Trivia: The quintessential tough guy, Humphrey Bogart remains one of Hollywood's most enduring legends and one of the most beloved stars of all time. While a major celebrity during his own lifetime, Bogart's appeal has grown almost exponentially in the years following his death, and his inimitable onscreen persona -- hard-bitten, cynical, and enigmatic -- continues to cast a monumental shadow over the motion picture landscape. Sensitive yet masculine, cavalier yet heroic, his ambiguities and contradictions combined to create a larger-than-life image which remains the archetype of the contemporary antihero. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born December 25, 1899, in New York City. Upon expulsion from Andover, Massachusetts' Phillips Academy, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a ship's gunner. While roughhousing on the vessel's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, a splinter becoming lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became among his most distinctive onscreen qualities. (For years his injuries were attributed to wounds suffered in battle, although the splinter story is now more commonly accepted.) After the war, Bogart returned to New York to accept a position on Broadway as a theatrical manager; beginning in 1920, he also started appearing onstage, but earned little notice within the performing community. In the late '20s, Bogart followed a few actor friends who had decided to relocate to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance opposite Helen Hayes in the 1928 short The Dancing Town, followed by the 1930 feature Up the River, which cast him as a hard-bitten prisoner. Warner Bros. soon signed him to a 550-dollars-a-week contract, and over the next five years he appeared in dozens of motion pictures, emerging as the perfect heavy in films like 1936's The Petrified Forest, 1937's Dead End, and 1939's The Roaring Twenties. The 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory, on the other hand, offered Bogart the opportunity to break out of his gangster stereotype, and he delivered with a strong performance indicative of his true range and depth as a performer. The year 1941 proved to be Bogart's breakthrough year, as his recent success brought him to the attention of Raoul Walsh for the acclaimed High Sierra. He was then recruited by first-time director John Huston, who cast him in the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; as gumshoe Sam Spade, Bogart enjoyed one of his most legendary roles, achieving true stardom and establishing the archetype for all hardboiled heroes to follow. A year later he accepted a lead in Michael Curtiz's romantic drama Casablanca. The end result was one of the most beloved films in the Hollywood canon, garnering Bogart his first Academy Award nomination as well as an Oscar win in the Best Picture category. Bogart then teamed with director Howard Hawks for his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, appearing for the first time opposite actress Lauren Bacall. Their onscreen chemistry was electric, and by the time they reunited two years later in Hawks' masterful film noir The Big Sleep, they had also married in real life. Subsequent pairings in 1947's Dark Passage and 1948's Key Largo cemented the Bogey and Bacall pairing as one of the screen's most legendary romances. His other key relationship remained his frequent collaboration with Huston, who helmed 1948's superb The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In Huston, Bogart found a director sympathetic to his tough-as-nails persona who was also capable of subverting that image. He often cast the actor against type, to stunning effect; under Huston's sure hand, he won his lone Oscar in 1951's The African Queen.Bogart's other pivotal director of the period was Nicholas Ray, who helmed 1949's Knock on Any Door and 1950's brilliant In a Lonely Place for the star's production company Santana. After reuniting with Huston in 1953's Beat the Devil, Bogart mounted three wildly different back-to-back 1954 efforts -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tearful The Barefoot Contessa, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina, and Edward Dmytryk's historical drama The Caine Mutiny -- which revealed new, unseen dimensions to his talents. His subsequent work was similarly diffuse, ranging in tone from the grim 1955 thriller The Desperate Hours to the comedy We're No Angels. After completing the 1956 boxing drama The Harder They Fall, Bogart was forced to undergo cancer surgery and died in his sleep on January 14, 1957.

