Trivia: When Brooklyn-born Constance Ockleman was prodded into a performing career by her ambitious mother, she chose her stepfather's name, Keane, for her nom de stage. After a year of thankless bit parts, she was dropped by RKO Radio Pictures. When she re-emerged at MGM in a small role in the Eddie Cantor vehicle Forty Little Mothers (1940), she was known as Veronica Lake. While posing for publicity pictures, Lake inadvertently allowed her blonde hair to obscure one eye, thereby creating her movie persona as "the girl with the peek-a-boo bang." Signed by Paramount in 1941, Lake quickly ascended to leading roles. Directors such as Preston Sturges and René Clair had the patience to draw genuine performances from her, but, for the most part, she was cast on the basis of her beauty and popularity, with acting hardly an afterthought. In This Gun for Hire (1942), Lake was teamed with up-and-coming Alan Ladd, thereby launching one of Paramount's most successful screen duos. Eventually renegotiating her contact and finding brief domestic happiness with her second husband, director André De Toth, the actress flourished professionally and financially until 1948, when she was hit with the double whammy of being dropped by Paramount and being sued for support payments by her mother. De Toth wangled a good role for Lake in the 20th Century Fox film Slattery's Hurricane (1949), but it failed to rekindle her stardom. She left Hollywood in the early '50s, making a living with stage appearances. But increasing personal problems and a stage injury effectively ended her career, and, by 1959, she was working as a Manhattan barmaid. Lake staged a comeback as a Baltimore TV host in the early '60s, and, in 1966 and 1970, financed two cheap films for herself (Footsteps in the Snow and Flesh Feast). She wrote a tell-all autobiography in 1969 and sought stage work in England. Lake returned to the U.S. in 1971; but after more personal problems and failed comeback attempts, she died of hepatitis two years later while visiting friends in Burlington, VT.

Trivia: Born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine, WI, he aspired to a career in business as a young man, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in economics after serving in the First World War as an artillery lieutenant. He entered the banking business in New York in 1920, working at what was then known as First National City Bank (now Citibank), but while recovering from an attack of appendicitis, he decided to give up banking and to try for a career on the stage. March made his debut that same year in Deburau in Baltimore, and also began appearing as an extra in movies being shot in New York City. In 1926, while working in a stock company in Denver, he met an actress named Florence Eldridge. At the very end of that same year, March got his first Broadway leading role, in The Devil in the Cheese. March and Eldridge were married in 1927 and, in lieu of a honeymoon, the two joined the first national tour of the Theatre Guild. Over the next four decades, the two appeared together in numerous theatrical productions and several films. March came along as a leading man just as Hollywood was switching to sound and scrambling for stage actors. His work in a West Coast production of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's satirical stage work The Royal Family in 1929, in which he parodied John Barrymore, got him a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures. March repeated the role to great acclaim (and his first Oscar nomination) in George Cukor's and Cyril Gardner's 1930 screen adaptation, entitled The Royal Family of Broadway. Over the next few years, March established himself as the top leading man in Hollywood, and in 1932, with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), became the first (and only) performer ever to win the Best Actor Academy Award for a portrayal of a monster in a horror film. He excelled in movies such as Design for Living (1933), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), and The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934). He showed off his skills to immense advantage in a pair of color productions in 1937, A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. In A Star Is Born, March was essentially reprising his Barrymore-based portrayal from The Royal Family of Broadway, but here he added more, most especially a sense of personal tragedy that made this film version of the story the most artistically successful of the four done to date. He received an Oscar nomination for his performance and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award. In the screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, by contrast, March played a brash, slightly larcenous reporter who cons, and is conned by, Carole Lombard, and who ends up running a public relations scam on the entire country. He also did an unexpectedly bold, dashing turn as the pirate Jean