Trivia: American actor Gary Cooper was born on the Montana ranch of his wealthy father, and educated in a prestigious school in England -- a dichotomy that may explain how the adult Cooper was able to combine the ruggedness of the frontiersman with the poise of a cultured gentleman. Injured in an auto accident while attending Wesleyan College, he convalesced on his dad's ranch, perfecting the riding skills that would see him through many a future Western film. After trying to make a living at his chosen avocation of political cartooning, Cooper was encouraged by two friends to seek employment as a cowboy extra in movies. Agent Nan Collins felt she could get more prestigious work for the handsome, gangling Cooper, and, in 1926, she was instrumental in obtaining for the actor an important role in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Movie star Clara Bow also took an interest in Cooper, seeing to it that he was cast in a couple of her films. Cooper really couldn't act at this point, but he applied himself to his work in a brief series of silent Westerns for his home studio, Paramount Pictures, and, by 1929, both his acting expertise and his popularity had soared. Cooper's first talking-picture success was The Virginian (1929), in which he developed the taciturn, laconic speech patterns that became fodder for every impressionist on radio, nightclubs, and television. Cooper alternated between tie-and-tails parts in Design for Living (1933) and he-man adventurer roles in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) for most of the 1930s; in 1941, he was honored with an Oscar for Sergeant York, a part for which he was the personal choice of the real-life title character, World War I hero Alvin York. One year later, Cooper scored in another film biography, Pride of the Yankees. As baseball great Lou Gehrig, the actor was utterly convincing (despite the fact that he'd never played baseball and wasn't a southpaw like Gehrig), and left few dry eyes in the audiences with his fade-out "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech. In 1933, Cooper married socialite Veronica Balfe, who, billed as Sandra Shaw, enjoyed a short-lived acting career. Too old for World War II service, Cooper gave tirelessly of his time in hazardous South Pacific personal-appearance tours. Ignoring the actor's indirect participation in the communist witch-hunt of the 1940s, Hollywood held Cooper in the highest regard as an actor and a man. Even those co-workers who thought that Cooper wasn't exerting himself at all when filming were amazed to see how, in the final product, Cooper was actually outacting everyone else, albeit in a subtle, unobtrusive manner. Consigned mostly to Westerns by the 1950s (including the classic High Noon [1952]), Cooper retained his box-office stature. Privately, however, he was plagued with painful, recurring illnesses, and one of them developed into lung cancer. Discovering the extent of his sickness, Cooper kept the news secret, although hints of his condition were accidentally blurted out by his close friend Jimmy Stewart during the 1961 Academy Awards ceremony, where Stewart was accepting a career-achievement Oscar for Cooper. One month later, and less than two months after his final public appearance as the narrator of a TV documentary on the "real West," Cooper died; to fans still reeling from the death of Clark Gable six months earlier, it seemed that Hollywood's Golden Era had suddenly died, as well.

Trivia: French actress Lili Damita began her career at age 16 as a music-hall entertainer and later went on to take over the starring role in the Casino de Paris Revue. She first appeared in French films in 1921 under the name Damita del Rojo, and later as Lily Seslys, before becoming Lili Damita in 1923. She worked for two years in German, Austrian and British films until MGM mogul Samuel Goldwyn invited her to visit Hollywood. Though she was a leading lady in many of the early sound films, she gained more fame for her tumultuous romance and marriage to Errol Flynn. She retired from films shorty after their wedding. Damita was the mother of Sean Flynn, a former actor and war correspondent in Vietnam who was listed as missing in action just months before the war's end. Although Damita spent an enormous amount of money searching for Sean, he was never found and was presumed dead.

Trivia: Though audiences were inclined to laugh when brutish, slack-jawed Scottish actor Ernest Torrence declared in 1930s Call of the Flesh that he'd once been the greatest opera singer in all Italy, the fact is that Torrence began his career in opera. A graduate of the Stuttgart Conservatory and London's Royal Academy of Music, Torrence excelled as an operatic baritone in the early years of the 20th century. When his voice began to fail him in 1920, Torrence turned to films, which at the time were silent and required no vocals whatsoever. He made his mark as a cinema villain by playing the moronic, twitch-eyed thief in 1921's Tol'able David. Most of his subsequent bad guy portrayals were played with tongue firmly in cheek, notably his outrageous Captain Hook in the 1924 version of Peter Pan. He continued his screen skullduggery into the talkie era, portraying the unspeakable Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes (1932) and an alcoholic smuggler in his last film, I Cover the Waterfront (1933). Ernest Torrence was the older brother of actor David Torrence.

