Trivia: MGM's resident "perfect gentleman," Canadian-born Walter Pidgeon was the son of a men's furnishing store owner. Young Walter Pidgeon planned to follow his brothers into a military career, but was invalided out of the service after a training accident. Pidgeon moved to Boston in 1919, where he worked as a banker until the death of his first wife. He gave up the world of finance to study singing at the New England Conservatory of Music, then in 1924 joined E.E. Clive's acting company. With the help of his friend Fred Astaire, Pidgeon (using the stage name Walter Verne) was hired as the touring partner of musical comedy star Elsie Janis; this led to his first Broadway appearance in Puzzles of 1925. Pidgeon was signed by film producer Joseph Schenck for a string of silent-film leading-man assignments in 1926, making his talkie debut in Universal's Melody of Love (1928). He starred or co-starred in several First National/Warner Bros. musicals of the early-talkie era, but this stage of his movie career ended when the musical craze petered out in 1931. Deciding to switch professional gears, Pidgeon returned to Broadway in order to establish himself as a dramatic actor. He returned to Hollywood in 1936, spending most of the next two decades at MGM, where he was cast opposite such stellar leading ladies as Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Rosalind Russell, and Hedy Lamarr. His most famous screen teammate was Greer Garson; the sophisticated twosome co-starred in seven films, including the Oscar-winning Mrs. Miniver. In the early '40s, MGM made the most of Pidgeon's popularity by loaning him out to other studios. It was on one of these loanouts to 20th Century Fox that the actor was cast in one of his favorite films, How Green Was My Valley (the 1941 Oscar winner). In 1955, the same year that he starred in the sci-fi favorite Forbidden Planet, Pidgeon hosted his home studio's TV anthology series The MGM Parade. After ending his 20-year association with MGM, Pidgeon returned to Broadway, where he starred in The Happiest Millionaire and Take Me Along. He continued accepting character assignments that intrigued him into the 1970s, notably the brief role of Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl (1968). When asked if he minded that most of his screen and TV assignments were secondary ones in his last two decades, Walter Pidgeon replied that he always strove to follow the advice given to him by Lionel Barrymore: even when your character has nothing to do, do nothing magnificently.

Trivia: Born in Ranelagh, Ireland, near Dublin, Maureen O'Hara was trained at the Abbey Theatre School and appeared on radio as a young girl before making her stage debut with the Abbey Players in the mid-'30s. She went to London in 1938, and made her first important screen appearance that same year in the Charles Laughton/Erich Pommer-produced drama Jamaica Inn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She was brought to Hollywood with Laughton's help and co-starred with him in the celebrated costume drama The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which established O'Hara as a major new leading lady. Although she appeared in dramas such as How Green Was My Valley with Walter Pidgeon, The Fallen Sparrow opposite John Garfield, and This Land Is Mine with Laughton, it was in Hollywood's swashbucklers that O'Hara became most popular and familiar. Beginning with The Black Swan opposite Tyrone Power in 1942, she always seemed to be fighting (or romancing) pirates, especially once Technicolor became standard for such films. Her red hair photographed exceptionally well, and, with her extraordinary good looks, she exuded a robust sexuality that made her one of the most popular actresses of the late '40s and early '50s.O'Hara was also a good sport, willing to play scenes that demanded a lot of her physically, which directors and producers appreciated. The Spanish Main, Sinbad the Sailor, and Against All Flags (the latter starring Errol Flynn) were among her most popular action films of the '40s. During this period, the actress also starred as young Natalie Wood's beautiful, strong-willed mother in the classic holiday fantasy Miracle on 34th Street and as John Wayne's estranged wife in the John Ford cavalry drama Rio Grande. O'Hara became Wayne's most popular leading lady, most notably in Ford's The Quiet Man, but her career was interrupted during the late '50s when she sued the scandal magazine Confidential. It picked up again in 1960, when she did one of her occasional offbeat projects, the satire Our Man in Havana, based on a Graham Greene novel and starring Alec Guinness. O'Hara moved into more distinctly maternal roles during the '60s, playing the mother of Hayley Mills in Disney's popular The Parent Trap. She also starred with Wayne in the comedy Western McLintock!, and with James Stewart in the The Rare Breed, both directed by Andrew V. McLaglen. Following her last film with Wayne, Big Jake, and a 1973 television adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony, O'Hara went into retirement, although returned to the screen in 1991 to play John Candy's overbearing mother in the comedy Only the Lonely, and later appeared in a handful of TV movies. In 2014, she received an Honorary Academy Award, despite having never been nominated for one previously. O'Hara died the following year, at age 95.

