Trivia: In the eyes of many film-buffs, actor Maurice Chevalier, with his sophisticated charm, zest for life, and wit, is the consummate movie Frenchman. Chevalier, born in Paris, was the youngest of nine children. His father was a house painter and did not work steadily. To help out, the 11-year-old Chevalier quit school to work as an apprentice engraver and a factory worker. After performing briefly as an acrobat, he was injured and unable to continue his acrobatics so began singing in Paris cafes and halls. It is odd that he should turn to music as Chevalier had a notoriously weak, and average singing voice; to compensate, he added a touch of comedy to his act and soon became the toast of the town. Though only 21, he got his biggest break when he became the revue partner of the infamous musical star Mistinguett in the Folies-Bergere. Soon she became his lover as well. While serving in World War I, Chevalier was captured and spent two years in a POW camp; later he was awarded a Croix de Guerre. After the war he rose to world fame as a star of music halls. His trademarks were his boulevardier outfit of a straw hat and bow tie, his suggestive swagger, and his aura of Epicurean enjoyment. Having appeared in a number of silent films, he moved to Hollywood in 1929 and was popular with American audiences as the light-hearted, sophisticated star of romantic films. He left Hollywood in 1935, but continued making movies elsewhere. In 1938 he was decorated a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. In 1951 he was refused re-entry to the United States because he had signed an anti-nuclear-weapons document, the "Stockholm Appeal." In 1958 he was allowed to return to Hollywood and receive a special Oscar "for his contributions to the world of entertainment for more than half a century."

Trivia: American actress/singer Jeanette MacDonald made her first public appearance at age three, singing at a benefit show. She trained her own voice by listening to recordings, and honed her dancing and acting skills in school productions. MacDonald entertained notions of starring in grand opera, but her soprano voice, though pleasant and vibrant, was not quite up to operatic standards; she settled instead for supporting roles in Broadway musicals of the 1920s. Director Ernst Lubitsch was impressed by MacDonald's movie screen test and cast her in his 1929 film The Love Parade opposite Maurice Chevalier. In this first phase of her film career, MacDonald was not yet the "iron butterfly" that her detractors described but a bewitching, sexy young lady who was seen in her lingerie as often as the censors allowed. One of her best early films was Monte Carlo (1930), which reached a wondrous peak of Hollywood artifice as MacDonald sang "Beyond the Blue Horizon" from the observation car of a moving train, with the peasants and farmers standing by the tracks picking up the lyrics as if by ESP. Offstage she clashed with frequent co-star Maurice Chevalier to the extent that neither performer would agree to work with the other after The Merry Widow (1934). Under contract to MGM in the mid-1930s, MacDonald (with studio press-agent assistance) altered her image from a kittenish provacateur to a mature, above-reproach prima donna; she also managed to drop six years off her age in official studio biographies. In 1935, MGM teamed MacDonald with baritone Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta, the first of eight highly popular MacDonald-Eddy film musicals. Though mercilessly lampooned by comedians and by cartoonmaker Jay Ward's "Dudley DoRight" cartoons, the pair's films were consummately produced and strove to entertain every member of the film audience, not merely opera lovers; if there were laughable moments in these films, they were usually intentional. After I Married an Angel (1942), the singing team split. Eddy wanted to establish himself in comedy roles (which he didn't), and MacDonald trained diligently to become a bonafide opera star, finally making her operatic debut in a 1943 Montreal production of Romeo and Juliet; soon afterward, she headlined a Chicago staging of Faust as Marguerite. But MacDonald failed to impress critics, who wrote her off as a mere film personality, unsufficiently gifted to carry off a live opera. She continued making films, though -- even spoofing her own image in 1942's Cairo.Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, MacDonald toured in concert and stage productions, playing to large and enthusiastic crowds, though seldom attempting to re-establish herself as an opera diva. In 1965, MacDonald died from heart complications, with her longtime husband, actor Gene Raymond, at her side.

Trivia: Although she is best known for her later work, Una Merkel actually started in film in 1920 as Lillian Gish's stand-in for Way Down East. After a stage career in the 1920s, she returned to films as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930). The vivacious character actress brightened up dozens of films, playing mostly comic roles interspersed with an occasional dramatic part. Films to watch include Dangerous Female (1931); Private Lives (1931); Red-Headed Woman (1932); 42nd Street (1933), the film in which she memorably says of Ginger Rogers' character Anytime Annie: "The only time she ever said no she didn't hear the question;" The Merry Widow (both 1934 and 1952); Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935); Born to Dance (1936); Destry Rides Again (1939), where she and Marlene Dietrich have a frenzied hair-pulling battle over the hapless Mischa Auer; On Borrowed Time (1939); The Bank Dick (1940); Road to Zanzibar (1941); This Is the Army (1943); With a Song in My Heart (1952); and The Parent Trap (1961), among many others. In 1956, she won a Tony Award for The Ponder Heart and in 1961 was nominated for an Academy Award for Summer and Smoke in the role she had originated on the stage.

