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

Trivia: Educated in London and Paris, the breathtakingly beautiful Maureen O'Sullivan was discovered for films by director Frank Borzage while both were attending a horse show in Dublin. She made her screen debut in 1930 opposite Irish tenor John McCormick in Song O' My Heart, which earned her a contract with Fox studios. After appearing in such Fox blockbusters as Just Imagine (1930) and A Connecticut Yankee (1931), she moved to MGM, where her first assignment was the role of Jane Parker in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). She repeated this characterization in Tarzan and His Mate (1934), causing a minor sensation with her bikini-like costume and a nude swimming scene. Somewhat more modestly garbed, she went on to co-star in four more Tarzan pictures over the next eight years. Though MGM kept her busy in a variety of films, ranging from such costume dramas as The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and David Copperfield (1935) to the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937), she is best remembered for her appearances as Jane, a fact that has been a source of both pride and irritation for the actress (she liked her co-star Johnny Weissmuller but despised Cheeta the chimpanzee, who bit her more than once). She retired from films in 1942 to devote her time to her husband, director John Farrow, and her many children, two of whom grew up to be actresses Mia Farrow and Tisa Farrow. She returned to the screen in 1948, averaging a film every two years until 1958. An early arrival on TV, she hosted a local children's program in New York and the syndicated series Irish Heritage, and in 1964 was hired by NBC to co-anchor The Today Show (her replacement the following year was Barbara Walters). In 1964 she starred with Paul Ford in the Broadway production Never Too Late, playing a fortysomething suburbanite who suddenly finds herself pregnant; the following year she and Ford repeated their roles in the screen version. Widowed in 1963, she remarried 20 years later, sporadically reviving her screen activities in such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1985), in which she and Lloyd Nolan played the combative parents of her real-life daughter Mia Farrow. As regally beautiful as ever, Maureen O'Sullivan showed up again on TV in the mid-'90s as one of the interviewees in a Tarzan retrospective.

Trivia: Child star Johnny Sheffield was the son of British actor Reginald Sheffield, himself a former juvenile performer (he played the title role in the 1913 cinemazation of David Copperfield). A wan, sickly infant, Johnny's health and physical stamina was beefed up by a strict exercise regimen supervised by his father. At age 7, Johnny co-starred in the original Broadway production of On Borrowed Time. This brought the young actor to the attention of the MGM casting department, which was looking for a suitably athletic child to play Boy in the studio's Tarzan pictures. Beginning with 1939's Tarzan Finds a Son, Sheffield played Boy in eight "Tarzan" programmers, remaining with the series when it shifted its base of operations from MGM to RKO. After a brief period of unemployment, the 17-year-old Sheffield was cast as the lead in Monogram's Bomba the Jungle Boy series, which endured for three years and twelve low-budget pictures. Sheffield decided to retire from acting in 1955. He sank his film earnings into real estate -- growing quite wealthy in the process -- and enrolled as a pre-med student at UCLA. When last heard from, Sheffield was living in happy retirement, overseeing his numerous real estate holdings. Johnny Sheffield's film credits should not be confused with those of British character actor John Sheffield.

Trivia: Hard-fighting, strong, durable redhead Charles Bickford graduated from MIT before he began appearing in burlesque in 1914. After serving in World War I, he started a career on Broadway in 1919. He didn't come to Hollywood until the birth of the Sound Era in 1929. His first film was Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite, during the production of which, he punched out DeMille. He became a star after playing Greta Garbo's lover in Anna Christie (1930), but didn't develop into a romantic lead, instead becoming a powerful character actor whose screen appearances commanded attention throughout a career spanning almost four decades, in films such as Duel in the Sun (1946) and Johnny Belinda (1948). His craggy, intense features lent themselves to roles as likable fathers, businessmen, captains, etc. He sometimes played stubborn or unethical roles, but more often projected honesty or warmth. He co-authored a play, The Cyclone Lover (1928) and wrote an autobiography, Bulls, Balls, Bicycles, and Actors (1965). He was Oscar-nominated three times but never won the award. Late in his life he starred in the TV show The Virginian.