Trivia: If Donald Crisp had any peer as an actor, it was probably his fellow Scotsman Finlay Currie, who made a virtual star career (albeit mostly in England) playing the same kind of dour roles that Crisp often essayed -- but even that only overlapped with one aspect of Crisp's career. An Oscar-winning character actor whose career spanned three generations, from the 1910s to the 1960s, Crisp was also unique as a director and, before that, an assistant and colleague to such figures as D.W. Griffith -- and none of those activities even touched upon his most influential role in the movie business. Donald Crisp was born in Abberfeldy, Scotland, in 1880, and was educated at Oxford. He served as a trooper in the 10th Hussars in the Boer War, which allowed him to cross paths with a young Winston Churchill, before emigrating to the United States in 1906. While on the boat coming over, he chanced to sing in a ship's concert and impressed John C. Fisher, an opera impresario, sufficiently to offer him a job with his company as both a member of the chorus and a handyman. It was while touring with the company in the United States and Cuba that Crisp became interested in theater. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he was working as a stage manager for George M. Cohan, and soon after that he met D.W. Griffith, a former stage actor who had developed a yen for making movies; Crisp accompanied the legendary director to Hollywood in 1912. After serving as Griffith's assistant and watching him work, Crisp -- who portrayed General Ulysses S. Grant in The Birth of a Nation -- became a director in his own right. He later told an interviewer that he gave up directing because he wearied of being forced to do favors for studio production chiefs by employing their relatives in his films, so he returned to acting. In between working for Griffith and producers such as William H. Clune, Crisp managed to return to England to serve in army intelligence during the First World War. After returning to Hollywood, he went to work for Adolph Zukor at his Famous Players company in 1919, which was later to become Paramount Pictures; Zukor employed Crisp as an executive, charged with setting up the studio's operations in Europe. He later worked as a director for Douglas Fairbanks Sr. on such movies as Son of Zorro. Crisp's most visible role to the public during the silent era, however, may well have come right after his military service, as the brutal villain in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). With the advent of sound, Crisp moved into acting entirely, and across the 1930s and '40s he essayed a wide range of roles, most memorably as the taciturn but loving father in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) (for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), one of the put-upon crew in Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and Doctor Kenneth in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). Crisp was equally good in lovable or sinister roles; during the same period in which he was playing charming old codgers in National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, he was also memorable as Commander Beach, the tormented presumptive grandfather to Gail Russell's Stella Meredith in Lewis Allen's The Uninvited (1944), who dies at the hands of the vengeful spirit of his own daughter. All of this activity, which included as many as nine movies in a single year, didn't prevent Crisp from contributing to the war effort, once the Second World War came along -- by then, he held the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army reserves. What few people outside of the movie community realized during this period was that, beyond his work as an actor, Crisp was also one of the most influential people in Hollywood, wielding more power than most directors and even more than many producers (most of whom were, in the end, just hired executives). He was one of Hollywood's gatekeepers, one of the responsible adults who worked to make the business side of the industry work while stars of the era paraded their egos and vices before the cameras. Specifically, Crisp's long experience as not only an actor but also as a director and a production and studio executive made him ideal as an advisor to Bank of America -- one of the leading sources of working capital for the movie business (whose life-blood was loans) -- on which movies to make. He was on the bank's advisory board for decades, including a stint as its chairman, and had the ear of its directors, and many of the major movies financed by the bank in the 1930s and '40s got their most important approval from Crisp. He was also, not surprisingly, one of the more well-off members of the acting community, his banker's sobriety and clear-headedness allowing Crisp to make good investments, especially in real estate, across the decades that paid off well for him and his wife of 25 years, screenwriter Jane Murfin. Crisp continued acting right up through 1960 and Walt Disney's Pollyanna (he'd worked for Mary Pickford, who'd played in and produced the silent version of the same story 45 years earlier), mostly because he liked to work. Crisp passed away in 1974 at the ripe old age of 93, one of the most revered and beloved senior members of the acting community.