Trivia: The son of British stage actor Frederick Rains, Claude Rains gave his first theatrical performance at age 11 in Nell of Old Drury. He learned the technical end of the business by working his way up from being a two-dollars-a-week page boy to stage manager. After making his first U.S. appearance in 1913, Rains returned to England, served in the Scottish regiment during WWI, then established himself as a leading actor in the postwar years. He was also featured in one obscure British silent film, Build Thy House. During the 1920s, Rains was a member of the teaching staff at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; among his pupils were a young sprout named Laurence Olivier and a lovely lass named Isabel Jeans, who became the first of Rains' six wives. While performing with the Theatre Guild in New York in 1932, Rains filmed a screen test for Universal Pictures. On the basis of his voice alone, the actor was engaged by Universal director James Whale to make his talking-picture debut in the title role of The Invisible Man (1933). During his subsequent years at Warner Bros., the mellifluous-voiced Rains became one of the studio's busiest and most versatile character players, at his best when playing cultured villains. Though surprisingly never a recipient of an Academy award, Rains was Oscar-nominated for his performances as the "bought" Senator Paine in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the title character in Mr. Skeffington (1944), the Nazi husband of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), and, best of all, the cheerfully corrupt Inspector Renault in Casablanca (1942). In 1946, Rains became one of the first film actors to demand and receive one million dollars for a single picture; the role was Julius Caesar, and the picture Caesar and Cleopatra. He made a triumphant return to Broadway in 1951's Darkness at Noon. In his last two decades, Claude Rains made occasional forays into television (notably on Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and continued to play choice character roles in big-budget films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

Trivia: With the possible exception of Edward G. Robinson, no actor has so often been the target of impressionists as the inimitable, Hungarian-born Peter Lorre. Leaving his family home at the age of 17, Lorre sought out work as an actor, toiling as a bank clerk during down periods. He went the starving-artist route in Switzerland and Austria before settling in Germany, where he became a favorite of playwright Bertolt Brecht. For most of his first seven years as a professional actor, Lorre employed his familiar repertoire of wide eyes, toothy grin, and nasal voice to invoke laughs rather than shudders. In fact, he was appearing in a stage comedy at the same time that he was filming his breakthrough picture M (1931), in which he was cast as a sniveling child murderer. When Hitler ascended to power in 1933, Lorre fled to Paris, and then to London, where he appeared in his first English-language film, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Although the monolingual Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically for Hitchcock, he picked up English fairly rapidly, and, by 1935, was well equipped both vocally and psychologically to take on Hollywood. On the strength of M, Lorre was initially cast in roles calling for varying degrees of madness, such as the love-obsessed surgeon in Mad Love (1935) and the existentialist killer in Crime and Punishment (1935). Signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936, Lorre asked for and received a chance to play a good guy for a change. He starred in eight installments of the Mr. Moto series, playing an ever-polite (albeit well versed in karate) Japanese detective. When the series folded in 1939, Lorre freelanced in villainous roles at several studios. While under contract to Warner Bros., Lorre played effeminate thief Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), launching an unofficial series of Warner films in which Lorre was teamed with his Falcon co-star Sidney Greenstreet. During this period, Lorre's co-workers either adored or reviled him for his wicked sense of humor and bizarre on-set behavior. As far as director Jean Negulesco was concerned, Lorre was the finest actor in Hollywood; Negulesco fought bitterly with the studio brass for permission to cast Lorre as the sympathetic leading man in The Mask of Dimitrios (1946), in which the diminutive actor gave one of his finest and subtlest performances. In 1951, Lorre briefly returned to Germany, where he directed and starred in the intriguing (if not wholly successful) postwar psychological drama The Lost One. The '50s were a particularly busy time for Lorre; he performed frequently on such live television anthologies as Climax; guested on comedy and variety shows; and continued to appear in character parts in films. He remained a popular commodity into the '60s, especially after co-starring with the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone in a series of tongue-in-cheek Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for filmmaker Roger Corman. Lorre's last film, completed just a few months before his fatal heart attack in 1964, was Jerry Lewis' The Patsy, in which, ironically, the dourly demonic Lorre played a director of comedy films.

