Trivia: Former All-American halfback Johnny Mack Brown was a popular screen cowboy during the 1930s. Already in the public eye for his athletic prowess, Brown was persuaded by a friend to give Hollywood a try after graduating from the University of Alabama. In 1927, the muscular macho man was signed by MGM where he played in a number of leading roles opposite popular actresses such as Garbo, Pickford, and Crawford for several years. But Brown never really found his acting niche until he starred in King Vidor's Billy the Kid (1930). From then on he was happily typecast as a cowboy actor, and became a hero to millions of American boys, appearing in over 200 B-grade Westerns over the next two decades. From 1942-50 he was consistently among the screen's ten most popular Western actors. Brown formally retired from movies in 1953 but made occasional return appearances as a "nostalgia" act.

Trivia: The daughter of a Michigan architect, actress Kay Johnson was on Broadway at age 19, following training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was lured to Hollywood during the "talkie boom" of 1929. Though she'd established her stage reputation in poised, sophisticated roles, Johnson's earliest film appearances were a pair of ridiculous, risible leading-lady assignments in Cecil B. DeMille's gloriously goofy Dynamite (1929) and Madam Satan (1930). While she enjoyed a handful of major roles in the 1930s (notably in 1934's Of Human Bondage, directed by her first husband John Cromwell), Johnson had to settle for second leads and supporting parts for most of her film career. After 10 years' retirement, Kay Johnson made one final screen appearance in the 1954 western Jivaro.

Trivia: Beery was a character actor in silents and talkies and the half-brother of actor Noah Beery, Sr. and uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr. At age 16 (1902) he joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer; two years later he began singing in New York variety shows, then worked in both Broadway musicals and Kansas City stock companies. A peculiar career path led him to his first series of silent comedy shorts in the cross-dressing role of Sweedie, a Swedish maid, beginning with his move to Hollywood in 1913 when he signed a contract with Essanay; from there he did one- and two-reelers with Keystone and Universal, then tried unsuccessfully to produce films in Japan. Returning to Hollywood, Beery tended (like his half-brother Noah) to be cast as "heavies" and villains, though by the late '20s his performances were tinted with considerable humor. Although he did not have a smooth voice, he made the transition into talkies and soon achieved great success in the role of a retired boxer in The Champ (1931), for which he won a Best Actor Oscar (the previous year he had been nominated for his work in The Big House). The huge box office sales for The Champ propelled Beery into a position as one of Hollywood's top ten stars, and he ceased to be cast as heavies, instead adopting a tough, dim-witted, easy-going persona, and often playing lovable slobs. He appeared in several films with Marie Dressler, and for a time the two of them were among Hollywood's most noteworthy screen couples; later he often played opposite Marjorie Main. From 1916-18 he was married to actress Gloria Swanson, with whom he had co-starred in a series of Mack Sennett comedies.

Trivia: At the turn of the century, 14-year-old Karl Dane first appeared on stage in the Copenhagen theater owned by his father. During the 1910s he traveled to Hollywood and in 1918 was cast in My Four Years in Germany and To Hell With the Kaiser both silent anti-German propaganda pieces. After his impressive portrayal of a U.S. infantryman in the World War I chronicle The Big Parade (1925) his popularity and film roles declined and he began working as a character comedian, often opposite George K. Arthur. Because he retained his heavy Danish accent, his acting career was finished at the end of the silent-film era. Sadly, at the age of 48, Karl Dane committed suicide.

Trivia: In films from 1915 to 1948, British stage veteran Wyndham Standing's heyday was in the silent era. During this time, Standing appeared in stiff-collar, stuffed-shirt roles in films like The Dark Angel and The Unchastened Woman (both 1925). His early-talkie credits include the squadron leader in Hell's Angels (1931) and Captain Pyke in A Study in Scarlet (1933). Thereafter, Standing showed up in such one-scene bits as King Oscar in Madame Curie (1943); he was also one of several silent-screen veterans appearing as U.S. senators in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Wyndham Standing was the brother of actors Sir Guy Standing and Herbert Standing.

Trivia: American actor Russell Simpson is another of those character players who seemed to have been born in middle age. From his first screen appearance in 1910 to his last in 1959, Simpson personified the grizzled, taciturn mountain man who held strangers at bay with his shotgun and vowed that his daughter would never marry into that family he'd been feudin' with fer nigh on to forty years. It was not always thus. After prospecting in the 1898 Alaska gold rush, Simpson returned to the States and launched a career as a touring actor in stock -- most frequently cast in romantic leads. This led to a long association with Broadway impresario David Belasco. Briefly flirting with New York-based films in 1910, Simpson returned to the stage, then chose movies on a permanent basis in 1917. Of his hundreds of motion picture and TV appearances, Russell Simpson is best known for his participation in the films of director John Ford, most memorably as Pa Joad in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath.