Trivia: British actor Roddy McDowall's father was an officer in the English merchant marine, and his mother was a would-be actress. When it came time to choose a life's calling, McDowall bowed to his mother's influence. After winning an acting prize in a school play, he was able to secure film work in Britain, beginning at age ten with 1938's Scruffy. He appeared in 16 roles of varying sizes and importance before he and his family were evacuated to the U.S. during the 1940 Battle of Britain. McDowall arrival in Hollywood coincided with the wishes of 20th Century-Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck to create a "new Freddie Bartholomew." He tested for the juvenile lead in Fox's How Green Was My Valley (1941), winning both the role and a long contract. McDowall's first adult acting assignment was as Malcolm in Orson Welles' 1948 film version of Macbeth; shortly afterward, he formed a production company with Macbeth co-star Dan O'Herlihy. McDowall left films for the most part in the 1950s, preferring TV and stage work; among his Broadway credits were No Time for Sergeants, Compulsion, (in which he co-starred with fellow former child star Dean Stockwell) and Lerner and Loewe's Camelot (as Mordred). McDowall won a 1960 Tony Award for his appearance in the short-lived production The Fighting Cock. The actor spent the better part of the early 1960s playing Octavius in the mammoth production Cleopatra, co-starring with longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor. An accomplished photographer, McDowall was honored by having his photos of Taylor and other celebrities frequently published in the leading magazines of the era. He was briefly an advising photographic editor of Harper's Bazaar, and in 1966 published the first of several collections of his camerawork, Double Exposure. McDowall's most frequent assignments between 1968 and 1975 found him in elaborate simian makeup as Cornelius in the Planet of the Apes theatrical films and TV series. Still accepting the occasional guest-star film role and theatrical assignment into the 1990s, McDowall towards the end of his life was most active in the administrative end of show business, serving on the executive boards of the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A lifelong movie collector (a hobby which once nearly got him arrested by the FBI), McDowall has also worked diligently with the National Film Preservation Board. In August, 1998, he was elected president of the Academy Foundation. One of Hollywood's last links to its golden age and much-loved by old and new stars alike -- McDowell was famed for his kindness, generosity and loyalty (friends could tell McDowall any secret and be sure of its safety) -- McDowall's announcement that he was suffering from terminal cancer a few weeks before he died rocked the film community, and many visited the ailing actor in his Studio City home. Shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer, McDowall had provided the voiceover for Disney/Pixar's animated feature A Bug's Life. A few days prior to McDowall's passing, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named its photo archive after him.

Trivia: Born Joanna Winnifrith, Anna Lee was a petite, charming, blond British actress. At age 14 she ran away from home to join a circus. After brief stage experience she began appearing in British films in 1932, playing leads and supporting roles; in 1940 she moved to Hollywood and began making films there. She is best remembered as Bronwyn Morgan, Roddy McDowall's sister-in-law, in How Green was My Valley (1941). Rarely onscreen after the late '60s, she had a regular role as Lila Quartermaine on the TV soap opera General Hospital. She married and divorced director Robert Stevenson. She was the widow of novelist/playwright/poet Robert Nathan and the mother of actors Jeffrey Byron and Venetia Stevenson.

Trivia: Born to a middle-class Irish family and educated at the Marlborough Street Training College, 19-year-old Sara Allgood joined the Irish National Theatre Society, obtaining her first speaking role in a 1903 production of W.B. Yeats' The King's Threshold. She became a member of Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1904; within a few years she was lauded as Ireland's foremost actress. While touring Australia in 1918, she made her film bow in Just Peggy. She didn't like the experience, and it would be eleven years before she would face the cameras again, this time in the role of Anna Ondra's mother in Blackmail (1929), Alfred Hitchcock's (and the British film industry's) first talkie. One year later, Hitchcock cast Sara in the demanding title role in the cinematic adaptation of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, a role she had created on stage with the Abbey Players in 1924. After a decade of worthwhile stage assignments and forgettable film roles, Sara came to Hollywood in 1940, where she was cast by John Ford in a strong role in the Oscar-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). This led to a long-term contract with 20th Century-Fox, which was financially satisfying but dramatically unrewarding; after years of incisive, commanding stage roles, Sara was compelled to play cliched Irish mothers and servants. Sara Allgood's final screen appearance was in Fox's Cheaper By the Dozen (1950), in which she received prominent billing--and approximately five lines of dialogue.