Trivia: Sydney Greenstreet ranked among Hollywood's consummate character actors, a classic rogue whose villainous turns in motion pictures like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon remain among the most memorable and enigmatic depictions of evil ever captured on film. Born December 27, 1879, in Sandwich, England, Greenstreet's initial ambition was to make his fortune as a tea planter, and toward that aim he moved to Sri Lanka at the age of 18. A drought left him penniless, however, and he soon returned to England, where he worked a variety of odd jobs while studying acting in the evening under Ben Greet. In 1902, he made his theatrical debut portraying a murderer in Sherlock Holmes, and two years later he traveled with Greet to the United States. After making his Broadway debut in Everyman, Greenstreet's American residency continued for the rest of his life.Greenstreet remained exclusively a theatrical performer for over three decades. He shifted easily from musical comedy to Shakespeare, and in 1933 he joined the Lunts in Idiot's Delight, performing with their Theatre Guild for the duration of the decade. While appearing in Los Angeles in a touring production of There Shall Be No Night in 1940, Greenstreet met John Huston, who requested he play the ruthless Guttman in his 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. A heavy, imposing man, Greenstreet was perfectly cast as the massive yet strangely effete Guttman, a dignified dandy who was in truth the very essence of malevolence. Making his film debut at the age of 62, he appeared alongside the two actors with whom he would be forever connected, star Humphrey Bogart and fellow character actor Peter Lorre. The acclaim afforded Greenstreet for The Maltese Falcon earned him a long-term contract with Warner Bros., where, after appearing in They Died With Their Boots On, he again played opposite Bogart in 1942's Across the Pacific. In 1942, he appeared briefly in Casablanca, another reunion with Bogart as well as Lorre. When Greenstreet and Lorre again reteamed in 1943's Background in Danger, their fate was sealed, and they appeared together numerous other times including 1944's Passage to Marseilles (again with Bogart), The Mask of Dimitrios, The Conspirators, and Hollywood Canteen, in which they portrayed themselves. Yearning to play comedy, Greenstreet got his wish in 1945's Pillow to Post, which cast him alongside Ida Lupino. He also appeared opposite Bogart again in the drama Conflict and with Barbara Stanwyck in Christmas in Connecticut. In 1952, he announced his retirement, and died two years later on January 18, 1954.

Trivia: Born Hein Van Der Niet, this handsome, deep-voiced leading man debuted onstage at age 14, going on to play leads in Dutch and European productions, in which he was billed as "Fritz Van Dongen." By the late '30s he was a popular matinee idol and screen actor. He moved to Hollywood when World War II broke out; beginning with Enemy Agent (1940) he played leads in numerous Hollywood films, often portraying refugees, anti-Nazi Germans, and Continental lovers. He began playing more mature roles in the late '40s, notably as Papa in I Remember Mama (1948) with Irene Dunne. Having long suffered from phlebitis, in 1945 he had the first of a series of strokes, which eventually ruined his voice; over the next few years he went on to have a heart attack and to require brain surgery. He returned to Europe in the early '50s and appeared in a number of films and plays; but following an injury in a stage accident he retired in 1955. He lived the last two decades of his life confined to his California home. He was married to Dutch actress Marianne Van Dam.

Trivia: Silver-haired Belgian leading man Victor Francen was the son of a police commissioner. Upon embarking on an acting career, Francen toured the provinces of Europe, Russia, Canada and South America before joining the Comedie Francaise. After a stop-and-go silent film career, in 1931, Francen established himself as a leading man of French films. Some of his best work was under the direction of innovative filmmaker Abel Gance, who inspired Francen to expand his emotional range to the breaking point in such films as The End of the World (1931) and J'Accuse (1937). When the Nazis marched into Paris in 1940, Francen moved to the United States. He found himself much in demand as a worldly continental type in Hollywood, often as a villain, spy or schemer; in keeping with the tenor of his roles, Francen's acting style became heavier (as did the actor himself). Victor Francen closed off the Hollywood phase of his career with 1961's Fanny, making one final film appearance in the French La Grande Frousse before retiring in 1964.

Trivia: Average in looks but above average in talent, New York native George Tobias launched his acting career at his hometown's Pasadena Playhouse. He then spent several years with the Provincetown Players before moving on to Broadway and, ultimately, Hollywood. Entering films in 1939, Tobias' career shifted into first when he was signed by Warner Bros., where he played everything from good-hearted truck drivers to shifty-eyed bandits. Tobias achieved international fame in the 1960s by virtue of his weekly appearances as long-suffering neighbor Abner Kravitz on the TV sitcom Bewitched; he'd previously been a regular on the obscure Canadian adventure series Hudson's Bay. Though he frequently portrayed browbeaten husbands, George Tobias was a lifelong bachelor.

