sent the girl to the Chautauqua Institution for piano lessons, but she was determined to pursue an acting career after watching the positive audience reaction given to vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen. Young Ball performed in amateur plays for the Elks club and at her high school, at one point starring, staging, and publicizing a production of Charley's Aunt. In 1926, Ball enrolled in the John Murray Anderson American Academy of Dramatic Art in Manhattan (where Bette Davis was the star pupil), but was discouraged by her teachers to continue due to her shyness. Her reticence notwithstanding, Ball kept trying until she got chorus-girl work and modeling jobs; but even then she received little encouragement from her peers, and the combination of a serious auto accident and recurring stomach ailments seemed to bode ill for her theatrical future. Still, Ball was no quitter, and, in 1933, she managed to become one of the singing/dancing Goldwyn Girls for movie producer Samuel Goldwyn; her first picture was Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933). Working her way up from bit roles at both Columbia Pictures (where one of her assignments was in a Three Stooges short) and RKO Radio, Ball finally attained featured billing in 1935, and stardom in 1938 -- albeit mostly in B-movies. Throughout the late 1930s and '40s, Ball's movie career moved steadily, if not spectacularly; even when she got a good role like the nasty-tempered nightclub star in The Big Street (1942), it was usually because the "bigger" RKO contract actresses had turned it down. By the time she finished a contract at MGM (she was dubbed "Technicolor Tessie" at the studio because of her photogenic red hair and bright smile) and returned to Columbia in 1947, she was considered washed up. Ball's home life was none too secure, either. She'd married Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940, but, despite an obvious strong affection for one another, they had separated and considered divorce numerous times during the war years. Hoping to keep her household together, Ball sought out professional work in which she could work with her husband. Offered her own TV series in 1950, she refused unless Arnaz would co-star. Television was a godsend for the couple; and Arnaz discovered he had a natural executive ability, and was soon calling all the shots for what would become I Love Lucy. From 1951 through 1957, it was the most popular sitcom on television, and Ball, after years of career stops and starts, was firmly established as a megastar in her role of zany, disaster-prone Lucy Ricardo. When her much-publicized baby was born in January 1953, the story received more press coverage than President Eisenhower's inauguration. With their new Hollywood prestige, Ball and Arnaz were able to set up the powerful Desilu Studios production complex, ultimately purchasing the facilities of RKO, where both performers had once been contract players. But professional pressures and personal problems began eroding the marriage, and Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, although both continued to operate Desilu. Ball gave Broadway a try in the 1960 musical Wildcat, which was successful but no hit, and, in 1962, returned to TV to solo as Lucy Carmichael on The Lucy Show. She'd already bought out Arnaz's interest in Desilu, and, before selling the studio to Gulf and Western in 1969, Ball had become a powerful executive in her own right, determinedly guiding the destinies of such fondly remembered TV series as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. The Lucy Show ended in the spring of 1968, but Ball was back that fall with Here's Lucy, in which she played "odd job" specialist Lucy Carter and co-starred with her real-life children, Desi Jr. and Lucie. Here's Lucy lasted until 1974, at which time her career took some odd directions. She poured a lot of her own money in a film version of the Broadway musical Mame (1974), which can charitably be labeled an embarrassment. Her later attempts to resume TV production, and her benighted TV comeback in the 1986 sitcom Life With Lucy, were unsuccessful, although Ball, herself, continued to be lionized as the First Lady of Television, accumulating numerous awards and honorariums. Despite her many latter-day attempts to change her image -- in addition to her blunt, commandeering off-stage personality -- Ball would forever remain the wacky "Lucy" that Americans had loved intensely in the '50s. She died in 1989.

Trivia: Slight, wizened British character-actor Edgar Norton entered films in 1914. Norton played a variety of aristocratic and authoritative roles during the silent era, notably Lutz in Ernst Lubitsch's Student Prince (1926). His best-remembered talkie appearance was as Henry Jekyll's faithful butler Poole in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a role he'd previously played on-stage in London and New York. Edgar Norton remained active until the early '40s, usually in bit roles but occasionally enjoying such juicy assignments as Basil Rathbone's family retainer in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Phineas Weed in House of the Seven Gables (1940).

Trivia: Gaunt, rich-voiced British actor Leonard Mudie made his stage bow in 1908 with the Gaiety Theater in Manchester. Mudie first appeared on the New York stage in 1914, then spent the next two decades touring in various British repertory companies. In 1932, he settled in Hollywood, where he remained until his death 33 years later. His larger screen roles included Dr. Pearson in The Mummy (1932), Porthinos in Cleopatra (1934), Maitland in Mary of Scotland (1936), and De Bourenne in Anthony Adverse (1936). He also essayed dozen of unbilled bits, usually cast as a bewigged, gimlet-eyed British judge. One of his more amusing uncredited roles was as "old school" actor Horace Carlos in the 1945 Charlie Chan entry The Scarlet Clue, wherein he explained his entree into the new medium of television with a weary, "Well, it's a living!" Active well into the TV era, Leonard Mudie showed up memorably in a handful of Superman video episodes and was a semi-regular as Cmdr. Barnes in the Bomba B-picture series.