Lafitte in Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1939). In 1937, March was listed as the fifth highest paid individual in America, earning a half-million dollars. Unfortunately for his later reputation, A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, and The Buccaneer, along with his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Les Miserables, and Smilin' Through, were all the subjects of remakes in the 1940s and '50s that came to supplant the versions in which he had starred in distribution to television; most were out of circulation for decades. March moved between big studio productions and independent producers, with impressive results in Victory (1940), So Ends Our Night (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), The Adventures of Mark Twain, and Tomorrow the World (both 1944). March's performances were the best parts of many of these movies; he was a particularly haunting presence in So Ends Our Night, as an anti-Nazi German aristocrat being hounded across Europe by the Hitler government. Although well-liked by most of his peers, he did have some tempestuous moments off-screen. March didn't suffer fools easily, and had an especially hard time working with neophyte Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch. His relationship with Tallulah Bankhead, with whom he worked in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, was also best described in language that -- based on a 1973 interview -- was best left unprinted. In both cases, however, the respective productions were very successful. March's appeal as a romantic lead waned after the Second World War, with a generational change in the filmgoing audience. This seemed only to free March -- then nearing 50 -- to take on more challenging roles and films, starting with Samuel Goldwyn's production of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which he won his second Academy Award, playing a middle-aged World War II veteran coping with the changes in his family and the world that have taken place since he went off to war. His next movie, An Act of Murder (1948), was years ahead of its time, dealing with a judge who euthanizes his terminally ill wife rather than allow her to suffer. March was chosen to play Willy Loman in the 1951 screen adaptation of Death of a Salesman. The movie was critically acclaimed, and he got an Oscar nomination and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, but the film was too downbeat to attract an audience large enough to generate a profit, and it has since been withdrawn from distribution with the lapsing of the rights to the underlying play. He excelled in dramas such as Executive Suite (1954), The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1955), The Desperate Hours (1955), and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), and in costume dramas like Alexander the Great (1956).During this post-World War II period, March achieved the highest honor of his Broadway career, winning Tony awards for his work in Years Ago (1947) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), the latter marking the peak of his stage work. March entered the 1960s with a brilliant performance as Matthew Garrison Brady, the dramatic stand-in for the historical William Jennings Bryan, in Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind, earning an award at the Berlin Film Festival, although he was denied an Oscar nomination. March's own favorite directors were William Wellman and William Wyler, but late in his career, he became a favorite of John Frankenheimer, a top member of a new generation of directors. (Frankenheimer was born the year that March did The Royal Family of Broadway in Hollywood.) In Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964), he turned in a superb performance as an ailing president of the United States who is forced to confront an attempted military coup, and easily held his own working with such younger, more dynamic screen actors as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and veteran scene-stealers like George Macready and Edmond O'Brien. March was equally impressive in Martin Ritt's revisionist Western Hombre (1967), and was one of the best things in Ralph Nelson's racial drama Tick, Tick, Tick (1970), playing the elderly, frightened but well-meaning mayor of a small Southern town in a county that has just elected its first black sheriff. March intended to retire after that film, and surgery for prostate cancer only seemed to confirm the wisdom of that decision. In 1972, however, he was persuaded by Frankenheimer to come out of retirement for one more movie, The Iceman Cometh (1973), playing the role of Harry Hope. The 240-minute film proved to be the capstone of March's long and distinguished career, earning him one more round of glowing reviews. He died of cancer two years later, his acting legacy secure and undiminished across more than 60 movies made over a period of more than 40 years.