Trivia: Dublin-born Barry Fitzgerald discounted his family's insistence that he was a descendant of 18th-century Irish patriot William Orr, but he readily admitted to being a childhood acquaintance of poet James Joyce. Educated at Civil Service College, Fitzgerald became a junior executive at the Unemployment Insurance Division, while moonlighting as a supernumerary at Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre. His first speaking role was in a 1915 production; his only line was "'Tis meet it should," which unfortunately emerged as "'Tis sheet it mould." A gust of laughter emanated from the audience, and Fitzgerald became a comedian then and there (at least, that was his story). By 1929, Fitzgerald felt secure enough as an actor to finally quit his day job with Unemployment Insurance; that same year, he briefly roomed with playwright Sean O'Casey, who subsequently wrote The Silver Tassle especially for Fitzgerald. In 1936, Fitzgerald was brought to Hollywood by John Ford to repeat his stage role in Ford's film version of The Plough and the Stars. It was the first of several Ford productions to co-star Fitzgerald; the best of these were How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952). In 1944, Fitzgerald (a lifelong Protestant) was cast as feisty Roman Catholic priest Father Fitzgibbon in Leo McCarey's Going My Way, a role which won him an Academy Award. He spent the rest of his career playing variations on Fitzgibbon, laying on the Irish blarney rather thickly at times. His last film role was as a 110-year-old poacher in the Irish-filmed Broth of A Boy (1959). Barry Fitzgerald was the brother of character actor Arthur Shields, whose resemblance to Barry bordered on the uncanny.

Trivia: Born John Lowe, this tall, aristocratic British leading man often wore tweeds and smoked a pipe in his roles. He served in Gallipoli in World War One, ending up a prisoner of war. First onscreen as an extra (in a dance-party scene) in the German-made Madame Wants No Children (1926), he played leads and second leads in numerous early Hollywood talkies (he was in Paramount's first talkie, The Doctor's Secret [1929]), then became a popular star in '30s British films. When World War Two came to England he returned to Hollywood; there for seven years, he played leads in B-movies and supporting roles in major productions, but never attained the star status he'd enjoyed in Britain. Appeared on Broadway in 1947 and 1950, Loder then returned to England; after several more films he retired to his wife's ranch in Argentina, coming back to the big screen for a film in 1965 and another in 1970. His five wives included actresses Micheline Cheirel (a star in France) and Hedy Lamarr, with whom he costarred in Dishonored Lady (1947), which Lamarr produced. He authored an autobiography, Hollywood Hussar (1977).

Trivia: Born in England of Irish stock, Patric Knowles had a few seasons' stage experience under his belt when he made his simultaneous British and American film debuts in 1936. Settling in Hollywood, Knowles signed with Warner Bros., where he alternated between full leads and stalwart "other man" support. He was often co-starred with Errol Flynn, presumably as "serious" ballast to Flynn's flamboyance. At Universal in the 1940s, Knowles was the studio's resident utility hero, forever providing a shoulder for the terrified heroine to cry on in such horror films as The Wolf Man (1941), The Strange Case of Dr. Rx (1942) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943); he also proved a good-humored foil to the antics of Abbott and Costello (Who Done It? [1942], Hit the Ice [1943]) and Olsen and Johnson (Crazy House [1943]). Free-lancing from 1946 until his retirement in 1973, Knowles could always be counted on for dignity and dependability, never more so than as Lindsey Woolsey, Mame Dennis' erstwhile through-the-years suitor, in Auntie Mame. In his last decades, Patric Knowles continued accepting film and TV character parts, wrote a novel (Even Steven), lectured at colleges, and even guested in a Kellogg's cereal commercial. Years after his retirement, Knowles often volunteered to work for the Motion Picture Country Home.

Trivia: The younger brother of Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields joined Fitzgerald at Dublin's famed Abbey as a Player in 1914, where he directed as well as acted. Though in films fitfully since 1910, Shield's formal movie career didn't begin until he joined several other Abbey veterans in the cast of John Ford's Plough and the Stars (1936). He went on to appear in several other Ford films, generally cast in more introverted roles than those offered his brother. Unlike his sibling, Shields was not confined to Irish parts; he often as not played Americans, and in 1943's Dr. Renault's Secret, he was seen as a French police inspector. Never as prominent a film personality as his brother, Arthur Shields nonetheless remained a dependable second-echelon character player into the 1960s.

Trivia: Ann Todd began her stage career in England in 1928 and broke into the movies three years later. After numerous (if somewhat intermittent) screen roles, she became internationally popular for her performance as a vulnerable pianist in The Seventh Veil (1945). From 1949-1957, she was married to director David Lean, who directed several of her films. Todd joined the London's Old Vic theater company in the '50s and appeared in a number of Shakespeare plays. In the mid-'60s, she began a second career as a maker of documentaries, which she wrote, produced, and directed. She published her autobiography, The Eighth Veil, 1980 and died in 1993.

Trivia: Bespectacled, dignified British stage actor Frederick Worlock came to Hollywood in 1938. During the war years, Worlock played many professorial roles, some benign, some villainous. A semi-regular in Universal's Sherlock Holmes series, he essayed such parts as Geoffrey Musgrave in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943). Active until 1966, Frederick Worlock's final assignments included a voice-over in the Disney cartoon feature 101 Dalmations (1961).