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

Trivia: Paul Kelly was one of the few actors who not only played killers, but also had first-hand experience in this capacity! On stage from age 7, "Master" Paul Kelly entered films at 8, performing on the sunlight stages of Flatbush's Vitagraph Studios. His first important theatrical role was in Booth Tarkington's Seventeen; he later appeared in Tarkington's Penrod, opposite a young Helen Hayes. Star billing was Kelly's from 1922's Up the Ladder onwards. In films from 1926, Kelly alternated between stage and screen until his talkie debut in 1932's Broadway Through A Keyhole. The actor's career momentum was briefly halted with a two-year forced hiatus. On May 31, 1927, Kelly was found guilty of manslaughter, after killing actor Ray Raymond in a fistfight. The motivating factor of the fatal contretemps was Raymond's wife, Dorothy MacKaye, who married Kelly in 1931, after he'd served prison time for Raymond's death (MacKaye herself died in an automobile accident in 1940). This unfortunate incident had little adverse effect on Kelly's acting career, which continued up until his death in 1956. Returning to Broadway in 1947, Paul Kelly won the Donaldson and Tony awards for his performance in Command Decision; three years later, he starred in the original stage production of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl.

Trivia: He began performing in early childhood, going on to appear in tent shows, vaudeville, and stock throughout the Southwest. He formed Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys, a singing group in which he was the leader and bass vocalist, in the '30s. After appearing with the group in several Westerns, beginning with his screen debut, Bar 20 Rides Again (1935), he disbanded the group in 1938. For the next fifteen years he was busy onscreen as a character actor, but after 1953 his film work became less frequent. He provided the voice of Francis the Talking Mule in the "Francis" comedy series of films. In the '60s he starred in the TV series "Frontier Circus" and "The Rounders." For his work in The Alamo (1960) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975 he released a singing album--his first.

Trivia: Cyrus W. Kendall was eight years old when he made his acting debut at the fabled Pasadena Playhouse. As an adult, the portly Kendall became a charter member of the Playhouse's Eighteen Actors Inc., acting in and/or directing over 100 theatrical productions. In films from 1936, he was usually typecast as an abrasive, cigar-chomping detective, gangster or machine politician. He showed up in roles both large and small in feature films, and was prominently cast in several of MGM's Crime Does Not Pay short subjects. Typical Kendall assignments of the 1940s included Jumbo Madigan in Alias Boston Blackie (1941) and "Honest" John Travers in Outlaw Trail (1944). Remaining active into the early years of live television, Cyrus W. Kendall essayed several guest spots on the 1949 quiz show/anthology Armchair Detective, and co-starred with Robert Bice, Spencer Chan and Herb Ellis on the Hollywood-based ABC weekly Mysteries of Chinatown (1949-50).

Trivia: Trained in prep school for a career as a businessman, Baltimore-born Russell Hicks chucked his predestined lifestyle for a theatrical career, over the protests of his family. As an actor, Hicks came full circle, spending the bulk of his career playing businessmen! Though he claimed to have appeared in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), Hicks' earliest recorded Hollywood job occured in 1920, when he was hired as an assistant casting director for Famous Players (later Paramount). Making his stage debut in It Pays to Smile, Hicks acted in stock companies and on Broadway before his official film bow in 1934's Happiness Ahead. The embodiment of the small-town business booster or chairman of the board, the tall, authoritative Hicks frequently used his dignified persona to throw the audience off guard in crooked or villainous roles. He was glib confidence man J. Frothingham Waterbury in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940) ("I want to be honest with you in the worst way!"), and more than once he was cast as the surprise killer in murder mysteries. Because of his robust, athletic physique, Hicks could also be seen as middle-aged adventurers, such as one of The Three Musketeers in the 1939 version of that classic tale, and as the aging Robin Hood in 1946's Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946). Russell Hicks continued accepting film assignments until 1956's Seventh Cavalry.

