Trivia: Born Herbert Alonzo McCallister Jr., he studied acting, dancing, and singing from childhood. At age 13 he began appearing onscreen in extra and bit roles. It was more than five years before he began landing speaking parts. After his portrayal of a shy GI in Stage Door Canteen (1943) he became mildly popular, and he went on to play juvenile leads in a number of films; he usually played gentle, boyish young men from the country. He found it difficult to land adult leads, partly due to the fact that he was only 5'6". In 1953 he retired from the screen. He attempted to continue acting onstage but was unsuccessful. He became an extremely successful real estate agent.

Trivia: One of the young unknown "stars" of the patriotic hodge-podge- musical Stage Door Canteen, blandly handsome William Terry (born William Thienes) had begun his acting career with the famed Pasadena Playhouse. After playing juveniles in such Broadway plays as Straw Hat (1937) and Out of the Frying Pan (1941), he starred in the short subject Private Smith, U.S.A., an entry in the This Is America series. Stage Door Canteen, which also "introduced future B-Western star Sunset Carson and Lon McCallister, was the natural next step, as were roles in such America-at-War entertainment as Gangway for Tomorrow (1943) and Three Little Sisters (1944). Stardom, however, eluded him and he returned to the stage (The Magic Touch, 1947) and also appeared on early television. Terry died at California's Patton State Hospital.

Trivia: The 1938 Tournament of Roses Queen, model Cheryl Walker began her film career at Paramount that same year. After several nondescript roles, Walker briefly changed her name to Sharon Lee and starred in the low-budget exploitationer Secrets of a Model (1939), a fact that tended to be ignored in her later studio publicity. Her best film role was as Eileen, the "GI's ideal" in the all-star Stage Door Canteen (1943). Cheryl Walker retired from moviemaking at the end of the 1940s.

Trivia: At the height of his screen career (1945-1946) American Western star Sunset Carson ranked an impressive eighth in a national B-Western popularity poll, beating out most of the old-timers who had been around since the silent days. Handsome and boasting quite a following among female audience members -- a rarity in the field of action adventures -- Carson, alas, was also perhaps the era's least impressive thespian and his time in the sun proved brief. Born Winifred Maurice Harrison, the future star claimed to have been named "All Around Champion Cowboy of South America" in 1942, but like the earlier Tom Mix, Carson was no stranger to exaggerations. He was billed plain Michael Harrison in his first two films, the all-star Stage Door Canteen (1943) -- in which he figured prominently in the wrap-around story -- and Janie (1944). Signed by genre specialist Republic Pictures, the youngster was given a new moniker, Sunset Carson, and co-starred with former Gene Autry protégé Smiley Burnette in four well-received low-budget Westerns. Despite his lack of acting prowess, Carson looked great on a horse and was awarded his own series, beginning with Sheriff of Cimarron (1945), directed by stunt expert Yakima Canutt. The Sunset Carson vehicles benefited from generally good production values, pretty leading ladies who could also act (Linda Stirling and Peggy Stewart), and such solid character villains as Roy Barcroft and Kenne Duncan. Carson's uneasiness with dialogue, however, did not bode well for longevity and he was summarily fired by company boss Herbert I. Yates after reportedly showing up at a studio function inebriated and with an underage girl on his arm. There would be a very low-budget series released by a company known as Yucca Productions ("Yucca is right!" as Western film historian Don Miller once put it), but Carson was basically a finished man in Hollywood after leaving Republic. He would turn up in a couple of barely released low-budget films -- including the wretched sci-fi opus Alien Outlaw (1985) which also featured his successor at Republic, Lash LaRue -- and was a frequent guest at B-Western fairs. But Carson is today perhaps best remembered as the host of Six Gun Heroes, a series of B-Western revivals broadcast in the early '80s by a South Carolina public television station. A great deal heavier and still having trouble delivering lines, Carson was nevertheless the real McCoy and the show remained successful for years.

Trivia: A model prior to her screen debut in 1934, minor-league dumb blonde comedienne Dorothea Kent usually turned up as the star's squeaky-voiced girlfriend. But unlike the better remembered Marie Wilson or Joyce Compton, Kent was mainly relegated to programmers, often of the poverty row variety. In 1936, she enjoyed a rare starring role -- as an heiress, no less -- in Carnival Queen, a Universal potboiler with Robert Wilcox, but her dumb blonde looks worked against her and she almost immediately returned to supporting roles.

Trivia: A vivacious presence in Educational's two-reel Torchy comedies, blonde Marion Shockley later co-starred as Tim McCoy's leading lady in the serial Heroes of the Flames and Bob Steele's in Near the Trail's End (1931), earning a WAMPAS Baby Star for her troubles the following year. Shockley, however, would make her mark not on the silver screen but in radio, where she was heard for years as Ellery Queen's peppy secretary Nikki. Making her Broadway debut in George M. Cohan's Dear Old Darling, she later was among the guest artists appearing in Stage Door Canteen and starred with husband Bud Collyer on such popular radio soaps as The Guiding Light and The Road of Life.

Trivia: Roman studied acting at the Bishop Lee Dramatic School and worked on stage before becoming a leading lady of Hollywood films in the mid '40s. (She later moved into character roles.) The film for which she first received good reviews and critical attention was Champion (1949). She tended to play determined, strong-willed characters who are cold externally but inwardly passionate. She is best remembered for her starring role in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) opposite Farley Granger. During the rest of the '50s she primarily appeared in routine films. She has also done much TV work, including the series The Long Hot Summer.

Trivia: Australian-born Dame Judith Anderson (she was knighted in 1960) was for nearly 70 years one of the foremost Shakespearian actresses of the stage, playing everything from Lady MacBeth to Portia to Hamlet (yes, Hamlet). In films, she was Cruella DeVil--over and over again. Perhaps this is an oversimplification, but it is true that movies seldom took full advantage of Anderson's versatility and rich speaking voice, opting instead to confine her to unsympathetic roles on the basis of her hard, cruel facial features. She made her first film appearance as an incongrously sexy temptress in 1933's Blood Money; seven years later, she essayed her most famous screen role, the obsessed housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940). For the rest of her career, she was apparently regarded by Hollywood as an alternate for Gale Sondergaard in roles calling for refined truculence. She played the New York society dragon who "keeps" weak-willed Vincent Price in Laura (1944), the sinister wife of tormented farmer Edward G. Robinson in The Red House (1948), the imperious Queen Herodias in Salome (1953) and the wicked stepmother of Jerry Lewis in Cinderfella (1960). Some of Judith Anderson's later film roles allowed her a modicum of audience empathy, notably the aged Sioux Indian matriarch in A Man Called Horse (1970) and the High Priestess of the Vulcans in Star Trek IV: The Search for Spock (1984).

Trivia: Born in Italy, Henry Armetta stowed away on an American-bound boat in 1902. While employed as a pants-presser at New York's Lambs Club, Armetta befriended Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock, who secured Armetta a small role in his stage play A Yankee Consul. A resident of Hollywood from 1923, the hunch-shouldered, mustachioed Armetta gained fame in the 1930s in innumerable roles as excited, gesticulating Italians. Often cast as barbers or restaurateurs, Armetta was so popular that he was frequently awarded with extraneous bit roles that were specially written for him (vide 1933's Lady for a Day). Laurel and Hardy fans will remember Armetta as the flustered innkeeper who is kept awake nights trying to emulate Laurel's "kneesie-earsie-nosie" game in The Devil's Brother (1933). In the late 1930s, Armetta was briefly starred in a series of auto-racing films, bearing titles like Road Demon and Speed to Burn. He also headlined several short-subject series, notably RKO's "Nick and Tony" comedies of the early 1930s. Henry Armetta died of a sudden heart attack shortly after completing his scenes in 20th Century-Fox's A Bell for Adano (1945).

Trivia: A nightclub singer in the early 1930s, Baker was a regular on Jack Benny's radio show and appeared in numerous musicals in the '30s and '40s, including George Marshall's The Goldwyn Follies, the Gilbert and Sullivan adaptation The Mikado, the Marx Brothers comedy At The Circus, and George Sidney's The Harvey Girls.

Trivia: Seductive, whiskey-voiced, one-of-a-kind American leading lady Tallulah Bankhead, the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives William Brockman Bankhead, began her stage career at age 15 after being educated in a convent. She did more stage work plus two silent films, then went to London in 1923 where she became a celebrity while performing brilliantly in a string of plays. The hot-blooded Bankhead preferred to live dangerously and became notorious for her uninhibited behavior (such as taking off her clothes in public), a tendency many have seen as detrimental to the use of her considerable talents. She appeared in two British silents before coming to America in 1930; signed by Paramount, she began her movie career in earnest but remained more a fixture of Broadway, where she shone in plays such as The Little Foxes (for which she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1939, an award she won again in 1942 for The Skin of Our Teeth). Her movie career was spotty and included several box office disasters, perhaps because her extravagant, larger-than-life personality was not done justice on the screen; her more memorable appearances include a celebrated performance in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), for which she was cited by New York Film Critics. Bankhead made only three more films after Lifeboat. She is divorced from actor John Emery. In 1952, she wrote her autobiography, Tallulah.

Trivia: From his late teens to his late 20s, Ralph Bellamy worked with 15 different traveling stock companies, not just as an actor but also as a director, producer, set designer, and prop handler. In 1927 he started his own company, the Ralph Bellamy Players. He debuted on Broadway in 1929, then broke into films in 1931. He went on to play leads in dozens of B-movies; he also played the title role in the "Ellery Queen" series. For his work in The Awful Truth (1937) he received an Oscar nomination, playing the "other man" who loses the girl to the hero; he was soon typecast in this sort of role in sophisticated comedies. After 1945 his film work was highly sporadic as he changed his focus to the stage, going on to play leads in many Broadway productions; for his portrayal of FDR in Sunrise at Campobello (1958) he won a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award. From 1940-60 he served on the State of California Arts Commission. From 1952-64 he was the president of Actors' Equity. In 1986 he was awarded an honorary Oscar "for his unique artistry and his distinguished service to the profession of acting." He authored an autobiography, When the Smoke Hits the Fan (1979).

