Trivia: During the late 1930s, when Clark Gable was named the King of Hollywood, Myrna Loy was elected the Queen. The legendary actress, who started her career as a dancer, moved into silent films and was typecast for a few years as exotic women. Her film titles from those early years include Arrowsmith (1931), Love Me Tonight (1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), and Manhattan Melodrama (1934), the film that gangster John Dillinger just had to see the night he was killed. Starting in 1934, with The Thin Man, opposite William Powell, she became Hollywood's ideal wife: bright, witty, humorous. She and Powell were often teamed throughout the '30s and '40s, and many of the characters she played were strong, independent, adventurous women. In addition to The Thin Man series, Loy's best appearances included The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Libeled Lady (1936), Wife vs. Secretary (1936), Test Pilot (1938), and Too Hot to Handle (1938). She took a break from filmmaking during WWII to work with the Red Cross, and in her later years she devoted as much time to politics as to acting (among her accomplishments, Loy became the first film star to work with the United Nations). She stands out in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), and its sequel Belles on Their Toes (1952). She received an honorary Oscar in 1991, two years before her death.

Trivia: Originally planning to become a lawyer, William Powell chose instead to pursue a career as an actor, dropping out of the University of Kansas to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Edward G. Robinson and Joseph Schildkraut. He made his Broadway debut in 1912, and within a few years had attained stardom in urbane, sophisticated roles. The sleek, moustachioed young actor entered films in 1922, playing the first of many villainous roles in John Barrymore's Sherlock Holmes. He finally broke out of the bad guy mode when talkies came in; his clipped, precise speech patterns and authoritative demeanor were ideally suited to such "gentleman detective" roles as Philo Vance in The Canary Murder Case, the Kennel Murder Case, and others in the Vance series. In 1933 he moved from Warner Bros. to MGM, where he co-starred with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934). So well-received was the Powell-Loy screen teaming that the actors were paired together in several subsequent MGM productions, most memorably the delightful Thin Man series and the 1936 blockbuster The Great Ziegfeld, in which Powell played the title character and Loy was cast as Ziegfeld's second wife, Billie Burke. Away from the screen for nearly a year due to a serious illness, Powell returned in 1944, curtailing his film activities thereafter. As he eased into his late fifties he reinvented himself as a character actor, offering superbly etched performances as a lamebrained crooked politician in The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947) and the lovably autocratic Clarence Day Sr. in Life With Father (1947), which earned him his third Academy Award nomination (the others were for The Thin Man and My Man Godfrey). After playing Doc in the 1955 film version of Mister Roberts, he retired to his lavish, air-conditioned home in Palm Springs, insisting that he'd return to films if the right role came along but he turned down all offers. Married three times, Powell's second wife was actress Carole Lombard, with whom he remained good friends after the divorce, and co-starred with in My Man Godfrey (1936); his third marriage to MGM starlet Diana Lewis was a happy union that lasted from 1940 until Powell's death in 1984. It has been said, however, that the great love of William Powell's life was actress Jean Harlow, to whom he was engaged at the time of her premature death in 1936.

Trivia: The daughter of legendary sports journalist Grantland Rice, actress Florence Rice launched her stage career in the late '20s. In films from 1934, Rice was generally wasted in insipid "good girl" roles. The least prepossessing of these was the antiseptic heroine in the 1939 Marx Brothers comedy At the Circus; upon being introduced to the mischievous Marxes on the set, Rice was promptly locked in the lion's cage, where she quietly remained until the property man showed up. Spending her last professional years in B-productions at such studios as Columbia, Republic, and PRC, Florence Rice retired from films in 1943.

Trivia: Actor John Beal was playing boyish, sensitive Jimmy Stewart types long before there was a Jimmy Stewart (in Hollywood, at least). After stage work, Beal was brought to Hollywood to appear in the screen version of Rose Franken's stage play Another Language (1933). The best of his early film assignments was in the title role of The Little Minister (1934), in which his easily outraged Scottish piety didn't stand a chance opposite hoydenish Katharine Hepburn. Beal continued appearing in films during the war years while serving in Special Services as actor and director of Army Air Force camp shows and training films. After the war, Beal concentrated on theatrical work, though he kept showing up in films as late as 1983's Amityville 3-D. John Beal was also a regular on the TV soap operas The Nurses (1962-67) and Another World (1964). Beal passed away at age 87 in his Santa Cruz, California two years after suffering a debilatating stroke.