Trivia: Energetic red-haired leading lady Susan Hayward (born Edythe Marrener) specialized in portraying gutsy women who rebound from adversity. She began working as a photographer's model while still in high school, and when open auditions were held in 1937 for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, she arrived in Hollywood with scores of other actresses. Unlike most of the others, however, she managed to become a contract player. Her roles were initially discouragingly small, although she gradually work her way up to stardom. For her role in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) -- the first in which she played a strong-willed, courageous woman -- Hayward received the first of her five Oscar nominations; the others were for performances in My Foolish Heart (1950), With a Song in My Heart (1952), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1956), and I Want to Live (1958), winning for the latter. Although the actress maintained her star status through the late '50s, the early '60s saw her in several unmemorable tearjerkers, and although she formally retired from films in 1964, that retirement was not a permanent one - as she later returned to the screen for a few more roles including parts in a couple of telemovies and one theatrical feature during the early 1970s. Her ten-year marriage to actor Jess Barker ended in 1954 with a bitter child-custody battle, and she died in 1975 after a two-year struggle with a brain tumor, one of several cast and crew members from 1956's The Conqueror to be stricken with cancer later in life.

Trivia: Born in Worcester, MA, on September 15, 1889, Robert Benchley became a journalist upon graduating from Harvard in 1912, soon joining the staff of the New York Tribune. After serving in World War I, he returned to New York to accept the position of managing editor at Vanity Fair magazine, later tenuring as a columnist for the New York World before being named the drama editor of Life in 1920. The following year, Benchley published his first book collection, Of All Things, and in 1922 performed an acclaimed monologue, "The Treasurer's Report," as a skit in an amateur revue. Throughout the decade of the 1920s, Benchley also earned notoriety as a charter member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, a much-publicized group of New York City writers, actors, and artists -- also including Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, and Harpo Marx -- who met for lunch daily at the Algonquin Hotel to share sparkling conversation, juicy gossip, and scathing insults.Through his work in Life as well as books including 1925's Pluck and Luck and 1927's Early Worm, Benchley emerged as one of America's most popular and well-respected writers, acutely dissecting the comic futility of Roaring Twenties society. His subtle, whimsical humor primarily depicted the struggles of the common man, often spinning off on purely nonsensical tangents; Benchley's friend Donald Ogden Stewart (The Philadelphia Story) dubbed his sensibility "crazy humor," and it found an eager audience among pre-Depression readers. Benchley first began working in movies in 1928, reprising "The Treasurer's Report" in one of the earliest short films to feature sound; in all, he appeared in some 46 acclaimed short features, typically appearing as a lecturer to muse on subjects including The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928), The Courtship of a Newt (1938), and How to Take a Vacation (1941). In 1935, Benchley even won an Academy Award for How to Sleep. In 1929, he rose to new prominence as the drama critic at The New Yorker, a magazine founded by Algonquin lunchmate Harold Ross.Beginning in 1932, Benchley began writing for feature films as well, making his debut with The Sport Parade, in which he also co-starred as a broadcaster. He continued to play any number of comedic supporting roles in the years to come, typically cast as a bumbling yet lovable sophisticate, a cocktail glass always firmly in hand. In 1940, he appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Foreign Correspondent; he also contributed dialogue to the script. Robert Benchley died on November 21, 1945, at the peak of his fame. Benchley's son, Nathanial, was a well-regarded novelist and children's books author while his grandson, Peter, later became a well-known novelist in his own right, authoring the book that inspired the film Jaws.

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

Trivia: British actress Eily Malyon enjoyed a lucrative Hollywood screen career playing scores of no-nonsense schoolteachers, maids, governesses and maiden aunts. Ideally suited for costume pieces, she was seen in two major Dickens adaptations of the 1930s, playing Sarah Pocket in Great Expectations (1934) and Mrs. Cruncher in Tale of Two Cities (1935). She was also appropriately sinister as Mrs. Barryman in Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and Mrs. Sketcher in Jane Eyre (1943). Eily Malyon's most hissable screen role was maiden Aunt Demetria Riffle in 1939's On Borrowed Time; Aunt Demetria's onerous Victorianism proved so distasteful to Julian Northrup(Lionel Barrymore) and his grandson Pud (Bob Watson) that they literally chose to die rather than submit to her whims.

Trivia: When young Elizabeth Patterson announced her intention to become an actress, her father, a Tennessee judge, couldn't have been less pleased. Despite family objections, Patterson joined Chicago's Ben Greet Players in the last decade of the 19th century. The gawky, birdlike actress played primarily Shakespearean roles until reaching middle age, when she began specializing in "old biddy" roles. Her Broadway debut came about when she was personally selected by Booth Tarkington to appear in his play Intimate Strangers. After a false start in 1928, Ms. Patterson commenced her Hollywood career at the dawn of the talkie era. Among her more prominent film assignments were So Red the Rose (1935), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), Remember the Night (1940), and Tobacco Road (1941). Approaching her eighties, Elizabeth Patterson gathered a whole new flock of fans in the 1950s with her recurring role of the Ricardos' neighbor/ babysitter, Mrs. Trumbull, on television's I Love Lucy.

Trivia: As a boy growing up in Sacramento, Robert Warwick sang in his church choir. Encouraged to pursue music as a vocation, Warwick studied in Paris for an operatic career. He abandoned singing for straight acting when, in 1903, he was hired by Clyde Fitch as an understudy in the Broadway play Glad of It. Within a few year, Warwick was a major stage star in New York. He managed to retain his matinee-idol status when he switched from stage to screen, starring in such films as A Modern Othello and Alias Jimmy Valentine and at one point heading his own production company. He returned to the stage in 1920, then resumed his Hollywood career in authoritative supporting roles. His pear-shaped tones ideally suited for talkies, Warwick played such characters as Neptune in Night Life of the Gods (1933), Sir Francis Knolly in Mary of Scotland (1936) and Lord Montague in Romeo and Juliet (1936). He appeared in many of the Errol Flynn "historicals" at Warner Bros. (Prince and the Pauper, Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex); in more contemporary fare, he could usually be found in a military uniform or wing-collared tuxedo. From The Great McGinty (1940) onward, Warwick was a particular favorite of producer/director Preston Sturges, who was fond of providing plum acting opportunities to veteran character actors. Warwick's best performance under Sturges' guidance was as the brusque Hollywood executive who insists upon injecting "a little sex" in all of his studio's product in Sullivan's Travels (1942). During the 1950s, Warwick played several variations on "Charles Waterman," the broken-down Shakespearean ham that he'd portrayed in In a Lonely Place (1950). He remained in harness until his eighties, playing key roles on such TV series as The Twilight Zone and The Law and Mr. Jones. Robert Warwick was married twice, to actresses Josephine Whittell and Stella Lattimore.