Trivia: Educated by the Philadelphia and Boston school systems, Helen Broderick became a chorus dancer at age 14, despite protests from her parents. After service as a Ziegfeld beauty, Helen toured in vaudeville with her husband, comedian Lester Crawford. Developing a wry, withering comic style, she became a major Broadway performer in such musicals as The Band Wagon and As Thousands Cheer. Her movie career, which began in 1931 and ended in 1946, included memorable supporting stints in two Astaire-Rogers musicals (Top Hat and Swing Time) and the starring role of spinterish sleuth Hildegarde Withers in Murder on the Bridal Path (1936). Helen Broderick was the mother of Oscar-winning actor Broderick Crawford.

Trivia: A comedienne on vaudeville in pre-World War I days, Ina Claire made only a few films during the silent era (beginning with The Puppet Crown, 1915), instead concentrating on her stage work. She was featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and 1916, appeared for two years as the star of The Gold Diggers, and developed into a Broadway favorite in the '20s. On Broadway she was the "queen of high comedy," a sophisticated blonde with verve and panache. She returned to the screen shortly after the advent of sound in The Awful Truth (1929). Her bubbly comedic style was employed in a handful of other movies in the '30s and '40s; her last appearance was as Dorothy McGuire's courageous, doomed mother in Claudia (1943). She retired from the stage in 1954. She was married to screen idol John Gilbert from 1929-31.

Trivia: The son of American actress Lillian Elliott, Lloyd Corrigan began working in films as a bit actor in the silent era. But Corrigan's heart was in writing and directing during his formative professional years. He was among Raymond Griffith's writing staff for the Civil War comedy Hands Up (1926), and later penned several of Bebe Daniels' Paramount vehicles. Corrigan worked on the scripts of all three of Paramount's "Fu Manchu" films (1929-30) starring Warner Oland; he also directed the last of the series, Daughter of the Dragon (1930). In contrast to his later light-hearted acting roles, Corrigan's tastes ran to mystery and melodrama in most of his directing assignments, as witness Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) and Night Key (1937). In 1938, Corrigan abandoned directing to concentrate on acting. A porcine little man with an open-faced, wide-eyed expression, Corrigan specialized in likable businessmen and befuddled millionaires (especially in Columbia's Boston Blackie series). This quality was often as not used to lead the audience astray in such films as Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), in which the bumbling, seemingly harmless Corrigan would turn out to be a master criminal or murderer. Lloyd Corrigan continued acting in films until the mid '60s; he also was a prolific TV performer, playing continuing roles in the TV sitcoms Happy (1960) and Hank (1965), and showing up on a semi-regular basis as Ned Buntline on the long-running western Wyatt Earp (1955-61).

Trivia: American supporting actress Jane Cowl has appeared in both silent and sound films. She only worked in two silent films and then didn't return to movies until she was much older. Cowl has also co-penned many plays.

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

Trivia: Famed for his ratchety voice and cold-fish stare, William Demarest was an "old pro" even when he was a young pro. He began his stage career at age 13, holding down a variety of colorful jobs (including professional boxer) during the off-season. After years in carnivals and as a vaudeville headliner, Demarest starred in such Broadway long-runners as Earl Carroll's Sketch Book. He was signed with Warner Bros. pictures in 1926, where he was briefly paired with Clyde Cook as a "Mutt and Jeff"-style comedy team. Demarest's late-silent and early-talkie roles varied in size, becoming more consistently substantial in the late 1930s. His specialty during this period was a bone-crushing pratfall, a physical feat he was able to perform into his 60s. While at Paramount in the 1940s, Demarest was a special favorite of writer/director Preston Sturges, who cast Demarest in virtually all his films: The Great McGinty (1940); Christmas in July (1940); The Lady Eve (1941); Sullivan's Travels (1942); The Palm Beach Story (1942); Hail the Conquering Hero (1944); Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), wherein Demarest was at his bombastic best as Officer Kockenlocker; and The Great Moment (1944). For his role as Al Jolson's fictional mentor Steve Martin in The Jolson Story (1946), Demarest was Oscar-nominated (the actor had, incidentally, appeared with Jolie in 1927's The Jazz Singer). Demarest continued appearing in films until 1975, whenever his increasingly heavy TV schedule would allow. Many Demarest fans assumed that his role as Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons (66-72) was his first regular TV work: in truth, Demarest had previously starred in the short-lived 1960 sitcom Love and Marriage.

Trivia: For over 40 years, composer and lyricist Dorothy Fields penned scores of tunes for stage and screen. Her most frequent collaborator was Jimmy McHugh. In 1936, her song "The Way You Look Tonight" from Swing Time won her an Oscar. Fields sometimes wrote librettos with her older brother Herbert, a noted playwright and screenwriter. Some of their better-known collaborations include Mexican Hayride and Annie Get Your Gun. She is the daughter of popular comic Lew Fields, one half of Weber and Fields. Her other brother Joseph also wrote plays and screenplays.

Trivia: From age 13 Gracie Fields worked as an entertainer in music halls; after 20 years in show business she soared to extraordinary popularity in the early '30s as a comedienne and singer, working onstage and debuting onscreen in 1931. For most of the '30s Fields was the top box-office draw and the highest-paid actress in Britain; her spirited, broad comedies were welcome relief from the Depression. Once described as England's Will Rogers, her British humor failed to excite American audiences. Married to actor and director Monty Banks, in 1940 Fields joined him in America after he was declared an alien in Britain (due to his birth in Italy and Italy's participation in the War). In Hollywood she co-starred with Monty Woolley in two successful films, played a supporting role in a third, then retired from the screen in 1945. Gracie Fields was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.

Trivia: Lynn Fontane and her husband Alfred Lunt still rank as one of the most respected acting teams in U.S. theater. They attempted to cross over to films in the '30s and '40s, but were unsuccessful. Fontane was born in Woodford, England.

Trivia: Most famous for her stage and TV work, Arlene Francis had a sporadic screen career as well. An only child, Francis early on adopted an extroverted personality to hide her lack of self-confidence. After attending Finch College in New York City, she decided to give acting a try, accumulating a handful of stage credits before making her screen debut as a "woman of the streets" in the 1932 Universal horror film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). The role called for her to be strung up by her wrists on an embalming rack while clad in a flimsy nightgown -- an image that infuriated her father, who demanded that she head back to New York immediately and stop "demeaning" herself in the movies. She returned to the stage, working with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater and co-starring in such Broadway hits as The Doughgirls in which she stole the show as a garrulous Russian sniper. After playing "herself" in Stage Door Canteen (1943), she once again acted in films in 1948, essaying a character role in All My Sons (1948), her last movie for several years. Plunging headlong into television in 1949, Francis emceed a number of interview, quiz, and human interest programs, and from 1950 until 1967 was a panelist on TV's What's My Line? She also hosted scores of radio programs, wrote several books, and was the peripatetic spokesperson of such charitable causes as the United Cerebral Palsy Fund. At the personal request of director Billy Wilder, she accepted her first screen role in 13 years, playing James Cagney's vitriolic wife in Wilder's One Two Three (1961). Thereafter, she appeared in only two more films, portraying a pregnant middle-ager in Carl Reiner's The Thrill of It All (1963) and a reporter in Wilder's Fedora (1978). In 1946, Arlene Francis married actor Martin Gabel, a union that endured until Gabel's death four decades later.

Trivia: Tall, rotund, popular comedic supporting actor Billy Gilbert is best remembered for his ability to sneeze on cue. The son of opera singers, he was 12 when he started performing. Later, in vaudeville and burlesque, he perfected a suspenseful sneezing routine; this became his trademark as a screen actor (he provided the voice of "Sneezy," one of the Seven Dwarfs, in Disney's feature cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, [1938]). Gilbert appeared in some silent films, then began a busier screen career during the sound era, eventually appearing in some 200 feature films and shorts where he was usually cast in light character roles as comic relief to straight performers and as support for major comedians, notably Laurel and Hardy. He also frequently had accented roles, including Field Marshall Herring in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). In the late '40s, Gilbert directed two Broadway shows; he also wrote a play, Buttrio Square, which was produced in New York in 1952. Billy Gilbert rarely appeared in films after the early '50s.

Trivia: Character actress Lucille Gleason (born Lu Webster) first appeared onscreen in the '30s, often playing gruff characters. She was married to actor James Gleason, with whom she appeared in several films; their son was actor Russell Gleason.

Trivia: Russia-born actress Vera Nemirou got her start on stage as a child. In 1904 she and her family emigrated to New York where she began working in Yiddish theater, and from there she began working in British and U.S. vaudeville. Nemirou started her film career in 1920 when she played a variety of character roles. She was frequently cast as Jewish mothers up through 1946.

Trivia: The daughter of silent comedy film director Ray Grey, who died when she was eight, Virginia Grey debuted onscreen at age 10 as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). She did a few more juvenile roles in silents, then as a teenager she appeared in small roles in talkies before working her way up to leading lady in a number of second features; she also played second leads in a few major productions. Grey went on to a prolific, long-lived screen career over the next three-plus decades; she also worked occasionally on TV and for a time was a regular on the soap opera General Hospital. Though she never married, at one time she was romantically involved with actor Clark Gable, whom she reportedly came close to marrying.

Trivia: Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theater, made most of her infrequent film appearances after an allergy to theater dust forced her to retire from the stage. Her stage career began when she was five; at age nine, she made her first Broadway appearance. By 1918, she was a star. When she married playwright Charles MacArthur in 1928, the couple came to Hollywood briefly, where she won her first Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Other memorable roles during that time included her role as a nurse in A Farewell to Arms (1932) with a very young Gary Cooper, and What Every Woman Knows (1934). Unhappy in Hollywood, she returned to the stage, where she reigned as one of the outstanding American stage actresses. One of her most famous roles was Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina. She won a Tony Award the first year they were presented, in 1947, for Happy Birthday, and another in 1958 for Time Remembered. Throughout the '40s, '50s, '60s and into the '70s, Hayes made numerous television appearances, winning an Emmy as Best Actress in 1952 and starring in the short-lived comic mystery series The Snoop Sisters with Mildred Natwick in 1971. She returned to films in the 1950s, making an impressive showing as the Dowager Empress in Anastasia (1956) and winning another Oscar for her role in Airport (1970). In her later years, she often played kind but mischievous old ladies. Her son is actor James MacArthur. Hayes wrote several memoirs, prompted to write originally by the death of her daughter.

