Trivia: The quintessential tough guy, Humphrey Bogart remains one of Hollywood's most enduring legends and one of the most beloved stars of all time. While a major celebrity during his own lifetime, Bogart's appeal has grown almost exponentially in the years following his death, and his inimitable onscreen persona -- hard-bitten, cynical, and enigmatic -- continues to cast a monumental shadow over the motion picture landscape. Sensitive yet masculine, cavalier yet heroic, his ambiguities and contradictions combined to create a larger-than-life image which remains the archetype of the contemporary antihero. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born December 25, 1899, in New York City. Upon expulsion from Andover, Massachusetts' Phillips Academy, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a ship's gunner. While roughhousing on the vessel's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, a splinter becoming lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became among his most distinctive onscreen qualities. (For years his injuries were attributed to wounds suffered in battle, although the splinter story is now more commonly accepted.) After the war, Bogart returned to New York to accept a position on Broadway as a theatrical manager; beginning in 1920, he also started appearing onstage, but earned little notice within the performing community. In the late '20s, Bogart followed a few actor friends who had decided to relocate to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance opposite Helen Hayes in the 1928 short The Dancing Town, followed by the 1930 feature Up the River, which cast him as a hard-bitten prisoner. Warner Bros. soon signed him to a 550-dollars-a-week contract, and over the next five years he appeared in dozens of motion pictures, emerging as the perfect heavy in films like 1936's The Petrified Forest, 1937's Dead End, and 1939's The Roaring Twenties. The 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory, on the other hand, offered Bogart the opportunity to break out of his gangster stereotype, and he delivered with a strong performance indicative of his true range and depth as a performer. The year 1941 proved to be Bogart's breakthrough year, as his recent success brought him to the attention of Raoul Walsh for the acclaimed High Sierra. He was then recruited by first-time director John Huston, who cast him in the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; as gumshoe Sam Spade, Bogart enjoyed one of his most legendary roles, achieving true stardom and establishing the archetype for all hardboiled heroes to follow. A year later he accepted a lead in Michael Curtiz's romantic drama Casablanca. The end result was one of the most beloved films in the Hollywood canon, garnering Bogart his first Academy Award nomination as well as an Oscar win in the Best Picture category. Bogart then teamed with director Howard Hawks for his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, appearing for the first time opposite actress Lauren Bacall. Their onscreen chemistry was electric, and by the time they reunited two years later in Hawks' masterful film noir The Big Sleep, they had also married in real life. Subsequent pairings in 1947's Dark Passage and 1948's Key Largo cemented the Bogey and Bacall pairing as one of the screen's most legendary romances. His other key relationship remained his frequent collaboration with Huston, who helmed 1948's superb The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In Huston, Bogart found a director sympathetic to his tough-as-nails persona who was also capable of subverting that image. He often cast the actor against type, to stunning effect; under Huston's sure hand, he won his lone Oscar in 1951's The African Queen.Bogart's other pivotal director of the period was Nicholas Ray, who helmed 1949's Knock on Any Door and 1950's brilliant In a Lonely Place for the star's production company Santana. After reuniting with Huston in 1953's Beat the Devil, Bogart mounted three wildly different back-to-back 1954 efforts -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tearful The Barefoot Contessa, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina, and Edward Dmytryk's historical drama The Caine Mutiny -- which revealed new, unseen dimensions to his talents. His subsequent work was similarly diffuse, ranging in tone from the grim 1955 thriller The Desperate Hours to the comedy We're No Angels. After completing the 1956 boxing drama The Harder They Fall, Bogart was forced to undergo cancer surgery and died in his sleep on January 14, 1957.

Trivia: Canadian actor Alexander Knox launched his stage career in Britain in 1929; two years later he made his film film, The Ringer. After a successful British stage career, Knox came to America in 1941, where he found steady film work playing learned types. In The Sea Wolf (1941), Knox was the pedantic Weyland, the opponent/doppelganger of brutish sea captain Wolf Larsen (Edward G. Robinson); while in This Above All (1942), Knox lent credibility to his role as clergyman who does but really doesn't condone a clandestine love affair. Knox's most daunting American film assignment was the title role in Wilson (1944), producer Darryl F. Zanuck's budget-busting valentine to the 28th president of the United States. Too healthy and fit to be totally convincing as Woodrow Wilson, Knox nonetheless sustained audience interest in an otherwise ponderous film marathon, and received an Oscar nomination -- which he might have won had not Wilson been one of the most conspicuous failures in Hollywood history. Nonetheless, the film allowed Knox to command star billing for his next few American pictures, including the enjoyable 1949 outing The Judge Steps Out, a light comedy loosely based on the Judge Crater disappearance. In the early 1950s, Knox found himself playing a few villains, at least until Hollywood's doors closed on him during the Blacklist era (that a man who once played a U.S. president should even be suspected of subversive leanings is quite ironic). The actor returned to Britain for choice character roles in such films as The Sleeping Tiger (1954), The Night My Number Came Up (1955) and Oscar Wilde (1957). In 1967, Knox was signed up for a term as a fictional U.S. president in the James Bond extravaganza You Only Live Twice (1967). Active in films until the mid 1980s, Knox also kept busy as a screenwriter and mystery novelist.