Trivia: Born in the waning months of the Civil War, Jessie Ralph made her stage debut with a Providence, RI, stock company in 1880. Her extensive Broadway experience ranged from Shakespearean classics to George M. Cohan musicals. She had appeared in films as early as 1915, but did not become a permanent Hollywood resident until 1933. For the most part, Ralph was cast as kindly grandmas, sagacious maids, and stern but loving governesses; her finest screen performances included Peggoty in 1934's David Copperfield and a benign sorceress in 1940's The Blue Bird. Her gift for exuding imperious abrasiveness was amply demonstrated in such films as After the Thin Man (1936), and W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940), appearing in the latter as Fields' gorgon mother-in-law, Mrs. Hermisillio Brunch. Jessie Ralph retired in 1941 after enduring a leg amputation.

Trivia: American comic actor Edgar Kennedy left home in his teens, smitten with the urge to see the world. He worked a number of manual labor jobs and sang in touring musical shows before returning to his native California in 1912 to break into the infant movie industry. Hired by Mack Sennett in 1914, Kennedy played innumerable roles in the Keystone comedies. He would later claim to be one of the original Keystone Kops, but his specialty during this period was portraying mustache-twirling villains. By the early 1920s, Kennedys screen image had mellowed; now he most often played detectives or middle-aged husbands. He joined Hal Roach Studios in 1928, where he did some of his best early work: co-starring with Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chase and Our Gang; directing two-reelers under the stage name E. Livingston Kennedy; and receiving top billing in one of Roach's most enduring comedies, A Pair of Tights (1928). Kennedy was dropped from the Roach payroll in a 1930 economy drive, but he'd already made a satisfactory talkie debut -- even though he'd had to lower his voice to his more familiar gravelly growl after it was discovered that his natural voice sounded high-pitched and effeminate. During his Roach stay, Kennedy developed his stock-in-trade "slow burn," wherein he'd confront a bad situation or personal humiliation by glowering at the camera, pausing, then slowly rubbing his hand over his face. In 1931, Kennedy was hired by RKO studios to star in a series of two-reelers, unofficially titled "Mr. Average Man." These films, precursors to the many TV sitcoms of the 1950s, cast Kennedy as head of a maddening household consisting of his dizzy wife (usually Florence Lake, sister of Arthur "Dagwood" Lake), nagging mother-in-law and lazy brother-in-law. Kennedy made six of these shorts per year for the next 17 years, taking time out to contribute memorable supporting roles in such film classics as Duck Soup (1933), San Francisco (1936), A Star Is Born (1937) and Anchors Aweigh (1944). Some of Kennedy's most rewarding movie assignments came late in his career: the "hidden killer" in one of the Falcon B mysteries, the poetic bartender in Harold Lloyd's Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946), and the classical music-loving private detective in Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which like Diddlebock was directed by Preston Sturges. On November 9, 1948, shortly after completing his 103rd "Average Man" two-reeler and 36 hours before a Hollywood testimonial dinner was to be held in his honor, Kennedy died of throat cancer; his last film appearance as Doris Day's Uncle Charlie in My Dream is Yours (1949) was released posthumously.