Trivia: "I'm a personality as well as an actress," Katharine Hepburn once declared. "Show me an actress who isn't a personality, and you'll show me a woman who isn't a star." Hepburn's bold, distinctive personality was apparent almost from birth. She inherited from her doctor father and suffragette mother her three most pronounced traits: an open and ever-expanding mind, a healthy body (maintained through constant rigorous exercise), and an inability to tell anything less than the truth. Hepburn was more a personality than an actress when she took the professional plunge after graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1928; her first stage parts were bits, but she always attracted attention with her distinct New England accent and her bony, sturdy frame. The actress' outspokenness lost her more jobs than she received, but, in 1932, she finally scored on Broadway with the starring role in The Warrior's Husband. She didn't want to sign the film contract offered her by RKO, so she made several "impossible" demands concerning salary and choice of scripts. The studios agreed to her terms, and, in 1932, she made her film debut opposite John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement (despite legends to the contrary, the stars got along quite well). Critical reaction to Hepburn's first film set the tone for the next decade: Some thought that she was the freshest and most original actress in Hollywood, while others were irritated by her mannerisms and "artificial" speech patterns. For her third film, Morning Glory (1933), Hepburn won the first of her four Oscars. But despite initial good response to her films, Hepburn lost a lot of popularity during her RKO stay because of her refusal to play the "Hollywood game." She dressed in unfashionable slacks and paraded about without makeup; refused to pose for pinup pictures, give autographs, or grant interviews; and avoided mingling with her co-workers. As stories of her arrogance and self-absorption leaked out, moviegoers responded by staying away from her films. The fact that Hepburn was a thoroughly dedicated professional -- letter-perfect in lines, completely prepared and researched in her roles, the first to arrive to the set each day and the last to leave each evening -- didn't matter in those days, when style superseded substance. Briefly returning to Broadway in 1933's The Lake, Hepburn received devastating reviews from the same critics who found her personality so bracing in The Warrior's Husband. The grosses on her RKO films diminished with each release -- understandably so, since many of them (Break of Hearts [1935], Mary of Scotland [1936]) were not very good. She reclaimed the support of RKO executives after appearing in the moneymaking Alice Adams (1935) -- only to lose it again by insisting upon starring in Sylvia Scarlett (1936), a curious exercise in sexual ambiguity that lost a fortune. Efforts to "humanize" the haughty Hepburn personality in Stage Door (1937) and the delightful Bringing Up Baby (1938) came too late; in 1938, she was deemed "box-office poison" by an influential exhibitor's publication. Hepburn's career might have ended then and there, but she hadn't been raised to be a quitter. She went back to Broadway in 1938 with a part written especially for her in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. Certain of a hit, she bought the film rights to the play; thus, when it ended up a success, she was able to negotiate her way back into Hollywood on her own terms, including her choice of director and co-stars. Produced by MGM in 1940, the film version was a box-office triumph, and Hepburn had beaten the "poison" label. In her next MGM film, Woman of the Year (1942), Hepburn co-starred with Spencer Tracy, a copacetic teaming that endured both professionally and personally until Tracy's death in 1967. After several years of off-and-on films, Hepburn scored another success with 1951's The African Queen, marking her switch from youngish sophisticates to middle-aged character leads. After 1962's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Hepburn withdrew from performing for nearly five years, devoting her attention to her ailing friend and lover Tracy. She made the last of her eight screen appearances with Tracy in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), which also featured her niece Katharine Houghton. Hepburn won her second Oscar for this film, and her third the following year for A Lion in Winter; the fourth was bestowed 13 years later for On Golden Pond (1981). When she came back to Broadway for the 1969 musical Coco, Hepburn proved that the years had not mellowed her; she readily agreed to preface her first speech with a then-shocking profanity, and, during one performance, she abruptly dropped character to chew out an audience member for taking flash pictures. Hepburn made the first of her several television movies in 1975, co-starring with Sir Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins -- and winning an Emmy award, as well. Her last Broadway appearance was in 1976's A Matter of Gravity. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hepburn continued to star on TV and in films, announcing on each occasion that it would be her last performance. She also began writing books and magazine articles, each of them an extension of her personality: self-centered, well-organized, succinct, and brutally frank (especially regarding herself). While she remained a staunch advocate of physical fitness, Hepburn suffered from a genetic condition, a persistent tremor that caused her head to shake -- an affliction she blithely incorporated into her screen characters. In 1994, Warren Beatty coaxed Hepburn out of her latest retirement to appear as his aristocratic grand-aunt in Love Affair. Though appearing frailer than usual, Hepburn was in complete control of herself and her craft, totally dominating her brief scenes. And into her nineties and on the threshold of her tenth decade, Katharine Hepburn remained the consummate personality, actress, and star.On June 29, 2003 Katharine Hepburn died of natural causes in Old Saybrook, Connetticut. She was 96.

Trivia: Hugh Herbert was a stage and vaudeville performer and playwright before coming to Hollywood as a dialogue director in the early talkie era. Signed as an actor at RKO Radio, Herbert played a variety of comic and noncomic roles in films like Hook Line and Sinker (1930), Danger Lights (1931) and Friends and Lovers (1931). His forte turned out to be comedy, as witness his sidesplitting performances as an arm-wrestling prime minister in Million Dollar Legs (1932) and an aphorism-spouting Chinaman in Diplomaniacs (1933). During his long association with Warner Bros. in the mid-1930s, Herbert developed his familiar half-in-the-bag screen persona, complete with fluttering, hand-clapping gestures and his trademarked cries of "woo woo!" and "oh, wunnerful, wunnerful." In the opinion of several film buffs, the quintessential Hugh Herbert performance can be found in the 1936 Warners musical Colleen (1936). At Universal in the 1940s, Herbert starred in a string of "B" comedies, one of which, There's One Born Every Minute (1942), represented the screen debut of Elizabeth Taylor; he was also a stitch as the resourceful detective in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941). From 1943 through 1952, Herbert starred in 23 two-reelers at Columbia Pictures, which were popular at the time but in retrospect represent a low point for the actor. Columbia director Edward Bernds has observed that Herbert considered these shorts beneath his talents, which may account for his listless performance in most of them. Throughout his Columbia stay, Herbert made scattered feature-film appearances, the best of which was in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Hugh Herbert died a of heart attack shortly after completing his final Columbia short, A Gink at the Sink (1952); he was preceded in death by his brother, movie bit player Tom Herbert.

Trivia: Danish actor Jean Hersholt was already a stage and movie veteran when he arrived in the USA in 1913. An apprenticeship as an extra and bit player led to a long and lucrative silent film career in the '20s, during which time Hersholt was firmly entrenched as the slimiest and most monstrous of movie villains. Towards the end of the silent era, Hersholt began playing nicer characters, still taking on the occasional bad guy or "surprise" killer in murder mysteries. Hersholt's screen image was altered permanently in 1936, when he was cast as Dr. Dafoe, the Canadian obstetrician who delivered the celebrated Dionne Quintuplets, in 20th Century-Fox's The Country Doctor. Plans to create a Dr. Dafoe movie series were blocked by the real Dafoe, but Jean Hersholt was anxious to sustain the characterization of a beneficent, lovable small-town medico; thus Dr. Christian -- named for Hersholt's favorite author, Hans Christian Andersen -- was born. The actor created the role of Dr. Christian on radio in 1937, then commenced a series of six low-budget Christian features for RKO Radio in 1939. Extending the ethics and generosity of Dr. Christian into his private life, Hersholt set up the Motion Picture Relief Fund, which provided medical care and a livable income for actors, directors, and other studio employees who were no longer able to care for themselves. While serving as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hersholt was lauded with three Academy Awards for his own charity work, and in 1948, he was knighted by King Christian X of Denmark. In 1956, a TV series based on Dr. Christian was produced by ZIV Studios; appearing on the first episode to bestow his practice upon the new Dr. Christian (MacDonald Carey) was Jean Hersholt, who had valiantly agreed to help launch the series even though he was dying of cancer and had wasted away to only 95 pounds. After the actor's death, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award was set up to honor conspicuous acts of selflessness and kindness in the movie industry.

Trivia: Nature obviously intended for Sam Jaffe to spend much of his screen career playing eccentric scientists and peppery little old men. As a child, Jaffe appeared in Yiddish stage productions with his mother, a prominent actress. He gave up the theater to study engineering at Columbia University, then served for several years as a mathematics teacher in the Bronx. He returned to acting in 1915 and never left, despite efforts by the more rabid communist-hunters of the 1950s to prevent the gently liberal-minded Jaffe from earning a living. Jaffe's now-familiar shock of wild, white hair was first put on view before the cameras in 1934's The Scarlet Empress, in which he played the insane Grand Duke Peter (several critics compared Jaffe's erratic behavior and bizarre appearance to Harpo Marx). Still only in his mid-40s, Jaffe went on to play the centuries-old High Lama in Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). In 1939, he essayed the title character in Gunga Din, though Hollywood protocol dictated that top billing go to Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Jaffe was Oscar-nominated for his performance as Doc, the "brains" in the 1950 crime film The Asphalt Jungle. His resemblance to Albert Einstein (minus the bushy moustache, of course) led to Jaffe being cast in Einsteinlike roles in Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Jaffe was the lifelong best friend of Edward G. Robinson, with whom he appeared in the made-for-TV film The Old Man Who Cried Wolf (1971). TV viewers with long memories will recall Sam Jaffe as snowy-haired father-figure Dr. Zorba on the 1960s TV series Ben Casey, in which Jaffe was co-starred with his second wife, Bettye Ackerman.

Trivia: The screen's premier "comic gangster," Allen Jenkins studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked several years in regional stock companies and on Broadway before talking pictures created a demand for his talents in Hollywood. One of his first films was Blessed Event (1932), in which Jenkins played the role he'd originated in the stage version. This and most subsequent Allen Jenkins films were made at Warner Bros., where the actor made so many pictures that he was sometimes referred to as "the fifth Warner Brother." As outspoken and pugnacious off screen as on, Jenkins was a member in good standing of Hollywood's "Irish Mafia," a rotating band of Hibernian actors (including James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Matt McHugh and Jimmy Gleason) who palled around incessantly. Popular but undisciplined and profligate with his money, Jenkins was reduced to "B" films by the 1940s and 1950s, including occasional appearances in RKO's Falcon films and the Bowery Boys epics at Monogram; still, he was as game as ever, and capable of taking any sort of physical punishment meted out to his characters. TV offered several opportunities for Jenkins in the 1950s and 1960s, notably his supporting role on 1956's Hey Jeannie, a sitcom starring Scottish songstress Jeannie Carson, and 30 weeks' worth of voice-over work as Officer Dibble on the 1961 animated series Top Cat. Going the dinner theater and summer stock route in the 1960s, Jenkins was as wiry as ever onstage, but his eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he had to memorize where the furniture was set. Making ends meet between acting jobs, Jenkins took on work as varied as tool-and-die making for Douglas Aircraft and selling cars for a Santa Monica dealer. Asked in 1965 how he felt about "moonlighting", Jenkins (who in his heyday had commanded $4000 per week) growled, "I go where the work is and do what the work is! Moonlighting's a fact. The rest is for the birds." Towards the end of his life, Jenkins was hired for cameo roles by directors who fondly remembered the frail but still feisty actor from his glory days; one of Jenkins' last appearances was as a telegrapher in the final scene of Billy Wilder's The Front Page (1974).