Trivia: Cambridge graduate Richard Fraser cut his acting teeth at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. After accumulating credits on the London stage, he came to Hollywood, where he was signed to a 20th Century Fox contract and appeared in such British-localed films as Man Hunt, A Yank in the R.A.F., and How Green Was My Valley (all 1941). His American film career reached its peak with his performance as James Vane, the vengeful brother of the unfortunate Sybil Vane (Angela Lansbury) in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). Retired from acting in 1949, Richard Fraser returned to England with his then-wife, actress Ann Gillis, spending his last two decades as a successful businessman.

Trivia: Few of the performers in director John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) were as qualified to appear in the film as Rhys Williams. Born in Wales and intimately familiar from childhood with that region's various coal-mining communities, the balding, pug-nosed Williams was brought to Hollywood to work as technical director and dialect coach for Ford's film. The director was so impressed by Williams that he cast the actor in the important role of Welsh prize fighter Dai Bando. Accruing further acting experience in summer stock, Rhys Williams became a full-time Hollywood character player, appearing in such films as Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Inspector General (1949), and Our Man Flint (1966).

Trivia: The very picture of an English gentleman officer, monocle and all, Lionel Pape came to Hollywood in 1935 after a distinguished career on stage and screen in his home country. Usually seen as a member of the horsy set, Pape played Major Allardyce in Shirley Temple's Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Lord Harry Droopy in The Big Broadcast of 1938, Lord Melrose in Raffles (1940), and Babberly in Charlie's Aunt (1941). Pape died at the then newly founded Motion Picture Country House and Hospital.

Trivia: The daughter of actor-manager Samuel Rupert Woods and actress Lillie Roberts, Ethel Griffies began her own stage career at the age of 3. Griffies was 21 when she finally made her London debut in 1899, and 46 when she made her first Broadway appearance in Havoc (1924). Discounting a tentative stab at filmmaking in 1917, she made her movie bow in 1930, repeating her stage role in Old English (1930). Habitually cast as a crotchety old lady with the proverbial golden heart, she alternated between bits and prominently featured roles for the next 35 years. Her larger parts included Grace Poole in both the 1935 and 1944 versions of Jane Eyre, and the vituperous matron who accuses Tippi Hedren of being a harbinger of doom in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Every so often, she'd take a sabbatical from film work to concentrate on the stage; she made her last Broadway appearance in 1967, at which time she was England's oldest working actress. Presumably at the invitation of fellow Briton Arthur Treacher, Ethel Griffies was a frequent guest on TV's Merv Griffin Show in the late 1960s, never failing to bring down the house with her wickedly witty comments on her 80 years in show business.

Trivia: British-born, California-educated Marten Lamont enjoyed a varied career that included a stint as a feature writer for Time, managing editor of Arts & Architecture (1938-1942), writing and producing for NBC and, in 1941, a flying instructor for the Army Air Corps. In between all these endeavors, Lamont found time to appear in scores of Hollywood productions, almost always playing dignified gentlemen from the British Isles: Sir Guy's Squire in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Mr. Denny in Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Yestyn, the mine owner's son in How Green Was My Valley (1944), to name a few. With his comfortable features and Cary Grant-like voice, Lamont was perhaps the least obvious serial star of all time but there he was, starring as Jerry Blake in Republic's Federal Operator 99, a "4-F" hero as ever there was one.

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: Actor James Monks played supporting roles on stage and, occasionally, the screen. His first Broadway appearance was in George Abbott's 1936 production Brother Rat. He made his feature film debut playing Owen Morgan in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941). He appeared in one more film and then focused on his stage career until the mid-'50s, when he retired to become a model. In 1975, he returned to play a small role in The Man Who Would Not Die.

Trivia: Diminutive Scottish stage and screen actress Mary Gordon was seemingly placed on this earth to play care-worn mothers, charwomen and housekeepers. In films from the silent area (watch for her towards the end of the 1928 Joan Crawford feature Our Dancing Daughters), Gordon played roles ranging from silent one-scene bits to full-featured support. She frequently acted with Laurel and Hardy, most prominently as the stern Scots innkeeper Mrs. Bickerdyke in 1935's Bonnie Scotland. Gordon was also a favorite of director John Ford, portraying Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Englishwomen with equal aplomb (and sometimes with the same accent). She was the screen mother of actors as diverse as Jimmy Cagney, Leo Gorcey and Lou Costello; she parodied this grey-haired matriarch image in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer (1945), wherein her tearful court testimony on behalf of her son (Ed Brophy) is accompanied by a live violinist. Mary Gordon is most fondly remembered by film buffs for her recurring role as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films of 1939-46 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a role she carried over to the Holmes radio series of the '40s.