Trivia: Sidney Sommers Toler was born in Warrensburg, MO, the son of a renowned horse-breeder, Col. H.G. Toler, in 1874; three weeks later, the family moved to a stock farm near Wichita, KS, where he grew up. From an early age, he showed an interest in acting, and got his start at seven when he played Tom Sawyer in an adaptation written by his mother (this in a period in which the author Samuel Clemens was very much alive and the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a popular contemporary work). Toler enrolled in the University of Kansas but abandoned his studies in favor of pursuing a career as an actor after receiving some words of encouragement during a brief encounter with actress Julia Marlowe. At 18, he headed to New York. He did a stint in the Corse Payton stock company, based in Brooklyn, where he became a leading man specializing in romantic parts over a period of four years.Toler later had his own stock company, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for five years, and became a successful playwright, authoring The Dancing Masters, The Belle of Richmond, The House on the Sands, Ritzy, and The Golden Age, among many other plays. One of his works, The Man They Left Behind, was a major hit regionally and was being performed simultaneously by 18 different companies, and Toler himself once had a dozen different acting companies on the road performing his work. Two of his plays, Golden Days and The Exile, were also produced on Broadway. But it was during his 14 years with producer David Belasco that Toler became a Broadway star, culminating with his portrayal of Kelly the iceman in A Wise Child. Following a run of the play in Boston, Hollywood beckoned; with the full arrival of sound, the film mecca was suddenly desperate for experienced stage actors -- and in 1929 he made the move into films. Over the next nine years, he worked in 50 movies, in everything from comedies to Westerns, including Madame X, White Shoulders, Tom Brown of Culver, Our Relations (playing the belligerent ship's captain in the Laurel and Hardy comedy), and The Phantom President. In 1938, fate took a hand when Warner Oland, the Swedish actor who had portrayed Honolulu-based police detective Charlie Chan in 16 movies for Fox, passed away. Toler was selected by the studio to succeed him in the role, and he immediately began receiving the largest amount of mail he had ever gotten in connection with his screen career, from fans of the Chan movies offering him encouragement and advice, which mostly consisted of urgings to mimic Oland was much as possible. Instead, with the support of the director, he went back to the six Chan novels written by Biggers (who had died in 1933) and reconstructed the character based on what he took out of those pages. Toler, who stood six feet and was a solid 190 pounds, created the illusion of being smaller and heavier in the role. The first two of his Chan movies, Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) and Charlie Chan in Reno (1939), proved so popular at the box office that Toler was signed to a long-term contract in August of 1939. Toler brought a good deal of warmth and wry humor to the role of the police detective, and had excellent interaction with Victor Sen Yung, who played the detective's number-two son, Jimmy. The Chan pictures, which usually clocked in at under 80 minutes and occasionally under 70 by the mid-'30s, were studio programmers, essentially classy B-pictures made on reasonable but fixed budgets; they were also bread-and-butter revenue pictures, guaranteed money-makers and perennially popular. When Toler took over the role, they remained in this category, and if they were never opulent, they were good-looking productions whose mysteries and twists were ever-teasing and enticing to audiences. The revenue stream that they generated helped pay the bills for such large-scale productions as Suez. The Charlie Chan movies remained popular right into 1941, but the entry of the United States into the Second World War at the end of the year, coupled with the uncertainty of international distribution -- and the Chan movies were enormously popular overseas -- caused Fox to drop the series. The last of the Fox Chan movies was Castle in the Desert, released in early 1942, which holds up very well as a representative of the series. Over the next year, Toler worked in other roles, including portraying one of the villains in Edgar G. Ulmer's two-fisted adventure yarn Isle of Forgotten Sins. The years 1942-1943 were not good for Toler, however. In addition to seemingly losing the Chan role in early 1942, his wife of 18 years, Vivian, passed away in 1943; he also underwent surgery that year from which, it was revealed after his death, he never fully recovered. According to his second wife, Viva Tattersall (who had worked with him on-stage in his play Ritzy), whom he married in 1943, Toler was never told that he had intestinal cancer or that he was terminally ill. Accounts vary somewhat as to what happened next. According to most historians, it was Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row studio with a special interest in film series (they had the East Side Kids, and would soon have the Bowery Boys), that picked up the screen rights to the Chan character from the Biggers estate, and then selected Toler to star in a new round of movies. But others maintain that it was Toler himself, recognizing that there was still an audience for the movies, who bought the screen rights and then sold them to Monogram, with the provision that he star in the movies. Given his previously demonstrated business acumen on the stage, one can see where the second scenario was not only possible but likely, especially as onlookers (including Toler) would have recognized that Fox had handed away a gold mine with the screen character of Sherlock Holmes, which Universal grabbed up and with which they were making a small fortune by late 1942 -- the whole truth is buried somewhere in the Monogram business records.In any case, Toler was back in the lead role in the revived series when it commenced in 1944 with Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, in which the renowned sleuth joins the war effort in Washington, turning his skills to the hunting down of spies, saboteurs, and other enemies of freedom. This new twist to the character -- possibly inspired by Universal's success in bringing the character of Sherlock Holmes (as portrayed by Basil Rathbone) into stories built on World War II's events -- gave Charlie Chan a new lease on life and added a fresh, contemporary edge to the movies. That new element in the plotting also helped to compensate for the threadbare production values of the Monogram Chan films, which looked nowhere near as good as the Fox films in terms of casting, sets, or costuming. Toler's acting was more important than ever and although he was in an ever-weakening physical state, he kept up the portrayal convincingly and also engaged in some surprisingly strenuous scenes in some of the 1944-1945 Monogram pictures. Though neither the actor himself, nor anyone around him (except his wife and physician), nor any of the audience knew it, those movies were the last testament of a dying man. Looked at in the decades since, whatever their production flaws, they're a powerful statement of fortitude, professionalism, and dedication to the acting profession in the face of horrendous physical toll. By the summer of 1946, Toler was almost too weak to work, and it was clear in his final two movies -- Dangerous Money and The Trap, shot simultaneously in August of that year -- that he could barely walk. He retired to his home in Beverly Hills and spent the next seven months bedridden, before he passed away in February of 1947.

