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

Trivia: American actress Miriam Hopkins studied to be a dancer, but her first major opportunity with a touring ballet troupe was cut short when she broke her ankle. Opting for an acting career, Hopkins drew upon her Georgia background to specialize in playing Southern belles, most notably in the 1933 Broadway play Jezebel. Entering films with 1930's Fast and Loose, Hopkins became a popular film star, though many critics and film historians deemed her histrionic, uninhibited style as "an acquired taste." During the early stages of her film career, Hopkins contributed at least two memorable performances: Champagne Ivy, the doomed cockney songstress in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and the title role in Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature film to be shot in the three-strip Technicolor process. Relatively charming offscreen, Hopkins could be a terror on the set, driving co-stars to distraction with her lateness, lack of concentration and self-centered attitude towards camera angles; she owned the distinction of being one of the few actors ever reprimanded in full view of the production crew by the otherwise gentlemanly Edward G. Robinson. Still, she had her following, and was able to continue her stage career (she was particularly good in the 1958 Pulitzer Prize winner Look Homeward Angel) after her movie popularity waned. One of Hopkins' best later roles was her character part in 1961's The Children's Hour; 25 years earlier, Miriam had starred in the first film version of that Lillian Hellman play, These Three (1936).

Trivia: American actor Joel McCrea came from a California family with roots reaching back to the pioneer days. As a youth, McCrea satiated his fascination with movies by appearing as an extra in a serial starring Ruth Roland. By 1920, high schooler McCrea was a movie stunt double, and by the time he attended USC, he was regularly appearing at the Pasadena Playhouse. McCrea's big Hollywood break came with a part in the 1929 talkie Jazz Age; he matriculated into one of the most popular action stars of the 1930s, making lasting friendships with such luminaries as director Cecil B. DeMille and comedian Will Rogers. It was Rogers who instilled in McCrea a strong business sense, as well as a love of ranching; before the 1940s had ended, McCrea was a multi-millionaire, as much from his land holdings and ranching activities as from his film work. Concentrating almost exclusively on westerns after appearing in The Virginian (1946), McCrea became one of that genre's biggest box-office attractions. He extended his western fame to an early-1950s radio series, Tales of the Texas Rangers, and a weekly 1959 TV oater, Wichita Town, in which McCrea costarred with his son Jody. In the late 1960s, McCrea increased his wealth by selling 1200 acres of his Moorpark (California) ranch to an oil company, on the proviso that no drilling would take place within sight of the actor's home. By the time he retired in the early 1970s, McCrea could take pride in having earned an enduring reputation not only as one of Hollywood's shrewdest businessmen, but as one of the few honest-to-goodness gentlemen in the motion picture industry.

Trivia: Born into a show-biz family, Bonita Granville first appeared onstage at the age of 3 and began making films at 9. As a child actress she was frequently cast as a mean, spiteful, naughty little girl; examples include These Three (1936), in which she played a mischievous girl spreading malicious lies about her teachers (and for which, at the age of 13, she received a "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar nomination), and Maid of Salem (1937), in which she lead a hysterical group of village girls as accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. As a teen she also played "nicer" girls, as in the title role in the series of four detective-reporter Nancy Drew movies, as well as a blond, blue-eyed Aryan Nazi "ideal youth" in the huge hit Hitler's Children (1943). She later gained standard leading lady roles before retiring from the screen in the '50s. Bonita Granville married a millionaire in 1947 and subsequently became a businesswoman as well as the producer of the TV series Lassie.

Trivia: The word "formidable" seems to have been especially coined for American actress Alma Kruger, who for over a decade was the quintessential immovable society dowager. Alma had been a stage actress for nearly sixty years before making her first film, These Three (1936), in which she played the easily shocked grandmother who swallowed the scandalous lies told by spiteful little Bonita Granville. She was a bit nicer but no less forceful as the mother-in-law who saw right through Rosalind Russell's shallow kindliness in Craig's Wife (1936). Alma played Empress Maria Theresa in Marie Antoinette (1938), who supervised the arranged marriage of Marie and the dullwitted Louis XVI; while in His Girl Friday (1940) she was Ralph Bellamy's domineering mother, who underwent the indignity of being first kidnapped and then arrested thanks to the machinations of newspaper editor Cary Grant. From 1938 through 1943 Alma played head nurse Molly Byrd, the friendly adversary to crusty Lionel Barrymore in the Dr. Kildare series. Alma Kruger made her last film, Forever Amber, in 1947, in which, despite the presence of a stellar supporting cast, the septugenarian actress still managed to dominate her big scenes.