Trivia: Also known as Blanche Friderici, this Brooklyn-born actress was generally cast in severe, baleful roles: governesses, matrons, society doyennes and such. Beginning her screen career in 1922, she hit her stride at Paramount in the early 1930s. Her larger roles include one of the three omnipresent maiden aunts in Lubitsch's Love Me Tonight and Madame Si-Si in Madame Butterfly (both 1932). She was also a regular in Paramount's Zane Grey western series, usually as the cast-off wife or mistress of perennial villain Noah Beery. One of Blanche Frederici's last roles was as the wife of motel-court manager Zeke in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (released posthumously in 1934).

Trivia: Mississippi-born Roscoe Ates spent a good portion of his childhood overcoming a severe stammer. Entering show business as a concert violinist, the shriveled, pop-eyed Ates found the money was better as a vaudeville comedian, reviving his long-gone stutter for humorous effect. In films from 1929, Ates appeared in sizeable roles in such films as The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932) and Alice in Wonderland (1933), and also starred in his own short subject series with RKO and Vitaphone. Though his trademarked stammer is something of an endurance test when seen today, it paid off in big laughs in the 1930s, when speech impediments were considered the ne plus ultra of hilarity. By the late 1930s Ates's popularity waned, and he was reduced to unbilled bits in such films as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Dixie (1942). His best showing during the 1940s was as comic sidekick to singing cowboy Eddie Dean in a series of 15 low-budget westerns. Remaining busy in films and on TV into the 1960s, Roscoe Ates made his last appearance in the 1961 Jerry Lewis comedy The Errand Boy.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the current British actor/director of (almost) the same name, James A. Marcus was a late-19th century stage actor who transferred his larger-than-life theatrical persona to films in 1915. Marcus spent the next two decades playing bombastic authority characters. His silent-screen roles ranged from Mr. Bumble in the 1922 version of Oliver Twist to the appropriately named Colonel Blood in Laurel & Hardy's 1927 two-reeler Duck Soup. At the time of his death at the age of 69, James A. Marcus was most frequently seen as sheriffs, mayors, land barons and "father to the heroine" in "B"-westerns.

Trivia: Lantern-jawed Warner P. Richmond (the initial stood for Paul) had enjoyed a stage career touring with such plays as Eyes of Youth, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and As a Man Thinks, prior to making his screen debut for the Vitagraph company in 1912. Typecast as a villain almost from the beginning, Richmond enjoyed one of the busiest and longest careers in Hollywood history, often playing characters with names such as Danny, the Dude, Bowery Blackie, or Pop Eye Jackson. In his later years, Richmond turned up in scores of B-Westerns, usually not on the side of the angels. He finished his long career playing villains in Eddie Dean music Westerns for PRC.