Trivia: His father was a playwright and stage producer. At age nine he began singing professionally; two years later he teamed up with Eddie Cantor in vaudeville. Over the next decade or so he established himself as a major entertainer and songwriter in nightclubs and on Broadway. Jessel appeared sporadically onscreen; his only moderately busy period as a film actor was 1926-30. In 1945 he began producing musical films for Fox. He was known for his charity work, traveling widely and giving lectures and performances to raise funds for various causes; for such activities, in 1969 he was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a special Oscar. Jessel often entertained U.S. troops overseas. For a time he was married to actress Norma Talmadge. He authored two volumes of memoirs, So Help Me (1943) and This Way, Miss (1955).

Trivia: Educated at California's Harvard Military academy and USC, Roscoe Karns was acting from age 15 with Marjorie Rambeau's stock company. By 1922, he was playing leads at LA's Morosco theatre, which led to film work at the Christie comedy studios. He showed up in several silent features, including the historic part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927) and the very first Academy Award winner, Wings (1927). In the early talkie era, Karns returned to the stage, then made a movie comeback playing fast-lipped reporters and press agents, most often at Columbia studios. He was awarded strong supporting roles in such Columbias as It Happened One Night (1934) ("Shapely's my name, and shapely's the way I like 'em"), Twentieth Century (1934) (working with his idol, John Barrymore) and His Girl Friday (1939); he also starred in a brace of Columbia 2-reelers, Black Eyes and Blues and Half Shot at Sunrise (both 1941). His film assignments dwindling in the late 1940s, Karns wrote a letter to the DuMont TV network, asking if they had any work handy. The result was a five-year starring stint on Rocky King, Detective, one of the most popular weekly series of the early 1950s. Karns' last TV assignment was the role of the crusty Admiral Walter Shafer on the Jackie Cooper sitcom Hennessey (1959-62). Roscoe Karns was the father of actor/recording executive Todd Karns, who starred in TV's first filmed comedy series, Jackson and Jill (1949).

Trivia: American actor Tom Kennedy at first entertained no notions of becoming a performer. An honor student in college, Tom excelled as an athlete; he played football, wrestled, and won the national amateur heavyweight boxing title in 1908. Eschewing a job with the New York City police force for a boxing career, Kennedy didn't have anything to do with movies until he was hired as Douglas Fairbanks Sr.'s trainer in 1915. Shortly afterward, he was hired for small parts at the Keystone Studios and remained primarily a bit actor throughout the silent period. Graduating to supporting roles in talkies, he was often cast as a dumb cop or an easily confused gangster. In 1935, Kennedy achieved star billing by teaming with comedian Monty Collins in a series of 11 Columbia two-reelers. In most of these, notably the hilarious Free Rent (1936), Tom was cast as a lummox whose density caused no end of trouble to the sarcastic Collins. Outside of his short subject work, Tom's most memorable screen appearances occured in Warner Bros' Torchy Blaine B-pictures, in which he was cast as the cretinous, poetry-spouting detective Gahagan. Tom Kennedy stayed active in films into the early '60s, looking and sounding just about the same as he had in the '30s; his most conspicuous screen bits in his last years were in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

Trivia: Erudite, silver-haired stage and screen actor Otto Kruger was a grandnephew of South African president Ohm Kruger. While attending the University of Michigan and Columbia University, Kruger switched his field of interest from music to acting. After several seasons in regional theatre, the 30-year-old Kruger made his Broadway bow in The Natural Law in 1915. That same year, he appeared in his first film, but did not actively pursue moviemaking until the talkie era. Kruger often exploited his respectable, sophisticated veneer to play villainous roles, such as the solid citizen-cum-Nazi ringleader in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). He was equally effective in parts calling for kindness and compassion, notably as Dr. Emil Behring, the real-life Nobel Prize winner, in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. During World War II, Kruger, an ardent home gardener, worked as a food coordinator for the Los Angeles Country Agricultural Department. While appearing in the pre-Broadway tryouts for Advise and Consent in 1960, Kruger suffered the first of several strokes that would eventually render him inactive. Otto Kruger made his last film, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1964; he died 10 years later, on his 89th birthday.

Trivia: Onetime dancer June Lang became a blond movie starlet at Fox Studios at the age of 16. For the first two years of her career, she was billed under her given name of Vlasek; her most memorable role during that period was in the elaborate Fox fantasy Chandu the Magician (1932). After "becoming" June Lang in 1934, she appeared with Laurel and Hardy in Bonnie Scotland (1935) with Warner Baxter and Fredric March in The Road to Glory (1936), and as Shirley Temple's mother in Wee Willie Winkie (1937). She also co-starred with brunette Fox contractee Lynn Bari in Meet the Girls (1938), an abortive attempt to launch a series of "smart girl/dumb girl" comedies. After her marriage to convicted mobster John Rosselli, Lang's career spiraled downward. By 1943, she was playing unbilled bits in films like Flesh and Fantasy (1943) and Up in Arms (1944). June Lang's last film was the PRC quickie Lighthouse (1947).

Trivia: British actress Gertrude Lawrence, a major star of musicals and revues in both Great Britain and on Broadway, only occasionally ventured onto the big screen. In 1968, Julie Andrews played her in the musical biopic Star! (1968).

Trivia: It's probable that no one had ever heard the word "ecdysiast" until Gypsy Rose Lee looked it up. To the world at large, self-proclaimed ecdysiast Lee was a striptease artist -- indeed, the most celebrated of that sorority. Lee's early life (fancifully recounted in her autobiography, which served as the source of the play and film Gypsy) consisted of touring the provinces in a vaudeville act managed by her mother. The star attractions of "Madame Rose's Dancing Daughters" were little Rose Louise Hovick and her younger sister June. When June struck out on her own as June Havoc, Rose Louise reinvented herself as "intellectual stripper" Gypsy Rose Lee, star of Minsky's Burlesque. When Mayor LaGuardia closed all the burlesque houses in New York in 1937, Lee went to Hollywood, where she was billed in her first films as Louise Hovick so as not to arouse the ire of the blue-noses. From 1943 on, her onscreen billing was Gypsy Rose Lee: while she seldom exhibited more than a trim ankle in these later film appearances, she was a welcome comedy-relief presence in such films as Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Screaming Mimi (1958). Lee penned the mystery novel The G-String Murders and the stage play The Naked Genius; these were adapted to film as, respectively, Lady of Burlesque (1943) and Doll Face (1945). In the 1950s and 1960s, the witty, self-mocking Lee was a frequent TV guest star, and on at least two occasions hosted her own talk show. Long after Gypsy Rose Lee's death, film director Otto Preminger revealed that Lee had borne one of his children.

Trivia: One of America's foremost stage actors, Alfred Lunt made his debut with a Boston stock company in 1912. He first set foot on a Broadway stage in 1917, and two years later scored his first significant success as the title character in Clarence. In 1922, he married British actress Lynn Fontanne, and for the next 35 years the team of Lunt and Fontanne reigned supreme along the Great White Way. Their string of stage successes included Amphytrion 38, Idiots' Delight, and The Visit, not to mention their sublime collaborations with actor/playwright Noel Coward (Private Lives, Design for Living). By nature and inclination a stage actor, Lunt made only a handful of film appearances, most of them during the silent era; one of his least characteristic film roles was in D.W. Griffith's Sally of the Sawdust, in which he played third fiddle to Carol Dempster and W.C. Fields. Outside of a guest appearance in 1943's Stage Door Canteen, Lunt and Fontanne appeared together onscreen only once, in a 1931 adaptation of their stage success The Guardsman, for which they both received Academy Award nominations. After his retirement, Alfred Lunt lived the life of a gentleman farmer in Genessee Depot, WI, occasionally phoning a Milwaukee radio talk show to offer gratis gardening tips to other listeners.

Trivia: Bert Lytell was a popular leading man in American movie romances, melodramas, and adventures of the late teens through the late '20s. The New York City-born Lytell made his theatrical debut at age three. Lytell's film career ended with the advent of sound, after which he resumed his career in theater. In 1936, Lytell directed Along Came Love. Later he spent several years as the president of the Actors' Equity. His brother, Wilfred Lytell, was also a silent film actor.

Trivia: Born Adolph Marx (a name he later legally changed to Arthur), New York-native Harpo Marx was the second oldest member of the Marx Brothers comedy team. Dropping out of school in the 2nd grade (literally so -- he was thrown out the window by two older boys), Harpo took odd jobs to help support his family, but his first love was always music. Inheriting a harp from a relative -- hence his nickname -- Marx taught himself how to play, and soon became proficient in several instruments, even though he never learned how to read music. Pressed into service by his stagestruck mother, Harpo joined brothers Groucho and Gummo as part of a vaudeville act called the Four Nightingales. When older brother Chico joined the act, Harpo found that, thanks to the verbosity of Chico and Groucho, his stage role as red-wigged tough kid Patsy Brannigan was being alotted less and less dialogue in each performance. Eventually Harpo stopped talking onstage altogether. Marx would never utter a word while dressed in the top hat and battered raincoat of Harpo; instead, he expressed a wide arrange of emotions through whistles, horn honks and frenetic pantomime, taking time out from his lunatic behavior only when settling down to play his harp. When the Marx Brothers became the toast of Broadway in the '20s, Harpo was befriended by theatre critic Alexander Woollcott, who introduced the wide-eyed comedian to the most brilliant artistic and literary talents of the era. (When asked how he got along so well with such heady company, Harpo always claimed it was because he was the only member of the witty group who kept his mouth shut). Harpo settled down at the age of 48 to marry actress Susan Fleming; thereafter, except for his manic film appearances, he revelled in the life of a loving husband and father, adopting several children and raising them beautifully. While most of his professional work between 1919 and 1949 was done with his brothers, Harpo appeared by himself in the 1925 silent film Too Many Kisses, and spent several weeks filming Androcles and the Lion in 1952 before he was replaced by Alan Young. In 1949, Harpo was supposed to solo in a film comedy titled Love Happy, but the money men wouldn't ante up the budget unless his brothers Groucho and Chico also appeared in the film. Though professionally a "dummy", Harpo was a sharp businessman, instinctively making wise investments that would keep him wealthy for life; and though he was no babe in the woods in terms of life experiences, Harpo was widely regarded as one of the kindest and most even-tempered men in show business. After the Marx Brothers went their separate ways, Harpo continued making TV guest appearances in his traditional wig and costume; the most fondly remembered of these guest stints occured on a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy. He also appeared out of character on the 1960 Jane Wyman Theatre "Silent Panic" -- albeit as a deaf-mute, thereby maintaining his professional silence. In collaboration with Rowland Barber, Harpo Marx hilariously summed up his life in a 1961 autobiography Harpo Speaks, the last sentence of which was a characteristic "Honk! Honk!"