Trivia: While studying for the ministry, George Barbier participated in a seminary pageant, and thereafter worshipped at the altar of acting. He was a stage actor of some 40-years' standing when he made his first film in 1930. Barbier was usually cast as corpulent business executives and flustered fathers. You might remember him as the theatrical agent of Faye Templeton (Irene Manning) in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy; he's the fellow who described George M. Cohan as "the whole United States wrapped up in one pair of pants." Barbier also played the small-town doctor with literary aspirations in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). George Barbier died at age 80, shortly after finishing his last film, Lucky Night.

Trivia: Few actors were more beloved of audiences across multiple generations -- and from more different fields of entertainment -- than Edward Everett Horton. For almost 70 years, his work delighted theatergoers on two coasts (and a lot of the real estate in between) and movie audiences, first in the silents and then in the talkies, where he quickly became a familiar supporting player and then a second lead, often essaying comically nervous "fuddy-duddy" parts, and transcended the seeming limitations of character acting to rival most of the leading men around him in popularity; he subsequently moved into television, both as an actor and narrator, and gained a whole new fandom for his work as the storyteller in the animated series "Fractured Fairy Tales." Edward Everett Horton was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1886 -- when it was a separate city from New York City -- the son of Edward Everett Horton and Isabella Diack Horton. His grandfather was Edward Everett Hale, the author of the story The Man Without a Country. He attended Boys High School and later studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and at Oberlin College in Ohio, and Columbia University in Manhattan. His path to graduation was thwarted when he joined the university's drama club -- despite his 6'2" build, his first role had him cast as a woman. He never did graduate from Columbia, but he embarked on a performing career that was to keep him busy for more than six decades. In those days, he also sang -- in a baritone -- and joined the Staten Island-based Dempsey Light Opera Company for productions of Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. His singing brought him to the Broadway stage as a chorus member, and he subsequently spent three years with the Louis Mann company honing his acting skills while playing in stock -- Horton made his professional acting debut in 1908 with a walk-on role in The Man Who Stood Still. By 1911, he was working steadily and regularly, and often delighting audiences with his comedic talents, and remained with the Mann company for another two years. He was a leading man in the Crescent Theatre stock company, based in Brooklyn, and spent the remainder of the teens playing leading roles in theater companies across the United States, eventually basing himself in Los Angeles. Horton entered movies in 1918, and became well known to screen audiences with his performance in the 1923 version of Ruggles of Red Gap. He was identified almost entirely with comedic work after that, and by the end of the '20s had starring roles in a string of comedic shorts. It was after the advent of sound, however, that he fully hit his stride on the big screen. Horton's first talking feature was The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, in which he played fidgety reporter Roy Bensinger. Starting in the early '20s, Horton based most of his stage work on the West Coast, producing as well as acting. He leased the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles and found success with works such as The Nervous Wreck, in which he worked with Franklin Pangborn, a character actor who would also -- like Horton -- specialize in nervous, fidgety roles (though Pangborn, unlike Horton, never rose beyond character actor and supporting player status in features). In 1932, he leased the Hollywood Playhouse, which he subsequently operated for a season starring in Benn Wolfe Levy's Springtime for Henry, in which he performed more than 3000 times, making enough money from that play alone to buy his summer home in the Adirondacks. Horton fit in his movie work in between productions of Springtime for Henry (which was filmed in 1934, without Horton), and was always in demand. Amid his many roles over the ensuing decade, Horton worked in a half-dozen of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO. His other notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a portrayal of The Mad Hatter in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland, and a neurotic paleontologist (who first appears disguised as a woman) in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). He worked in at least six movies a year from the early '30s through the end of the 1940s, and there were occasional serious variations in his roles -- Horton played an unusually forceful part in Douglas Sirk's Summer Storm (1944), and he delivered a comedic tour de force (highlighted by a delightful scene with Carmen Miranda) in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943). Horton kept busy for more than 60 years, and not just in acting -- along with his brother George he bought up property in the San Fernando Valley from the 1920s onward, eventually assembling Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre development where he lived with his mother (who passed away at age 102). His hobbies included antiques, and at the time of his death in 1970, he had a collection with an estimated value of a half million dollars. He was busy on television throughout the 1950s and '60s, not only in onscreen work but also voice-overs for commercials, and he even hosted the Westminster Kennel Club dog show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was a regular cast member on the comedy Western series F Troop, playing Roaring Chicken (also referred to as Running Chicken), the Hekawi indian tribe medicine man. But his most enduring work from the 1960s was as the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales," the Jay Ward-produced co-feature to Rocky & Bullwinkle, in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. That engagement endeared him to millions of baby boomers and their parents, and his work in those cartoons continues to gain Horton new fans four decades after his death. He grew frail in appearance during the 1960s, and was not averse to playing off of that reality on series such as Dennis the Menace, where he did a guest-star spot in one episode as Uncle Ned, a health-food and physical-culture fanatic. Horton never married, and shared a home later in life with his sister, Hannabelle Grant. He was hospitalized weeks before his death from cancer in September 1970, and was so busy that during that hospitalization he showed up as a guest star in two episodes of the sitcom The Governor and J.J., His final big-screen appearance was in the Bud Yorkin/Norman Lear comedy Cold Turkey, which wasn't released until the following year.