Trivia: Czechoslovakian actress Florence Marly played leading roles in the films of her own country, France, and even the occasional Hollywood film.

Trivia: A gangling young Southerner and lead actor in comedies, Courtland played juveniles in the early to mid '40s, then served in World War II; upon his return he played young leads and second leads, generally in action-adventure flicks. After six year of doing native-language films in Germany and Italy, he did a variety of work for Disney in the '50s (starred in the TV series The Saga of Andy Burnett, sang the title song for Old Yeller, did all the male voiceovers for the cartoon Noah and the Ark, and narrated and sang for the TV show The Boy and the Falcon), all of which led to a position as a producer for Disney. In the '60s, Courtland gave up acting to produce for Disney and elsewhere (for an example, he produced the '60s TV show The Flying Nun). He was married at one time to actress Polly Bergen.

Trivia: Tall, muscular Gordon Jones played heroes, villains, comic-relief second bananas, and just about everything in between, in a screen career lasting almost 30 years -- not bad for a fellow who, eight years into that career, admitted to a reporter that he was still learning about acting. Born in 1911, Jones came to movies in his early twenties, not out of any aspirations as an actor but on the basis of his good looks and athletic build. The brawny Iowa-born Jones was well known as a top student athlete and star football guard ("Bull" Jones) at U.C.L.A., and had also played a few seasons of professional football. Jones started doing movie work for the easy money, and got serious about acting when he found that he liked it; he soon began downplaying his football background so that casting agents would take him more seriously. Jones started out playing small roles in Wesley Ruggles' and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Monkey's Paw and Sidney Lanfield's Red Salute, and by 1937, he had moved on to a contract at RKO. His biggest screen role in terms of billing came in 1940, in the Universal serial The Green Hornet, where he portrayed publisher Britt Reid, the alter ego of the masked hero of the title; Jones also played the Hornet, but when he was in that guise, he was redubbed with the voice of the era's more familiar radio Green Hornet, Al Hodge. Jones had gained some stage experience, particularly in comedy, during the late '30s, and this stood him in good stead when he auditioned for a role in Max Gordon's Broadway adaptation My Sister Eileen while on a visit to New York; the "rambling wreck from Georgia Tech" (billed as the Wreck in the original program) was the role of a lifetime, giving Jones the chance to play exactly what he was, a lovable big lug. He was good enough in the part to repeat it in Alexander Hall's 1942 movie version, produced by Columbia Pictures. Jones wasn't able to follow up on his success in the film, however, due to the outbreak of the Second World War. The actor held a reserve commission in the army and he was called into the service very soon after finishing work on the movie. In contrast to some actors, however (such as Ronald Reagan, who felt war service had damaged his career and resented it deeply), Jones never complained and, indeed, was very active for the next 20 years of his life in encouraging college students to consider the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). One of his other key roles during 1942 was as Alabama Smith, John Carroll's slightly dim-witted but good-natured sidekick, in Flying Tigers (1943), a John Wayne-starring vehicle that was one of the most popular action films of the war. This picture began Jones' 20-year onscreen association with Wayne, who was also (perhaps not coincidentally) a former football player from U.C.L.A. After resuming his acting career in the late '40s, Jones appeared in prominent roles in the John Wayne features Big Jim McLain and Island in the Sky. By the end of the 1940s, Jones had aged into a somewhat beefier screen presence and into very physical character roles. He would no longer have been considered a leading man, even in serials, but he had developed a very good, slightly over-the-top comic villain persona, strongly reminiscent of Nat Pendleton, Joseph Sawyer, or William Bendix. All of these attributes meshed well with the work of the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello; Jones' association with the duo began in The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947) with the role of the film's heavy, Jake Frame. During the early '50s, when they began their television series The Abbott & Costello Show, Jones was cast as Mike the cop, the hulking, loud-voiced antagonist to the roly-poly Costello (and, thus, succeeded Pendleton, Sawyer, and Bendix, who had played tough, burly foils to the duo in the movies Buck Privates, Buck Privates Come Home, The Naughty Nineties, and Who Done It). The program was only in production for two seasons, but was rerun regularly into the 1980s and became available on DVD in the 21st century, and, thus, has ensured Jones a permanent place in American popular culture. He remained busy in films and on television throughout the 1950s, in pictures as different as the sci-fi chiller The Monster That Challenged the World and the Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh sex comedy The Perfect Furlough, and on series ranging from The Real McCoys to The Rifleman. Jones also appeared in two very successful Disney movies during the early '60s, The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, portraying harried school coaches in both pictures. He returned to the John Wayne stock company portraying Douglas, the bureaucrat antagonist to Wayne's G.W. McLintock in the Western comedy McLintock, in the spring of 1963. Jones succumbed to a heart attack on June 20, 1963, five months before the release of that movie. He is remembered, however, by millions of Abbott and Costello and John Wayne fans, and also for his work in serials, and he is given a special mention -- in connection with The Green Hornet -- on the home page of the town of his birth, Alden, IA.