Trivia: A busy child and juvenile actress of the 1930s and 1940s, Ann E. Todd (née Mayfield) added the initial "E" in order not to be confused with British leading lady Ann Todd. It didn't work and the British Miss Todd is often still listed as having appeared in such incongruous fare as Homesteaders of Paradise Valley (1947), an Allan Lane "Red Ryder" Western, and The Lion Hunters (1951), a "Bomba the Jungle Boy" series entry. These credits of course belong to the American Ann Todd who earlier had played Linda Darnell as a child in Blood and Sand (1940), Ceinwen in How Green Was My Valley (1941), Dorothy Lamour as a young girl in Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), and Margie's daughter Joyce in Margie (1946). She retired after the Bomba film.

Trivia: Gertrude Astor did so much work in Hollywood in so many different acting capacities that it's not simple or easy to characterize her career. Born in Lakewood, OH, she joined a stock company at age 13, in the year 1900, and worked on showboats during that era. She played in vaudeville as well, and made her movie debut in 1914 as a contract player at Universal. She was an accomplished rider, which got her a lot of work as a stuntwoman, sometimes in conjunction with a young Maine-born actor named John Ford in pictures directed by the latter's brother, Francis Ford. But Astor soon moved into serious acting roles; a tall, statuesque, angular woman, she frequently towered over the leading men of the era, and was, thus, ideal as a foil in comedies of the 1910s and '20s, playing aristocrats, gold diggers, and the heroine's best friend (had the character of Brenda Starr existed that far back, she'd have been perfect playing Hank O'Hair, her crusty female editor). Astor was the vamp who plants stolen money on Harry Langdon in The Strong Man (1926), Laura La Plante's wisecracking traveling companion in The Cat and the Canary (1927), and the gold digger who got her hooks into Otis Harlan (as well as attracting the attention of fellow sailor Eddie Gribbon) in Dames Ahoy. When talkies came in, Astor's deep, throaty voice assured her steady work in character parts, still mostly in comedy. Her roles weren't huge, but she worked prolifically at Hal Roach studios with such headliners as Laurel and Hardy, in the Our Gang shorts, and especially with Charley Chase, and also worked at Columbia Pictures' short subjects unit. Astor's specialty at this time was outraged dignity; she was forever declaring, "I've never been so embarrassed in all my life!" and stalking out of a slapstick situation, usually with a comedy prop (a balloon, a folding chairs, a cream puff) affixed to her posterior. Astor worked regularly into the early '60s; she was briefly glimpsed as the first murder victim in the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Scarlet Claw (1944) and was among the ranks of dress extras in Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Her longtime friend John Ford also gave her roles in his feature films right into the early '60s, culminating with her appearance in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Gertrude Astor remained alert and quick-witted into her eighties, cheerfully sharing her memories of the glory days of comedy short subjects with fans and film historians. And in a town that can scarcely remember last year's studio presidents, in 1975, when she was 87 years old, Astor was given a party at Universal, where she was honored by a gathering of old friends, including the directors George Cukor, Allan Dwan, and Henry Hathaway. She passed away suddenly and peacefully on the day of her 90th birthday in 1977.

Trivia: Lantern-jawed British actor Dennis Hoey was 25 when he launched his theatrical career. A character player almost from the outset, Hoey was a valuable supporting presence in British films from 1927 through 1936. He came to America in 1941, where he worked steadily in films and in Hollywood-based radio programs until his retirement a decade later. Dennis Hoey is most fondly remembered for his portrayal of the thick-eared Inspector Lestrade in Universal's Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s, a role that he carried over into the Holmes radio series.