Trivia: During her twenty-one year Hollywood career, Minna Gombell was also billed as Winifred Lee and Nancy Carter. By any name, Gombell was usually typecast in brittle, hollow-eyed, hard-boiled character parts. Devoted Late Late Show fans will recall Gombell as one of the secondary murder victims in The Thin Man (1934), as Mrs. Oliver Hardy in Block-Heads (1938), as the Queen of the Beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and as clubfooted Joan Leslie's mother in High Sierra (1941). In 1935, Minna Gombell was afforded top billing in the above-average Monogram domestic drama Women Must Dress.

Trivia: Famed for his country-bumpkin features and fruity vocal intonations, American actor Sterling Holloway left his native Georgia as a teenager to study acting in New York City. Working through the Theatre Guild, the young Holloway was cast in the first Broadway production of songwriters Rodgers and Hart, Garrick Gaieties. In the 1925 edition of the revue, Holloway introduced the Rodgers-Hart standard "I'll Take Manhattan;" in the 1926 version, the actor introduced another hit, "Mountain Greenery." Hollywood beckoned, and Holloway made a group of silent two-reelers and one feature, the Wallace Beery vehicle Casey at the Bat (1927), before he was fired by the higher-ups because they deemed his face "too grotesque" for movies. Small wonder that Holloway would insist in later years that he was never satisfied with any of the work Hollywood would throw his way, and longed for the satisfaction of stage work. When talkies came, Holloway's distinctive voice made him much in demand, and from 1932 through the late '40s he became the archetypal soda jerk, messenger boy, and backwoods rube. His most rewarding assignments came from Walt Disney Studios, where Holloway provided delightful voiceovers for such cartoon productions as Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Ben and Me (1954) and The Jungle Book (1967). Holloway's most enduring role at Disney was as the wistful voice of Winnie the Pooh in a group of mid-'60s animated shorts. On the "live" front, Holloway became fed up of movie work one day when he found his character being referred to as "boy" - and he was past forty at the time. A few satisfactory film moments were enjoyed by Holloway as he grew older; he starred in an above-average series of two reel comedies for Columbia Pictures from 1946 to 1948 (in one of these, 1948's Flat Feat, he convincingly and hilariously impersonated a gangster), and in 1956 he had what was probably the most bizarre assignment of his career when he played a "groovy" hipster in the low-budget musical Shake, Rattle and Rock (1956). Holloway worked prodigiously in TV during the '50s and '60s as a regular or semi-regular on such series as The Life of Riley, Adventures of Superman and The Baileys of Balboa. Edging into retirement in the '70s, Sterling Holloway preferred to stay in his lavish hilltop house in San Laguna, California, where he maintained one of the most impressive and expensive collections of modern paintings in the world.

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 tough-looking supporting actress from San Francisco, auburn-haired Barbara Leonard had studied languages prior to entering films in 1928. The training would come in handy in the years to come as Leonard was cast in several foreign-language renditions of major Hollywood films, including the French version of The Merry Widow (1934).

Trivia: For nearly two decades in Hollywood, Scottish-born actor Donald Meek lived up to his name by portraying a series of tremulous, shaky-voiced sycophants and milquetoasts -- though he was equally effective (if not more so) as nail-hard businessmen, autocratic schoolmasters, stern judges, compassionate doctors, small-town Babbitts, and at least one Nazi spy! An actor since the age of eight, Meek joined an acrobatic troupe, which brought him to America in his teens. At 18 Meek joined the American military and was sent to fight in the Spanish-American War. He contracted yellow fever, which caused him to lose his hair -- and in so doing, secured his future as a character actor. Meek made his film bow in 1928; in the early talkie era, he starred with John Hamilton in a series of New York-filmed short subjects based on the works of mystery writer S. S. Van Dyne. Relocating to Hollywood in 1933, Meek immediately found steady work in supporting roles. So popular did Meek become within the next five years that director Frank Capra, who'd never worked with the actor before, insisted that the gratuitous role of Mr. Poppins be specially written for Meek in the film version of You Can't Take It With You (1938) (oddly, this first association with Capra would be the last). Meek died in 1946, while working in director William Wellman's Magic Town; his completed footage remained in the film, though he was certainly conspicuous by his absence during most of the proceedings.