Trivia: Born in Galveston, TX, King Vidor was the son of a wealthy lumber manufacturer. He became interested in movies -- then a brand new form of entertainment -- as a young boy, and later took a job as a ticket-taker at the local theater, where he subsequently became a fill-in projectionist. Vidor took this opportunity to watch the same movies over and over, learning from what he saw and deciding that he could do as good a job as most of the people whose films were up on the screen. After working as an amateur photographer, he began shooting newsreel material of events in his area of Texas and selling it to newsreel producers. It was after his marriage to the former Florence Arto in 1915 that he decided to head out to the then newly formed film colony in Hollywood. The couple entered the motion-picture business, but Florence Vidor was the far more successful of the two at first, starting out as a bit player and moving up to supporting roles in films such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and into starring roles in the late teens and 1920s. King Vidor, by contrast, worked as an extra and clerk while writing scripts in his spare time, which he was mostly unsuccessful at selling. In 1918, he moved into the director's chair at Universal, making two-reel shorts, and in 1919 he moved up to directing features with The Turn in the Road, which was based on his own screenplay. The Vidors soon began working together under the aegis of his own production unit, called Vidor Village, making movies from his screenplays with Florence Vidor starring in them, including a 1923 production of Alice Adams. By that time, however, their marriage was in trouble and they divorced a year later. Vidor joined the newly organized MGM, where his real reputation was made, on pictures such as the antiwar drama The Big Parade (1925), a silent version of La Boheme (1926) starring Lillian Gish and John Gilbert, the costume drama Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), starring Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman (who became Vidor's second wife), and The Crowd (1928). The latter, a story (written by Vidor) of one anonymous clerk's drudge-filled life, displayed a remarkably sophisticated social conscience as well as an innovative directorial technique that placed it at the pinnacle of silent-era cinema. Vidor moved with ease into the sound era, largely because he was one of the few silent directors who didn't let the new medium intimidate him -- rather, he used sound to enhance his visual technique, which was unimpaired; his 1929 musical Hallelujah! worked better than most musicals of the era simply because Vidor refused to let the presence of sound (and sound-recording equipment) restrict the mobility of his camera or the editing of his shots. He was also one of the bolder directors of the period in his willingness to work in new formats and media, such as his 1930 Billy the Kid starring Johnny Mack Brown and Wallace Beery, which was shot in 70 mm. His output in 1931 included Street Scene, an adaptation of Elmer Rice's play that utilized an extraordinary block-long tenement set; and The Champ, starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, one of the most popular melodramas of its era. Vidor also found time as a writer and producer to return to the social conscience themes displayed in The Crowd, in the form of Our Daily Bread (1934), a story of a young farm couple trying to cope with the effects of the Great Depression; the film is widely celebrated today for its stylistic eloquence. Vidor was one of the few filmmakers of his era who could make such "message" pictures and present their content gracefully. Vidor enjoyed considerable box-office success during the remainder of the 1930s, on movies such as Stella Dallas (1937) and The Citadel (1938), and even when his movies weren't entirely successful, as in the case of The Wedding Night (1935), they were always interesting to watch, and almost every Vidor movie contained at least one visually dazzling sequence; indeed, one of the complaints that occasionally dogged the director over the decades was that critics found the individual scenes in his movies far more striking than the complete work. Ironically, the most widely seen and known film today that Vidor worked on was one for which he never received credit, and which was considered a flop at the time: The Wizard of Oz (1939) -- Vidor was one of a handful of directors who worked on various parts of the picture when the officially credited director, Victor Fleming, was unavailable. In the years that followed, Vidor directed the satirical comedy Comrade X (1940), an attempt to emulate Ninotchka, and the thriller Northwest Passage (1940), starring Spencer Tracy, but his next major box-office hit came seven years later with Duel in the Sun (1947). As a production of David O. Selznick, who tended to intrude on every aspect of filming and utilized several directors in the course of completing the epic Western, the latter was more of a producer's picture than a director's film -- it was widely seen, however, and its very baroque visual touches, coupled with its sexually charged story of two estranged brothers competing for the same, seemingly wanton woman (Jennifer Jones), helped place Vidor once more in the front rank of Hollywood directors. His film The Fountainhead (1949) only solidified his reputation as a stylist, with its audacious (and stunning) visual content and a drama that walked a fine line between the fiercely sexual and the coldly intellectual; like most of Vidor's best movies, it has improved with age. Alas, it was to be the director's last major triumph -- he was unable to make much out of the melodramas Beyond the Forest (1949) and Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), and an attempted return to social conscience themes with Japanese War Bride (1952) was largely ignored by the public. He also failed in his try at rekindling the chemistry of Duel in the Sun in tandem with Jennifer Jones in Ruby Gentry (1952). Oddly enough, the more modestly framed Western drama Man Without a Star (1955), starring Kirk Douglas, worked much better and is still shown occasionally. Vidor's 1956 adaptation of War and Peace was a modest success, showing the director, who was already past 60, as capable of riding herd over a gargantuan international cast and crew, and he seemed to find the beginnings of a second career in the burgeoning field of international production, where major, albeit aging, Hollywood directors were often welcome, if only for the prestige that they brought to such productions and their potential access to favorable American distribution. His next project, Solomon and Sheba (1959), was produced in Spain with money from United Artists, but the biblical costume epic was marred by a behind-the-scenes tragedy and a major miscalculation by Vidor: Tyrone Power was the original star, and died of a heart attack during filming. There might have been enough finished footage of Power to have completed the movie, but for the fact that Vidor, for reasons best known to himself, had filmed Power's long shots first and neglected his close-ups, thus requiring his replacement by Yul Brynner. Vidor ceased making movies after 1959. He tried to return to filmmaking once, in 1979, at the age of 85, attempting unsuccessfully to raise money to finance a film about the life of James Murray. That movie, to have been based on Vidor's own screenplay, was never made, but he was awarded an honorary Oscar that same year for his career-long contribution to filmmaking.

Trivia: Tall, wiry, and with a bushy mustache, Missouri native Nelson McDowell usually played ranchers, homesteaders, and, increasingly emaciated, comic undertakers, and did it so well that he remains a favorite of B-Western fans everywhere. Often cast as a comic sidekick during the silent era, McDowell also played the music teacher in The Last of the Mohicans twice, in 1920 and 1932, and was Sowerberry in Monogram's version of Oliver Twist (1933). Although the parts grew increasingly smaller, McDowell remained a welcome addition to any B-Western cast until ill health forced his retirement in 1940. Sadly, the veteran actor ended his own life, reportedly with a gun he had used in many of his Western roles. At the time of his death, McDowell was functioning as a caretaker for a Hollywood apartment building in which he also resided.

Trivia: Born in the Arizona Territory to Mexican parents, Chris-Pin Martin developed a reputation as a laughgetter at an early age. He made his earliest film appearance in 1911, playing an Indian. During his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, Martin earned his salary perpetuating a stereotype that nowadays would be the ultimate in political incorrectness: the lazy, dull-witted Hispanic comic foil. Chris-Pin Martin appeared in several Cisco Kid programmers, playing sidekick Pancho (sometimes named Gorditor) to such screen Ciscos as Warner Baxter, Cesar Romero, Gilbert Roland and Duncan Renaldo.

Trivia: In films from 1919, Aggie Herring was a useful comic foil for such comedians as Harold Lloyd. Aggie's dramatic assignments included the role of Miss Corney in Oliver Twist (1922). She also played Maggie Kelly in director Frank Capra's very first Columbia feature, That Certain Thing (1928), which earned her a photo in Capra's autobiography The Name Above the Title. Aggie Herring continued portraying frontier mothers, flower ladies, dowagers and charwomen until her retirement in 1938, a year before her death.