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

Trivia: 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: British actor Herbert Marshall was born to a theatrical family, but initially had no intentions of a stage career himself. After graduating from St. Mary's College in Harrow, Marshall became an accounting clerk, turning to acting only when his job failed to interest him. With an equal lack of enthusiasm, Marshall joined a stock company in Brighton, making his stage debut in 1911; he ascended to stardom two years later in the evergreen stage farce, Brewster's Millions. Enlisting in the British Expeditionary Forces during World War I, Marshall was severely wounded and his leg was amputated. While this might normally have signalled the end of a theatrical career, Marshall was outfitted with a prosthesis and determined to make something of himself as an actor; he played a vast array of roles, his physical handicap slowing him down not one iota. In tandem with his first wife, actress Edna Best, Marshall worked on stage in a series of domestic comedies and dramas, then entered motion pictures with Mumsie (1927). His first talking film was the 1929 version of Somerset Maugham's The Letter, which he would eventually film twice, the first time in the role of the heroine's illicit lover, the second time (in 1940) as the cuckolded husband. With Ernst Lubitsch's frothy film Trouble in Paradise (1932), Marshall became a popular romantic lead. Easing gracefully into character parts, the actor continued working into the 1960s; he is probably best remembered for his portrayal of author Somerset Maugham in two separate films based on Maugham's works, The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor's Edge (1946). Alfred Hitchcock, who'd directed Marshall twice in films, showed the actor to good advantage on the Hitchcock TV series of the 1950s, casting Marshall in one episode as a washed-up matinee idol who wins a stage role on the basis of a totally fabricated life story. Marshall hardly needed to embroider on his real story of his life: he was married five times, and despite his gentlemanly demeanor managed to make occasional headlines thanks to his rambunctious social activities.

Trivia: American character actress Janet Beecher spent much of her film career as everybody's mother. After three decades on stage, Beecher made her first film, Gallant Lady, in 1934. Because of her handsome features, matronly demeanor and naturalistic acting style, Ms. Beecher was ideally cast as firm but compassionate matriarchs; one of her best screen assignments was as Tyrone Power's mother in Mark of Zorro (1940), never wavering in her belief of her son's fortitude despite his (apparently) foppish manners. Even when appearing as the First Lady in the political drama The President Vanishes, Beecher was spiritually the "mother" of her country. Undoubtedly Janet Beecher felt straitjacketed by the roles offered her in Hollywood; she retired in 1943, after only ten years before the cameras.

Trivia: American actor John Halliday went the usual route of Brooklyn-born performers by hiding behind a stage British accent in his theatrical and film performances. Except for a few awkward early-talkie appearances where he's laying it on too thick (Perfect Understanding [1933]), Halliday pulled off his artifice so well that at least one knowledgable historian has pigeonholed the actor as Scottish! In films since 1920 and on stage for at least a decade prior to that, Halliday was one of the best of the gentleman villains of the screen: He'd never get the girl, but he could ruin her boyfriend in business, destroy the lives of her family, or kill her off altogether. In the little-seen horror gem Terror Aboard (1933), it's fairly obvious throughout that Halliday is the hidden killer, but he performs his perfidy with such grisly aplomb that the audience is half hoping he'll get away with it. As a subtler conniver in the 1936 Gary Cooper-Marlene Dietrich vehicle Desire, he is able to shift from suavity to menace so abruptly that it throws Dietrich's character momentarily off balance. Even when he was cast in the lead, as in Hollywood Boulevard (1936), his behavior as a Barrymore-like faded actor is caddish enough to get him murdered a reel before the fadeout. John Halliday was permitted a modicum of audience empathy in one of his last films: as Katharine Hepburn's gently philandering father in The Philadelphia Story (1940), he manages to invest humanity and a touch of wistfulness into a basically unsympathetic idle-rich stock character.

Trivia: A grand-niece of legendary songwriter Stephen Foster, Henrietta Crosman became a major theatrical star in the latter part of the 19th century under the management of David Belasco and Charles Frohman. Widely acclaimed for her Shakespearean roles (her favorite was Rosalind in As You Like It), Crossman was one of the scores of stage luminaries brought to films in 1914 by Famous Players. She starred as The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch (1914) opposite Harold Lockwood and accepted a couple of other screen assignments, but her film career did not get into high gear until after the changeover to sound. A rather grand supporting player in such films as The Royal Family of Broadway (1930) (one reviewer called her performance as the show business matriarch "incisive"), she was equally convincing as the embittered, downtrodden mother in John Ford's Pilgrimage (1933). There were several other stand-out performances to come (including the aged actress in The Curtain Falls [1934]) but she returned to the legitimate stage in 1939. Crosman was married to her longtime manager, Maurice Campbell.