Trivia: Nora Cecil's earliest known screen credit was 1918's Prunella. Chances are Cecil played then what she'd play in most of her talkie efforts: the tight-lipped, sternly reproving old biddy. She made a good living essaying dozens of battle-ax mothers-in-law, welfare workers, landladies, schoolmistresses and maiden aunts. One of her largest parts was boarding-house keeper Mrs. Wendelschaffer in W.C. Fields' The Old Fashioned Way (1934). Nora Cecil also served as an excellent foil for screen comedians as varied as Laurel and Hardy (1932's Pack Up Your Troubles) and Will Rogers (1933's Dr. Bull).

Trivia: Trained at Iowa's Morningside College for a career as a musician, American actor Emory Parnell spent his earliest performing years as a concert violinist. He worked the Chautauqua and Lyceum tent circuits for a decade before leaving the road in 1930. For the next few seasons, Parnell acted and narrated in commercial and industrial films produced in Detroit. Determining that the oppurtunities and renumeration were better in Hollywood, Emory and his actress wife Effie boarded the Super Chief and headed for California. Endowed with a ruddy Irish countenance and perpetual air of frustration, Parnell immediately landed a string of character roles as cops, small town business owners, fathers-in-law and landlords (though his very first film part in Bing Crosby's Dr. Rhythm [1938] was cut out before release). In roles both large and small, Parnell became an inescapable presence in B-films of the '40s; one of his better showings was in the A-picture Louisiana Purchase, in which, as a Paramount movie executive, he sings an opening song about avoiding libel suits! Parnell was a regular in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle film series (1949-55), playing small town entrepreneur Billy Reed; on TV, the actor appeared as William Bendix' factory foreman The Life of Riley (1952-58). Emory Parnell's last public appearance was in 1974, when he, his wife Effie, and several other hale-and-hearty residents of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital were interviewed by Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Matronly British-born actress Emma Dunn was typed as mothers, grandmothers and housekeepers even during her earliest years in the theater. She was 41 when she played her first starring role on stage in 1916's Old Lady 31. She made her first film in 1919, and her last in 1948, changing very little physically during those three decades. Emma Dunn's best-remembered film assignments included the housekeeper of "pixillated" Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and the mother of Lew Ayres in several installments of MGM's Dr. Kildare series.

Trivia: American actor Harry Tyler wasn't really as old as the hills when he started his film career in 1929; in fact, he was barely 40. Still, Tyler's wizened, gimlet-eyed face was his fortune, and he spent most of his movie years playing variations of the Spry Old Timer. Tyler began his stage career as a boy soprano in 1901, under the aegis of producer Flo Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld's wife Anna Held. He married Gladys Crolius in 1910, and for the next twelve years they toured vaudeville in a precursor to Burns and Allen's smart guy/dumb dora act. Returning to the legitimate stage in 1925, Tyler journeyed to Hollywood when talking pictures took hold four years later. His inaugural screen appearance was a recreation of his stage role in The Shannons on Broadway. Harry Tyler played bits and featured roles as janitors, sign painters, philandering businessmen, frontier farmers and accident victims from 1929 until his farewell appearance in John Ford's The Last Hurrah (1958).

Trivia: Moon-faced American character actor Ralph Peters was active in films from 1937 to 1956. At first, Peters showed up in Westerns, usually cast as a bartender. He then moved on to contemporary films, usually cast as a bartender. During the 1940s, Ralph Peters could be seen in scores of Runyon-esque gangster roles like Asthma Anderson in Ball of Fire (1941) and Baby Face Peterson in My Kingdom for a Cook (1943).

Trivia: African American actor Charles Moore was sometimes billed as Charles R. Moore. In films from 1929, Moore played a variety of supporting roles and was evidently a favorite of writer/director Preston Sturges, as he appeared in four of Sturges' films, delivering one of the funniest single lines in 1941's The Palm Beach Story (to repeat the line out of context would kill the joke). Unfortunately, Charles Moore's skills as a dancer seldom got a workout during his 25-year screen career.