Trivia: Shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1920, Aline MacMahon made her New York debut in The Madras House. She was lavishly praised by the Manhattan critics for her starring turn in the 1926 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon. After appearing in the 1930 Kaufman-Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime, MacMahon was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role in the film version. Production delays allowed her to work elsewhere, thus her screen bow was in Warner Bros.' Five Star Final (1931). She was stuck in a "wisecracking dame" rut until her moving portrayal of philandering silver tycoon Edward G. Robinson's careworn wife in Silver Dollar (1932). In 1944, she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Katharine Hepburn's Chinese mother in Dragon Seed. More than a decade later, MacMahon appeared as James Agee's grandmother in both the stage and screen versions of All the Way Home. Retiring from films in 1963, Aline MacMahon continued performing on stage, joining New York's Lincoln Repertory troupe just after turning 65.

Trivia: Violinist who appeared in Stage Door Canteen (1943).

Trivia: Twenty-two-year-old ex-stenographer and former nightclub singer Ethel Merman achieved overnight superstardom when, in 1930, she first belted out "I Got Rhythm" in the Broadway production of Girl Crazy. Merman's subsequent stage hits included Anything Goes, Red, Hot and Blue, Panama Hattie, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, and Gypsy. While her Living Legend status was secure on the Great White Way, Merman was less fortunate in the movies. She was upstaged by Ed Wynn in Follow the Leader (1930), by Bing Crosby and Burns and Allen in We're Not Dressing (1934), by Eddie Cantor in Kid Millions (1934), and -- most ignominiously -- by the Ritz Brothers in Straight, Place and Show (1938). While she was permitted to repeat her stage roles in the movie versions Anything Goes (1936) and Call Me Madam (1954), she had to endure watching Betty Hutton wail her way through the film adaptations Red, Hot and Blue (1949) and Annie Get Your Gun (1950), and withstand the spectacle of a miscast Rosalind Russell misplaying the part of Mama Rose in the 1963 filmization Gypsy. Perhaps Merman's talents were too big and bombastic for the comparatively intimate medium of films; or perhaps she just didn't photograph well enough to suit the Hollywood higher-ups. Merman's best movie work includes the two Irving Berlin catalogues Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) and There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), and her character role as Milton Berle's behemoth mother-in-law in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Ethel Merman's final film appearance was a cameo in Airplane! (1980): she played the unfortunate Lieutenant Hurwitz, who is confined to the psycho ward because he thinks he's Ethel Merman.

Trivia: The older brother of actor Frank Morgan, Ralph Morgan graduated from Columbia University with a law degree, but chucked the stuffy world of jurisprudence for the more exciting (to him) vocation of journeyman actor. So successful was Morgan in stock and on Broadway that his kid brother, Frank, was encouraged to give the theater a try -- and as a result became even more famous than Ralph. The elder Morgan made his film bow in 1931, playing leading roles in such productions as Strange Interlude (1932) and Rasputin and the Empress (1933) before settling into secondary character parts. It was Morgan's distinction to play more "surprise" killers in more murder mysteries than virtually any other actor in Hollywood (to list the titles of these mysteries would give away the surprise -- if any). Among the actor's off-camera interests were politics and labor relations; he was one of the founders and charter members of the Screen Actors Guild. He was also the first President of the SAG. Ralph Morgan was the father of Claudia Morgan, an actress best known for her portrayal of Nora Charles on the "Thin Man" radio series.

Trivia: Born to a non-theatrical British family, Alan Mowbray was in his later years vague concerning the exact date that he took to the stage. In some accounts, he was touring the provinces before joining the British Navy in World War I; in others, he turned to acting after the war, purportedly because he was broke and had no discernible "practical" skills. No matter when he began, Mowbray climbed relatively quickly to Broadway and London stardom, spending several seasons on the road with the Theater Guild; his favorite stage parts were those conceived by Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. Turning to films in the early talkie era, Mowbray received good notices for his portrayal of George Washington in 1931's Alexander Hamilton (a characterization he'd repeat along more comic lines for the 1945 musical Where Do We Go From Here?). He also had the distinction of appearing with three of the screen's Sherlock Holmeses: Clive Brook (Sherlock Holmes [1932]), Reginald Owen (A Study in Scarlet [1933], in which Mowbray played Lestrade), and Basil Rathbone (Terror by Night [1946]). John Ford fans will remember Mowbray's brace of appearances as alcoholic ham actors in My Darling Clementine (1946) and Wagonmaster (1950). Lovers of film comedies might recall Mowbray's turns as the long-suffering butler in the first two Topper films and as "the Devil Himself" (as he was billed) in the 1942 Hal Roach streamliner The Devil With Hitler. And there was one bona fide romantic lead (in Technicolor yet), opposite Miriam Hopkins in Becky Sharp (1935). Otherwise, Mowbray was shown to best advantage in his many "pompous blowhard" roles, and in his frequent appearances as the "surprise" killer in murder mysteries (Charlie Chan in London, The Case Against Mrs. Ames, Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer: Boris Karloff, and so many others). In his off hours, Mowbray was a member of several acting fraternities, and also of the Royal Geographic Society. One of Alan Mowbray's favorite roles was as the softhearted con man protagonist in the TV series Colonel Humphrey Flack, which ran on the Dumont network in 1953, then as a syndicated series in 1958.

Trivia: Born in 1895 in what was then Austria and what is now Russia, Paul Muni was brought to the U.S. in 1902 by his parents, who were both touring Yiddish-language actors. Muni made his stage debut in 1907, and before reaching his teen years was recruited by Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre, where Muni specialized in playing very old men. He did not perform in English until he was 29; his first Broadway appearance was in 1926's We Americans. Minus the character makeup which distinguished most of his earlier stage appearances, Muni scored a hit as a gangster in the Broadway production Four Walls. He was signed by Fox Studios in 1929, but he was so displeased by his first two films (The Valiant and Seven Faces) that he hurried back to Broadway. In 1931, Muni starred in the original stage production of Counsellor at Law, and also resumed his film career, playing a sister-obsessed Al Capone-type in Scarface. With his still-powerful portrayal of a hunted (and haunted) convict in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Muni launched his long association with Warner Bros. Insisting upon being permitted the broadest range of characterizations possible, Muni alternated between "entertainments" like Dr. Socrates and prestige pictures which allowed him to don makeup and experiment with accents. He is most fondly remembered for his trio of biographies: 1936's The Story of Louis Pasteur (which won Muni his Oscar), 1937's The Life of Emile Zola, and 1939's Juarez. On the set, Muni was almost completely reliant upon the advice and counsel of his wife; if she didn't like a "take," the scene would have to be reshot. Like many highly individual talents, Muni gained a reputation as an eccentric, his character quirks ranging from relaxing between takes by playing his violin to (reportedly) going into a panic whenever he saw someone wearing the color red. Extremely self-involved, Muni often came to the set with his performance totally developed in advance, and did not alter his interpretation no matter what nuances or surprises his fellow actors might throw at him. After a long period of professional disappointments, Muni made a triumphant comeback in the role of the Clarence Darrow-like Henry Drummond in the 1955 Broadway production Inherit the Wind, for which he won the Tony award. After his final film, The Last Angry Man, Paul Muni was forced to curtail his appearances due to encroaching physical infirmities; one of his last performances was in the TV play The Last Clear Chance, wherein Muni was seen sporting a hearing aid through which he was "fed" his dialogue. In addition to his Best Actor win for Pasteur and his four Best Actor nominations for The Valiant, Chain Gang, Zola and The Last Angry Man, Muni received an "unofficial" Best Supporting Actor nomination, as a write-in candidate, for Casablanca helmer Michael Curtiz's 1935 Black Fury; he came in second. Hampered by increasing blindness that kept him out of work, Paul Muni died on August 25, 1967 of a heart ailment, one month shy of his 72nd birthday.

Trivia: The son of American actor/producer/playwright J.C. Nugent, Elliott Nugent began walking in his dad's mocassins from childhood. Elliott appeared with his parents and his sister Ruth in vaudeville, taking time off for his college career at Ohio State University, where he befriended future humorist James Thurber. Making his Broadway debut in the 1921 George S. Kaufman/Marc Connelly play Dulcy, Nugent followed this personal triumph with the 1922 production Kempy, which he co-authored with his father J.C. Ten more Elliott/J.C. Nugent collaborations followed throughout the '20s; Elliott capped the decade by making his film bow in 1929's So This is College, with his old friend Robert Montgomery. In the first few years of talking pictures, Nugent showed up in intriguing juvenile roles: He was wrongly accused of murder in Lon Chaney Sr.'s The Unholy Three (1930), and tooled around Paris ingesting mysterious "controlled substance" pills in The Last Flight (1931). He tired of film acting in the early '30s and decided to concentrate on writing and directing, though he'd occasionally play cameo roles in the films he directed (e.g. Welcome Stranger [1947]). Preferring to make comedies, Nugent became one of Bob Hope's favorite directors, and also guided Danny Kaye through his feature film debut, Up in Arms (1944); he got along less well with "control freak" Harold Lloyd, whom he directed in Professor Beware (1938). On the Broadway stage, Nugent continued his acting career throughout the '30s; he starred in 1940's The Male Animal, which he co-wrote with college chum James Thurber and which he'd direct for the movies in 1942, with Henry Fonda in the lead. Retiring in 1957, Elliott Nugent spent his last years with his wife Norma Lee in their posh Manhattan apartment; in 1965, he wrote a frank, no-holds-barred autobiography, Events Leading Up to the Comedy.