Trivia: Veteran American silent-screen actress Ruth Clifford began her career at the tender age of 16, starring for various Universal companies. Britisher Monroe Salisbury, the teenage Clifford's leading man in melodramas such as The Savage (1917), Hungry Eyes (1918), and The Millionaire Pirate (1919), was a paunchy gent no longer in the bloom of youth and sporting an ill-fitting hairpiece. According to the actress, although ever the gentleman, Mr. Salisbury's appearance made love scenes somewhat uneasy. Clifford played Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1924), but overall her career was on the wane when she struck up a lifelong friendship with director John Ford in the late 1920s. Along with another early silent-screen actress, Mae Marsh, Clifford would turn up in about every other Ford film, usually playing pioneer women. In more glamorous surroundings, Clifford and Marsh stole the limelight for a brief moment as aging saloon belles in Three Godfathers (1948) and, away from Ford, Clifford was the studio head's secretary in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950). Her last recorded appearance was in Ford's Two Rode Together in 1961; she was billed merely as "Woman." Although not known for enjoying interviews, Clifford was keenly interested in film history and made appearances in two documentaries on the subject: the 1984 Ulster Television program A Seat in the Stars: The Cinema and Ireland and historian Anthony Slide's ground-breaking The Silent Feminists: America's First Women Directors. In the latter, she discussed the work of Elsie Jane Wilson, Clifford's director on both The Lure of Luxury (1918) and The Game's Up (1919). As old as the century, Ruth Clifford was one of the last remaining leading ladies of the early, silent era when she died at the Motion Picture Country Hospital in Woodland Hills on December 1, 1998.

Trivia: In American films from 1917, British actor Herbert Evans played countless butlers, bobbies, store clerks, porters and pursers. Evans usually differentiated between his high-born and "common" characters through the simple expedient of sporting a monocle. Only a handful of his characters actually had names; among the few that did were Count von Stainz in MGM's Reunion in Vienna (1933) and Seneschal in Warners' The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Towards the end of his career, Herbert Evans exhibited a heretofore untapped skill for farce comedy in a brace of Three Stooges shorts, Who Done It? (1949) and Vagabond Loafers (1949).

Trivia: Said to have been a protégée of Lillian Gish, blonde Pauline Garon had done some chorus work and appeared in vaudeville prior to becoming a stand-in for Lillian's sister Dorothy. She starred opposite Richard Barthelmess in Henry King's beautiful Sonny (1922) and was awarded a contract by Cecil B. DeMille, who publicized her as "The DeMille Blonde." Garon was cute and personable, but Demille found her somewhat lacking in the acting department and was rumored to have made her watch endless screenings of Gloria Swanson films. Something must have rubbed off and Garon was indeed very much à la Swanson in Adam's Rib (1923), lolling about on a tiger skin as Anna Q. Nilsson's wanton daughter and looking extremely fetching while doing so. King Vidor then used her to maximum effect in Wine of Youth (1923), in which she played a sexually experimental, gin-loving debutante who wakes up fully clothed in the shower after an especially wild night on the town. She stole the film outright from its nominal star, Vidor's wife Eleanor Boardman, and earned a 1923 WAMPAS Baby Star title. Unfortunately, her subsequent films had tempting titles but little else and an abusive marriage to actor/director Lowell Sherman basically sealed her fate. By the early '30s, she was playing bit parts and appearing in French language versions of Paramount films. Divorced from Sherman, Garon later married Ross Forrester, the widower of fellow WAMPAS Baby Star Maryon Aye. She died of a brain disorder at California's Patton State Hospital.

Trivia: Bearlike, bushy-eyebrowed British actor Gibson Gowland began his stage career in England, where he was billed as T.E. Gowland. He came to America in the teens, almost immediately securing film work as a minor character actor. Director Erich Von Stroheim admired Gowland's naturalistic acting style, and cast the actor as the lead of two of his films. The better of the two was Greed (1924), in which Gowland etched an unforgettable portrait of an essentially decent man driven to madness and murder by his grasping, money-hungry wife. Gowland continued to play roughneck character parts throughout the silent era, returning to England in the 1930s. By 1940 Gibson Gowland was back in the U.S., where he spent his declining years playing bit roles in such films as The Wolf Man (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942).

Trivia: American actor Ben Hall trafficked in adolescent and juvenile roles from his 1928 film debut in Harold Teen onward. Frequently cast in bucolic roles, Hall was seen as Goofy in Fritz Lang's Fury (1935) and as heroine Anne Shirley's dim-witted brother in John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend (1935). Even when playing a Gallic character in Algiers (1938), Hall was still essentially the country bumpkin. One of Ben Hall's last film credits was Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), in which he was briefly seen as a tremulous barber.