Trivia: Ann Carter was a child actress and young ingénue of the 1940s, who first came to the attention of producers and the movie press because of her startling resemblance to Veronica Lake. After making her debut in an uncredited role in The Last of the Duanes (1941), she played a small role in Commandos Strike at Dawn the same year, and then portrayed the daughter of Lake's character in I Married a Witch (1942). Her biggest and best role, however, was in the Val Lewton-produced Curse of the Cat People (1944), in which she played the sweet, impressionable daughter of Kent Smith and Jane Randolph (whose characters had previously appeared in Lewton's Cat People), who is beset by images of ghosts and the machinations of a disturbed adult (Elizabeth Russell) in a huge, dark, old neighboring house. Carter played the young Texas Guinan (portrayed by Betty Hutton as an adult) in Incendiary Blonde, but all of her scenes were deleted. She was in a few more notable films, including The Two Mrs. Carrolls, for which she won an award for her portrayal of the preteen daughter, and The Boy With Green Hair, but somehow didn't manage to regularly get roles that were as good as her talent. She portrayed a large supporting role in Blondie Hits the Jackpot (1949), a very late entry in Columbia Pictures' "Blondie" series, at age 13. Carter contracted polio in 1948 and spent years recovering; she wasn't seen again until her appearance in Fred Zinnemann's superb Member of the Wedding (1952), which was her last acting role. She died in 2014 at age 77.

Trivia: A master of the delayed, dull-witted double take, American actor George Guhl spent several decades in vaudeville as a member of the Guhl Brothers and Guhl and Adams comedy teams. He entered films in 1935, remaining active until his death eight years later. Fans of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies will remember Guhl as gimlet-eyed truant officer Smithers in Arbor Day (1936). George Guhl's best feature-film assignment was the recurring role of dim-bulbed desk sergeant Graves in Warner Bros.' "Torchy Blane" series.

Trivia: Broderick Crawford was the typical example of "overnight" success in Hollywood -- the 1949 release of All the King's Men turned him into one of the most popular "character" leads in Hollywood, a successor to Wallace Beery and a model for such unconventional leading men to come as Ernest Borgnine. His "overnight" success, however, involved more than a decade of work in routine supporting roles in more than 20 movies, before he was ever considered as much more than a supporting player. Crawford was born into a performing family -- both of his maternal grandparents, William Broderick and Emma Kraus, were opera singers, and his mother, Helen Broderick, was a Broadway and screen actress, while his father, Lester Crawford, was a vaudeville performer. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he accompanied his parents on tour as a boy and later joined them on-stage. He attended the Dean Academy in Franklin, MA, and excelled in athletics, including football, baseball, and swimming. Crawford entered show business by way of vaudeville, joining his parents in working for producer Max Gordon. With vaudeville's decline in the later 1920s, he tried attending college but dropped out of Harvard after just three months, preferring to make a living as a stevedore on the New York docks, and he also later served as a seaman on a tanker. Crawford returned to acting through radio, including a stint working as a second banana to the Marx Brothers. He entered the legitimate theater in 1934 when playwright Howard Lindsay selected him for a role in the play She Loves Me Not, portraying a football player in the work's London run -- although the play only ran three weeks, that was enough time for Crawford to meet Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (then theater's leading "power couple" on either side of the Atlantic) and come to the attention of Noel Coward, who selected him for a role in his production of Point Valaine, in which the acting couple was starring. After a string of unsuccessful plays, Crawford went to Hollywood and got a part as the butler in the comedy Woman Chases Man, produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Crawford's theatrical breakthrough came in 1937 when he won the role of the half-witted Lennie in the theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. His performance won critical accolades from all of the major newspapers, and Crawford was on his way, at least as far as the stage was concerned -- when it came time to do the movie, however, the part went to Lon Chaney Jr.. In movies, Crawford made the rounds of the studios in one-off roles, usually in relatively minor films such as Submarine D-1, Undercover Doctor, and Eternally Yours. The murder mystery Slightly Honorable gave him a slight boost in both billing and the size of his role, but before he could begin to develop any career momentum the Second World War intervened. Crawford served in the U.S. Army Air Force and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned to civilian life, he immediately resumed his screen career with a series of fascinating films, including The Black Angel and James Cagney's production20of The Time of Your Life. True stardom however, still eluded him. That all changed when director-producer Robert Rossen selected Crawford to portray Willie Stark in All the King's Men. In a flash, Crawford became a box-office draw, his performance attracting raves from the critics and delighting audiences with its subtle, earthy, rough-hewn charm. His portrayal of the megalomaniac political boss of a small state, based on the life and career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, won Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor. He signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1949, which resulted in his starring in the comedy hit Born Yesterday (1950). That was to be his last major hit as a star, though Crawford continued to give solid and successful lead performances for much of the next five years, portraying a tough undercover cop in the crime drama T he Mob, and a villainous antagonist to Clark Gable in Vincent Sherman's Lone Star. During the early '50s, Crawford was Hollywood's favorite tough-guy lead or star antagonist, his persona combining something of the tough charm of Spencer Tracy and the rough-hewn physicality of Wallace Beery -- he could be a charming lunkhead, in the manner of Keenan Wynn, or dark and threatening, calling up echoes of his portrayal of Willie Stark. In the mid-'50s at 20th Century Fox, he added vast energy and excitement to such films as Night People and Between Heaven and Hell -- indeed, his performance in the latter added a whole extra layer of depth and meaning to the film, moving it from wartime melodrama into territory much closer to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with his character Waco serving as the dramatic stand-in for Kurtz. In 1955, after working on the melodrama Not As a Stranger and Fellini's Il Bidone (his portrayal of the swindler Augusto being one of his best performances), Crawford became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era to make the jump to television. He signed to do the series Highway Patrol for Ziv TV, which was a hit for three seasons. In its wake, however, Crawford was never able to get movies or roles of the same quality that he'd been offered in the early '50s. He did two more series, King of Diamonds and The Interns, and did play the title role in Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which attracted some offbeat notice; otherwise, Crawford's work during his final 30 years of acting involved roles as routine as the ones he'd muddled through while trying for his break at the other end of his career. One of his most visible screen appearances took place on television, in a 1977 episode of CHiPS that played off of his work in Highway Patrol, with Crawford making a gag appearance as himself, a motorist pulled over and cited for a moving violation by the series' motorcycle police officers.