Trivia: A handsome, dark-haired silent-screen leading man with a widow's peak, Charles Meredith appeared opposite some of the era's great leading ladies, including Marguerite Clark, Blanche Sweet, Mary Miles Minter, Katherine MacDonald, and Florence Vidor. Between 1924 and 1947, Meredith concentrated on the legitimate stage, then returned to film as a distinguished character actor, playing the judge in Joan Crawford's Daisy Kenyon (1947), the High Priest in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), and an admiral in Submarine Command (1952). Continuing well into the television era, the veteran actor had continuing roles in two short-lived series: Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954) and Erle Stanley Garner's Court of Last Resort.

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: American actor Harold Goodwin started performing as a child in Los Angeles community theatre. In 1915 he appeared in his first film, The Little Orphan. Though initially cast as under-fed waifs, Goodwin matured into a strapping, athletic leading man, working in roles of varying sizes and importance at Fox, Universal and other studios during the 1920s. He became a close pal and baseball buddy of comedian Buster Keaton while playing the B.M.O.C. villain in Keaton's College (27). Even when Goodwin descended into small character roles in the 1930s, Keaton saw to it that Goodwin was cast in substantial secondary parts in Buster's Educational Studios two-reelers of the 1930s. By 1955, Goodwin had been around Hollywood so long that he was among the film "pioneers" given prominent billing in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops. In between acting assignments, Goodwin functioned as a dialogue director. When a British actor named Harold Goodwin rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, the American Harold Goodwin changed the spelling of his first name to Herold to avoid confusion.

Trivia: Tommy Bond was five years old when he began posing for magazine ads in his native Dallas. Discovered by a talent scout for Hal Roach Studios in 1933, Bond and his grandmother headed to Hollywood where he was immediately put to work in Roach's Our Gang films. After playing a cherubic, tousle-headed kid named Tommy for two seasons, he left the Our Gang series to freelance at other studios, building up a reputation as one of Hollywood's most reliable movie brats. He was brought back into the Our Gang fold in 1937; this time around, he was cast as scowling neighborhood bully Butch, one of the series' most memorable and sharply-defined characters. He continued to play Butch in 1940, by which time Roach had sold Our Gang to MGM. During this period, he also bedeviled such adult comedians as Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, Laurel & Hardy, and Walter Catlett. Despite the nastiness of his movie characters, Bond was well known as one of the nicest and most well-adjusted juvenile actors in the business. His best friend was his onscreen "worst enemy," Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer; in fact, whenever Switzer began misbehaving or cutting up on the set, it was usually Bond who calmed him down. Long after their Our Gang days, Bond and Switzer co-starred in PRC's Gas House Kids films, a ripoff of Monogram's Bowery Boys. Though most of his 1940s roles were bit parts, Bond landed a meaty supporting role as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen in Columbia's Superman serials. Graduating from Los Angeles College in 1951, Bond left acting to work as a property master at L.A. TV station KTTV, a job that later expanded to all the TV outlets owned by KTTV's parent company Metromedia. Long married to a former Miss California, Bond retired in 1990. Still as nice and unassuming as ever, Tommy Bond has become a welcome addition to many a film and nostalgia convention, and has made innumerable personal appearances in connection with his 1993 autobiography, You're Darn Right It's Butch!