Trivia: Cadaverous character actor Tully Marshall attended the University of Santa Clara in the 1880s. Drifting into acting, Marshall first appeared onstage at the age of 26, turning professional shortly thereafter. He had nearly a quarter century of theatrical experience behind him when he made his first film in 1914. Like his fellow actors Charles Coburn and Donald Crisp, Marshall was one of those performers who seemed to have been born at the age of 60. Throughout the silent era, he played a vast array of drunken trail scouts, lovable grandpas, unforgiving fathers, sinister attorneys and lecherous aristocrats. In films until his death at the age of 78, one of the best of Tully Marshall's last performances was as the wheelchair-bound criminal mastermind in This Gun For Hire (1942).

Trivia: Nominated by film historian William K. Everson as "the best western badman of all," American actor Fred Kohler Sr. began appearing onscreen in 1911. A homely man with a burly physique and huge, bearlike hands, Kohler seemed born to play characters who'd sell liquor to Indians, kidnap the sheriff's daughter, burn out homesteaders and shoot stagecoach guards in the back. In virtually all his films, Kohler wore the same costume: a stained frock coat, ostentatiously flowered vest and sloppily knotted string tie. As the principal heavy in 1924's The Iron Horse, Kohler had a rugged fistfight with leading man George O'Brien; these two actors continued to clash on-screen into the B-westerns of the '30s, including Kohler's final picture Lawless Valley (1938). This last-mentioned film is worth noting because it teamed Kohler with his equally unsavory-looking actor son, Fred Kohler Jr. (Senior's wife was one-time musical comedy actress Maxine Marshall, whom he'd met in vaudeville.) Apparently, if the part was good enough and the character bad enough, Fred Kohler Sr. would appear in any sort of film, from such top-drawer epics as Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1938), to such meager-budgeted fare as the Three Stooges short Horses Collars (1935).