Trivia: Diminutive Scottish stage and screen actress Mary Gordon was seemingly placed on this earth to play care-worn mothers, charwomen and housekeepers. In films from the silent area (watch for her towards the end of the 1928 Joan Crawford feature Our Dancing Daughters), Gordon played roles ranging from silent one-scene bits to full-featured support. She frequently acted with Laurel and Hardy, most prominently as the stern Scots innkeeper Mrs. Bickerdyke in 1935's Bonnie Scotland. Gordon was also a favorite of director John Ford, portraying Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Englishwomen with equal aplomb (and sometimes with the same accent). She was the screen mother of actors as diverse as Jimmy Cagney, Leo Gorcey and Lou Costello; she parodied this grey-haired matriarch image in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer (1945), wherein her tearful court testimony on behalf of her son (Ed Brophy) is accompanied by a live violinist. Mary Gordon is most fondly remembered by film buffs for her recurring role as housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in the Sherlock Holmes films of 1939-46 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a role she carried over to the Holmes radio series of the '40s.

Trivia: A busy supporting actor of the 1930s who was often cast as the quintessential English manservant, tall, dapper-looking Barnett Parker had appeared with such British stage stars as George Alexander and Fred Terry prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Billie Burke in Mind the Paint Girl. The year was 1912 and the busy Parker immediately established himself as the typical "silly ass" British comic, "silly ass" being a description favored by the actor himself. Parker, who went on to appear opposite such legendary stage stars as Lew Fields and Lou Tellegen, moonlighted in movies from 1915 to 1920, chiefly for the New Rochelle-based Thanhouser company, where he scored quite a hit playing Astorbilt, the millionaire hero of the comedy Prudence the Pirate (1916). Parker spent the next decade or so on the boards but returned to films in 1936 to play a seemingly endless series of butlers, servants, and waiters. His death was attributed to a heart attack.

Trivia: Usually playing dignified women of high social standing, brunette Katherine Alexander could occasionally prove a rather catty acquaintance. A noted Broadway actress and the daughter-in-law of legendary impresario William Brady (she married his namesake son, William Brady Jr.), Alexander is perhaps best remembered for playing Queen Anne to George Arliss' Cardinal Richelieu (1935) and the neglected wife in Sutter's Gold (1936). In both films, however, she was overshadowed by the gregarious Edward Arnold (playing Louis XIII and Sutter, respectively), as she would be by John Barrymore in The Great Man Votes (1939). In fact, Alexander was always more vibrant on the legitimate stage, where she was highly acclaimed for her Linda opposite Paul Muni in the 1949 London revival of Death of a Salesman.