Trivia: Born in India to an Indian mother and an Indo-Irish father, Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson spent an impoverished childhood in the subcontinent, before coming to England in 1928 to pursue an acting career. Because her bi-racial parentage would have been a subject of immense prejudice, Oberon began telling others that she was born to white parents on the Australian island of Tasmania -- a story she would keep up until almost the end of her life. It was Hungarian-born film mogul Alexander Korda who first spotted Oberon's screen potential, and began giving her parts in his pictures, building her up toward stardom with role such as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Although she was an actress of very limited range, Oberon acquitted herself well in movies such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), as Sir Percy Blakeney's wife, and her exotic good looks made her extremely appealing. She was cast opposite Laurence Olivier in the 1938 comedy The Divorce of Lady X, which was shot in Technicolor and showed Oberon off to even better advantage. Seeking to build her up as an international star, Korda sold half of Oberon's contract to Samuel Goldwyn in America, who cast her as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939). She moved to America with the outbreak of war, and also married Korda (1939-1945), but despite some success in That Uncertain Feeling, The Lodger, and A Song to Remember, her star quickly began to fade, and the Korda vehicle Lydia (1941), a slow-moving melodrama that had her aging 50 years, didn't help her career at all. Even a good acting performance in the Hitchcock-like chiller Dark Waters (1944) failed to register with the public. Oberon re-emerged only occasionally after the early '50s, until 1973 when she starred in, produced, and co-edited Interval, a strange romantic drama that costarred her future husband Robert Wolders, that failed to find good reviews or an audience.Oberon would marry three more times, to cinematographer Lucien Ballard in the late forties, to Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliali throughout the 60's, and finally, to actor Robert Wolders from the mid 70's until her death in 1979 at the age of 68.

Trivia: American actor Franklin Pangborn spent most of his theatrical days playing straight dramatic roles, but Hollywood saw things differently. From his debut film Exit Smiling (1926) to his final appearance in The Story of Mankind (1957), Pangborn was relegated to almost nothing but comedy roles. With his prissy voice and floor-walker demeanor, Pangborn was the perfect desk clerk, hotel manager, dressmaker, society secretary, or all-around busybody in well over 100 films. Except for a few supporting appearances in features and a series of Mack Sennett short subjects in the early 1930s, most of Pangborn's pre-1936 appearances were in bits or minor roles, but a brief turn as a snotty society scavenger-hunt scorekeeper in My Man Godfrey (1936) cemented his reputation as a surefire laugh-getter. The actor was a particular favorite of W.C. Fields, who saw to it that Pangborn was prominently cast in Fields' The Bank Dick (1940) (as hapless bank examiner J. Pinkerton Snoopington) and Never Give a Sucker An Even Break (1941). Occasionally, Pangborn longed for more dramatic roles, so to satisfy himself artistically he'd play non-comic parts for Edward Everett Horton's Los Angeles-based Majestic Theatre; Pangborn's appearance in Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero (1942) likewise permitted him a few straight, serious moments. When jobs became scarce in films for highly specialized character actors in the 1950s, Pangborn thrived on television, guesting on a number of comedy shows, including an appearance as a giggling serial-killer in a "Red Skelton Show" comedy sketch. One year before his death, Pangborn eased quietly into TV-trivia books by appearing as guest star (and guest announcer) on Jack Paar's very first "Tonight Show."

Trivia: The daughter of a stage actress, Helen Parrish began appearing in silent films as a child. In the early '30s, she was briefly a member of Hal Roach's Our Gang. Parrish went on to inspire hisses as Deanna Durbin's spiteful nemesis in such films as Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939) and First Love (1939). She began playing adult roles at Universal and RKO in 1940 before her career went into a slow decline at Monogram. For many years the wife of People Are Funny and You Bet Your Life producer John Guedel, Helen Parrish died of cancer at the age of 34. Her older brother was juvenile star-turned-editor-turned-director Robert Parrish.

Trivia: Raft spent his childhood in the tough Hell's Kitchen area of New York, then left home at 13. He went on to be a prizefighter, ballroom dancer, and taxi-driver, meanwhile maintaining close contacts with New York's gangster underworld. He eventually made it to Broadway, then went to Hollywood in the late '20s. At first considered a Valentino-like romantic lead, Raft soon discovered his forte in gangster roles. He was the actor most responsible for creating the '30s cinema image of gangster-as-hero, particularly after his portrayal of coin-flipping Guido Rinaldo in Scarface (1932). He was highly successful for almost two decades, but then bad casting diminished his popularity. By the early '50s he was acting in European films in a vain attempt to regain critical respect, but he was unsuccessful. He starred in the mid-'50s TV series "I Am the Law," a failure that seriously hurt his financial status. In 1959 a Havana casino he owned was closed by the Castro government, further damaging his revenues; meanwhile, he owed a great deal to the U.S. government in back taxes. In the mid '60s he was denied entry into England (where he managed a high-class gambling club) due to his underworld associations. Most of his film appearances after 1960 were cameos. He was portrayed by Ray Danton in the biopic The George Raft Story (1961).

Trivia: Lanny Ross was a popular radio crooner during the 1930s best remembered for singing "Moonlight and Roses." While a law student at Yale, he made his radio debut singing with the university's glee club. Soon afterward, he left school to pursue his career. He then hosted the hit radio program "Show Boat" for NBC and also appeared in a few movie musicals. Later he appeared on both the radio and television versions of Your Hit Parade and then hosted his own television show.

Trivia: It was rare in 1940s Hollywood for actors to portray their real-life exploits, but Selena Royle was also a rare talent, who first became known to most moviegoers portraying herself, and her real-life work on behalf of America's war effort. Though nearly forgotten today, apart from her work in a handful of films, Selena Royle was one of the most respected actresses on the Broadway stage from the 1920s onward, and in Hollywood during the 1940s. The daughter of celebrated playwright Edwin Milton Royle (best remembered as the author of the play The Squaw Man, which was a hit on three separate occasions -- 1914, 1918, 1931 -- for Cecil B. DeMille and helped Samuel Goldwyn get a foothold in the movie business), Selena Royle embarked on a theatrical career over her parents' objections, earning her first professional acting credit playing Guinevere in a play that her father had written, Launcelot and Elaine. Her next few roles were, to her embarrassment, all in works written or produced by friends of her family, but she finally proved her own talent by winning a part (before her name was known to the producers) in the Theater Guild's production of Peer Gynt in 1923, opposite Joseph Schildkraut. Royle distinguished herself in long-running plays such as When Ladies Meet and Days Without End. She tried life in Hollywood in the early '30s, in The Misleading Lady (1932), but she quickly returned to New York where she spent ten more years on-stage, easing into maternal roles with grace and dignity, and also establishing herself on radio as a star of long-running series such as "Hilda Hope, M.D." and "Kate Hopkins." Royle also endeared herself to a generation of her colleagues by organizing the Actor's Dinner Club at the Hotel Woodstock in New York City, as a means of feeding members of her profession who were left out of work during the Great Depression. This experience served Royle in good stead 11 years later, after America's entry into WWII, when she organized the Stage Door Canteen, a Broadway institution that entertained and served millions of free meals to many hundreds of thousands of servicemen who passed through New York on their way to or from the world's battle-fronts. The canteen also brought Royle back into movies, playing herself in Frank Borzage's feature film Stage Door Canteen (1943). She spent the next 11 years in Hollywood, principally in maternal roles, most notably as the mother of the five young, doomed sailors in The Sullivans and Elizabeth Taylor's mother in Courage of Lassie, and in such famous movies of the period as Night and Day (the alleged Cole Porter biographical film) and The Harvey Girls. She remained busy throughout the 1940s and into the early '50s in every kind of movie, from big-budgeted epics such as Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc, small-scale psychological dramas such as Frank Borzage's Moonrise, William Wyler's high-profile literary adaptation The Heiress, and crime dramas such as He Ran All the Way. In 1951, however, her career came to a halt when Royle was denounced in the publication Red Channels as an alleged Communist sympathizer, and subsequently refused to appear before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's investigative committee. She was suddenly "wrong" for every role that she tested for and her screen career was effectively ended -- she sued Red Channels and the American Legion (who had published the Red Channels list of supposed subversives) and mounted a publicity campaign that ended with the Red baiters backing off. Royle had beaten the blacklist, but she only made two more movies, Phil Tucker's ultra-low-budget Robot Monster, and Edgar G. Ulmer's independently made Murder Is My Beat, neither of which was produced on a scale resembling the films of her earlier days. In 1954, seeing that she was no longer wanted or needed in Hollywood, Royle and her second husband, George Renavent, decided to leave the United States. They moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where they lived happily until his death in 1968. During her final 20 years, Royle was a successful author of books about cooking and about Mexico.

Trivia: Direct from the University of Michigan, actress Martha Scott made her first professional appearance with the Globe Theatre troupe, performing abridged versions of Shakespeare at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair. Scott then worked extensively in stock and on radio before making her celebrated Broadway bow as Emily Webb in the original 1938 production of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town. She repeated the role of Emily in the 1940 film version, earning an Oscar nomination despite the fact that the film's tacked-on happy ending rendered Scott's famous "back from the dead" monologue pointless. Scott's subsequent film assignments, notably Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) and One Foot in Heaven (1941), found her portraying characters far older than herself with total credibility. Having previously played both the wife and the sister of Charlton Heston (nine years her junior) on stage and TV, Scott portrayed Heston's mother on the big screen in The Ten Commandments (1955) and Ben-Hur (1959). Her television resumé includes the 1954 anthology Modern Romance, which she hosted, and the roles of Mrs. Patricia Shepard and Margaret Millington in, respectively, Dallas and Secrets of Midland Heights. Her most intriguing TV assignment was the 1987 Murder She Wrote episode "Strangest of Bargains," wherein, with the help of extensive stock footage, Scott, Jeffrey Lynn and Harry Morgan reprised their roles from the 1949 film Strange Bargain. Dabbling in producing in the 1970s, Scott served as co-producer of the 1978 Broadway play First Monday in October, functioning in the same capacity when the play was turned into a film in 1981. Martha Scott was married for many years to musician Mel Powell.

Trivia: Like her father, the distinguished actor Otis Skinner, Cornelia Otis Skinner spent much of her career on the stage. Beginning in 1920, Skinner also made the occasional sojourn onscreen. In 1944, her semi-autobiographical book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay was made into a feature film.