Trivia: It's a source of amazement to those filmgoers born after 1915 -- which is to say, most of us in the early 21st century -- that rotund, frog-voiced, barrel-shaped Eugene Pallette started out in movies as a rough-and-tumble stuntman and graduated to romantic leading man, all in his first five years in pictures. Indeed, Pallette led enough differing career phases and pursued enough activities outside of performing to have made himself a good subject for an adventure story or a screen bio, à la Diamond Jim Brady, except that nobody would have believed it. He was born into an acting family in Winfield, KS, in the summer of 1889; his parents were performing together in a stage production of East Lynne when he came into the world. He grew up on the road, moving from town to town and never really putting down roots until he entered a military academy to complete high school -- which he apparently never quite managed to do. By his teens, Pallette, who was slender and athletic, was working as a jockey and had a winning record, too. Before long, he was part of a stage act involving riding, in a three-horse routine that proved extremely popular. He began acting on the stage as well, and was scraping out a living in the Midwest and West Coast, hoping to make it to New York. At one point, he was allowing a company manager in whose troupe he was working to pocket a major part of his earnings in anticipation of using the sum to finance a trip to New York, only to see the man abscond with the cash and leave him stranded. Pallette turned to movies when he arrived in Los Angeles looking for stage work and found that there was nothing for him. He headed to a nearby studio, where he was told they were looking for riders and took a job as a stuntman for $1.50 a day. He quickly realized that there was a need -- and much more money offered -- for leading men, and he was able to put himself forward in that role. In a matter of a few days, Pallette had managed to make the jump from bit player to lead, and by 1914, he was working opposite the likes of Dorothy Gish. Such was his range that he was just as capable of playing convincingly menacing villains as romantic leads and dashing heroes. He was in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in a small role as a wounded soldier. That same year, he played starring roles in three movies by director Tod Browning -- The Spell of the Poppy, The Story of a Story, and The Highbinders -- as, respectively, a drug-addicted pianist, a writer struggling with his conscience, and an abusive Chinese husband of a white woman. In Griffith's Intolerance, he had a much bigger heroic part in that movie's French sequences, while in Going Straight, also made in 1916, he gave a memorable performance as a sadistic villain. Pallette's career was interrupted by the American entry into the First World War, for which he joined the flying corps and served stateside. When he returned to acting in 1919, he discovered that he had to restart his career virtually from square one -- a new generation of leading men had come along during his two years away. He'd also begun putting on weight while in uniform and, with his now bland-seeming features, found that only supporting parts were open to him -- and that's what he got, including an important role in Douglas Fairbanks' 1921 adaptation of The Three Musketeers. For a time, he even gave up acting, pulling his available funds together and heading to the oil fields of Texas, where he made what was then a substantial fortune -- 140,000 dollars in less than a year -- only to see it disappear in a single bad investment. Pallette spent an extended period in seclusion, hospitalized with what would now be diagnosed as severe depression, and then turned back to acting. He reestablished himself during the late silent era in character roles, built on his newly rotund physique and a persona that was just as good at being comical as menacing. Pallette signed with Hal Roach Studios in 1927, where work as a comedy foil was plentiful, and his notable two-reel appearances included the role of the insurance man in the Laurel and Hardy classic The Battle of the Century that same year. It was with the advent of the talkies, however, that he truly came into his own; his croaky but distinctive, frog-like voice -- acquired from time spent as a streetcar conductor calling off stops to his passengers -- completed a picture that made him one of the movies' most memorable, beloved, and highly paid character actors and even a character lead at times. Paramount kept Pallette especially busy, and among his more notable movies were The Virginian, playing "Honey" Wiggin, and The Canary Murder Case and The Greene Murder Case in the studio's Philo Vance series, in which he portrayed Det. Sgt. Heath. He became especially good at portraying excitable wealthy men and belligerent officials. Pallette was a veritable fixture in Hollywood for the next decade and a half, playing prominent roles in every kind of movie from sophisticated screwball comedies such as My Man Godfrey (1936) to the relatively low-brow (but equally funny) Abbott & Costello vehicle It Ain't Hay, with digressions into Preston Sturges' unique brand of comedy (The Lady Eve), fantasy (The Ghost Goes West), musicals (The Gang's All Here, in which he also got to sing as part of the finale), and swashbucklers (The Adventures of Robin Hood). The latter, in which he portrayed Friar Tuck to Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, is probably the movie for which he is best remembered. He was earning more than 2,500 dollars a week and indulged himself freely in his main offscreen hobby: gourmet cooking. He was unique among Hollywood's acting community for having free round-the-clock access to the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel. Not surprisingly, Pallette's girth increased dramatically between the late '20s and the mid-'40s -- his weight rising to well over 300 pounds -- but it all meant more work and higher fees, right until the middle of the 1940s. He was diagnosed with what he referred to as a throat problem then, and gave up acting. By then, he had a ranch in Oregon where he and his wife lived. Pallette was also extremely pessimistic about the future of the human race, was on record as believing that some catastrophe would wipe us out, and reportedly had stockpiled food and water in a survivalist frame of mind. He died of throat cancer in the late summer of 1954, at age 65.

Trivia: Brawny character actor James Farley made his entree into films in 1918. Best-served in roles calling for authority backed by muscle, Farley can be seen as Southern General Thatcher in Buster Keaton's The General (1926) and as the executioner in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). He spent most of the talkie era in small roles as detectives, patrolmen and night watchman. James Farley's credits are sometimes confused with those of another actor by the same name who acted in "regional" productions of the 1960s.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the current British actor/director of (almost) the same name, James A. Marcus was a late-19th century stage actor who transferred his larger-than-life theatrical persona to films in 1915. Marcus spent the next two decades playing bombastic authority characters. His silent-screen roles ranged from Mr. Bumble in the 1922 version of Oliver Twist to the appropriately named Colonel Blood in Laurel & Hardy's 1927 two-reeler Duck Soup. At the time of his death at the age of 69, James A. Marcus was most frequently seen as sheriffs, mayors, land barons and "father to the heroine" in "B"-westerns.

Trivia: From Scotland, pioneering screen actor/director Donald MacKenzie (sometimes given as McKenzie) appeared with stage legend Augustin Daly, the Whitney Opera Company, and was featured in Lew Field's The June Bride prior to making his screen debut as an actor for the old Kalem Company in 1912. MacKenzie's main claim to fame, however, was as co-director (with Louis Gasnier) of The Perils of Pauline (1914), the era's most famous chapterplay and the serial that put Pearl White on the map. MacKenzie also played the supporting role of Blinky Bill, complete with hideous makeup and a wooden leg. There would be several other serials to come but none would have the impact of the original The Perils of Pauline, arguably the only silent serial whose title is familiar today. Returning to acting in the 1920s, MacKenzie continued in films until at least 1931.