Trivia: Enjoying one of the longer careers in Hollywood history, Gino Corrado is today best remembered as a stocky bit-part player whose pencil-thin mustache made him the perfect screen barber, maître d', or hotel clerk, roles he would play in both major and Poverty Row films that ranged from Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942) to serials such as The Lost City (1935) and, perhaps his best-remembered performance, the Three Stooges short Micro Phonies (1945; he was the bombastic Signor Spumoni).A graduate of his native College of Strada, Corrado finished his education at St. Bede College in Peru, IL, and entered films with D.W. Griffith in the early 1910s, later claiming to have played bit parts in both Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). By the mid-1910s, he was essaying the "other man" in scores of melodramas, now billed under the less ethnic-sounding name of Eugene Corey. He became Geno Corrado in the 1920s but would work under his real name in literally hundreds of sound films, a career that lasted well into the 1950s and also included live television appearances. In a case of life imitating art, Corrado reportedly supplemented his income by working as a waiter in between acting assignments.

Trivia: No relation to stage actor Frank Mills (1870-1921), character actor Frank Mills made his film debut in 1928. Though usually unbilled, Mills was instantly recognizable in such films as Golddiggers of 1933, King Kong (1933) and Way Out West (1937), to mention but a few. He played reporters, photographers, barkers, bartenders, bums, cabbies, kibitzers, soldiers, sailors...in short, he played just about everything. In addition to his feature-film appearances, he showed up with frequency in short subjects, especially those produced by the Columbia comedy unit between 1935 and 1943. As late as 1959, Frank Mills was popping up in bits and extra roles in such TV series as Burns and Allen and Lassie.

Trivia: Born Edward Flanagan, O'Keefe was a lithe, brash, charming, tall, rugged lead actor. The son of vaudevillians, he began appearing onstage in his parents' act while still a toddler. By age 16 he was writing scripts for "Our Gang" comedy shorts. He attended some college and did more work on vaudeville before entering films in the early '30s, appearing in bit roles in more than 50 films under the name Bud Flanagan. His work in a small role in the film Saratoga (1937) impressed Clark Gable, who recommended that he be cast in leads. MGM agreed, so he changed his name to Dennis O'Keefe and went on to play leads in numerous films, beginning with Bad Man of Brimstone (1938). Besides many light action-oriented films, he also appeared in numerous '40s comedies, and later specialized in tough-guy parts. Later in his career he directed a film or two and also wrote mystery stories. In the late '50s O'Keefe starred in the short-lived TV series "The Dennis O'Keefe Show." He was in only two films in the '60s. He died at 60 of lung cancer. His widow is actress Steffi Duna.

Trivia: When rustic comedian Chic Sale began making 2-reel comedies at RKO Radio in the early 1930s, Sale's vaudeville partner Ben Holmes came along for the ride. Before long, Holmes gave up acting to join RKO's writing and directing staff, overseeing the short-subject antics of such comedians as Clark and McCullough, Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol. With 1934's Lightning Strikes Twice, Holmes branched out into features, directing RKO medium-budgeters like Maid's Night Out (1938) and Petticoat Larceny (1943). Ben Holmes also handled the second-unit direction of Sandrich's Buck Benny Rides Again (Paramount, 1940).

Trivia: Despite hailing from San Francisco, dark-haired Robert A'Dair (sometimes given as Robert Adair) spent his screen career playing English military personnel, bobbies, butlers, footmen, and so on. A'Dair played the cockroach racing Captain Hardy in the 1930 Hollywood screen version of the anti-war play Journey's End (1930), the highlight of a long screen career spent mostly in small supporting roles.

Trivia: Born Alexander Williamson, American supporting player Roy Brent had worked in carnivals and been a semi-professional baseball player when entering films as an extra and a stuntman in the 1920s, reportedly at the suggestion of comic Bobby Vernon. After appearing for more than a decade as a stuntman and stand-in (he was Spencer Tracy's double in Dante's Inferno [1935]), Brent began earning supporting roles at Republic in 1939, mainly through his friend Robert Livingston, who starred in the company's Three Mesqueteers series. With his clipped mustache and steely gaze, the now veteran performer usually played a member of the gang but could be equally persuasive on the right side of the law. One such occasion was Blazing Guns (1943), a Trail Blazers oater from Monogram, in which he was well-cast as Leroy Mason's peaceful rancher brother and even got to romance the girl (Kay Forrester). Brent, whose screen career lasted until 1946, was also an accomplished composer.