Trivia: Earthy Russian character actor Akim Tamiroff was relatively aimless, not settling upon a theatrical career until he was nearly 19. Selected from 500 applicants, Tamiroff was trained by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater School. While touring the U.S. with a Russian acting troupe in 1923, Tamiroff decided to remain in New York and give Broadway a try. He was quite active with the Theatre Guild during the 1920s and early '30s, then set out for Hollywood, hoping to scare up movie work. After several years' worth of bit roles, Tamiroff's film career began gaining momentum when he was signed by Paramount in 1936. He became one of the studio's top players, appearing in juicy featured roles in A-pictures and starring in such B's as The Great Gambini (1937), King of Chinatown (1938), and The Magnificent Fraud (1939). Essaying a wide variety of nationalities, Tamiroff was most frequently cast as a villain or reprobate with a deep down sentimental and/or honorable streak. He was a favorite of many directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, starring in Union Pacific (1939), Northwest Mounted Police (1940), and Preston Sturges' The Great McGinty (1940). He was twice nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his work in The General Died at Dawn (1936) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). During the 1950s, Tamiroff was a close associate of actor/director Orson Welles, who cast Tamiroff in underhanded supporting roles in Mr. Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1963), and retained his services for nearly two decades in the role of Sancho Panza in Welles' never-finished Don Quixote. Akim Tamiroff continued to flourish with meaty assignments in films like Topkapi (1964) and After the Fox (1966), rounding out his long and fruitful career with a starring assignment in the French/Italian political melodrama, Death of a Jew (1970).

Trivia: Along with such immortals as Percy Helton, Franklin Pangborn and Grady Sutton, Herman Bing is a member of that Valhalla of film character actors. Educated in his native Germany for a musical career, Bing went into vaudeville at 16, and soon after found work as a circus clown. Entering films in the mid-1920s, Bing apprenticed under the great director F. W. Murnau. He accompanied Murnau to Hollywood in 1927, where he worked as a scripter and assistant director on the classic silent drama Sunrise. After several more years assisting the likes of John Ford and Frank Borzage, Bing established himself as a character actor. Nearly always cast as a comic waiter, excitable musician, apoplectic stage manager or self-important official, Bing became famous for his wild-eyed facial expressions and his thick, "R"-rolling Teutonic accent. When the sort of broad comedy for which Herman Bing was renowned became passe in the postwar era, work opportunities dried up; despondent over his fading career, Bing shot himself at the age of 57.

Trivia: In films from 1929 to 1943, character actor Lucien Prival was able to parlay his vocal and physical resemblance to Erich von Stroheim into a sizeable screen career. Prival was at his most Stroheim-like in war films, notably Hell's Angels (1930), in which his Baron Von Kranz both set the plot in motion and brought things to a conclusion. He went on to play Teutonic menaces in films ranging from Sherlock Holmes (1932) and Return of Chandu (1934). Horror fans will remember Lucien Prival as the ill-tempered butler in James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Trivia: In bit roles from 1932, American leading lady Luana Walters made the first of several movie-serial appearances as the exotic Sonya in Shadows of Chinatown (1936). Walters also starred in the infamous anti-marijuana tract Assassin of Youth (1938). A Columbia contractee in the 1940s, she was seen in everything from the Andy Clyde two-reeler Lovable Trouble (1942, as a lady baseball player) and the 15-chapter serial Superman (1948, as Lara, Superman's real mom). Luana Walters continued essaying character roles in such low-budgeters as The She-Creature until 1959.

Trivia: Along with the better-remembered Gail Patrick, brunette Lona Andre (born Laura Anderson) was a runner-up to Kathleen Burke in Paramount's Panther Woman contest. Burke won the coveted role opposite Charles Laughton in the quasi-horror epic Island of Lost Souls (1933) and Patrick would, many years later, become the producer of television's Perry Mason. Andre, meanwhile, did plenty of cheesecake art and acted in low-budget programmers, but her personal life was rather more dramatic than any of her screen roles, the most prominent of which was as one of the flirtatious dates in Laurel & Hardy's Our Relations. Having deserted actor James Dunn virtually at the altar, Andre later married handsome B-movie player Edward Norris, only to leave him after only four days of what she termed "marital hell." After her screen career ended in 1947, she successfully ran her own North Hollywood real estate business.

Trivia: A former dancer and model, silent-screen actress Caryl Lincoln entered films in 1926 as a bit player in two-reel comedies for Al Christie and Hal Roach. She reached stardom opposite a dog (Rin-Tin-Tin-imitator Ranger) in Wolf Fangs (1927) and Tracked (1928) and was the "Girl from Liverpool" in the popular A Girl in Every Port (1928) opposite Victor McLaglen. (Louise Brooks was the "Girl in France.") Lincoln received fine notices as Tom Mix's romantic interest in the Fox Western Hello Cheyenne, with Variety's reviewer applauding her for getting away "from the dumbness of the usual plains heroine." As a result of the Mix Western, she was voted a 1929 WAMPAS Baby Star by the Hollywood publicists, but unlike fellow WAMPAS baby Jean Arthur, she failed to escape the dreaded Poverty Row. Playing increasingly less important roles in cheap potboilers, Lincoln turned to working as an extra in the 1930s. In 1934, she married Barbara Stanwyck's brother, actor Byron Stevens, a union that lasted until Stevens' death in 1964.