Trivia: Stately stage leading man Howard C. Hickman entered films through the auspices of producer Thomas H. Ince. Hickman starred as Count Ferdinand, the Messianic protagonist of Ince's Civilization (1916). He co-starred with his actress wife Bessie Barriscale in several productions before returning to the theatre. In the talkie era, he accepted innumerable featured and bit roles as doctors, judges, ministers, senators, and executives. Generations of filmgoers will remember Howard Hickman for his brief appearance as John Wilkes, father of Ashley Wilkes and father-in-law of Melanie Hamilton, in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Trivia: Hatchet-faced character actor Charles Lane has been one of the most instantly recognizable non-stars in Hollywood for more than half a century. Lane has been a familiar figure in movies (and, subsequently, on television) for 60 years, portraying crotchety, usually miserly, bad-tempered bankers and bureaucrats. Lane was born Charles Levison in San Francisco in 1899 (some sources give his year of birth as 1905). He learned the ropes of acting at the Pasadena Playhouse during the middle/late '20s, appearing in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Noel Coward before going to Hollywood in 1930, just as sound was fully taking hold. He was a good choice for character roles, usually playing annoying types with his high-pitched voice and fidgety persona, encompassing everything from skinflint accountants to sly, fast-talking confidence men -- think of an abrasive version of Bud Abbott. His major early roles included the stage manager Max Jacobs in Twentieth Century and the tax assessor in You Can't Take It With You. One of the busier character men in Hollywood, Lane was a particular favorite of Frank Capra's, and he appeared in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, It's a Wonderful Life -- with a particularly important supporting part in the latter -- and State of the Union. He played in every kind of movie from screwball comedy like Ball of Fire to primordial film noir, such as I Wake Up Screaming. As Lane grew older, he tended toward more outrageously miserly parts, in movies and then on television, where he turned up Burns & Allen, I Love Lucy, and Dear Phoebe, among other series. Having successfully played a tight-fisted business manager hired by Ricky Ricardo to keep Lucy's spending in line in one episode of I Love Lucy (and, later, the U.S. border guard who nearly arrests the whole Ricardo clan and actor Charles Boyer at the Mexican border in an episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour), Lane was a natural choice to play Lucille Ball's nemesis on The Lucy Show. Her first choice for the money-grubbing banker would have been Gale Gordon, but as he was already contractually committed to the series Dennis the Menace, she hired Lane to play Mr. Barnsdahl, the tight-fisted administrator of her late-husband's estate during the first season of the show. Lane left the series after Gordon became available to play the part of Mr. Mooney, but in short order he moved right into the part that came very close to making him a star. The CBS country comedy series Petticoat Junction needed a semi-regular villain and Lane just fit the bill as Homer Bedloe, the greedy, bad-tempered railroad executive whose career goal was to shut down the Cannonball railroad that served the town of Hooterville. He became so well-known in the role, which he only played once or twice a season, that at one point Lane found himself in demand for personal appearance tours. In later years, he also turned up in roles on The Beverly Hillbillies, playing Jane Hathaway's unscrupulous landlord, and did an excruciatingly funny appearance on The Odd Couple in the mid-'70s, playing a manic, greedy patron at the apartment sale being run by Felix and Oscar. Lane also did his share of straight dramatic roles, portraying such parts as Tony Randall's nastily officious IRS boss in the comedy The Mating Game (1959), the crusty River City town constable in The Music Man (1962) (which put Lane into the middle of a huge musical production number), the wryly cynical, impatient judge in the James Garner comedy film The Wheeler-Dealers (1963), and portraying Admiral William Standley in The Winds of War (1983), based on Herman Wouk's novel. He was still working right up until the late '80s, and David Letterman booked the actor to appear on his NBC late-night show during the middle of that decade, though his appearance on the program was somewhat disappointing and sad; the actor, who was instantly recognized by the studio audience, was then in his early nineties and had apparently not done live television in many years (if ever), and apparently hadn't been adequately prepped. He seemed confused and unable to say much about his work, which was understandable -- the nature of his character parts involved hundreds of roles that were usually each completed in a matter or two or three days shooting, across almost 60 years. Lane died at 102, in July 2007 - about 20 years after his last major film appearance.

Trivia: The son of an English manufacturer, Miles Mander had dabbled in several careers before making his screen bow as an extra in 1918. He'd been a farmer, a novelist, a playwright, a stage director and a cinema exhibitor -- and, if all the stories can be believed, a fight promoter, horse and auto racer, and aviator. He was billed as Luther Miles in his earliest film appearances, reserving his real name for his screenwriting credits. In Hollywood from 1935 on, the weedy, mustachioed Mander made a specialty of portraying old-school-tie Britishers who, for various reasons, had fallen into disgrace. He was never more unsavory than when he portrayed master criminal Giles Conover in the 1945 "Sherlock Holmes" entry The Pearl of Death. Mander also showed up in two separate versions of The Three Musketeers, playing Louis XIII in the 1935 version and Richelieu in the 1939 edition (he also played Aramis in the Musketeers sequel The Man in the Iron Mask [1939]). Shortly after wrapping up his scenes in Imperfect Lady (1947), 57-year-old Miles Mander died of a sudden heart attack.