Trivia: One of the most imitated comic actors in Hollywood history, stone-faced Ned Sparks began his career as a boy singer during the 1898 Klondike gold rush. After "gold fever" subsided, Sparks knocked around in tent theatricals, medicine shows, and carnivals, then tried his luck in New York. By the mid-teens, Sparks was firmly established as one of Broadway's premiere comedy actors. He was one of the leaders of the 1918 actor's strike, which led to the formation of Actors Equity, and shortly afterward made his first film appearance. Sparks' most rewarding film work came during the talkie era, when his sourpuss countenance and inimitable nasal bray was seen and heard in picture after picture. So well-established was Sparks as a dour doomsayer that he allegedly was heavily insured by Lloyds of London against the possibility of his ever being photographed with a smile on his face. Ned Sparks retired from films in 1947, at which point he apparently cut off virtually all contact with his friends and associates; when he died ten years later, only seven people attended his funeral.

Trivia: Ethel Waters was raised by her grandmother in the dismal ghettoes of South Philadelphia. She began working as a hotel chambermaid for $4.75 a week, and at age 12 she married the first of three husbands. Her goal at that time was to become a maid/companion to a wealthy white woman; instead, she launched a show-business career at 17, when she entered a local talent contest on a dare. Her exquisite, self-trained singing voice attracted the attention of a black vaudeville team, who offered her $10 weekly to join their act. Billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean in honor of her tall, slender frame, Waters toured the black vaudeville circuit singing such standards-to-be as "St. Louis Blues," and continued to hold on to her chambermaid job just in case the bubble burst. Throughout her singer years, Waters fought against performing "hot" -- i.e. sexually suggestive -- songs, preferring instead to perform religious music. But the audiences preferred "hot," and that's what she gave them during her formative years. Her popularity extended to white audiences by way of the recording of her signature tune "Dinah." In 1927, she starred on Broadway in the all-black musical revue Africana, which she followed in quick succession with Vaudeville, Blackbirds of 1930 and Rhapsody in Black. Booked into the Cotton Club, a Harlem night spot catering to a rich white clientele, Waters caught the eye of Irving Berlin with her rendition of "Stormy Weather." Berlin cast her in his 1933 musical revue As Thousands Cheer, supplying her with the hit tunes "Heat Wave," "Harlem on My Mind" and "Supper Time." The difference between As Thousands Cheer and Waters' earlier New York stage appearances was that, for the first time in Broadway history, a black female entertainer was given equal billing with her white co-stars. After spending several years in touring shows, she returned to Broadway in 1939, making her dramatic, nonsinging debut in Mamba's Daughters. The following year, she starred in the musical Cabin in the Sky, in which she introduced "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe" and "Taking a Chance on Love." Her film career, which began with her performance of "Am I Blue?" in the 1929 Warner Bros. musical On With the Show, was jump-started in 1943 with the movie version of Cabin in the Sky, wherein Waters co-starred with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong. Back in New York, Waters was offered the role of housekeeper Bernice Sadie Brown in Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding, but she turned it down, insisting that her character be rewritten to include "more religion." She later accepted the role of mulatto Jeanne Crain's worldly-wise grandmother in the 1949 film Pinky, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination. The following year, she finally opened on Broadway in Member of the Wedding, her role at last rewritten to her specifications. By the time Waters appeared in the film version of Member of the Wedding, she'd become a law unto herself: when director Fred Zinnemann attempted to instruct Waters in a minor bit of stage business, she raised her head to the skies and bellowed "God is my director!" Evidently God knew His business, since Member earned Waters her second Oscar nomination. By rights, Ethel Waters should have spent her last years treated with the reverence and respect due a person of her accomplishments. Unfortunately, she managed to distance herself from her more militant black colleagues by (a) starring as a maid on the TV series Beulah; (b) aligning herself with such white Establishment types as Billy Graham and Richard M. Nixon; and (c) making such proclamations as "I'm not concerned with civil rights. I'm concerned with God-given rights, and they are available to everyone!" Waters worked only sporadically in her eighth decade. She died at the age of 80, in the Chatsworth, California home of the young couple then caring for her. Though she left behind a comparatively tiny financial estate, the artistic legacy of Ethel Waters includes dozens of 1920s recordings, 10 film appearances, and two autobiographies.

Trivia: He won five gold medals as a swimmer at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics, setting many free-style records. Weissmuller appeared in several sports shorts, then was hired by MGM to play Tarzan onscreen. Beginning in 1932, he starred in 12 "Tarzan" adventures, meanwhile doing almost no other film work. In the late '40s he quit "Tarzan" and began starring in a new series, "Jungle Jim," while occasionally appearing in other films through the mid '50s, after which he retired from acting. He was married six times. His stormy marriage to actress Lupe Velez (1933-38) received much coverage in scandal sheets. He authored an autobiography, Water, World and Weissmuller (1967).

Trivia: A former manicurist, Arleen Whelan had been playing movie bits for nearly a year when she was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1938. Largely confined to programmers and "B"-pictures, Whelan managed to cop the plum role of pioneer wife Hannah Clay in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Her career peaked in the mid-1940s; by the 1950s, she had to make do with Republic westerns, though Young Mr. Lincoln director John Ford did secure her a good part in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Married three times, Arleen Whelan's first husband was Egyptian leading man Alex D'Arcy.

Trivia: The daughter of a Liverpool newspaper editor, British actress Dame May Whitty first stepped on a London stage in 1882. Shortly afterward she was engaged by the St. James Theatre, serving mostly in an understudy capacity. From there, Whitty went into a travelling stock company, finally attaining leading roles. She had been one of the leading lights of the British stage for nearly 25 years when she appeared in her first film, Enoch Arden, in 1914; caring little for the experience, she made only a smattering of silent films thereafter. In 1918, the 53-year-old May Whitty was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in recognition of her above-and-beyond activities performing before the troops in World War I. After a string of 1930s Broadway successes, Whitty went to Hollywood for the same reasons that many of her British contemporaries had previously done so -- the work was easy and the money, fabulous. In keeping with the regality of her name, Whitty was usually cast in high-born roles, sometimes imperious, often warmhearted. In her first talking picture Night Must Fall (1937), she is the foolhardy invalid who falls for the charms of homicidal Robert Montgomery, and as consequence winds up literally losing her head. In Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) she plays the title role, enduring a great deal of physical exertion while never losing her poise and dignity. Whitty was also capable of playing working-class types, such as the dowdy phony psychic in The Thirteenth Chair (1937). She was twice nominated for the Oscar, first for Night Must Fall in 1937, then for Mrs. Miniver in 1942. Despite her advanced age, Whitty became extremely active on the Hollywood social circuit in the 1940s--at least for the benefit of the newsreel photographers. Whitty died at the age of 82, shortly after completing her scenes for Columbia's The Sign of the Ram (1948). She was the wife of London producer Ben Webster, and the mother of actress/playwright Margaret Webster, who wrote a 1969 biography of Whitty, The Same Only Different.

Trivia: Born Isaiah Edward Leopold, Wynn ran away from home at 15 to work as a utility boy for a stage company, with which he also acted. The company failed and he returned home. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York, soon becoming a vaudeville comic headliner. In 1914, he began appearing with the Ziegfeld Follies, billed as the Perfect Fool; meanwhile, he got into a widely publicized feud with another Ziegfeld star, W.C. Fields. After organizing an actors' strike in 1919, he was boycotted by the Shuberts. At the height of his popularity as a Broadway comic star, he got around the boycott by writing and producing his own shows, which were both critical and popular successes. Having appeared in a few films, in the '30s he increased his popularity on radio as the Texaco Fire Chief. At the end of the '30s, several of his business ventures collapsed, including a radio chain; he suffered a nervous breakdown and his career seemed over. He bounced back on Broadway in the '40s. In 1949, he won the first TV Emmy Award as Best Actor in a Series. Out of work in the '50s, when his comedy style had become dated, he was encouraged by his son -- actor Keenan Wynn -- to launch a new career as a film actor. From 1957 to 1967, he was busy onscreen as a dramatic character actor, and for his work in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He also appeared in TV dramas.

Trivia: Slight, owlish American actor Francis Pierlot made his film debut in 1914, but it wasn't until 1931 that he abandoned the stage to settle permanently in Hollywood. Pierlot generally essayed minor roles, showing up briefly but memorably as scores of judges, professors, priests, and orchestra leaders. Film buffs have a special place in their hearts for the actor's sly portrayal of lovable pyromaniac Nero Smith in 1942's Henry Aldrich, Editor. Francis Pierlot made his final screen appearance in a surprisingly sizeable role as Jean Simmons' manservant in the 1953 biblical epic The Robe.

Trivia: Irish stage actor Patrick O'Moore began his film career in 1934, playing a few leads in English films before settling in Hollywood. A close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart, O'Moore was seen to good advantage in such Bogart features as Sahara (1943) and Conflict (1945). Otherwise, most of his film roles were unbilled bits as clerks, constables, government officials, and military men. He kept active into the 1980s, playing small parts in such TV productions as QB VII and theatrical features as The Sword and the Sorcerer. Patrick O'Moore was at one time married to Broadway musical-comedy star Zelma O'Neal.

Trivia: Edgar Bergen was still in grammar school when he sent away for a 25-cent ventriloquism instruction book. By the time he was 11, Bergen was driving his family crazy with his prankish voice-throwing. While attending medical school at Northwestern University, Bergen paid his tuition by performing a small-time ventriloquist act; it wasn't long before he dropped out of college to hit the vaudeville and tent-show circuit. After a tour of Europe and South America, Bergen filmed a series of one-reel short subjects for Vitaphone between 1930 and 1935; even in these early efforts, top billing went not to Bergen but to his creation, the impish, top-hatted dummy Charlie McCarthy. From time-to-time Bergen would test out other wooden alter egos, including hayseed Mortimer Snerd and man-hungry Effie Clinker, but Charlie would remain his star attraction. After gaining nationwide fame through his appearances on Rudy Vallee's radio program, Bergen launched his own radio series, The Charlie McCarthy Show, a top-rated endeavor which ran from 1937 through 1955. Bergen and Charlie made their feature film debuts in The Goldwyn Follies (1938). They went on to appear together in eight more films between in 1938 and 1948; curiously, however, Charlie McCarthy came across better on radio than he did on screen--partly due to the inescapable fact that Bergen tended to move his lips while throwing his voice. At his peak, Bergen was pulling down $10,000 weekly from his radio series and an additional $100,000 from Charlie McCarthy toys and merchandise. He was also the recipient of the only wooden Academy Award in history, a special Oscar bestowed upon himself and the pine-headed Charlie. On his own, Bergen co-starred in I Remember Mama (1948) as the shy Norwegian suitor of spinster Ellen Corby; he also played supporting parts in Captain China (1949) and Don't Make Waves (1965). After the cancellation of their radio series, Bergen and Charlie played nightclubs, summer stock and state fairs. They also hosted the 1956 TV quiz show Do You Trust Your Wife?. Emerging from a long professional slump, Bergen made a triumphant Las Vegas comeback in 1978--the evening before his death at the age of 75. His last screen appearance was in Jim Henson's The Muppet Movie (1979), which was dedicated to his memory. Edgar Bergen was the husband of actress Frances Bergen, and the father of film and TV star Candice Bergen.