Trivia: Auburn-haired Ziegfeld girl Eleanor Hunt blazed onto the screen in 1930, as Eddie Cantor's leading lady in the phenomenally successful Whoopee. She signed with Fox but was then wasted in a couple of so-so roles in so-so films. By 1934, she was playing John Wayne's leading lady in the Western Blue Steel, but the studio was Monogram and Wayne merely an also-ran cowboy at the time. She made four minor action adventures with the fading Conrad Nagel, produced by Condor Pictures, but it was too little, too late and she retired. Hunt was the wife of B-movie perennial Rex Lease.

Trivia: One of the oldest "we're gonna make you a star" clichés actually happened to blue-eyed brownette Dorothy Wilson. While working as a stenographer at RKO Radio studios, Wilson was spotted by a talent scout and signed to an acting contract. It's not certain whether or not the scout fell in love with Wilson once she took off her glasses, but it wouldn't be a bit surprising. Proving to be as talented as she was pretty, Wilson appeared opposite fellow RKO contractees William Boyd in Lucky Devils (1933), Tom Keene in Scarlet River (1933), and Preston Foster in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935). Loaned out to other studios, Wilson co-starred with Loretta Young in The White Parade (1934), Will Rogers in In Old Kentucky (1935), Harold Lloyd in The Milky Way (1936), and Rosalind Russell in Craig's Wife (1936). This last-named film proved to be the cinematic swan song for Dorothy Wilson, who retired from acting to marry Oscar-winning writer/director Lewis R. Foster.

Trivia: A beauty-contest winner at age 13, Dorothy Granger went on to perform in vaudeville with her large and talented family. Granger made her film bow in 1929's Words and Music, and the following year landed a contract with comedy producer Hal Roach. Working with such masters as Harry Langdon, Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase, she sharpened her own comic skills to perfection, enabling her to assume the unofficial title of "Queen of the Short Subjects." During her long association with two-reelers, she appeared with the likes of W.C. Fields (The Dentist), the Three Stooges (Punch Drunks), Walter Catlett, Edgar Kennedy, Hugh Herbert and a host of others. She also appeared sporadically in features, playing everything from full leads to one-line bits. A favorite of director Mitchell Leisen, Granger essayed amusing cameos in such Leisen productions as Take a Letter, Darling (1942) and Lady in the Dark (1944). George Cukor wanted to cast Granger in the important role of Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind (1939), but producer David O. Selznick decided to go with Ona Munson, who had more "name" value. Granger is most fondly remembered for her appearances in RKO's long-running (1935-51) Leon Errol short-subject series, in which she was usually cast as Leon's highly suspicious spouse. She retired from films in 1963, keeping busy by helping her husband manage a successful Los Angeles upholstery store. Dorothy Granger made her last public appearance in 1993 at the Screen Actors Guild's 50th anniversary celebration.

Trivia: Burly vaudeville monologist/comedian Russell J. Powell made his first film in 1920. It wasn't until the advent of talkies, however, that Powell's gift for dialects and bizarre vocal sound effects could truly be appreciated. His more memorable screen roles included the Afghan Ambassador in Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929) and his blackface turn as the Kingfish in the Amos and Andy vehicle Check and Double Check (1930). So far as many film aficionados are concerned, Russell J. Powell achieved immortality as the dockhand in the opening scene of King Kong (1933), who launches into a stream of fluent exposition with the quizzical "Say, you goin' on this craaazy voyage?"

Trivia: Stage actor Tyler Brooke was signed to a movie contract by Hollywood producer Hal Roach in 1926. One of Brooke's first assignments was a role opposite fading movie queen Theda Bara in the nonsensical two-reeler Madame Mystery. He ended his association with Roach on a discordant note, suing fellow contractee Oliver Hardy for $100,000 in 1929, claiming that Hardy had fractured his arm during an overzealous game of pool. Brooke made the transition to talkies as a society rake in Cecil B. DeMille's first sound films, Dynamite (1929) and Madam Satan (1930). Throughout the 1930s, Brooke showed up in several period pictures like Belle of the Nineties (1934) and Alexander Graham Bell (1939), usually cast as a handlebar-mustached quartet singer or musical hall comedian. He was quite amusing as the young Gay-90s swain in the prologue of 1940's Kitty Foyle. Tyler Brooke was 51 when he died of self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning.

Trivia: A tall (6'2"), gangly supporting actor onscreen from the early '30s, Roger Gray played James Cagney's sailor pal in the "Shanghai Lil" number in Footlight Parade (1933) and was Celano, a Philippine bandit masquerading as a sailor (named "Brooklyn," no less), in Come on Marines (1934). Those were perhaps the highlights of a career mainly constituted by unbilled, bit roles as cops, military officers, small-time gangsters, and even the occasional sheriff (Oh, Susannah!, 1936). Gray made his final screen appearance in yet another unbilled bit part in Gaslight (1944). He also appeared on television in the early '50s, and made his final screen appearance in 1958's Gang War.