Trivia: Immortalized as Princess Aura, daughter of Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton) in the first Flash Gordon serial, beautiful but ultimately star-crossed Priscilla Lawson (née Shortridge) had been crowned Miss Miami Beach in 1935. The honor resulted in a contract with Universal and, in turn, the plum role of Princess Aura. But the studio quickly dropped her option and a stint with Paramount resulted in only a few supporting roles, including 1936's Rose Bowl, opposite former co-star Larry "Buster" Crabbe. She spent the remainder of her brief screen career playing bit parts at MGM and was, at the time, better known for marrying handsome B-movie actor Alan Curtis. According to former co-star Jean Rogers, who had played Dale Arden in Flash Gordon, Lawson lost a leg in an accident while serving in the Women's Army Corps during World War II. Divorced from Curtis, she later managed a stationary shop in Los Angeles. Her untimely death in the Veterans' Administration Hospital in West Los Angeles in 1958 was listed as upper gastro-intestinal bleeding, due to a duodenal ulcer.

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: Mountainous American actor Bert Roach reportedly launched his film career at the Keystone Studios in 1914. The porcine Mr. Roach remained in comedy during his years of comparative prominence in the '20s, providing jovial support to the romantic leads in such films as Tin Hats (1927). In talkies, Roach occasionally enjoyed a substantial role, notably as Leon Waycoff's whining roomate in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). In general, Bert Roach's talkie career consisted of featured and bit parts, often as a sentimental inebriate (e.g. 1932's Night World and 1934's The Thin Man).

Trivia: Husky actor Mitchell Lewis attended Annapolis and Syracus University before making his stage debut in 1902. Lewis went on tour with such theatrical heavyweights as William Collier, Dustin Farnum and Alla Nazimova. He made his film bow in 1914 at the old Thanhouser Company. Specializing in ethnic roles, Lewis spent both the silent and talkie era playing menacing gypsies (The Cuckoos, The Bohemina Girl), Arab potentates (he was horse-loving Sheik Iderim in the 1926 version of Ben-Hur), East Indian warriors and Native American chiefs. He even donned blackface to portray "Tambo" in Al Jolson's Big Boy (1930). In 1937, Lewis was signed to an MGM lifetime contract, which assured him steady if not always stellar work for the next eighteen years. One of his many MGM bit-part assignments was the green-skinned Winkie Captain ("You've killed her! She's dead! Long live Dorothy!") in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Active throughout his career in charitable pursuits, Mitchell Lewis served on the original board of the Motion Picture Relief Fund.

Trivia: Best remembered as one of silent screen star Barbara La Marr's many husbands, handsome Jack Daugherty (or Dougherty as it was sometimes spelled) began his career starring in minor action melodramas for low-budget producer Benjamin F. Wilson. Although most of Wilson's cheap fare only played the grind-houses, Daugherty came to the attention of Universal who paired him with newcomer Laura La Plante in a series of Western two-reelers. But true Western stardom eluded him and he did much better in serials, of which he made no less than nine, seven of which were produced for Universal. But La Marr's sensational death from an apparent drug overdose would forever taint Daugherty's reputation and he was playing supporting roles, mostly villainous, by the end of the decade. A second marriage to former WAMPAS Baby Star Virginia Brown Faire ended in divorce after only one year and Daugherty was all but forgotten by moviegoers when he committed suicide in May 1938.

Trivia: After making his screen bow in 1928's The Racket, craggy-faced character actor G. Pat Collins could usually be found on the wrong side of the law. Collins may hold the record for prison-picture appearances, showing up behind bars in such efforts as I Am a Fugitive (1932) 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), Hold Em Jail (1932) and Triple Trouble (1950), among many others. James Cagney fans will recall Collins as "The Reader," whose lip-reading skills set the stage for the "bust-out" scene in Cagney's White Heat (1949). Towards the end of his life, G. Pat Collins "went straight" cinematically, playing a number of military roles in westerns and war pictures.

Trivia: Wacky comic actor Doodles Weaver started appearing in films in the late '30s, usually playing country-bumpkin bits. He rose to fame as a musician/comedian with the Spike Jones Orchestra, regaling audiences with his double-talk renditions of such tunes as "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" and "The Whiffenpoof Song." His most popular routine was his mile-a-minute parody of an overly excited sports announcer ("And the winnerrrrrrrr....Bei-del-baum!!!!). So valuable was Weaver to Jones' aggregation that Doodles was the only member of the group who was allowed to drink while on tour. This indulgence, alas, proved to be Weaver's undoing; though he'd scaled the heights as a radio and TV star in the 1940s and 1950s, Doodles had lost most of his comic expertise by the 1960s thanks to his fondness for the bottle. A bitter, broken man in his last years, Weaver died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 71. Doodles Weaver was the brother of TV executive Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, and the uncle of actress Sigourney Weaver.