Trivia: Darkly handsome Austrian-born leading man, Helmut Dantine had finely chiseled features and deep-set eyes. A fugitive from the German Anschluss of Austria, he moved to California in 1938. Soon thereafter he joined the Pasadena Community Players, gaining enough acting experience to make his film-debut playing a Nazi in International Squadron (1941) with Ronald Reagan. Soon he had cornered the market on young Nazi characters in Hollywood films, particularly after his popular performance as a downed and wounded Luftwaffe pilot in Mrs. Miniver (1942), his third film. Later Dantine was promoted to stardom by Warner Brothers, who gave him his first lead role in Edge of Darkness (1943). He went on to play leads and second leads in many films of the '40s and '50s, but made few films after 1958. In 1958 he directed the unmemorable film Thundering Jets. After marrying the daughter of Nicholas M. Schenck, the former president of Loew's Inc., he became the vice president of the Schenck Enterprises film production and distribution organization in 1959; in 1970 he became its president. In the '70s Dantine was the executive producer of three films, two of which he appeared in.

Trivia: Born John Lowe, this tall, aristocratic British leading man often wore tweeds and smoked a pipe in his roles. He served in Gallipoli in World War One, ending up a prisoner of war. First onscreen as an extra (in a dance-party scene) in the German-made Madame Wants No Children (1926), he played leads and second leads in numerous early Hollywood talkies (he was in Paramount's first talkie, The Doctor's Secret [1929]), then became a popular star in '30s British films. When World War Two came to England he returned to Hollywood; there for seven years, he played leads in B-movies and supporting roles in major productions, but never attained the star status he'd enjoyed in Britain. Appeared on Broadway in 1947 and 1950, Loder then returned to England; after several more films he retired to his wife's ranch in Argentina, coming back to the big screen for a film in 1965 and another in 1970. His five wives included actresses Micheline Cheirel (a star in France) and Hedy Lamarr, with whom he costarred in Dishonored Lady (1947), which Lamarr produced. He authored an autobiography, Hollywood Hussar (1977).

Trivia: Italian-born actor Eduardo Ciannelli was mostly known for his sinister gangster roles, but he first rose to fame as an opera singer and musical comedy star! The son of a doctor who operated a health spa, Ciannelli was expected to follow his father's footsteps into the medical profession, and to that end studied at the University of Naples. Launching his career in grand opera as a baritone, Ciannelli came to the U.S. after World War I, where he was headlined in such Broadway productions as Rose Marie and Lady Billy. He switched to straight acting with the Theatre Guild in the late 1920s, co-starring with luminaries like the Lunts and Katherine Cornell. Cianelli's resemblance to racketeer Lucky Luciano led to his being cast as the eloquent but deadly gangster Trock Estrella in Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, the role that brought him to Hollywood on a permanent basis (after a couple of false starts) in 1936. He followed up the film version of Winterset with a Luciano-like role in the Bette Davis vehicle Marked Women (1937), then did his best to avoid being typed as a gangster. After inducing goosebumps in Gunga Din (1939) as the evil Indian cult leader ("Kill for the love of Kali!"), Ciannelli did an about-face as the lovable, effusive Italian speakeasy owner in Kitty Foyle (1940)--and was nominated for an Oscar in the process. During the war, the actor billed himself briefly as Edward Ciannelli, and in this "guise" brought a measure of dignity to his title role in the Republic serial The Mysterious Dr. Satan (1945). He returned to Italy in the 1950s to appear in European films and stage productions, occasionally popping up in Hollywood films as ageing Mafia bosses and self-made millionaires. In 1959, he was seen regularly as a nightclub owner on the TV detective series Johnny Staccato. Had he lived, Eduardo Ciannelli would have been ideal for the starring role in 1972's The Godfather, as he proved in a similar assignment in the 1968 Mafia drama The Brotherhood.

Trivia: Hollywood character actor Konstantin Shayne generally played threatening internationals during the '40s and '50s.