Trivia: George Magrill entered films in 1921 as a general-purpose bit player. Magrill's imposing physique and dexterity enabled him to make a good living as a stunt man throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. From time to time, he'd have speaking roles as bank guards, cops, sailors, truck drivers and chauffeurs. On those rare occasions that he'd receive screen credit, George Magrill was usually identified as "Thug," a part he played to the hilt in westerns, crime mellers and serials.

Trivia: Enjoying one of the longer careers in Hollywood history, Gino Corrado is today best remembered as a stocky bit-part player whose pencil-thin mustache made him the perfect screen barber, maître d', or hotel clerk, roles he would play in both major and Poverty Row films that ranged from Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942) to serials such as The Lost City (1935) and, perhaps his best-remembered performance, the Three Stooges short Micro Phonies (1945; he was the bombastic Signor Spumoni).A graduate of his native College of Strada, Corrado finished his education at St. Bede College in Peru, IL, and entered films with D.W. Griffith in the early 1910s, later claiming to have played bit parts in both Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). By the mid-1910s, he was essaying the "other man" in scores of melodramas, now billed under the less ethnic-sounding name of Eugene Corey. He became Geno Corrado in the 1920s but would work under his real name in literally hundreds of sound films, a career that lasted well into the 1950s and also included live television appearances. In a case of life imitating art, Corrado reportedly supplemented his income by working as a waiter in between acting assignments.

Trivia: A slightly built, often mustachioed, supporting actor who usually played professional men (dentists, fingerprint experts, druggists, bookkeepers, etc.), Perry Ivins had been in the original 1924 production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. He entered films as a dialogue director in 1929 (The Love Parade [1929], The Benson Murder Case [1930]) before embarking on a long career as a bit part player. Among Ivins' more notable roles were the copy editor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the assistant home secretary in Charlie Chan in London, and the mysterious but ultimately benign Crenshaw in the serial Devil Dogs of the Air (1937). Ivins' acting career lasted well into the television era and included guest roles on such programs as Gunsmoke and Perry Mason.

Trivia: Handsome, swarthy Paul Ellis played an unscrupulous party-giver luring young girls in general and innocent Harley Wood in particular into a life of drug dependency in the 1936 exploitation thriller Marihuana. This "sensational" melodrama -- road-shown for years and making its creator, entrepreneur Dwain Esper, a wealthy man -- was actually the nadir in the long screen career of this dancer/writer/actor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In Hollywood from the mid-'20s, Ellis (born Benjamin Ingenito) also appeared under another nom de cinema, Manuel Granados. Often cast as cads, Ellis caused Corinne Griffith's downfall in Three Hours (1927), attempted to corrupt Constance Bennett in The Common Law (1931), and portrayed General Castrillion in the low-budget Heroes of the Alamo (1937). In between his work in English-language films, Ellis appeared in Spanish versions of The Good Bad Girl (1931), Men in Her Life (1931), Revenge at Monte Carlo (1933), and danced in both the English and French versions of The Merry Widow (1934). Rarely seen in America after 1941, Ellis' final credited performance came in the Argentinean La Tiera del Fuego se Apaga (1955).

Trivia: Forced to flee his native St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik revolution, Russian-born actor Leonid Kinskey arrived in New York in 1921. At that time, he was a member of the Firebird Players, a South American troupe whose act consisted of dance-interpreting famous paintings; since there was little call for this on Broadway, Kinskey was soon pounding the pavements. The only English words he knew were such translation-book phrases as "My good kind sir," but Kinskey was able to improve his vocabulary by working as a waiter in a restaurant. Heading west for performing opportunities following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Kinskey joined the road tour of the Al Jolson musical Wonder Bar, which led to a role in his first film Trouble in Paradise (1932). His Slavic dialect and lean-and-hungry look making him ideal for anarchist, artist, poet and impresario roles, Kinskey made memorable appearances in such films as Duck Soup (1933), Nothing Sacred (1937) and On Your Toes (1939). His best known appearance was as Sacha, the excitable bartender at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca (1942). The film's star, Humphrey Bogart, was a drinking buddy of Kinskey's, and when the first actor cast as the barkeep proved inadequate, Bogart arranged for Kinskey to be cast in the role. During the Red Scare of the '50s, Kinskey was frequently cast as a Communist spy, either comic or villainous. In 1956 he had a recurring role as a starving artist named Pierre on the Jackie Cooper sitcom The People's Choice. Kinskey cut down on acting in the '60s and '70s, preferring to write and produce, and help Hollywood distribution companies determine which Russian films were worth importing. But whenever a television script (such as the 1965 "tribute" to Stan Laurel) called for a "crazy Russian", Leonid Kinsky was usually filled the bill.