Trivia: A bald British supporting actor who played Superintendent Talbot in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), Matthew Boulton came to Hollywood in 1937 and almost exclusively played English or colonial authority figures, often members of Scotland Yard. Among his best-remembered roles were Inspector Cressney, who trailed jewel thief Clark Gable in They Met in Bombay (1941), and Inspector Graham in The Brighton Strangler (1945). Boulton retired in 1953.

Trivia: Appropriately nicknamed "Google Eyes" by his childhood friends, African-American actor Mantan Moreland joined a carnival at 14 and a medicine show a year later - and both times was dragged home by juvenile authorities. Most of Moreland's early adult years were spent on the "Chitlin Circuit," the nickname given by performers to all-black vaudeville. After a decade of professional ups and downs, Moreland teamed with several comics (notably Benny Carter) in an act based on the "indefinite talk" routine of Flournoy and Miller, wherein each teammate would start a sentence, only to be interrupted by the other teammate ("Say, have you seen...?" "I saw him yesterday. He was at..." "I thought they closed that place down!"). Moreland's entered films in 1936, usually in the tiny porter, waiter and bootblack roles then reserved for black actors. Too funny to continue being shunted aside by lily-white Hollywood, Moreland began getting better parts in a late-'30s series of comedy adventures produced at Monogram and costarring white actor Frankie Darro. The screen friendship between Mantan and Frankie was rare for films of this period, and it was this series that proved Moreland was no mere "Movie Negro." Moreland stayed with Monogram in the '40s as Birmingham Brown, eternally frightened chauffeur of the Charlie Chan films. The variations Moreland wrought upon the line "Feets, do your duty" were astonishing and hilarious, and though the Birmingham role was never completely free of stereotype, by the end of the Chan series in 1949 Monogram recognized Moreland's value to the series by having Charlie Chan refer to "my assistant, Birmingham Brown" - not merely "my hired man." Always popular with black audiences (he was frequently given top billing in the advertising of the Chan films by Harlem theatre owners), Moreland starred in a series of crude but undeniably entertaining comedies filmed by Toddy Studios for all-black theatres. The actor also occasionally popped up in A-pictures like MGM's Cabin in the Sky, and worked steadily in radio. Changing racial attitudes in the '50s and '60s lessend Moreland's ability to work in films; in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, a frightened black man was no longer considered amusing even by Mantan's fans. Virtually broke, Moreland suffered a severe stroke in the early '60s, and it looked as though he was finished in Hollywood. Things improved for Moreland after 1964, first with a bit in the oddly endearing horror picture Spider Baby (1964), then with a pair of prominent cameos in Enter Laughing (1968) and The Comic (1969), both directed by Carl Reiner. With more and more African Americans being hired for TV and films in the late '60s, Moreland was again in demand. He worked on such TV sitcoms as Love American Style and The Bill Cosby Show, revived his "indefinite talk" routine for a gasoline commercial, and enjoyed a solid film role was as a race-conscious counterman in Watermelon Man (1970). In his last years, Mantan Moreland was a honored guest at the meetings of the international Laurel and Hardy fan club "The Sons of the Desert," thanks to his brief but amusing appearance in the team's 1942 comedy A-Haunting We Will Go (1942).

Trivia: Tall, distinguished-looking Eddie Kane was never remotely a star in movies or television, but he played just about every kind of important supporting and bit role that there was to portray in a Hollywood career that stretched over a quarter century. Born in 1889, Kane entered show business by way of vaudeville and rose to the top of that field as a member of the team of Kane & Herman. Hollywood beckoned with the coming of sound and his first role was typical of the kind of work that he would do for the next 25 years. In MGM's The Broadway Melody, although uncredited, Kane played the important supporting role of Francis Zanfield (a thin burlesque of Ziegfeld), the theatrical producer whose interest in one of the two sisters, played by Anita Page and Bessie Love, gets the backstage plot rolling. In later films, the actor's parts varied from anonymous head waiters and hotel managers to essential supporting roles, small but telling in the plot. He was apparently at least a nodding acquaintance of James Cagney, playing important bit parts in two of Cagney's movies: in Something To Sing About, Kane portrayed the San Francisco theater manager who shelters Cagney from the crowds swarming around him on his return from an ocean voyage; in Yankee Doodle Dandy he played the actor in Little Johnny Jones who tells Cagney's George M. Cohan, in the title role of Jones, of the plan to fire a rocket from the ship when the evidence clearing him has been found. Kane's range of roles ran from business executives and impressarios to maitre d's and as he grew older and more distinguished-looking, his delivery grew even sharper onscreen. Kane is probably best known to audiences from the 1950s and beyond for his portrayal (uncredited, as usual) of Mr. Monahan, Ralph Kramden's boss at the Gotham Bus Company, in The Honeymooners' episode in which Kramden impersonates a bus company executive to impress an old rival. Kane retired from movies and television after the 1950s and died in 1969 of a heart attack at his home.