Trivia: A product of the Indiana orphanage system, the part-Cherokee-Indian Monte Blue held down jobs ranging from stevedore to reporter before offering his services as a movie-studio handyman in the early 1910s. Pressed into service as an extra and stunt man, Blue graduated to featured parts in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Thanks to his work with Griffith and (especially) Cecil B. DeMille, Blue became a dependable box-office attraction of the 1920s, playing everything from lawyers to baseball players. He was a mainstay of the fledgling Warner Bros. studios, where the profits from his films frequently compensated for the expensive failures starring John Barrymore. In 1928 he was cast in his finest silent role, as the drink-sodden doctor in White Shadows on the South Seas. After making a successful transition to talkies, Blue decided to retire from filmmaking, taking a tour around the world to celebrate his freedom. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1931, Blue found that he had lost his fortune through bad investments, and that the public at large had forgotten him. By now too heavy-set to play romantic leads, Blue rebuilt his career from the bottom up, playing bits in "A" pictures and supporting roles in "B"s. He was busiest in the bread-and-butter westerns produced by such minor studios as Republic, Monogram and PRC; he also showed up in several serials, notably as "Ming the Merciless" clone Unga Khan in 1936's Undersea Kingdom. Movie mogul Jack Warner, out of gratitude for Blue's moneymaking vehicles of the 1920s, saw to it that Monte was steadily employed at Warner Bros., and that his name would appear prominently in the studio's advertising copy. While many of his talkie roles at Warners were bits, Blue was given choice supporting roles in such films as Across the Pacific (1942), Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and especially Key Largo (1948). Extending his activities into TV, Blue continued accepting character roles until retiring from acting in 1954. During the last years of his life, Monte Blue was the advance man for the Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus; it was while making his annual appearance in this capacity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that Blue suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 73.

Trivia: With little thought to her own safety, at least according to the screenplay, exotic-looking Corinna Mura belted out "La Marseillaise" in Casablanca (1942), one of the most stirring sequences in a film filled with memorable moments. Although trained as a coloratura at a very young age, Mura (born Wall and of Spanish-English-Scottish descent) preferred pop and her concerned parents reportedly committed her to a rest home in Connecticut. She learned to play the guitar there and soon starred in her own radio program, "The Corinne Mura International Salon." That in turn led to a contract with Warner Bros. and after cooling her heels in RKO's Call Out the Marines (1942), Mura made her indelible mark on film history as Andrea, the girl singer at Rick's café. Adhering to the wartime "Good Neighbor" policy of hiring South American entertainers, Warner Bros. kept her true nationality (not to mention parentage) a secret. It didn't matter much; Mura appeared in a couple of minor musicals, recorded "Buenas Noches" and "Samba Le Le" from The Gay Senorita (1945) and then hightailed it to New York for Mexican Hayride (1944-1945), a Broadway musical that lasted a respectable 481 performances. Marrying a reporter from the Hearst newspapers, Mura became the stepmother of well-known illustrator Edward Gorey.

Trivia: A literature and philosophy student in his native Moscow, Vladimir Sokoloff trained for an acting career under Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Leaving Russia in 1923, Sokoloff resettled in Germany, where he made his first film, Uneasy Money, in 1926. Dividing his time between Paris and Berlin throughout the 1930s, Sokoloff came to Hollywood in 1937, where his craggy face and colorful accent enabled him to secure choice character roles. Despite his name and ethnic derivation, Sokoloff successfully portrayed nearly 35 different nationalities during his American career: He was Frenchman Paul Cezanne in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a Middle Easterner in Road to Morocco (1942), Spanish freedom fighter Anselmo in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), an elderly Mexican in The Magnificent Seven (1960), and so it went. Vladimir Sokoloff was active in films (Taras Bulba) and TV programs (The Twilight Zone) right up to his death in 1962.

Trivia: A graduate of Columbia University and a veteran stage actor, New York-born Charles La Torre played the Italian military officer Tonelli in Casablanca (1942). That was perhaps a highlight in a screen career spent portraying every ethnic type possible, from a Portuguese café proprietor in The Hairy Ape (1944) to an Arabic villain, Abdullah, in Bomba and the Hidden City (1950). This Charles La Torre, who appeared in hundreds of feature films, comedy shorts, and television shows from 1941-1966, should not be confused with Charles Latorre, an African-American player who appeared in several Oscar Micheaux films of the late '30s.

