Trivia: Lukas trained for the stage at the Hungarian Actors Academy, and in 1916 he debuted on the Budapest stage. He soon became a local matinee idol, having appeared in many plays and films. He became well-known throughout Central Europe, and Max Reinhardt had him guest-star in Berlin and Vienna productions in the '20s. In 1927 Adolph Zukor brought him to the U.S., and from 1928 he made his career playing Continental Europeans in Hollywood films. At first he portrayed smooth, suave seducers; as age caught up with him he moved into villainous roles, and often played Nazis. His greatest acting triumph, however, came in an anti-Nazi role -- one of his few sympathetic parts at the time -- in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine on Broadway (1941); he reprised the role in the play's film version (1943), for which he won the Best Actor Oscar and New York Film Critics Award. He continued appearing in occasional films throughout the rest of his life, usually playing sympathetic old men.

Trivia: A witty and stylish lead actress of stage and screen, Russell tended to play successful career women who were skilled in repartee. She trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then began her stage career in her early '20s. She debuted onscreen in 1934 and immediately had a very busy film career. At first appearing in routine films, in the '40s she began to specialize in light, sophisticated comedies, for which she had a unique talent. In the '50s her career briefly declined and she went to Broadway, where she starred in three successful productions. One of these was Auntie Mame, later made into a film in which she reprised her stage role (1958). She went on to appear in a handful of films before she was struck by crippling arthritis. Known for her charity work, in 1972 she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a special Oscar. Russell received four Academy Award nominations during her career. She was married to producer Frederick Brisson. She authored an autobiography, Life is a Banquet.

Trivia: Formidable British comic actress Alison Skipworth became an actress in her early twenties to help support her starving-artist husband. A classic beauty in her youth, Ms. Skipworth served as decoration in such London stage productions as The Gaiety Girl and An Artist's Model. Her acting improved with each performance, and by 1908 she was co-starring with James K. Hackett in the prestige production The Prisoner of Zenda. She made her film debut in 1920, re-creating her long-running stage role in 39 East. Preferring the stage to films during the silent era, Skipworth did not become a full-time movie actress until 1930, when establishing herself as one of Hollywood's most reliable character actresses. Exuding aristocratic hauteur from every pore, Skipworth was an excellent foil for Mae West in Night After Night (1932) and for W.C. Fields in If I Had a Million (1932) and Tillie and Gus (1933). She had leading assignments as the title character Madame Racketeer (1932) and opposite Polly Moran in the Republic programmers Two Wise Maids (1937) and Ladies in Distress (1938). Leaving films in 1938, Alison Skipworth returned to the stage, retiring for good in 1942; she died ten years later at the age of 88.

Trivia: Entering vaudeville in the early 1920s, Donald Cook matriculated to Broadway in 1926 and came to films in the first years of the talkies. He was a leading man in most of his earliest movie appearances; he played the protégé of crippled ballet impresario John Barrymore in The Mad Genius (1931), Bette Davis' love interest in The Man Who Played God (1932), and so on. By the mid-1930s, Cook had settled into secondary roles, often neurotic in nature (the best of these was the tormented husband of mulatto Helen Morgan in Show Boat [1936]). He often appeared in murder mysteries, where no matter how helpful and cooperative he was to the investigating detectives, the words "I DID IT" were practically emblazoned on his forehead. Throughout the 1940s, Cook alternated his increasingly standardized film roles with solid leading assignments in such Broadway plays as Claudia and Private Lives; he forsook films entirely in favor of stage work in 1950. In 1959, Donald Cook was a regular on the teen-oriented TV sitcom Too Young to Go Steady.

Trivia: Veteran Broadway actor Arthur Byron came to Hollywood at the dawn of the talkie era, when his clear, precise vocal intonations proved to be a sound recordist's dream. Generally cast as high-ranking politicos and business executives, Byron's best screen assignments included the reform-minded warden in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and the title character in The President Vanishes (1934). He could also use his veneer of respectability for dishonest purposes, as witness his Depression-era profiteer in Stand Up and Cheer (1934). Already well-on in years when he entered films, Arthur Byron retired after playing Mr. Erickson in John Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island (1936).

