Trivia: Born to a well-to-do Southern family, Joseph Cotten studied at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington D.C., and later sought out theater jobs in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1930, and seven years later joined Orson Welles' progressive Mercury Theatre company, playing leads in such productions as Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday. He briefly left Welles in 1939 to co-star in Katharine Hepburn's Broadway comeback vehicle The Philadelphia Story. Cotten rejoinedWelles in Hollywood in 1940, making his feature-film debut as Jed Leland in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). As a sort of private joke, Jed Leland was a dramatic critic, a profession which Cotten himself had briefly pursued on the Miami Herald in the late '20s. Cotten went on to play the kindly auto mogul Eugene Morgan in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and both acted in and co-wrote Journey Into Fear, the film that Welles was working on when he was summarily fired by RKO. Cotten remained a close friend of Welles until the director's death in 1985; he co-starred with Welles in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and played an unbilled cameo for old times' sake in the Welles-directed Touch of Evil (1958). A firmly established romantic lead by the early '40s, Cotten occasionally stepped outside his established screen image to play murderers (Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt [1943]) and surly drunkards (Under Capricorn [1949]). A longtime contractee of David O. Selznick, Cotten won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance in Selznick's Portrait of Jennie (1948). Cotten's screen career flagged during the 1950s and '60s, though he flourished on television as a guest performer on such anthologies as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fireside Theatre, The Great Adventure, and as host of The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), The Joseph Cotten Show (1956), On Trial (1959), and Hollywood and the Stars (1963). He also appeared in several stage productions, often in the company of his second wife, actress Patricia Medina. In 1987, Cotten published his engagingly candid autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. He died of pneumonia in 1994 at the age of 88.

Trivia: Born into an aristocratic Mexican family, actress Dolores Del Rio was the daughter of a prominent banker. After a convent education, she was married at age 16 to writer Jaime Del Rio, whose name she retained long after the marriage had dissolved. The second cousin of silent film star Ramon Novarro, Del Rio was a regular guest at Hollywood parties; at one of these, director Edwin Carewe, struck by her dazzling beauty, felt she'd be perfect for a role in his upcoming film Joanna (1925). Stardom followed rapidly, with Del Rio achieving top billing in several major silent productions, including What Price Glory? (1927), as the French coquette Charmaine, and The Loves of Carmen (1927), in the title role. Since Del Rio spoke fluent English, the switch-over to sound posed no problem for her, though her marked Hispanic accent limited her range of roles. Most often, she was cast on the basis of beauty first, talent second; she is at her most alluring in 1932's Bird of Paradise, in which she appears all but nude in some sequences. Del Rio looked equally fetching when fully clothed, as in the title role of Madame Du Barry (1934). Upon the breakup of her second marriage to art director Cedric Gibbons, the graceful, intelligent Del Rio became the most eligible "bachelor girl" in Hollywood; one of her most ardent suitors was Orson Welles, ten years her junior, who cast her in his 1942 RKO production Journey Into Fear. In 1943, Del Rio returned to Mexico to star in films, negotiating a "percentage of profits" deal which increased her already vast fortune. Enormously popular in her native country, Del Rio returned only occasionally to Hollywood, usually at the request of such long-standing industry friends as director John Ford. Her seemingly ageless beauty and milk-smooth complexion was the source of envy and speculation; from all accounts, she used no cosmetic surgery, maintaining her looks principally through a diligent (and self-invented) diet and exercise program. Even as late as 1960, she looked far too young to play Elvis Presley's mother in Flaming Star. Del Rio retired from filmmaking in 1978, choosing to devote her time to managing her financial and real estate holdings, and to her lifelong hobbies of writing and painting.

Trivia: A 1941 RKO radio press book claimed that actress Ruth Warrick first came to New York as the winner of something called the "Miss Jubelesta" contest, carrying a live turkey into Mayor LaGuardia's office. It's a safe bet Warrick, a former radio singer and model, would rather be remembered for her first Hollywood accomplishment, which was certainly no turkey: the role of Emily Monroe Norton, Mrs. Kane number one, in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Much too reserved and aristocratic for standard leading lady roles, Warrick was seen to better advantage in character parts. Since 1970, Ruth Warrick has starred as a snooty, status-conscious doctor's wife on the ABC daytime drama All My Children; Warrick alluded to this long-running character in the title of her 1980 autobiography, The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler.