Trivia: Actor Hans Conried, whose public image was that of a Shakespearean ham, was born not in England but in Baltimore. Scrounging for work during the Depression era, Conried offered himself to a radio station as a performer, and at 18 became a professional. One of his earliest jobs was appearing in uncut radio adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, and before he was twenty he was able to recite many of the Bard's lengthier passages from memory. After several years in summer stock and radio, Conried made his screen debut in Dramatic School (1938). Conried's saturnine features and reedy voice made him indispensable for small character roles, and until he entered the service in World War II the actor fluctuated between movies and radio. Given a choice, Conried would have preferred to stay in radio, where the money was better and the parts larger, but despite the obscurity of much of his film work he managed to sandwich in memorable small (often unbilled) appearances in such "A" pictures as Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), The Big Street (1942) and Passage to Marseilles (1944). While in the army, Conried was put in charge of Radio Tokyo in postwar Japan, where he began his lifelong hobby of collecting rare Japanese artifacts; the actor also had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of American Indian lore. As big-time radio began to fade during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Conried concentrated more on film work. He was awarded the starring role in the bizarre musical 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1952), written by his friend Dr. Seuss; unfortunately, the studio, not knowing how to handle this unorthodox project, cut it to ribbons, and the film was a failure. Later he was engaged for a choice co-starring role in Cole Porter's Broadway musical Can Can; in addition, he became a favorite guest on Jack Paar's late-night TV program, popped up frequently and hilariously as a game show contestant, and in 1957 made the first of many special-guest visits as the imperishable Uncle Tonoose on The Danny Thomas Show. Cartoon producers also relied heavily on Conried, notably Walt Disney, who cast the actor as the voice of Captain Hook in the animated feature Peter Pan, and Jay Ward, for whom Conried played Snidely Whiplash on The Bullwinkle Show and Uncle Waldo on Hoppity Hooper. In 1963, Jay Ward hired Conried as the supercilious host of the syndicated comedy series Fractured Flickers. Conried cut down on his TV show appearances in the 1970s and 1980s, preferring to devote his time to stage work; for well over a year, the actor co-starred with Phil Leeds in an Atlanta production of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. Just before his death, Conried was cast in a recurring role on the "realistic" drama series American Dream, where he was permitted to drop the high-tone Shakespearean veneer in the gruff, down-to-earth part of Jewish oldster Abe Berlowitz.

Trivia: After studying to become a painter, Mark Stevens became active in Canadian theatrical work. He then launched a radio career as an announcer at a small station in Akron, Ohio. In 1944, Stevens was brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros., where he was billed as Stephen Richards. He graduated to top billing in RKO's From This Day Forward (1945), playing a returning war hero making an uneasy adjustment to civilian life. Critics panned the film but praised Stevens, who was then snatched up by 20th Century-Fox for a series of plum starring roles, including songwriter Joe E. Howard in the 1947 musical biopic I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now? and the husband of mental patient Olivia De Havilland in The Snake Pit (1949). When it seemed as though his film career had ground to a halt, Stevens moved to television, where in 1953 he became the fourth actor to essay the role of detective Martin Kane. The following year, he succeeded Pat McVey in the part of crusading journalist Steve Wilson on the weekly TVer Big Town. During both of his TV-series stints, Stevens publicly derided the quality of the material he'd been handed, demanding full script control and the opportunity to direct. Upon returning to the Big Screen, Stevens produced and directed a brace of serviceable programmers: Cry Vengeance (1954) and Timetable (1956). After closing out his Hollywood career in 1964, Mark Stevens repaired to Europe, where he directed his last film to date, the German-Spanish co-production Sunscorched (1966).

Trivia: French character actor Louis Mercier was in American films from 1929's Tiger Rose until well into the 1970s. Mercier was particularly busy at 20th Century-Fox's "B"-picture unit in the 1930s and 1940s, usually cast as detectives and magistrates. He can be seen fleetingly in Casablanca (1942) as a smuggler in the first "Rick's Café Americain" sequence. Louis Mercier's later credits include An Affair to Remember (1957, in which he was given a character name--a rarity for him), The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and Darling Lili (1970).