Trivia: The daughter of an actress (Elaine Inescort) and a British journalist, Frieda Inescort learned the intricacies of High Society on a first-hand basis as the personal secretary of Lady Astor. Thus it was hardly surprising that Inescort would specialize in playing haughty grande dames when she went into acting. She made her first Broadway appearance in the 1922 production The Truth About Blayds, then went on to appear in a number of Shaw plays. In films from 1935 to 1960, she was at her imperious best as Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. Multiple sclerosis forced Frieda Inescort into an all-too-early retirement.

Trivia: Stereotyped early on as a "silly ass" Englishman, Claud Allister perpetuated that stereotype in countless British and American films from 1929 through 1953. Allister made his Hollywood debut as Algy in 1929's Bulldog Drummond, then headed back to England to play peripheral roles in such Alexander Korda productions as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). Back in America in 1936, Allister settled into a string of brief, frequently uncredited roles, nearly always as a supercilious high-society twit. The fruity vocal tones of Claud Allister were ideally suited to the title character in the 1941 Disney animated feature The Reluctant Dragon.

Trivia: Paris-born George Breakston moved to the U.S. when he was six. As a child actor, Breakston got in on the ground floor of the Los Angeles radio industry. In films, he played the young Pip in the 1934 Great Expectations, and that same year played the sickliest of the Wiggs children in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and the boy with the ailing bus-passenger mother in It Happened One Night. In the late 1930s, Breakston was seen in the recurring role of Breezy in MGM's Andy Hardy series. Upon reaching adulthood, Breakston retired from acting to become a producer/director. He moved to Kenya, where he set up his own production company, turning out several African-themed films (Urubu, Golden Ivory) and such TV series as African Patrol and Adventures of a Jungle Boy. George Breakston went on to produce and direct films in Europe and Japan before returning to his "home town" of Paris.

Trivia: British actor Douglas Walton kept busy in the Hollywood of the 1930s playing upper-class twits, ineffectual weaklings, and other such highly coveted roles. Walton was most memorably cast as the genteelly depraved Percy Shelley in the prologue scenes of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also played the dull-witted, cowardly Darnley in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Douglas Walton remained in films until the late '40s, usually in bit parts but sometimes in such sizeable characterizations as Percival Priceless in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1947).

Trivia: After a tentative movie debut in the New York-filmed 1929 musical Glorifying the American Girl, stately character actress Sarah Edwards settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1935. Another of those performers who evidently jumped directly from birth to old age, Edwards portrayed many a kindly grandmother, imperious dowager, hardy pioneer wife, ill-tempered teacher and strict governess. She played peripheral roles in films like The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Shadow of the Doubt (1942), and enjoyed larger assignments in films like Hal Roach's Dudes are Pretty People (1942, as "The Colonel") and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Sarah Edwards is not related to the 1980s TV personality of the same name.

Trivia: Piping-voice, hamster-faced Scottish character actor Olaf Hytten left the British stage for films in 1921. By the time the talkie era rolled around, Hytten was firmly established in Hollywood, playing an abundance of butlers and high-society gentlemen. The actor was primarily confined to one or two-line bits in such films as Platinum Blonde (1931), The Sphinx (1933), Bonnie Scotland (1935), Beloved Rebel (1936), The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Bride Came COD (1941). He was a semi-regular of the Universal B-unit in the '40s, appearing in substantial roles as military men and police official in the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes series and as burgomeisters and innkeepers in the studio's many horror films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein, etc.) Olaf Hytten was active until at least 1956; one of his more memorable assignments of the '50s was as the larcenous butler who participates in a scheme to drive Daily Planet editor Perry White crazy in the "Great Caesar's Ghost" episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman.

Trivia: Veteran British stage actor Lawrence Grant entered films in 1918, when his marked resemblance to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm made him a "natural" for such epics as To Hell with the Kaiser. An acknowledged expert in American Indian lore, Grant also took time in 1918 to produce an experimental color film about Native Americans. Sound proved no obstacle to Grant's film career, as he proved in his first talkie role, the scurrilous Dr. Lakington in Bulldog Drummond (1929). He later appeared with his Drummond co-star Ronald Colman in such films as The Unholy Garden (1931) and Lost Horizon (1937). Usually a villain, Grant enjoyed a sizeable sympathetic role as Sir Lionel Barton, the luckless aristocrat tortured to death by the insidious Boris Karloff, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Active until 1945, Lawrence Grant could be seen in minor roles (often unbilled) in such horror efforts as Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and The Living Ghost (1944).