Trivia: At age three Agnes Moorehead first appeared onstage, and at 11 she made her professional debut in the ballet and chorus of the St. Louis Opera. As a teenager she regularly sang on local radio. She earned a Ph.D. in literature and studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began playing small roles on Broadway in 1928; shortly thereafter she shifted her focus to radio acting, becoming a regular on the radio shows March of Time, Cavalcade of America, and a soap opera series. She toured in vaudeville from 1933-36 with Phil Baker. In 1940 she joined Orson Welles's Mercury Theater Company, giving a great boost to her career. Moorehead debuted onscreen as Kane's mother in Welles' film Citizen Kane (1941). Her second film was Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination; ultimately she was nominated for an Oscars five times, never winning. In films, she tended to play authoritarian, neurotic, puritanical, or soured women, but also played a wide range of other roles, and was last onscreen in 1972. In the '50s she toured the U.S. with a stellar cast giving dramatic readings of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell. In 1954 she began touring in The Fabulous Redhead, a one-woman show she eventually took to over 200 cities across the world. She was also active on TV; later audiences remember her best as the witch Endora, Elizabeth Montgomery's mother, in the '60s TV sitcom Bewitched. Moorehead's last professional engagement was in the Broadway musical Gigi. She died of lung cancer in 1974. She was married to actors John Griffith Lee (1930-52) and Robert Gist (1953-58).

Trivia: Manhattan-born Everett Sloane first set foot on-stage at age seven, in the role of Puck in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At 18, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to join a stock company. Poor reviews convinced Sloane that his future did not lie in the theater, so he secured a job as a Wall Street runner -- only to return to acting after the 1929 crash. He went into radio, playing anything and everything (he was the standard voice of Adolph Hitler on "The March of Time"), then made his Broadway bow with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. Welles brought Sloane to Hollywood in 1940 to play the wizened Mr. Bernstein in the cinema classic Citizen Kane; Sloane remained a Mercury associate until 1947, when he played the crippled attorney Bannister in Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Outside of the Welles orbit, Sloane was seen in the 1944 Broadway hit A Bell for Adano, and starred as the ruthless business executive in both the television and screen versions of Rod Serling's Patterns. Sloane's additional TV work included a 39-week starring stint on the syndicated series Official Detective, the voice of Dick Tracy in a batch of 130 cartoons produced in 1960 and 1961, and several episodic-TV directorial credits. Reportedly depressed over his encroaching blindness, Everett Sloane committed suicide at the age of 55.

Trivia: In his few major film appearances, American actor Edgar Barrier exuded a professorial air, which he frequently augmented by sporting a well-groomed beard. Barrier's best acting opportunities came via his association with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, both in its Broadway incarnation and its radio spinoff. Welles used Barrier to good advantage in his film productions of Journey Into Fear and MacBeth; in the latter picture, Barrier plays the unfortunate Banquo, whose materialization as a ghost is one of the film's highlights. Outside of the Welles orbit, Barrier worked steadily on radio, notably in the spooky confections of Lights Out maven Arch Oboler. In 1945, Barrier starred in the radio detective weekly The Saint. Many of Edgar Barrier's film roles were brief, and often uncredited (War of the Worlds [1953], On the Double [1961] etc.); his most memorable film appearance was as the mad sportsman Count Zaroff, enthusiastic hunter of human beings, in A Game of Death (1945).

Trivia: The son of German pianist Artur Schnabel, Stefan Schnabel prepared for a theatrical career at the University of Bonn and London's Old Vic. Schnabel made his Broadway debut in 1937 as a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, playing meaty roles in such ambitious Mercury efforts as Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday. He made his first film appearance in the Welles-produced Journey Into Fear (1942), and thereafter was seen in roles calling for Teutonic bombast. Back on Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s, Schnabel essayed one of his best-loved roles: Papa Yoder in the musical Plain and Fancy. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, he was seen in a number of off-Broadway productions, including Tango and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. On television, Stefan Schnabel spent several years in the role of Dr. Steven Jackson in the CBS daytimer The Guiding Light, and in 1959 played "Firebeard" in the syndicated adventure weekly Tales of the Vikings.