Trivia: It was once said of the versatile Louis Jean Heydt that he played everything except a woman. Born in New Jersey, the blonde, chiseled-featured Heydt attended Worcester Academy and Dartmouth College. He briefly served as a reporter on the New YorkWorld before opting for a stage career. Among his Broadway appearances was the lead in Preston Sturges' Strictly Dishonorable, establishing a long working relationship with Sturges that would extend to the latter's film productions The Great McGinty (1940) and The Great Moment (1942). Heydt's film characters often seemed destined to be killed off before the fourth reel, either because they were hiding something or because they'd just stumbled upon important information that could prove damaging to the villains. He was knocked off in the first three minutes of Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) and was shot full of holes just before revealing an important plot point to Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) (this after an unforgettable interrogation scene in which Heydt is unable to look Bogart straight in the eye). Heydt's many other assignments include the hungry soldier in Gone with the Wind (1939), Mentor Graham in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), a frustrated general practitioner in Tortilla Flat (1941), a squadron leader in Gung Ho (1943) and a loquacious rural family man in Come to the Stable (1949). Our Gang fans will recall Heydt as Bobby Blake's stepfather in the MGM "Gang" shorts Dad For a Day (1939) and All About Hash (1940). A ubiquitous TV actor, Louis Jean Heydt was seen on many anthology series, and as a semi-regular on the 1958 syndicated adventure weekly MacKenzie's Raiders.

Trivia: American actress Mae Marsh was the daughter of an auditor for the Santa Fe railroad - and as such, she and her family moved around quite a bit during Marsh's childhood. After her father died and her stepfather was killed in the San Francisco earthquake, she was taken to Los Angeles by her great aunt, a one-time chorus girl who'd become a New York actress. Marsh followed her aunt's footsteps by securing film work with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith; it was Griffith, the foremost film director of the early silent period, who first spotted potential in young Miss Marsh. The actress got her first big break appearing as a stone-age maiden in Man's Genesis (1911), after Mary Pickford refused to play the part because it called for bare legs. Specializing in dramatic and tragic roles, Marsh appeared in innumerable Griffith-directed short films, reaching a career high point as the Little Sister in the director's Civil War epic, The Birth of A Nation (1915). She made such an impression in this demanding role that famed American poet Vachel Lindsay was moved to write a long, elaborate poem in the actress' honor. Marsh's career went on a downhill slide in the '20s due to poor management and second-rate films, but she managed to score a personal triumph as the long-suffering heroine of the 1931 talkie tear-jerker Over the Hill. She retired to married life, returning sporadically to films - out of boredom - as a bit actress, notably in the big-budget westerns of director John Ford (a longtime Marsh fan). When asked in the '60s why she didn't lobby for larger roles, Mae Marsh replied simply that "I didn't care to get up every morning at five o'clock to be at the studio by seven."

Trivia: With the body of a scarecrow, the contemptuous stare of a house detective, and the voice of an air-raid siren, Irish-born Una O'Connor was one of filmdom's most unforgettable character actresses. Beginning her career with Dublin's Abbey Players and extending her activities to the London's West End and Broadway, O'Connor was cast as the socially conscious housekeeper in Noel Coward's 1932 London production Cavalcade; it was this role which brought her to Hollywood in 1933. She rapidly became a favorite of two prominent directors, James Whale and John Ford, neither of whom were inclined to ask her to tone down her film performances. For Whale, O'Connor screeched her way through two major 1930s horror films, The Invisible Man (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); for Ford, O'Connor played the grieving mother of martyred IRA activist Wallace Ford in The Informer (1935) and Mrs. Grogan in The Plough and the Stars (1936). For those detractors who believe that O'Connor never gave a subtle, controlled performance in her life, refer to Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946), wherein Ms. O'Connor spoke not a single word as the glowering mother of upper-class twit Richard Haydn. Fourteen years after portraying Charles Laughton's overprotective mother in This Land Is Mine (1943), Una O'Connor once more appeared opposite Laughton in 1957's Witness for the Prosecution, playing a hard-of-hearing housekeeper; it was her last screen performance.

Trivia: Irish actor J. M. Kerrigan was a stalwart of Dublin's Abbey Players, though from time to time he'd make the crossing to America to appear in such films as Little Old New York (1923) and Song O' My Heart (1930) (His film debut was 1916's Food of Love). Kerrigan settled in Hollywood permanently in 1935 when he was brought from Ireland with several other Abbey performers to appear in John Ford's The Informer. Kerrigan was given a generous amount of screen time as the barfly who befriends the suddenly wealthy Victor McLaglen, then drops his "pal" like a hot potato when the money runs out. Not all of Kerrigan's subsequent Hollywood performances were this meaty, and in fact the actor did a lot of day-player work, sometimes showing up for only one or two scenes. It was in one of these minor roles that J. M. Kerrigan shone in Gone with the Wind (1939), playing Johnny Gallegher, the seemingly jovial mill owner who whips his convict labor into "cooperation."