Trivia: In films from 1919 onward, stocky American actor Wade Boteler hit his stride in talking pictures. Blessed with a pit-bull countenance, Boteler was in practically every other "B" western made between 1930 and 1935, often cast as a hard-hearted sheriff or crooked land baron. Affecting an Irish brogue, Boteler was also in demand for policeman roles, notably as Inspector Queen in the 1936 Ellery Queen opus The Mandarin Mystery. His most effective lovable-Irishman stint was as conclusion-jumping cop Michael Axford in the 1940 serial The Green Hornet; in fact, when fans of the Green Hornet radio version would ask Detroit station WXYZ for a picture of Axford, the station would send off an autographed photo of Boteler, even though Gil O'Shea essayed the part on radio. Frequently on call for bit parts at 20th Century-Fox studios, Boteler was seen in such Fox productions as In Old Chicago (1938) and A-Haunting We Will Go (1942). Wade Boteler's final film was Warner Bros.' prophetically titled The Last Ride (1944), released one year after Boteler's death.

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 leading man Jack Luden, a member of the Pennsylvania cough-drop dynasty, graduated from Paramount's talent school in 1927 along with Thelma Todd and Charles "Buddy" Rogers, among others. The studio saw in him the same appeal that was making Gary Cooper a star, but Luden's initial starring western, Shootin' Irons (1927), proved a failure. The handsome actor did rather better in Paramount's popular "flapper" melodramas -- Two Flaming Youths (1927), Clara Bow's The Wild Party (1929]), etc. -- but a pronounced stammer did not bode well for a future in talkies. Luden's career declined rather drastically during the '30s, but independent producers such as Larry Darmour occasionally cashed in on his still-recognizable name. Darmour's westerns were on the cheap side -- to be generous -- and Luden's four starring vehicles in 1938 did not exactly set the range ablaze. The former leading man was all but forgotten by the 1950s, and his death at 49, while incarcerated at San Quentin on a drug conviction, came as a shock to former colleagues.

Trivia: A product of the Indiana orphanage system, the part-Cherokee-Indian Monte Blue held down jobs ranging from stevedore to reporter before offering his services as a movie-studio handyman in the early 1910s. Pressed into service as an extra and stunt man, Blue graduated to featured parts in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Thanks to his work with Griffith and (especially) Cecil B. DeMille, Blue became a dependable box-office attraction of the 1920s, playing everything from lawyers to baseball players. He was a mainstay of the fledgling Warner Bros. studios, where the profits from his films frequently compensated for the expensive failures starring John Barrymore. In 1928 he was cast in his finest silent role, as the drink-sodden doctor in White Shadows on the South Seas. After making a successful transition to talkies, Blue decided to retire from filmmaking, taking a tour around the world to celebrate his freedom. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1931, Blue found that he had lost his fortune through bad investments, and that the public at large had forgotten him. By now too heavy-set to play romantic leads, Blue rebuilt his career from the bottom up, playing bits in "A" pictures and supporting roles in "B"s. He was busiest in the bread-and-butter westerns produced by such minor studios as Republic, Monogram and PRC; he also showed up in several serials, notably as "Ming the Merciless" clone Unga Khan in 1936's Undersea Kingdom. Movie mogul Jack Warner, out of gratitude for Blue's moneymaking vehicles of the 1920s, saw to it that Monte was steadily employed at Warner Bros., and that his name would appear prominently in the studio's advertising copy. While many of his talkie roles at Warners were bits, Blue was given choice supporting roles in such films as Across the Pacific (1942), Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and especially Key Largo (1948). Extending his activities into TV, Blue continued accepting character roles until retiring from acting in 1954. During the last years of his life, Monte Blue was the advance man for the Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus; it was while making his annual appearance in this capacity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that Blue suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 73.