Trivia: Actor Hans Conried, whose public image was that of a Shakespearean ham, was born not in England but in Baltimore. Scrounging for work during the Depression era, Conried offered himself to a radio station as a performer, and at 18 became a professional. One of his earliest jobs was appearing in uncut radio adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, and before he was twenty he was able to recite many of the Bard's lengthier passages from memory. After several years in summer stock and radio, Conried made his screen debut in Dramatic School (1938). Conried's saturnine features and reedy voice made him indispensable for small character roles, and until he entered the service in World War II the actor fluctuated between movies and radio. Given a choice, Conried would have preferred to stay in radio, where the money was better and the parts larger, but despite the obscurity of much of his film work he managed to sandwich in memorable small (often unbilled) appearances in such "A" pictures as Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), The Big Street (1942) and Passage to Marseilles (1944). While in the army, Conried was put in charge of Radio Tokyo in postwar Japan, where he began his lifelong hobby of collecting rare Japanese artifacts; the actor also had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of American Indian lore. As big-time radio began to fade during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Conried concentrated more on film work. He was awarded the starring role in the bizarre musical 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1952), written by his friend Dr. Seuss; unfortunately, the studio, not knowing how to handle this unorthodox project, cut it to ribbons, and the film was a failure. Later he was engaged for a choice co-starring role in Cole Porter's Broadway musical Can Can; in addition, he became a favorite guest on Jack Paar's late-night TV program, popped up frequently and hilariously as a game show contestant, and in 1957 made the first of many special-guest visits as the imperishable Uncle Tonoose on The Danny Thomas Show. Cartoon producers also relied heavily on Conried, notably Walt Disney, who cast the actor as the voice of Captain Hook in the animated feature Peter Pan, and Jay Ward, for whom Conried played Snidely Whiplash on The Bullwinkle Show and Uncle Waldo on Hoppity Hooper. In 1963, Jay Ward hired Conried as the supercilious host of the syndicated comedy series Fractured Flickers. Conried cut down on his TV show appearances in the 1970s and 1980s, preferring to devote his time to stage work; for well over a year, the actor co-starred with Phil Leeds in an Atlanta production of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. Just before his death, Conried was cast in a recurring role on the "realistic" drama series American Dream, where he was permitted to drop the high-tone Shakespearean veneer in the gruff, down-to-earth part of Jewish oldster Abe Berlowitz.

Trivia: Broadway luminary Richard Bennett made his first acting appearance in an 1891 Chicago production of The Limited Mail. Later that year, he made his New York bow appearing in the same play. With his classically chiseled features and athletic build, Bennett rapidly achieved "matinee idol" status, continuing to portray virile leading men into his fifties. He had a flair for foreign dialects, which he demonstrated to maximum effects in such plays as They Knew What They Wanted (1924) and such films as Arrowsmith (1931). While he regarded Hollywood as a "madhouse," Bennett occasionally functioned as technical advisor in silent-film adaptations of his stage plays, and was sporadically lured before the cameras in the talkie era, most memorably as the dying millionaire in If I Had a Million (1932) and the crusty Amberson paterfamilias in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Richard Bennett was the father of actresses Constance, Joan and Barbara Bennett, and the grandfather of talk show host Morton Downey Jr.

Trivia: The most well-known filmmaker to the public this side of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles was the classic example of the genius that burns bright early in life only to flicker and fade later. The prodigy son of an inventor and a musician, Welles was well-versed in literature at an early age -- particularly Shakespeare -- and, through the unusual circumstances of his life (both of his parents died by the time he was 12, leaving him with an inheritance and not many family obligations), he found himself free to indulge his numerous interests, which included the theater. He was educated in private schools and traveled the world, even wangling stage work with Dublin's Gate Players while still a teenager. He found it tougher to get onto the Broadway stage, and traveled the world some more before returning to get a job with Katharine Cornell, with help from such notables as Alexander Woollcott and Thornton Wilder. He later became associated with John Houseman, and, together, the two of them set the New York theater afire during the 1930s with their work for the Federal Theatre Project, which led to the founding of the Mercury Theater. The Mercury Players later graduated to radio, and their 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast made history when thousands of listeners mistakenly believed aliens had landed on Earth. In 1940, Hollywood beckoned, and Welles and company went west to RKO, where he began his short-lived reign over the film world. Working as director, producer, co-author, and star, he made Citizen Kane (1941), the most discussed -- if not the greatest -- American movie ever created. It made striking use of techniques that had been largely forgotten or overlooked by other American filmmakers, and Welles was greatly assisted on the movie by veteran cinematographer Gregg Toland. Kane, himself, attracted more attention than viewers, especially outside the major cities, and a boycott of advertising and coverage by the newspapers belonging to William Randolph Hearst -- who had served as a major model for the central figure of Charles Foster Kane -- ensured that it racked up a modest loss. Welles second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, ran into major budget and production problems, which brought down the studio management that had hired him. With the director overextending himself, the situation between Welles and RKO deteriorated. Faced with a major loss on a picture that was considered unreleasable, RKO gained control of the film and ordered it recut without Welles' consent or input, and the result is considered a flawed masterpiece. However, it was a loss for RKO, and soon after the Mercury Players were evicted from RKO, word quickly spread through the film community of Welles' difficulty in adhering to shooting schedules and budgets. His career never fully recovered, and, although he directed other films in Hollywood, including The Stranger (1946), Macbeth (1948), and Touch of Evil (1958), he was never again given full control over his movies. European producers, however, were more forgiving, and with some effort and help from a few well-placed friends, Welles was able to make such pictures as Othello (1952), Chimes at Midnight (1967), and The Trial (1963). He also remained highly visible as a personality -- he discovered in the mid-'40s that, for 100,000 dollars a shot, he could make money as an actor to help finance his films and his fairly expensive lifestyle, which resulted in Welles' appearances in The Third Man (1949), The Roots of Heaven (1958), and Catch-22 (1970), among other pictures. He also made television appearances, did voice-overs and recordings, and occasional commercials until his death in 1985. Despite his lack of commercial success, Welles remains one of the most well-known, discussed, and important directors in the history of motion pictures.