Trivia: Scrawny supporting actor Syd Saylor managed to parlay a single comic shtick -- bobbing his adam's apple -- into a four-decade career. He starred in several silent two-reel comedies from 1926 through 1927, then settled into character parts. During the late '30s and early '40s, Saylor frequently found himself in B-Westerns as the comical sidekick for many a six-gun hero, though he seldom lasted very long in any one series. Syd Saylor was still plugging away into the 1950s, playing "old-timer" bits in such films as Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Jackpot (1950), and such TV series as Burns and Allen and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Trivia: American actor E. Alyn Warren joined the Essanay film company in 1910. Warren played a variety of roles throughout the teens and '20s, the most famous of which was the title character in The Courtship of Miles Standish (1923). However, he was best known for his Chinese characterizations; most of these were patterned after his performance as Lo Sang Kee in both the 1922 and 1930 versions of East Is West. E. Alyn Warren's credits are often confused with those of another Asian impersonator, Fred Warren.

Trivia: American character actor Frank Campeau was the perfect skulking villain, whether dressed as a millionaire or a Bowery henchman. Short, wiry, and with a face like a dyspeptic weasel, Campeau was "Runyonesque" before there was a Damon Runyon. Actor/producer Douglas Fairbanks capitalized on Campeau's untrustworthy demeanor by casting the actor in several bad-guy roles. In Fairbanks' first United Artists release, 1919's His Majesty the American, Campeau is on hand as an outwardly respectable but shifty-eyed diplomat, while in Fairbank's second UA picture Til the Clouds Roll By (1919) he is identified only as "The Jilted Villain". Two decades later, a seedier-looking Campeau was sneaking through alleys in such talkies as A Soldier's Plaything (1930) and Everything's Rosie (1931). Frank Campeau retired from films at age 74, after completing a starving-peasant bit in the lavish MGM costumer Marie Antoinette.

Trivia: Born with show business in his blood, Charles Winninger was nine years old when he joined his parents' vaudeville act, the Winninger Family Novelty Company. The troupe appeared at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, then spent the next sixteen years touring the provinces. Going out as a "single" in 1909, Winninger trod the boards as a monologist, dialectician, singer, dancer, dramatic actor and master of ceremonies. He made his Broadway debut as a German comic in 1912's Yankee Girl Company. Three years later, he launched his film career at the L-KO comedy studios. The character-actor phase of his Hollywood years began in 1924, though at the time he was still more committed to the stage than film. In 1927, he scored one of his biggest Broadway successes as Cap'n Andy in Showboat, a role he repeated with gusto in the 1936 film version. Except for occasional Dutch-comic turns in such films as Soup to Nuts (1930) and Friendly Enemies (1945) Winninger was generally seen in talkies in "foxy papa" or roguish-reprobate roles. His own favorite screen part was Deanna Durbin's roving-eyed millionaire father in Three Smart Girls (1936) and its three sequels. Winninger's performance as the drink-sodden, grudge-bearing general practitioner in Nothing Sacred (1937) is perhaps his finest cinematic hour, with his portrayal of Iowa farmer Abel Frake in State Fair (1945) running a close second. Usually billed at the top of the supporting cast list, Winninger was afforded a rare starring role as Judge Priest in John Ford's wonderful The Sun Shines Bright (1953). On TV, Winninger co-starred in the 1956 sitcom The Charles Farrell Show as Farrell's dad, and guested as Fred Mertz' down-and-out vaudeville partner in the "Mertz and Kurtz" episode of I Love Lucy. Charles Winninger was at one time married to Broadway favorite Blanche Ring, meaning that he was briefly the brother-in-law of silent screen star Thomas Meighan and comedienne Charlotte Greenwood.