Trivia: Effervescent little Billy Bevan commenced his stage career in his native Australia, after briefly attending the University of Sydney. A veteran of the famous Pollard Opera Company, Bevan came to the U.S. in 1917, where he found work as a supporting comic at L-KO studios. He was promoted to stardom in 1920 when he joined up with Mack Sennett's "fun factory." Adopting a bushy moustache and an air of quizzical determination, Bevan became one of Sennett's top stars, appearing opposite such stalwart laughmakers as Andy Clyde, Vernon Dent and Madelyn Hurlock in such belly-laugh bonanzas as Ice Cold Cocos (1925), Circus Today (1926) and Wandering Willies (1926). While many of Bevan's comedies are hampered by too-mechanical gags and awkward camera tricks, he was funny and endearing enough to earn laughs without the benefit of Sennett gimmickry. He was particularly effective in a series of "tired businessman" two-reelers, in which the laughs came from the situations and the characterizations rather than slapstick pure and simple. Bevan continued to work sporadically for Sennett into the talkie era, but was busier as a supporting actor in feature films like Cavalcade (1933), The Lost Patrol (1934) and Dracula's Daughter (1936). He was frequently cast in bit parts as London "bobbies," messenger boys and bartenders; one of his more rewarding talkie roles was the uncle of plumbing trainee Jennifer Jones (!) in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946). Among Billy Bevan's final screen assignments was the part of Will Scarlet in 1950's Rogues of Sherwood Forest.

Trivia: Born Edith Blossom MacDonald, Marie Blake started out as a child performer in vaudeville, singing with her younger sisters Jeanette and Elsie. In 1926, Marie married song-and-dance man Clarence Rock, forming an act that endured into the 1930s. When vaudeville died, Marie and Clarence went "legit" in straight drama. While playing a consumptive prostitute in the Los Angeles company of Dead End, Marie was spotted by an MGM talent agent. Since sister Jeanette was already an established MGM star, the studio decided to avoid accusations of nepotism by changing Marie's last name to Blake. Never a leading lady, Marie remained a reliable member of MGM's featured-player stable for nearly ten years. She played hospital receptionist Sally in 13 of the studio's Dr. Kildare entries, and also showed up in such short subjects as Our Gang's Alfalfa's Aunt (1940). Loaned out to RKO in 1944, she enjoyed one of her meatiest roles as Harold Peary's vis-a-vis in Gildersleeve's Ghost. From 1957 onward, Blake acted under her married name, Blossom Rock (her husband, who'd retired from show business to work as night manager of the Beverly Hilton, died in 1960). Marie Blake/Blossom Rock's last major assignment was as Grandmama in the TV series The Addams Family (1965-66).

Trivia: While the name and face may not be familiar, the voice of Reed Hadley will be instantly recognizable to filmgoers of the 1940s. Working as an actor by night and floorwalker by day, the tall, spare Hadley began picking up radio gigs in the 1930s. His best-known airwaves assignment was the voice of western hero Red Ryder. In films from 1938, Hadley spent his first few years before the camera bouncing around between heroes and heavies; he starred in the 1939 serial Zorro's Fighting Legion, and was seen briefly as a burlesqued Hollywood matinee idol in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940). Signed by 20th Century-Fox in 1943, Hadley appeared onscreen and served as the offscreen narrator of such "docudramas" as House on 92nd Street (1945), Call Northside 777 (1947) and Boomerang (1947). From 1950 through 1953, Hadley starred as Captain Braddock, the unctuous, chain-smoking star/narrator of the popular TV series Racket Squad; in 1954, he played a similar role on the 39-week series Public Defender. Considering the fact that Reed Hadley's deep, persuasive voice was his fortune, it is ironic that his last screen role was a non-speaking supporting part in Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967).

Trivia: Endowed with a voice like a bellows and a face like a bullfrog, Australian actor Robert Greig specialized in pompous-servant roles. In Greig's first talking picture, the Marx Brothers' vehicle Animal Crackers (1930), he portrays Hives, Margaret Dumont's imperious butler; Hives dominates the film's opening scene by singing his instructions to the rest of the staff, and later participates in Groucho Marx' signature tune "Hooray for Captain Spaulding". Evidently the Marx Brothers liked his work, for in 1932 Greig was cast as an unflappable chemistry professor in Horse Feathers (1932). In most of his films, Greig played variations of Hives, notably in the wacked-out 1932 comedy short Jitters the Butler, in which he willingly offers his ample derriere to be kicked at the slightest provocation. In 1940, Greig became a member of the informal stock company of writer/producer Preston Sturges. Sturges brought out untapped comic possibilities in all of his favorite character actors; accordingly, Greig's performances in The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1942) and The Palm Beach Story (1942) are among his best. Fans of Robert Greig's work with Sturges and the Marx Brothers are advised to catch his non-butler roles as the Duke of Weskit in Wheeler and Woolseys Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934) and as the wealthy, gross "protector" of Hedy Lamarr in Algiers (1938).