Trivia: Sour-visaged Danish actor Torben Meyer entered films as early as 1913, when he was prominently featured in the Danish super-production Atlantis. Despite his Scandinavian heritage, Meyer was usually typecast in Germanic roles after making his American screen debut in 1933. Many of his parts were fleeting, such as the Amsterdam banker who is offended because "Mister Rick" won't join him for a drink in Casablanca (1942). He was shown to excellent advantage in the films of producer/director Preston Sturges, beginning with Christmas in July (1940) and ending with The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Evidently as a private joke, Sturges nearly always cast Meyer as a character named Schultz, with such conspicuous exceptions as "Dr. Kluck" in The Palm Beach Story (1942). Torben Meyer made his last movie appearance in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), playing one of the German judges on trial for war crimes; Meyer's guilt-ridden inability to explain his actions was one of the film's most powerful moments.

Trivia: A dark-haired actor from Illinois who mostly portrayed "dog heavies," Edward Howard enjoyed a more substantial role in the 1945 Texas Ranger oater Three in the Saddle, attempting to steal Lorraine Miller's ranch. Long in retirement, Howard died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Trivia: A bald, round-faced comedian from the Ukraine, Alex Melesh (born Melesher) made his professional debut in American vaudeville in 1907. Onscreen from 1927, Melesh went on to portray scores of highly agitated foreigners, waiters, bellboys, revolutionists, and others, usually comedic in nature. More often than not unbilled, Melesh's career screen lasted until his death in 1949.

Trivia: Sicilian actor Frank Puglia started his career with a travelling operetta company at age 13. He and his family moved to the US in 1907, where he worked in a laundry until he hooked up with an Italian-language theatrical troupe based in New York. In 1921, Puglia was appearing as Pierre Frochard in a revival of the old theatrical warhorse The Two Orphans when he was spotted by film director D.W. Griffith. Puglia was hired to repeat his role for Griffith's film version of the play, retitled Orphans of the Storm; while Pierre Frochard was slated to die at the end of the film, preview-audience reaction to the death was so negative that Griffith called Puglia back to reshoot his final scenes, allowing him to survive for the fade-out. For the rest of his long film career, Puglia essayed a wide variety of ethnic supporting parts, portraying priests, musicians, diplomats and street peddlers. In 1942's Casablanca, Puglia has a memorable bit as a Morroccan rug merchant who automatically marks down his prices to any friends of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Frank Puglia played a larger and less likable role as a treacherous minion to sultan Kurt Katch in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944); when the film was remade as Sword of Ali Baba in 1965, so much stock footage from the 1944 film was utilized that Puglia was hired to replay his original part.

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

Trivia: European character actor George Sorel made his first American film appearance in 1936. Usually showing up unbilled as gendarmes and maître d's, Sorel was afforded rare screen billing for his one scene and one line as Walter Woolf King's valet in Laurel and Hardy's Swiss Miss (1938). He flourished during WWII thanks to his rather shifty, sinister features, which permitted him to play many a Nazi or collaborator. One of George Sorel's most extensive assignments was in the 1946 Universal serial Lost City of the Jungle; when the serial's principal heavy, Lionel Atwill, died during production, Sorel was called in to double for Atwill in several transitional scenes.

Trivia: Supporting actress Irene Tedrow spent most of her 60-year career on stage, but she also had considerable experience in feature films and on television. Slender and possessing an austere beauty, Tedrow was well suited for the rather prim and moral characters she most often played. After establishing herself on stage in the early '30s, she made her film debut in 1937. She gained fame during the 1940s playing Mrs. Janet Archer in the Meet Corliss Archer film series. She kept the role in the subsequent television series. She played Mrs. Elkins on Dennis the Menace between 1959 and 1963. In 1976, Tedrow earned an Emmy for her performance in Eleanor and Franklin.

Trivia: Born Norman Hoeffer, Norman Foster became a stage actor in 1926 and by the end of the decade was acting in films. He switched to directing in 1936, and helmed six of the eight "Mr. Moto" mysteries starring Peter Lorre. In 1942 he completed (and signed) Orson Welles' stylish thriller Journey Into Fear. He was then made director of the "My Friend Bonito" segment of Welles' Pan-American anthology film It's All True until RKO aborted the project. From his genre work of the next twenty-five years, Foster is most fondly remembered for his westerns Rachel and the Stranger and Navajo, and the crime thriller Woman on the Run. He turned his attention to television in the '60s and in the mid '70s had his final acting role in Welles' as-yet-unreleased Hollywood satire, The Other Side of the Wind.