Trivia: A true screen pioneer, Evelyn Selbie entered films in 1912 as leading lady to the first true Western star, Broncho Billy Anderson. Although billed as "The Broncho Billy Girl," Selbie was actually Anderson's third onscreen counterpart, having followed Marguerite Clayton and Vedah Bertram. Filmed more or less by the seat of his pants at Niles Canyon near Oakland, CA, Anderson's one- and two-reel Westerns were extremely popular in the early 1910s and Selbie was soon considered a major star. When Marguerite Clayton returned in 1915, however, the already middle-aged Selbie quickly settled into a career as a supporting player, a career encompassing films, radio, and the legitimate stage, and lasting until at least 1941. She died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture House and Hospital's care facility in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: A handsome, mustachioed supporting player, Wedgewood Nowell entered films in 1915, according to his official studio bio, "after 15 years of stage work." A classically trained musician as well, the actor moonlighted as a composer of original music, his scores accompanying the screenings of such popular melodramas as The Disciple (1915) and The Deserter (1916). Very busy throughout the silent era -- mostly playing slightly degenerate noblemen and various bluenoses -- Nowell became a dress extra and bit player after the changeover to sound.

Trivia: Dignified, shiny-domed American actor/playwright Richard Carle acted in both the U.S. and England for several decades before making his first film in 1916. Usually fitted with a pince-nez and winged collar, Carle was perfect for roles calling for slightly faded dignity. Comedy fans will recall Carle as the genially mad scientist in the Laurel and Hardy 2-reeler Habeas Corpus (1928) and as the besotted ship's captain who takes six months to travel from New York to Paris in Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (1933). He went on to appear as college deans, bankers and judges until his death in 1941, a year in which he showed up in no fewer than eight films. What might have been Richard Carle's finest screen role, the eccentric Father William in the 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland, was cut from the final release print of that film.

Trivia: After considerable experience on the New York stage, Morgan Wallace entered films at D.W. Griffith's studio in Mamaroneck, Long Island. Wallace's first screen role of note was the lecherous Marquis de Praille in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921). Thereafter, he specialized in dignified character parts such as James Monroe in George Arliss' Alexander Hamilton (1931). A favorite of comedian W.C. Fields (perhaps because he was born in Lompoc, CA, one of Fields' favorite comic targets), Wallace showed up as Jasper Fitchmuller, the customer who wants kumquats and wants them now, in Fields' It's a Gift (1934). Morgan Wallace retired in 1946.

Trivia: A one-time Miss California, American actress Sheila Bromley came to films relatively late; she was 26 when she appeared in her first movie, Idol of the Crowds (1937). While she had several short-term starlet contracts over the years, principally at Columbia, Fox and Warner Bros., Bromley's credits are hard to trace, simply because she spent so much time not being Sheila Bromley. At various points in her career she billed herself as Sheila Manners, Sheila Mannors and Sheila Fulton, seldom rising above B-picture status under any of those names. On TV, she was a regular on the popular sitcom I Married Joan (1952-55), billed again as Sheila Bromley. After nearly twenty years in such disposable second features as Torture Ship (1939), Calling Philo Vance (1940), Time to Kill (1942) and Young Jesse James (1950), "Sheila Bromley/Manners/Mannors/Fulton" retired, returning several years later for small roles in major 1960s productions like Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Hotel (1966). In 1965, Sheila Bromley had a continuing featured role on the NBC TV daytime drama Morning Star.

Trivia: Nora Cecil's earliest known screen credit was 1918's Prunella. Chances are Cecil played then what she'd play in most of her talkie efforts: the tight-lipped, sternly reproving old biddy. She made a good living essaying dozens of battle-ax mothers-in-law, welfare workers, landladies, schoolmistresses and maiden aunts. One of her largest parts was boarding-house keeper Mrs. Wendelschaffer in W.C. Fields' The Old Fashioned Way (1934). Nora Cecil also served as an excellent foil for screen comedians as varied as Laurel and Hardy (1932's Pack Up Your Troubles) and Will Rogers (1933's Dr. Bull).

Trivia: New Zealand-born stage actor Winter Hall first appeared in American films when he joined the Lasky Company (later Paramount) in 1916. The poised, distinguished Hall soon became a regular of the Cecil B. DeMille unit at Lasky, playing major roles in DeMille's Romance of the Redwoods (1917), Til I Come Back to You (1918), The Squaw Man (1918), The Affairs of Anatol (1921) and Saturday Night (1922). Beginning with 1919's Red Lantern, Hall tended to be typecast as a cleric. Throughout the talkie era, Winter Hall was seen as various ministers and priests in such productions as The Love Parade (1929), Cavalcade (1933), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Invisible Ray (1936) and Slave Ship.

Trivia: A child star of the early silent era, Matty Roubert was advertised as the "Universal Boy." Often appearing in melodramas produced and/or directed by his real-life father, William L. Roubert, Matty's popularity remained high through the 1910s but waned as he grew into young adulthood. Continuing in films well into the sound era, Matty Roubert made something of a specialty playing newsboys or messengers, usually unbilled. He left the screen in the late '40s.