Trivia: American actress Jane Darwell was the daughter of a Missouri railroad executive. Despite her father's disapproval, she spent most of her youth acting in circuses, opera troupes and stock companies, making her film debut in 1912. Even in her early thirties, Darwell specialized in formidable "grande dame" roles, usually society matrons or strict maiden aunts. Making an easy transition to talking pictures, Darwell worked primarily in small character parts (notably as governesses and housekeepers in the films of Shirley Temple) until 1939, when her role as the James Brothers' mother in Jesse James began a new career direction--now she was most often cast as indomitable frontierswomen, unbending in the face of hardship and adversity. It was this quality that led Darwell to be cast in her favorite role as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which she won an Oscar. Darwell continued to work until illness crept upon her in the late 1950s. Even so, Darwell managed to essay a handful of memorable parts on TV and in movies into the 1960s; her last film role was as the "Bird Woman" in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).

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: In films from 1918, dark, mustachioed Harry Semels was a reliable serial villain for Pathe and other studios. Semels spent the 1920s menacing the heroes and heroines of such chapter plays as Hurricane Hutch, Pirate Gold, Plunder, and Play Ball; he even found time to spoof his screen image in the serial parody Bound and Gagged (1919). Active in talkies until his death in 1946, Semels played mostly bit roles, usually as excitable foreigners. During this period, Harry Semels was also a fixture of Columbia Pictures' two-reel comedy unit, in support of such funmakers as Andy Clyde, Buster Keaton, Monty Collins, Tom Kennedy, Gus Schilling, Dick Lane, and especially the Three Stooges: He made seven appearances with the last-named team, most memorably as the prosecuting attorney ("Whooo killed Kirk Robin?") in Disorder in the Court (1936).

Trivia: While maintaining his whole life that he was part Cree and part Cherokee, actor Iron Eyes Cody was in fact born Espera DeCorti, a second generation Italian-American. He started out as a Wild-West-show performer, like his father before him. His earliest recognizable film appearances date back to 1919's Back to God's Country. While his choice of film roles was rather limited in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Cody made himself a valuable Hollywood commodity by offering his services as a technical advisor on Indian lore, customs, costuming and sign language. In between his TV work and personal appearances with the Ringling Bros. Circus and other such touring concerns, Iron Eyes continued accepting supporting roles in Hollywood westerns of the 1950s; he played Chief Crazy Horse twice, in Sitting Bull (1954) and The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). Far more erudite and well-read than most of his screen characters, Iron Eyes has in recent years become a popular interview subject and a fixture at western-movie conventions and film festivals. His famous appearance as the tear-shedding Indian in the "Keep America Beautiful" TV campaign of the 1970s recently enjoyed a "revival" on cable television. In 1982, Cody wrote his enjoyably candid autobiography, in which several high-profile movie stars were given the "emperor has no clothes" treatment. As well as being an actor, Cody owns an enormous collection of Indian artifacts, costumes, books and artwork; has written several books with Indian themes; is a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Indian Center, the Southwest Museum and the Los Angeles Library Association; is vice-president of the Little Big Horn Indian Association; is a member of the Verdugo Council of the Boy Scouts of America; and has participated as Grand Marshal of Native American pow-wows throughout the U.S.

Trivia: Bearded and scruffy-looking, William Merrill McCormick became one of the busiest character actors in B-Western history. Beginning his screen career in the late 1910s, McCormick excelled at playing unshaven henchmen, rustlers, stage robbers, and a host of other less-than-desirable prairie varmints. Rarely the main villain, he could usually be spotted sneering in the background alongside such fellow bit part players as Jim Corey, Bill Gillis, and Al Ferguson. Taking time out to direct good friend Marin Sais in a couple of very inexpensive oaters in 1923, McCormick kept up a hectic acting schedule that lasted well into the television era. He died of a heart attack right after finishing a scene for the television series The Roy Rogers Show.

Trivia: Best known for having posed for the famous Indian head nickel, Chief John Big Tree (real name Isaac John) enjoyed a screen career lasting 1915-1950. Among his countless Westerns, large and small, Big Tree played important roles in the controversial The Spirit of '76 (1917) and such epics as The Big Trail (1930), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

Trivia: Arriving in America from his native Australia at the turn of the century, Frank S. Hagney eked out a living in vaudeville. He entered films during the silent era as a stunt man, gradually working his way up to featured roles. While most of Hagney's film work is forgettable, he had the honor of contributing to a bonafide classic in 1946. Director Frank Capra hand-picked Frank S. Hagney to portray the faithful bodyguard of wheelchair-bound villain Lionel Barrymore in the enduring Yuletide attraction It's A Wonderful Life (1946).