Trivia: On Broadway in 1932 in the short-running We Are No Longer Children and other plays, tall, solid-looking German actor Walter Bonn became extremely busy in Hollywood films of the 1940s, almost always playing Nazis. Among his countless bit parts, Bonn is affectionately remembered by serial fans as Tala Birell's assistant in Universal's Jungle Queen (1945).

Trivia: French character actor Jean Del Val was a regular in American films from at least 1927. In the early days of the talkies, he offered his services as translator and vocal coach for the French-language versions of American films. Many of his later roles were fleeting but memorable: he's the French aviator in Block-Heads (1938) who rescues over-aged doughboy Stan Laurel from the trenches ("Why, you blockhead. Ze war's been over for twenty years!") and the French radio announcer who opens Casablanca (1942) by spreading the news of the murder of two German couriers carrying letters of transit. He enjoyed a larger role in Columbia's So Dark the Night (1946), a film seemingly conceived as a showcase for the best of Hollywood's foreign-accented bit players. Active in films until the 1960s, Jean del Val played a crucial non-speaking role in Fantastic Voyage (1966): he's the comatose scientist whose arterial system and brain are explored by the miniaturized heroes.

Trivia: From his appearance as Humphrey Bogart's son in the Casablanca follow-up A Passage to Marseille to his career as the writer of films including They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968), actor-turned-screenwriter Gerald Perreau-Saissine's (aka Peter Miles) tenure in film and television provided audiences with both memorable characters and intriguing stories. Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, Saissine made his feature debut as a baby in Murder Will Out (1939). Saissine would appear in such features as Heaven Only Knows (1947), Special Agent (1949), and Quo Vadis? (1951) throughout the 1950s before making his screenwriting debut with the sci-fi-thriller Madmen of Mandoras (aka They Saved Hitler's Brain) in 1963. Frequently appearing onscreen with sister Gigi Perreau, the siblings remained in close contact with producer Samuel Goldwyn, who would later present Saissine with two Samuel Goldwyn writing awards. In addition to his film work, Saissine published novels and poetry; he also created numerous catalogues of Japanese woodblock print artists and curated their shows at such locations as the Pacific-Asia Museum in Pasadena and the Honolulu Academy of Arts. On August 3, 2002, Gerald Perreau-Saissine died of cancer in his Los Angeles home. He was 64.

Trivia: Sicilian actor Frank Puglia started his career with a travelling operetta company at age 13. He and his family moved to the US in 1907, where he worked in a laundry until he hooked up with an Italian-language theatrical troupe based in New York. In 1921, Puglia was appearing as Pierre Frochard in a revival of the old theatrical warhorse The Two Orphans when he was spotted by film director D.W. Griffith. Puglia was hired to repeat his role for Griffith's film version of the play, retitled Orphans of the Storm; while Pierre Frochard was slated to die at the end of the film, preview-audience reaction to the death was so negative that Griffith called Puglia back to reshoot his final scenes, allowing him to survive for the fade-out. For the rest of his long film career, Puglia essayed a wide variety of ethnic supporting parts, portraying priests, musicians, diplomats and street peddlers. In 1942's Casablanca, Puglia has a memorable bit as a Morroccan rug merchant who automatically marks down his prices to any friends of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Frank Puglia played a larger and less likable role as a treacherous minion to sultan Kurt Katch in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944); when the film was remade as Sword of Ali Baba in 1965, so much stock footage from the 1944 film was utilized that Puglia was hired to replay his original part.

Trivia: There's a bit of a cloud surrounding the origins of character actor Harry Cording. The 1970 biographical volume The Versatiles lists his birthplace as New York City, while the exhaustive encyclopedia Who Was Who in Hollywood states that Cording was born in England. Whatever the case, Cording made his mark from 1925 through 1955 in distinctly American roles, usually portraying sadistic western bad guys. A break from his domestic villainy occurred in the 1934 Universal horror film The Black Cat, in which a heavily-made-up Harry Cording played the foreboding, zombie-like servant to Satan-worshipping Boris Karloff.