Trivia: While growing up in Texas, Ted Healy planned to become a businessman, but a series of financial failures in early adulthood led him to try the theatre as a vocation. He started out in burlesque as a blackface comedian, cadging his best jokes from such well-established performers as Al Jolson and Ed Wynn. He gradually developed into a "singing monologist" in vaudeville, surrounding himself with stooges who would continually interrupt his act and whom he would slap, poke and knock around. Among those stooges were Ted's lifelong friend Moe Howard, Moe's brother Shemp, and reformed fiddler Larry Fine. With this trio, Healy graduated to Broadway in such top-dollar reviews as A Night in Spain and A Night in Venice. In 1930, Healy was signed by Fox film studios to star in a musical comedy written by cartoonist Rube Goldberg, Soup to Nuts; while he carried the bulk of the humor, Healy's stooges were also given a few moments to shine. Healy retained his retinue throughout his first few years as an MGM contractee, starring in a group of short subjects and appearing as a supporting player in such films as Dancing Lady (1933) and Stage Mother (1934). In 1934, Moe Howard, convinced Larry Fine and new stooge Curly Howard (Moe's brother) to strike out on their own as The Three Stooges. Healy continued his film career as a solo, serving up abrasive supporting characterizations in films like Death on the Diamond (1934) and Mad Love (1935). Healy was very popular, and at one point was the highest-paid comedian in show business.

Trivia: Most often cast as a snide gentleman's gentleman or dissipated nobleman, British actor Eric Blore abandoned the business world for the theatre when he was in his mid-twenties. Established in both London and New York, Blore began adding movies to his acting achievements with 1920's A Night Out and a Day In(1920); he also appeared in the 1926 silent version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. A scene-stealing role in RKO's Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio (1933) led to Blore's becoming a fixture in such subsequent Astaire-Rogers projects as Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935) and Shall We Dance? (1937). The actor also became a "regular" in the unorthodox film comedies of Preston Sturges, notably The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan's Travels(1942). In addition, Blore found himself in support of several "star" comedians, from Laurel and Hardy to Bob Hope to The Marx Brothers. When pickings became lean for "veddy" British character actors in the mid 1950s, Blore was reduced to co-starring with the bargain-counter Bowery Boys in Bowery to Baghdad (1955); he played an inebriated genie in this, his last film. On a more artistically rewarding note, cartoon fans will recall the pixilated voice of Blore as the automobile-happy Mr. Toad in the 1949 Disney animated feature Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

Trivia: Born and raised on a Wyoming ranch, American actress Isabel Jewell would only rarely be called upon to play a "Western" type during her career. For the most part, Isabel -- who made her screen debut in Blessed Event (1932) -- was typecast as a gum-chewing, brassy urban blonde, or as an empty-headed gun moll. Jewell's three best remembered film performances were in Tale of Two Cities (1935), where she was atypically cast as the pathetic seamstress who is sentenced to the guillotine; Lost Horizon (1937), as the consumptive prostitute who finds a new lease on life when she is whisked away to the land of Shangri-La; and Gone with the Wind (1939), where she appears briefly as "poor white trash" Emmy Slattery. In 1946, Isabel finally got to show off the riding skills she'd accumulated in her youth in Wyoming when she was cast as female gunslinger Belle Starr in Badman's Territory. Denied starring roles because of her height (she was well under five feet), Isabel Jewell worked as a supporting player in films until the '50s and in television until the '60s.

Trivia: Already a veteran stage performer in her teens, Louise Fazenda entered films with Universal's Joker Comedy unit in 1913. Two years later she joined Mack Sennett's Keystone company, where she rose to stardom. In real life a most attractive young woman, Fazenda deliberately "dressed down" for her early film appearances, portraying a gawky, frizzy-haired, buck-toothed bumpkin, just ripe for being seduced and abandoned by any city slicker who happened along. Sennett admired Fazenda's comic gifts and her willingness to do anything for a laugh, and accordingly starred her in his 1920 feature film Down on the Farm. By the mid-1920s, Fazenda was an extremely popular character actress, contributing frolicsome comic characterizations to such films as The Bat (1925), The Babe Comes Home (1926), The Cradle Snatchers (1927) and Noah's Ark (1928). During this period, she often put her country-girl characterization on the back burner to portray elegant society dowagers, alternately browbeating their wealthy husbands or enjoying the high-priced attentions of oily gigolos. While under contract to Warner Bros/First National, Fazenda met and married producer Hal B. Wallis, several years her junior. Retiring from films in 1939, Louise Fazenda spent her final decades as one of Hollywood's most beloved social leaders, remaining active in charitable and humanitarian causes until her death at the reported age of 66.

Trivia: Liverpool native Leslie Fenton was raised in the U.S., where he secured work as a stage juvenile. In films from 1924, Fenton specialized in playing charming but slightly slimy rogues; one of his more memorable movie assignments was as dapper bootlegger Nails Nathan in The Public Enemy (1931). In 1939, Fenton switched from acting to directing, working on such brisk programmers as Tell No Tales (a truly accomplished 1939 crime melodrama), Tomorrow the World (1944), Saigon (1948) and Whispering Smith (1948). For many years, Leslie Fenton was the husband of film star Ann Dvorak, who moved to England with Fenton while he served the British military during World War II.