Trivia: Rotund, ruddy-faced character actor Ferdinand Munier first showed up in films around 1923. Blessed with a rich, rolling voice that perfectly matched his portly frame, Munier flourished in the talkie era, playing scores of pompous foreign ambassadors, gouty aristocrats, and philandering businessmen. His many screen assignments included King Louis XIII in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and the aptly named Prince Too-Much-Belly in Diamond Horseshoe. A perfect Santa Claus type, Ferdinand Munier was frequently cast as Saint Nick, most amusingly in Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland (1934) and Hope and Crosby's Road to Utopia (1945).

Trivia: Barrel-chested American actor Dewey Robinson was much in demand during the gangster cycle of the early '30s. Few actors could convey muscular menace and mental vacuity as quickly and as well as the mountainous Mr. Robinson. Most of his roles were bits, but he was given extended screen time as a polo-playing mobster in Edward G. Robinson's Little Giant (1933), as a bored slavemaster in the outrageously erotic "No More Love" number in Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933) and as a plug-ugly ward heeler at odds with beauty contest judge Ben Turpin in the slapstick 2-reeler Keystone Hotel (1935). Shortly before his death in 1950, Dewey Robinson had a lengthy unbilled role as a Brooklyn baseball fan in The Jackie Robinson Story, slowly metamorphosing from a brainless bigot to Jackie's most demonstrative supporter.

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: Vaudevillian John "Skins" Miller was a Hollywood habitue from the early 1930s until his retirement in 1951. Miller's biggest screen role was the Comedy Hillbilly in 1934's Stand Up and Cheer; holding Stepin Fetchit at bay with a shotgun, the bearded, barefooted Miller sings a love song to his gargantuan sweetheart Sally, then inexplicably falls flat on his back. During the 1930s, he was briefly under contract to MGM, where one of his duties was to imitate Groucho Marx during rehearsals of such Marx Bros. films as Day at the Races at At the Circus, so that Groucho could decide whether or not the material written for him would "play." Some sources have incorrectly listed John "Skins" Miller as a member of the original Three Stooges, in truth, he appeared in 1934's Gift of Gab as one-third of another team calling themselves the Three Stooges, who never worked together before or since (for the record, Miller's fellow "stooges" were Sid Walker and Jack Harling).

Trivia: A dapper-looking supporting comic from St. Louis, Otto H. Fries came to films in the early 1910s with a varied background in medicine shows and vaudeville. By 1915, he was with Keystone and a lifelong friendship with Stan Laurel led to appearances in that star comedian's early films for Bronco Billy Anderson. Not surprisingly, Fries later landed at Roach, where he supported not only Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase but also such lesser lights as Max Davidson and James Finlayson. Sound proved no hindrance and Fries would appear in many of Roach's German-language talkies. Often cast as inebriates, Fries played scores of bit parts and walk-ons in grade-A films until the year of his death. A German actor with a similar surname (Otto Friese) acted in British films of the 1950s.

Trivia: He studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After establishing himself prominently on the American stage, he began appearing in silents beginning with The Gilded Lily (1921). He appeared in more than 100 films, the last of which was the Elvis Presley vehicle Wild in the Country (1961). He starred in a number of silents, often as a clean-living rural hero; in the sound era he began playing character roles, almost always as an arch villain. Due to a serious eye infection, he was absent from the big screen in the '50s. He was the father of actor Jason Robards, with whom he appeared on Broadway in 1958 in The Disenchanted.

Trivia: Dapper character actor Rolfe Sedan was nine times out of ten cast as a foreigner, usually a French maître d' or Italian tradesman. In truth, Sedan was born in New York City. He'd planned to study scientific agriculture, but was sidetracked by film and stage work in New York; he then embarked on a vaudeville career as a dialect comic. Sedan began appearing in Hollywood films in the late '20s, frequently cast in support of such major comedy attractions as Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chase, the Marx Brothers, and Harold Lloyd. He was proudest of his work in a handful of films directed by Ernst Lubitsch, notably Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938). Though distressed that he never made it to the top ranks, Sedan remained very much in demand for comedy cameos into the 1980s. Rolfe Sedan's television work included the recurring role of Mr. Beasley the postman on The Burns and Allen Show, and the part of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee in several TV commercials of the mid-'70s.

Trivia: A genuine westerner, Lane Chandler, upon leaving Montana Wesleyan College, moved to LA and worked as a garage mechanic while seeking out film roles. After several years in bit parts, Chandler was signed by Paramount in 1927 as a potential western star. For a brief period, both Chandler and Gary Cooper vied for the best cowboy roles, but in the end Paramount went with Cooper. Chandler made several attempts to establish himself as a "B" western star in the 1930s, but his harsh voice and sneering demeanor made him a better candidate for villainous roles. He mostly played bits in the 1940s, often as a utility actor for director Cecil B. DeMille. The weather-beaten face and stubbly chin of Lane Chandler popped up in many a TV and movie western of the 1950s, his roles gradually increasing in size and substance towards the end of his career.