Trivia: American supporting and character actress Catherine Doucet occasionally appeared in Hollywood films during the '30s and '40s. Before becoming an actress at age 30, Doucet (born Catherine Green in Richmond, VA) was a school teacher. She made her acting debut on stage and appeared many times on Broadway and in stock theater.

Trivia: The daughter of actress Freda Jones, dark-eyed, sad-faced child performer Marcia Mae Jones was an infant when she made her screen bow in Mannequin (1926). There was always an air of tragedy about Marcia Mae; more often than not she played cripples or consumptives who didn't survive past reel five. She was at her best as the terror-stricken Rosalie, the virtual slave of vitriolic Bonita Granville, in These Three (1936). She also proved a good, realistic "opposite" to sweetness'n'light Shirley Temple in Heidi (1937) and A Little Princess. In the 1940s, Jones played grown-up leads in several Monogram and PRC films; she was always worth watching, even when he films were barely tolerable. Latterly billed as Marsha Jones, the actress continued appearing in supporting and minor roles in TV and films until the early 1970s.

Trivia: A kindergarten teacher in her native Cleveland, Margaret Hamilton began her acting career there in community theatre and with the prestigious Cleveland Playhouse. In 1933, Hamilton was invited to repeat her stage role of the sarcastic daughter-in-law in the Broadway play Another Language for the MGM film version. Though only in her early '30s, the gloriously unpretty Hamilton subsequently played dozens of busybodies, gossips, old maids, and housekeepers in films bearing such titles as Hat, Coat and Glove (1934), Way Down East (1935) and These Three (1936). She proved an excellent foil for such comedians as W.C. Fields (in 1940's My Little Chickadee) and Harold Lloyd (in 1946's The Sin of Harold Diddlebock). Her most famous film assignment was the dual role of Elvira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West in the imperishable 1939 gem The Wizard of Oz -- a role which nearly cost her her life when her green copper makeup caught fire during one of her "disappearance" scenes. She played several smaller but no less impressive roles at 20th Century-Fox, including the first-scene plot motivator in People Will Talk (1951) and Carrie Nation in Wabash Avenue (1950). She alternated her film work with stage assignments in the 1950s and 1960s, frequently returning to her home base at the Cleveland Playhouse. Achieving "icon" status in the 1970s by virtue of The Wizard of Oz, Hamilton sometimes found herself being cast for "camp" effect (e.g. Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud), but also enjoyed some of her best-ever parts, including the role of professorial occult expert in the 1972 TV movie The Night Strangler. Despite her menacing demeanor, Hamilton was a gentle, soft-spoken woman; she was especially fond of children, and showed up regularly on such PBS programs as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. In the 1970s, Margaret Hamilton added another sharply etched portrayal to her gallery of characters as general-store proprietor Cora on a popular series of Maxwell House coffee commercials -- one of which ran during a telecast of The Wizard of Oz!