Trivia: The son of a house painter, American actor/dancer Ray Bolger grew up in a middle-class Boston neighborhood called Dorchester. Bolger knew what he wanted to do in life the moment he saw Broadway entertainer Fred Stone literally bounce on stage in a Boston production of Jack O'Lantern. "That moment opened up a whole new world for me" Bolger would remember; after a relatively aimless childhood, he determined to become a performer himself. Starting out in vaudeville as a dancer, Bolger developed a loose-limbed ad lib style that would win him starring spots in such 1930s Broadway musicals as Life Begins at 8:40 and On Your Toes; in the latter, Bolger introduced Richard Rodgers' "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue". Signed by MGM in 1936 for a featured solo in The Great Ziegfeld, Bolger was given a $3,000 per week contract and was expected to take whatever part was assigned him. But Bolger balked when he was cast as the Tin Man in the studio's Wizard of Oz. He felt the role was too confining for his talents, so Bolger convinced the film's Scarecrow, Buddy Ebsen, to switch parts with him. This move, of course, assured film immortality for Bolger, but wasn't so beneficial for Ebsen, whose allergic reaction to the Tin Man's silver makeup forced him to drop out of the film and be replaced by Jack Haley. Bolger's movie career pretty much took second place to his Broadway work in the 1940s. In 1948, Bolger was awarded the lead in a musical version of Charley's Aunt titled Where's Charley? It was when the daughter of one of the production people began singing his lyrics back to him during out-of-town tryouts that Bolger, in league with composer Frank Loesser, developed the "everybody sing" chorus for the song "Once in Love With Amy". Bolger repeated his role in the 1952 filmization of Where's Charley (1952), then continued his Broadway career with intermittent film appearances into the 1960s. He also starred in a 1953 TV series, alternately titled The Ray Bolger Show and Where's Raymond?, which was so bad that even he was uncharacteristically putting himself down before the inevitable cancellation. Bolger suffered a few career setbacks on stage in the early 1960s, and his villain role in Disney's Babes in Toyland (1961) hardly showed him to best advantage, but the performer prospered as a nightclub performer during the rest of the decade in a nostalgic (if slightly lachrymose) act which recalled his past song hits. Bolger charmed live audiences with his still-athletic hoofing skills into the 1970s. In the twilight of his career, Bolger was allowed to sparkle in guest spots on such TV programs as The Partridge Family, The Love Boat, Baretta, and even PBS's Evening at the Pops.

Trivia: This Spanish violinist and band leader was born in Spain and raised in Havana. He emigrated to the U.S. and worked as a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. In 1928 he began appearing with his first band at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. Greatly helping to popularize Latin rhythms in the U.S., by the 30s and 40s he became known as America's "rumba king." Occasionally he appeared in films, often as himself leading his band through several musical numbers; sometimes played genial fictional characters. He gave up his career after suffering a stroke in 1971. His third wife was singer Abbe Lane and his fourth was singer and TV personality Charo.

Trivia: In his heyday, jazz clarinet player and bandleader Benny Goodman was the undisputed "King of Swing." He was born the eighth son to an immigrant family of 12 on the west side of Chicago. Learning to play clarinet with an instrument loaned to him from a local synagogue, he started out playing in neighborhood bands. A year after his high school graduation, Goodman moved to California to work in Ben Pollack's band and from there went on to radio work and free-lance recording. In the early 1930s, Goodman founded his own band and began working for Billy Rose and eventually, after replacing Guy Lombardo at the Roosevelt Grill, moved to Hollywood to play his new "swing" music at the Palomar Ballroom. Later, he made major inroads against the racism of the music industry by hiring African American pianist Teddy Wilson, and vibraphone player Lionel Hampton. Others followed. In 1936, Goodman and his band made their screen debut in The Big Broadcast of 1937 and after that performed in several other musicals, including The Gang's All Here (1941). In 1946, Goodman played his clarinet for the animated musical Make Mine Music, and in 1956, Goodman became the subject of the musical biopic The Benny Goodman Story starring Steve Allen.

Trivia: North Dakota-born vocalist Peggy Lee went straight from the family farm to local radio; by the time she was 16, she was a professional singer. Fame came relatively early when, in the late 1930s, Lee was chosen to be vocalist for the Benny Goodman orchestra. Her first film work consisted of specialty numbers in such films as The Powers Girl (42) and Stage Door Canteen (43). While best remembered for such hit records as "Lover," "Fever" and "Is That All There Is?", Lee's movie assignments of the 1950s should not be overlooked. She made her dramatic acting debut in the 1953 remake of The Jazz Singer opposite Danny Thomas, and in 1955 she was Oscar-nominated for her convincing portrayal of a hard-boiled speakeasy chanteuse who reverts to childhood after incurring severe brain damage in Pete Kelly's Blues, a film directed by Jack Webb. Lee was also instrumental in the success of the Disney cartoon feature Lady and the Tramp (55); she not only provided several of the character voices (the Siamese Cats, the dog pound vamp "Peg," etc.), but also wrote many of the film's songs. When Lady and the Tramp was released to video in 1987, Lee, miffed that she had earned a mere $3500 for her work on the film, sued Disney for several million dollars' royalties -- and won. After Pete Kelly's Blues, Peggy Lee wrote lyrics for the 1958 musical fantasy Tom Thumb and was heard on the soundtrack of 1970's Pieces of Dreams; her acting in later years was confined to TV guest-star appearances, notably a chucklesome turn as a Mae West-style dance-hall queen on a 1967 episode of The Girl from UNCLE.

Trivia: The irrepressible Charlie McCarthy was born at the age of 11. More specifically, he was carved from a block of pine by an Illinois carpenter named Theodore Mack, then sold to aspiring teenage ventriloquist Edgar Bergen for 35 dollars. Created in the image of a Chicago newsboy named -- what else? -- Charlie, the little wooden head joined Bergen for a series of private parties, touring shows, and one-night stands, finally finding steady work on vaudeville. At first dressed as a street urchin, Charlie eventually adopted the tuxedo, top hat, and monocle that would one day become world famous. The story goes that one evening, while Bergen's act was bombing in front of a bored night club audience, Charlie suddenly turned to his partner and ad-libbed, "Who the hell ever told you you were a ventriloquist!" He then proceeded to insult each and every member of the audience, while Bergen, who up to this point had been suffering without complaint, sat by in helpless silence (except for his ever-moving lips). The "new," irreverent Charlie McCarthy scored an immediate hit with the audience, inspiring Bergen to continue venting his frustrations through his dummy in a similarly hilarious but better scripted fashion. In 1930, Charlie made his screen debut in a Vitaphone one-reeler, and within a few years was receiving billing over his mentor Bergen. Officially discovered for radio by Rudy Vallee in 1936, Bergen and McCarthy went on to star on the top-rated Chase and Sanborn Hour, later retitled The Charlie McCarthy Show. The duo made their first feature film appearance in The Goldwyn Follies (1938), then went on to star in a series of breezy comedies opposite such film and radio favorites as W.C. Fields, Lucille Ball, and Fibber McGee and Molly. After co-starring in the Disney feature Fun and Fancy Free (1947), Charlie and his fellow dummies Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker (together with Bergen, of course) moved into TV, where in the mid-'50s they co-hosted the comedy quiz program Do You Trust Your Wife? Even when his fortunes waned in the 1960s, Charlie continued to live in lavish splendor with the Bergen family, occupying a bedroom that was even larger than that of his "sister" Candice Bergen. Not long after making a cameo appearance in The Muppet Movie, Bergen and McCarthy made a spectacularly successful comeback appearance in Las Vegas -- a comeback cut short by Bergen's fatal heart attack at the age of 75. For all intents and purposes, Charlie McCarthy died right along with Bergen: Since retiring to the Smithsonian Institution in 1978, Charlie has uttered not one, single, solitary word.

Trivia: Latin-American singer/actress Lina Romay was active in films from 1942 to 1952. She came to Hollywood under contract to Columbia, then worked briefly at MGM and RKO. In 1949, she began a three-year run as featured vocalist on the TV series Paul Whiteman's Goodyear Revue. Lina Romay's screen credits should not be confused with those of the same-named actress/director of the 1970s and 1980s.

Trivia: Born in North Carolina, Kay Kyser attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked his way through school by leading a student band, later going professional as the orchestra leader at Chicago's Blackhawk Restaurant. In radio from 1933, he finally hit the big time five years later with the weekly NBC musical quiz program Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Dressed in a scholarly robe and mortar board in hand, "the old perfessor" (as the bespectacled Kyser billed himself) addressed the audience and contestants as "students," reserving the big prizes for those who gave the wrong answers to quiz questions. During this first flush of radio fame, Kyser's bandmembers became almost as famous as their boss, notably vocalists Ginny Simms, Harry Babbitt, and Sully Mason, and especially deadpan musician Merwyn A. Bogue, aka "Ish Kabibble." Though in later years he claimed to dislike moviemaking, Kyser entered film in 1939, with a starring role in That's Right, You're Wrong. The film proved to be one of RKO Radio's biggest hits, spawning a series of popular Kyser vehicles: perhaps the best known (but not the best) of these films was You'll Find Out (1940), which was distinguished by the only screen teaming of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre. Not long after completing his final film, Columbia's Carolina Blues (1944), Kyser married his band vocalist Georgia Carroll and began raising a family. He moved his radio show into TV in 1949, by which time his featured singer was a young Mike Douglas. Having promised himself that he'd retire from show business when he'd saved a million dollars, Kay Kyser did just that in 1950, returning to Chapel Hill to devote himself full-time to his family and to the Christian Science movement.