Trivia: Trained for a career in opera, blonde leading lady Anne Jeffreys supported herself as a singer and model before going to Hollywood in 1941. Among her first film assignments was a modest Columbia 2-reeler, Olaf Laughs Last, starring El Brendel; she then worked briefly at MGM before signing at RKO. Jeffreys now insists that she was rushed through so many "B" pictures during her first few years at the latter studio that she's forgotten most of them. When reminded by a fan that she played Tess Trueheart in the first two Dick Tracy films, she refused to believe it until she saw the pictures herself on TV. Her roles, and the quality of her films, improved towards the end of her RKO stay, but by 1948 Jeffreys briefly abandoned Hollywood for Broadway. Appearing in several productions throughout the 1950s, Jeffreys was at one time the highest-paid actress on the New York musical stage. In 1951, Jeffreys married her second husband, actor Robert Sterling, with whom she co-starred in the very popular TV sitcom Topper (1953-55), as well as the very unpopular 13-week wonder Love That Jill (1958). Except for a few isolated films like Clifford (1992), Anne Jeffreys has limited her acting to television and the stage in the last few decades; she was a regular on the daytime drama General Hospital, and briefly hosted a fashion-and-health series on cable TV.

Trivia: The screen's first Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln might never have landed the role had it not been for WWI. An enormous man (6'1", 230 pounds) who'd worked as an Arkansas law officer before entering films as a bit player, Lincoln was selected on the basis of his physique by D.W. Griffith to play blacksmith White Arm Joe in Birth of a Nation (1915) and the Mighty Man of Valor in Intolerance (1916). He might have continued playing supporting roles indefinitely had not actor Winslow Wilson dropped out of the 1918 production Tarzan of the Apes to fight on the battlefields of France. Rushed into the role of Tarzan, Lincoln gave an impressively virile performance, even though his acting skills left a great deal to be desired. He went on to play Tarzan in two subsequent films and starred in several action-oriented feature films and serials (his credits are sometimes confused with those of actor E.K. Lincoln). He retired from films in 1926 to operate a moderately successful salvage business in Salt Lake City. Returning to Hollywood in 1939, he played bit parts in a number of features, including a brace of Tarzan pictures. At the time of his death, Elmo Lincoln was still active in films, playing tiny roles in Columbia's Charles Starrett Westerns for 55 dollars a day.

Trivia: The son of a Nevada railroading engineer, Hobart Cavanaugh was educated in San Francisco and at the University of California. His friendships with such California-based actors as Charlie Ruggles and Walter Catlett gave Cavanaugh the impetus to enter the theatrical world. After several years on stage, Cavanaugh began his screen career with 1928's San Francisco Nights. Slight, balding and virtually chinless, Cavanaugh was ideally cast as a henpecked husband, a clerk, or a process server. He was signed to a Warners' contract in 1932, and appeared in several Busby Berkeley and Jimmy Cagney pictures. Thanks to his next-door-neighbor demeanor, Cavanaugh frequently appeared as humorist Robert Benchley's friend or co-worker in Benchley's one-reel MGM shorts of the 1930s. Occasionally, Cavanaugh played against his established image by popping up as the "hidden killer" in mystery films of the 1940s (e.g. Universal's Horror Island). Hobart Cavanaugh's final appearance, filmed just before his death, was as an unctuous undertaker in 20th Century-Fox's Stella (1950).

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.

Trivia: It is perhaps superfluous to note that actor Philip Morris was no relation to the cigarette-manufacturing family of the same name. In films from 1935 to 1948, Morris was generally cast as a cop, doorman, cabbie, or truck driver. He can be glimpsed near the end of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as the traffic cop investigating George Minafer's auto accident, and in High, Wide and Handsome (1937) as one of the sweating teamsters. One of Philip Morris' few screen characters to be given a name was Howard Ross in the 1948 Western Whirlwind Raiders.