Trivia: Though various sources list his birth date as anywhere between 1865 and 1870, Scottish actor David Torrence was "officially" born in 1880, which would make him two years younger than his more famous brother, character star Ernest Torrence. Like his brother, David went from stage to screen in the early part of the 20th century. Unlike Ernest, David abandoned acting for the life of a Mexican rancher, but a series of reverses compelled him to return before the cameras. While Ernest specialized in villains and rogues, David conveyed a more respectable landed-gentry image, and as such was principally cast as bankers, merchants and attorneys. In his first talkie, Disraeli (1929), David played a sternfaced anti-Semitic head of the Bank of England, whose refusal to finance the Suez canal results in drastic action from Prime Minister Disraeli George Arliss. Most of David's film roles were of shorter duration, as witness his fleeting appearances in such productions as Lost Horizon (1937) and Rulers of the Sea (1939). Comedy fans are most familiar with David Torrence for his performance as Scots attorney Mr. Miggs, executor to the estate of Angus Ian MacLaurel in the 1935 Laurel and Hardy comedy Bonnie Scotland.

Trivia: Dewey-eyed, pudgy-cheeked child actress Cora Sue Collins made her screen debut at the age of 6. Collins' more intense film roles included young Christina in Greta Garbo's Queen Christina (1933), the out-of-wedlock Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (1934), potential voodoo-sacrifice victim Nancy in Black Moon (1934), and Linda Darnell's character as a child in Blood and Sand (1940). On rare occasions, she was permitted to exhibit her considerable skills as a tap dancer. Collins retired from films at 17, when she married a wealthy Nevada rancher. Though usually comfortably sequestered in her lavish Mexican estate, Cora Sue Collins has occasionally touched base with her film fans at various nostalgia conventions throughout America.

Trivia: A serious-looking teenage actor of the 1930s, dark-haired Jimmy Butler earned good roles in such seminal dramas as Only Yesterday (1933), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), and Stella Dallas ([1938] as the grownup Con Morrison). Military Academy (1940) foreshadowed his eventual tour of duty in World War II. Sadly, he became one of a handful of Hollywood actors killed in action.

Trivia: Of the many movie-industryites bearing the name "Colin Campbell," the best known was the Scots-born silent film director listed below. Emigrating to the U.S. at the turn of the century, Campbell barnstormed as a stage actor and director before settling at the Selig studios in 1911. The best-remembered of his Selig directorial efforts was 1914's The Spoilers, a crude but ruggedly realistic Alaskan adventure film climaxed by a brutal fistfight. It was during his Selig years that Campbell helped to nurture the talents of future western star Tom Mix. Considered an "old-timer" and has-been by the early 1920s, Colin Campbell ended his career with such plodding time-fillers as Pagan Passions (1924) and The Bowery Bishop (1924).

Trivia: A handsome and dignified stage actor, Murdock MacQuarrie began his long screen career in early versions of The Scarlet Letter (1913), The Count of Monte Cristo (1913), and Richelieu ([1914], in the title role) before becoming a director at Universal. Increasingly gaunt and cadaverous, MacQuarrie returned to acting exclusively in the early '20s, playing hundreds of bit parts until the year of his death. Two brothers, Albert MacQuarrie (1882-1950) and Frank MacQuarrie (1875-1950), also appeared in films.

Trivia: A former circus and minstrel-show performer, British actor Holmes Herbert toured on the provincial-theatre circuit as a juvenile in the early 1900s. Born Edward Sanger, Herbert adopted his professional first name out of admiration for Sherlock Holmes -- a role which, worse luck, he never got to play. Herbert never appeared in films in his native country; he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, appeared in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1918), and never looked homeward. Talking pictures enabled Holmes Herbert to join such countrymen as Reginald Denny and Roland Young in portraying "typical" British gentlemen. The stately, dynamic-featured Herbert nearly always appeared in a dinner jacket, selflessly comforting the heroine as she pined for the man she really loved. He received some of his best roles in the early-talkie era; he appeared as a soft-spoken police inspector in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), then recreated the role for the 1937 remake. Herbert also appeared as Dr. Lanyon, Henry Jekyll's closest friend and confidante in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). By the '40s, many of Herbert's roles were uncredited, but he was still able to make a maximum impression with a minimum of lines in such roles as the village council head in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Herbert's second wife was another supporting-cast stalwart of the '30s, Beryl Mercer (best remembered as James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy [1931]). Holmes Herbert remained in films until 1952's The Brigand; reportedly, he also appeared in a few early west-coast television productions.