Trivia: Scratch a sniveling prison "stoolie" or cowardly henchman and if he were not Paul Guilfoyle or George Chandler, he would be the diminutive Ernie S. Adams, a ubiquitous presence in scores of Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s. Surprisingly, the weasel-looking Adams had begun his professional career in musical comedy -- appearing on Broadway in such shows as Jerome Kern's Toot Toot (1918) -- prior to entering films around 1919. A list of typical Adams characters basically tells the story: "The Rat" (Jewels of Desire, 1927), "Johnny Behind the 8-Ball" (The Storm, 1930), "Lefty" (Trail's End, 1935), "Jimmy the Weasel" (Stars Over Arizona, 1937), "Snicker Joe" (West of Carson City, 1940), "Willie the Weasel" (Return of the Ape Man, 1944) and, of course "Fink" (San Quentin, 1937). The result, needless to say, is that you didn't quite trust him even when playing a decent guy, as in the 1943 Columbia serial The Phantom. One of the busiest players in the '40s, the sad-faced, little actor worked right up until his death in 1947. His final four films were released posthumously.

Trivia: Stocky, pinch-faced actor Purnell B. Pratt made his first film appearance in 1914, and his last in 1941, the year of his death. Pratt appeared as publisher John Bland in the very first version of George M. Cohan and Earl Derr Biggers' Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), co-starring with Cohan himself. He made a smooth transition to talkies with such 1929 efforts as Alibi and Thru Different Eyes. Many of his more famous roles, notably the stern policeman father of criminal-in-the-making Tom Powers in Public Enemy (1931), and the New York mayor in the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera (1935), were uncredited. In 1935, Purnell B. Pratt became the latest in a long line of actors to play district attorney Francis X. Markham in the Philo Vance mystery The Casino Murder Case (1935).

Trivia: Leo G. Carroll was the son of an Irish-born British military officer. The younger Carroll had intended to follow in his father's footsteps, but his World War I experiences discouraged him from pursuing a military career. On the British stage from the age of sixteen, Carroll settled in the U.S. in 1924, playing such plum theatrical roles as the title character in The Late George Apley. In films from 1934, Carroll often portrayed shy, self-effacing Britishers who, in "Uriah-Heep" fashion, used their humility to hide a larcenous or homicidal streak. Reportedly Alfred Hitchcock's favorite actor, Carroll was seen in half a dozen Hithcock films, notably Spellbound (1946) (as the scheming psychiatrist) and North by Northwest (1959) (as the dry-witted CIA agent). A "method actor" before the term was invented, Carroll was known to immerse himself in his roles, frequently confounding strangers by approaching them "in character." Leo G. Carroll was always a welcome presence on American television, starring as Topper in the "ghostly" sitcom of the same name, and co-starring as Father Fitzgibbons in Going My Way (1962) and Alexander Waverly on The Man From UNCLE (1964-68).

Trivia: The archetypal screen sourpuss (excluding Ned Sparks, that is), actor Charles A. Sellon was already typecast when he made his first film appearance in 1923. In the first few years of the talkies, Sellon tended to play nondescript character roles in such films as Bulldog Drummond (1929) and Tom Sawyer (1930). He truly came into his own with his unforgettable performance as a cantankerous blind man Mr. Muckle ("Hah! Moved that door again, eh?") in the 1934 W.C. Fields classic It's a Gift (1934). Charles A. Sellon's other memorable mid-'30s roles included the wheelchair-bound, surreptitiously softhearted Uncle Ned in Shirley Temple's Bright Eyes and dour police coroner Doremus in The Casino Murder Case (1935).

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: American actress Grace Hayle spent most of her screen time playing bejeweled dowagers, huffy department store customers and aggressive lady journalists. Hayle proved a worthy Margaret Dumont type in Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (1933), supplied laughs as a ruddy-faced cyclist in The Women (1939) and played a most unlikely rhumba dancer in Two-Faced Woman (1940). One of her few credited roles was the long-suffering Madame Napaloni in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). Grace Hayle remained in Hollywood long enough to appear in an early Elvis Presley film.

Trivia: The look-alike younger brother of character star Hugh Herbert, Tom Herbert suffered from inevitable comparison with his famous sibling. Lacking the distracted congeniality of his brother or a trademark like Hugh's "woo-woo," Tom instead played bit roles as comic cab drivers, drunks, waiters, and hotel clerks, often sporting a bushy mustache. Onscreen from 1934, Tom Herbert was a member of the stock company at 20th Century Fox.

Trivia: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.