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

Trivia: In films from 1931, Alan Bridge was always immediately recognizable thanks to his gravel voice, unkempt moustache and sour-persimmon disposition. Bridge spent a lot of time in westerns, playing crooked sheriffs and two-bit political hacks; he showed up in so many Hopalong Cassidy westerns that he was practically a series regular. From 1940's Christmas in July onward, the actor was one of the most ubiquitous members of writer/director Preston Sturges' "stock company." He was at his very best as "The Mister," a vicious chain-gang overseer, in Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, and as the political-machine boss in the director's Hail the Conquering Hero, shining brightly in an extremely lengthy single-take scene with blustery Raymond Walburn. Alan Bridge also essayed amusing characterizations in Sturges' Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946), Unfaithfully Yours (1948, as the house detective) and the director's final American film, The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949).

Trivia: William Haade spent most of his movie career playing the very worst kind of bully--the kind that has the physical training to back up his bullying. His first feature-film assignment was as the arrogant, drunken professional boxer who is knocked out by bellhop Wayne Morris in Kid Galahad (37). In many of his western appearances, Haade was known to temper villainy with an unexpected sense of humor; in one Republic western, he spews forth hilarious one-liners while hacking his victims to death with a knife! William Haade also proved an excellent menace to timorous comedians like Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello; in fact, his last film appearance was in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (55).

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

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: The career of American comic actor Billy Bletcher stretched from the silent era through the late 1960s. He began performing in vaudeville at age 19 and began his screen career at the Vitagraph Studios, Brooklyn in 1913. While there, he sometimes directed John Bunny comedies. He and his wife Arline came to Hollywood in 1917 where he became a stock comic for Mack Sennett's troupe and played in many two-reelers. Bletcher's career didn't really take off until the early 1920s when he teamed up with Billy Gilbert. Together they appeared in a number of Hal Roach two-reelers. Bletcher later appeared as Spanky's father in the "Our Gang" shorts. He also provided voices for Disney cartoon characters and in features such as The Wizard of Oz (as a Munchkin). Bletcher also did voiceovers on television. His last film appearance was in 1969.

Trivia: A leading man for the New York-based Excelsior company in the early 1910s, this supporting actor of many names was born Gordon de Main Wood. Later in his career, DeMain would alternately bill himself as Gordon De Maine, Gordon DeMain, Gordon Wood, G.D. Wood, or simply Bud Wood, but in the early sound era he would invariably play two of the mainstays of low-budget Westerns, either the Boss Villain or the Sheriff. Once in a while, he would emerge far down in the cast list of a Grade-A film, but then merely playing "Aide" (Mata Hari [1932]) or "Man" (The Whole Town's Talking [1935]). DeMain was always more at home on the range, either making life miserable for such stars as Bob Steele and Tom Tyler or helping them out of a scrape or two. DeMain continued in films until the mid-'40s, but in his later years he was mainly just a member of the posse.

Trivia: A former Barnum circus clown, pint-sized Chester Conklin entered movies at Mack Sennett's Keystone studios in 1913. Sporting a huge mustache to hide his youthful appearance, Conklin was usually cast as "A. Walrus." Legend has it that Conklin helped Keystone novice Charlie Chaplin put together his famous Tramp costume; true or not, it is a fact that Chaplin kept Conklin on year-round payroll for his later productions Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). After leaving Keystone, Conklin remained a popular comedian at the Fox and Sunshine Studios. In the late 1920s, he was teamed with W.C. Fields for a brief series of feature films at Paramount Pictures. In talkies, Conklin mostly appeared in bits in features and supporting parts in 2-reelers; he also showed up in such nostalgic retrospectives as Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) and The Perils of Pauline (1947). At his lowest professional ebb, in the 1950s, Conklin made ends meet as a department-store Santa. In and out of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in the 1960s, Conklin fell in love with another patient, 65-year-old June Gunther. The two eloped (she was Chester's fourth wife) and settled in a modest bungalow in Van Nuys. Chester Conklin showed up in a handful of films in the 1960s; his last appearance, playing a character appropriately named Chester, was in 1966's A Big Hand for the Little Lady.