Trivia: Together with Arthur Treacher, Olaf Hytten and Wilson Benge, Charles Coleman was one of Hollywood's "perfect butlers." On stage, he was Pauline Frederick's leading man for many years. After touring the U.S. and Australia, he settled in Hollywood in 1923. Coleman was virtually always cast as a gentleman's gentleman, often with a streak of effeminacy; representative Charles Coleman assignments include Bachelor Apartment (1931), Diplomaniacs (1933), Three Smart Girls (1937) and Cluny Brown (1946). Charles Coleman is best remembered by film buffs for two classic lines of dialogue. Explaining why he falsely informed his master Charlie Ruggles that he was to dress for a costume ball in Love Me Tonight (1932), Coleman "I did so want to see you in tights!" And when asked by Deanna Durbin in First Love (1939) why butlers are always so dour, Coleman moans "Gay butlers are extremely rare."

Trivia: Gangly American comic Billy Dooley was discovered on the vaudeville circuit by producer Al Christie, who brought Dooley and his stage partner Frances Lee to Hollywood in 1925. Somewhat reminiscent of whiteface comic Larry Semon, Dooley played dumb sailors and other service men in a series of two-reel comedies with explanatory titles such as A Goofy Gob (1925), A Briny Boob (1926), the inevitable Sailor Beware (1927), and A Dizzy Diver (1928). Never able to stand out in a crowded field of two-reel comedy performers, Dooley left Christie and played minor roles in talkies until his death from a heart attack.

Trivia: American stage-actor Oscar O'Shea made his first screen appearance in the 1937 MGM musical Rosalie. O'Shea spent most of the rest of his movie career as an MGM utility player. One of his best-remembered roles, however, was for producer Hal Roach: O'Shea appeared as the ranch boss in 1939's Of Mice and Men. Otherwise, Oscar O'Shea was generally consigned to one- or two-scene roles, usually as salty sea captains.

Trivia: Stage actress Josephine Whittell began appearing in films in 1919, often acting opposite her then-husband Robert Warwick. In the first year of the talkies, Whittell cornered the market in middle-aged flirts, as witness her saucy scenes with comedian Robert Woolsey in Caught Plastered and Peach o' Reno (1931). When the Production Code came in, Whittell's characters became a little more respectable, if a bit on the naggy side; W.C. Fields fans will remember her as the mother of troublesome Baby LeRoy in It's a Gift (1934). Josephine Whittell remained active in films until the late '40s.

Trivia: American actor E. Alyn Warren joined the Essanay film company in 1910. Warren played a variety of roles throughout the teens and '20s, the most famous of which was the title character in The Courtship of Miles Standish (1923). However, he was best known for his Chinese characterizations; most of these were patterned after his performance as Lo Sang Kee in both the 1922 and 1930 versions of East Is West. E. Alyn Warren's credits are often confused with those of another Asian impersonator, Fred Warren.

Trivia: Burly Jack Baxley had been a side show barker and played that in most of his early films, including Anna Christie (1930), Dancing Lady (1933) and O'Shaughnessey's Boy (1935). Long at MGM, Baxley also portrayed salesmen, bartenders, process servers, and reporters -- in other words men not necessarily all that trustworthy. He was a member of Screen Extras Guild until his death in 1950.

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 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: A master of the delayed, dull-witted double take, American actor George Guhl spent several decades in vaudeville as a member of the Guhl Brothers and Guhl and Adams comedy teams. He entered films in 1935, remaining active until his death eight years later. Fans of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies will remember Guhl as gimlet-eyed truant officer Smithers in Arbor Day (1936). George Guhl's best feature-film assignment was the recurring role of dim-bulbed desk sergeant Graves in Warner Bros.' "Torchy Blane" series.