Trivia: It had originally been the hope of Walter Brennan (and his family) that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, an engineer; but while still a student, he was bitten by the acting bug and was already at a crossroads when he graduated in 1915. Brennan had already worked in vaudeville when he enlisted at age 22 to serve in World War I. He served in an artillery unit and although he got through the war without being wounded, his exposure to poison gas ruined his vocal chords, leaving him with the high-pitched voice texture that made him a natural for old man roles while still in his thirties. His health all but broken by the experience, Brennan moved to California in the hope that the warm climate would help him and he lost most of what money he had when land values in the state collapsed in 1925. It was the need for cash that drove him to the gates of the studios that year, for which he worked as an extra and bit player. The advent of the talkies served Brennan well, as he had been mimicking accents in childhood and could imitate a variety of different ethnicities on request. It was also during this period that, in an accident during a shoot, another actor (some stories claimed it was a mule) kicked him in the mouth and cost him his front teeth. Brennan was fitted for a set of false teeth that worked fine, and wearing them allowed him to play lean, lanky, virile supporting roles; but when he took them out, and the reedy, leathery voice kicked in with the altered look, Brennan became the old codger with which he would be identified in a significant number of his parts in the coming decades. He can be spotted in tiny, anonymous roles in a multitude of early-'30s movies, including King Kong (1933) (as a reporter) and one Three Stooges short. In 1935, however, he was fortunate enough to be cast in the supporting role of Jenkins in The Wedding Night. Directed by King Vidor and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, it was supposed to launch Anna Sten (its female lead) to stardom; but instead, it was Brennan who got noticed by the critics. He was put under contract with Goldwyn, and was back the same year as Old Atrocity in Barbary Coast. He continued doing bit parts, but after 1935, his films grew fewer in number and the parts much bigger. It was in the rustic drama Come and Get It (1936) that Brennan won his first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. Two years later, he won a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Kentucky (1938). That same year, he played major supporting roles in The Texans and The Buccaneer, and delighted younger audiences with his moving portrayal of Muff Potter, the man wrongfully accused of murder in Norman Taurog's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Brennan worked only in high-profile movies from then on, including The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Stanley and Livingston, and Goldwyn's They Shall Have Music, all in 1939. In 1940, he rejoined Gary Cooper in The Westerner, playing the part of a notoriously corrupt judge. Giving a beautifully understated performance that made the character seem sympathetic and tragic as much as dangerous and reprehensible, he won his third Best Supporting Actor award. There was no looking back now, as Brennan joined the front rank of leading character actors. His ethnic portrayals gradually tapered off as Brennan took on parts geared specifically for him. In Frank Capra's Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks' Sergeant York (both 1941), he played clear-thinking, key supporting players to leading men, while in Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (released that same year), he played another virtual leading role as a haunted man driven by demons that almost push him to murder. He played only in major movies from that point on, and always in important roles. Sam Wood used him in Goldwyn's The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Lewis Milestone cast him as a Russian villager in The North Star (1943), and he was in Goldwyn's production of The Princess and the Pirate (1944) as a comical half-wit who managed to hold his own working alongside Bob Hope. Brennan played the choice role of Ike Clanton in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and reprised his portrayal of an outlaw clan leader in more comic fashion in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff some 23 years later. He worked with Cooper again on Delmer Daves' Task Force (1949) and played prominent roles in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock and Anthony Mann's The Far Country (both 1955). In 1959, the 64-year-old Brennan got one of the biggest roles of his career in Hawks' Rio Bravo, playing Stumpy, the game-legged jailhouse keeper who is backing up the besieged sheriff. By that time, Brennan had moved to television, starring in the CBS series The Real McCoys, which became a six-season hit built around his portrayal of the cantankerous family patriarch Amos McCoy. The series was such a hit that John Wayne's production company was persuaded to release a previously shelved film, William Wellman's Goodbye, My Lady (1956), about a boy, an old man (played by Brennan), and a dog, during the show's run. Although he had disputes with the network and stayed a season longer than he had wanted, Brennan also liked the spotlight. He even enjoyed a brief, successful career as a recording artist on the Columbia Records label during the 1960s. Following the cancellation of The Real McCoys, Brennan starred in the short-lived series The Tycoon, playing a cantankerous, independent-minded multimillionaire who refuses to behave the way his family or his company's board of directors think a 70-year-old should. By this time, Brennan had become one of the more successful actors in Hollywood, with a 12,000-acre ranch in Northern California that was run by his sons, among other property. He'd invested wisely and also owned a share of his first series. Always an ideological conservative, it was during this period that his political views began taking a sharp turn to the right in response to the strife he saw around him. During the '60s, he was convinced that the anti-war and civil rights movements were being run by overseas communists -- and said as much in interviews. He told reporters that he believed the civil rights movement, in particular, and the riots in places like Watts and Newark, and demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, were the result of perfectly content "Negroes" being stirred up by a handful of trouble-makers with an anti-American agenda. Those on the set of his last series, The Guns of Will Sonnett -- in which he played the surprisingly complex role of an ex-army scout trying to undo the damage caused by his being a mostly absentee father -- say that he cackled with delight upon learning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. Brennan later worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of reactionary right-wing California Congressman John Schmitz, a nominee of the American Party, whose campaign was predicated on the notion that the Republican Party under Richard Nixon had become too moderate. Mostly, though, Brennan was known to the public for his lovable, sometimes comical screen persona, and was still working as the '60s drew to a close, on made-for-TV movies such as The Over-the-Hill Gang, which reunited him with one of his favorite directors, Jean Yarbrough, and his old stablemate Chill Wills. Brennan died of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.

Trivia: Tall, commanding actor Frank McGlynn Sr. made his 1896 stage debut in The Gold Bug. Eleven years later, McGlynn entered films as a member of the Edison Company. His professional future was secured when, in 1919, he starred on Broadway in John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln. Thereafter, McGlynn was best known as Hollywood's foremost Lincoln impersonator. He was cast as Honest Abe in Are We Civilized? (1934), Hearts in Bondage (1935), The Littlest Rebel (1935), Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), The Plainsman (1936), Wells Fargo (1937), The Lone Ranger (1939) and the Warner Bros. historical short Lincoln at the White House (1939). The actor's non-Lincoln screen roles included David Gamut in Last of the Mohicans (1920) and Patrick Henry in D.W. Griffith's America. In the 1930 musical Good News, McGlynn was afforded a rare opportunity to play comedy as a sarcastic college dean. Frank Glynn Sr.'s son Frank McGlynn Jr. was also a busy film actor, usually seen in hillbilly roles.