Trivia: In films from 1935, American character actor Bud Geary showed up in fleeting roles as chauffeurs, sailors and cops at a variety of studios. Geary was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1942, but nothing really came of it. He finally blossomed as an actor when he hitched up with Republic in the mid-1940s. One of the best "action" heavies in the business, Geary convincingly menaced everyone in sight in such Republic serials as Haunted Harbor (1944), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) and King of the Texas Rangers (1946). Bud Geary was on the verge of bigger things when he was killed in a car accident at the age of 47.

Trivia: Irish actor Colin Kenny was in films from 1917. Kenny was seen as Cecil Greystoke, Tarzan's romantic rival, in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and its sequel The Romance of Tarzan (1918). In talkies, Kenny was consigned to such single-scene roles as the Talking Clock in Alice in Wonderland (1933) and Sir Baldwin in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); he also showed up as British-India military officers and Scotland Yard operatives. Colin Kenny kept working until 1964, when he and dozens of his fellow British expatriates appeared in My Fair Lady (1964).

Trivia: Hailing from Australia despite his distinctive, clipped British accent, C. Montagu Shaw (the initial stood for "Charles") appeared in countless Hollywood pictures from 1926-1953, almost always cast as distinguished types. In his later years, Shaw made serials his specialty, appearing as the Clay King in Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), Dr. Malcolm in Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939), Professor Scott, the heroine's father, in The Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940), Dr. Huer in Buck Rogers (1940), and Dr. Nicholson in G-Men vs. the Black Dragon (1943). Shaw's most notable contribution to the genre, however, came in Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939) as Pablo, the dignified council member who turns out to be the nefarious Don del Oro, a megalomaniac hiding behind a hideous mask. Shaw retired in the early 1950s and died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: A native New Yorker, Albert Russell began his screen career acting in locally filmed Thanhouser productions alongside his more famous brother, William Russell. Becoming a director in the late 1910s, Russell worked mainly in Universal two-reel Westerns but also helmed such serials as The Lion Man (1919) with newcomer Jack Perrin and The Secret Four starring Eddie Polo. In his final years, Albert Russell operated a laundry business. He died of pneumonia mere weeks after brother William Russell had suffered the same fate.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.

Trivia: Veteran British stage actor and director Claude King made his first film in 1923, playing Lord Charles Chetwyn in the historical drama Six Days. Brought to America by MGM, the most "British" of Hollywood's studios, King essayed aristocratic roles in such films as Lon Chaney's London After Midnight (1927) and Mr. Wu (1928). One of his earliest talkie assignments was the plum role of Sir John Petrie in Paramount's The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu. He spent the 1930s as in general-purpose "English gentleman" assignment. Curiously, some of his better roles, notably General Fletcher in Bonnie Scotland (1935) and the Hollywood producer who reacts in mute astonishment as Janet Gaynor launches into a Garbo imitation in A Star is Born (1937), were unbilled. Claude King ended his Hollywood career where it began, at MGM.

Trivia: Actor Tom Moore starred in many Hollywood silent and early sound films. Born in Ireland, Moore entered films in 1912. He and his two younger brothers, Matt and Owen Moore, all had successful careers in American films where they were usually cast in dashing, romantic leads. Tom Moore retired from starring roles in the mid-'30s. Ten years later, he returned to play small supporting roles. Moore's daughter, Alice Moore (1916-1960), was also an actress and appeared in many of his films.

Trivia: In his autobiography The Moon's a Balloon, David Niven recalled the kindnesses extended to him by Hollywood's dress extras during Niven's formative acting years. Singled out for special praise was a dignified, frequently bearded gentleman, deferentially referred to as "The Major" by his fellow extras. This worthy could be nobody other than the prolific Major Sam Harris, who worked in films from the dawn of the talkie era until 1964. Almost never afforded billing or even dialogue (a rare exception was his third-billed role in the 1937 John Wayne adventure I Cover the War), Harris was nonetheless instantly recognizable whenever he appeared. His output included several of John Ford's efforts of the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing upon his extensive military experience, Major Sam Harris showed up in most of the "British India" pictures of the 1930s, and served as technical advisor for Warners' Charge of the Light Brigade (1935).