Trivia: Constance Bennett was the eldest of three daughters born to theatrical luminary Richard Bennett and his wife, actress Adrienne Morrison. Though her father did everything he could to discourage her from pursuing an acting career, Constance was willful and rebellious almost from the moment of her birth. She tried to break away from Daddy's influence by marrying at age 16, but the union was quickly annulled. At 17, Constance was signed to a Goldwyn movie contract on the strength of her family name. She treated her silent-film career as a lark, but along the way she developed a superb sense of comic timing and an instinctive gift for heavy dramatics. After her second marriage in 1926, Constance left films in favor of the international "party set"; her third husband was the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudray, a well-known playboy of questionable royal lineage who'd previously been married to Gloria Swanson. In the early 1930s, after the termination of this marriage, Constance returned to films, specializing in "fallen woman" roles before switching to light comedy in such films as The Affairs of Cellini (1934) and Topper (1937). At one point she was the highest paid actress in Hollywood. In 1945 she became a producer, bankrolling a film titled Paris Underground, in which she co-starred with British musical favorite Gracie Fields. During the 1950s, Ms. Bennett appeared in numerous stage productions, and also ran a successful cosmetics firm. Constance's fifth and longest-lasting husband, whom she married in 1946, was Brigadier General John Theron Couper (for the record, husband #4 was actor Gilbert Roland); at age 59, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in the Walson Army Hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where her husband was stationed. Constance Bennett was the sister of actresses Barbara and Joan Bennett, and the aunt of radio talk-show host Morton Downey Jr.

Trivia: Active in amateur theatricals from age three, Briton Brian Aherne studied for his craft at the Italia Conti School, making his professional bow when he was eight. Aherne would later claim that he remained an actor into adulthood (after a tentative stab at becoming an architect) mainly because he liked to sleep until ten in the morning. Successful on stage and screen in England, Aherne came to America in 1931 to appear in the first Broadway production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. His first Hollywood film was 1933's Song of Songs, in which he appeared with Marlene Dietrich. Free-lancing throughout the 1930s, Aherne established himself as a gentlemanly Britisher who was willing to defend his honor (or someone else's) with his fists if needs be. Many of his roles were secondary, though he played the title role in 1937's The Great Garrick and was starred in a brace of Hal Roach productions in 1938 and 1939 (the actor wasn't crazy about the improvisational attitude at Roach, but he enjoyed the roles). He was Oscar-nominated for his sensitive performance of the doomed Emperor Maximillian in Juarez (1939). In the late 1950s, he put film and TV work aside for a theatrical tour as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Off-camera, Aherne was a licensed pilot and an aspiring writer: he penned a 1969 autobiography, A Proper Job, as well as a biography of his close friend George Sanders, A Dreadful Man. At one point in his life, Aherne was married to Joan Fontaine, but he knew the honeymoon was over when, out of pique, she ripped up a collection of his best reviews. Brian Aherne was the brother of Patrick Ahearne, a character player who showed up in such films as Titanic (1953), The Court Jester (1955) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

Trivia: Actor Barry Sullivan was a theater usher and department store employee at the time he made his first Broadway appearance in 1936. His "official" film debut was in the 1943 Western Woman of the Town, though in fact Sullivan had previously appeared in a handful of two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios in the late '30s. A bit too raffish to be a standard leading man, Sullivan was better served in tough, aggressive roles, notably the title character in 1947's The Gangster and the boorish Tom Buchanan in the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. One of his better film assignments of the 1950s was as the Howard Hawks-style movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Sullivan continued appearing in movie roles of varying importance until 1978. A frequent visitor to television, Barry Sullivan starred as Sheriff Pat Garrett in the 1960s Western series The Tall Man, and was seen as the hateful patriarch Marcus Hubbard in a 1972 PBS production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.

Trivia: Pressured by his father to become a policemen like all five of his brothers, American actor Michael O'Shea defied his dad by dropping out of school at age 12, then entered vaudeville in an act with his idol, boxer Jack Johnson. Working the Prohibition years as a comic and emcee in speakeasies, O'Shea organized his own dance band, Michael O'Shea and His Stationary Gypsies. Adopting the professional name Eddie O'Shea, the actor spent the '30s in stock companies and in radio, until accruing good reviews for his 1942 Broadway appearance in The Eve of St. Mark. Somewhat reluctantly, O'Shea entered movies on the strength of his stage work; the one Michael O'Shea film that seems to get the most circulation today is Lady Of Burlesque (1943) in which he played a red-nosed burleyque comic who was the erstwhile boyfriend of stripper Barbara Stanwyck. Bouncing back and forth between Broadway and movies, O'Shea never quite became a star, though he did manage to marry one: Virginia Mayo, with whom he'd appeared in the 1943 film Jack London. O'Shea's film work in the '50s was acceptable, but he was shown to better advantage in the 1955 TV sitcom, It's A Great Life, which though no hit had a great second life in reruns. According to an interview given in 1972 Michael O'Shea fulfilled his father's "policeman" wishes after a fashion by working as an operative for the FBI in the mid '60s, helping to break up a gambling ring plaguing O'Shea's home turf of Ventura County, California.

Trivia: Character actor James Gleason usually played tough-talking, world-weary guys with a secret heart-of-gold. He is easily recognized for his tendency to talk out of the side of his mouth. Gleason's parents were actors, and after serving in the Spanish-American War, Gleason joined their stock company in Oakland, California. His career was interrupted by service in World War I, following which he began to appear on Broadway. He debuted onscreen in 1922, but didn't begin to appear regularly in films until 1928. Meanwhile, during the '20s he also wrote a number of plays and musicals, several of which were later made into films. In the early sound era, Gleason collaborated on numerous scripts as a screenwriter or dialogue specialist; he also directed one film, Hot Tip (1935). As an actor, he appeared in character roles in over 150 films, playing a wide range of hard-boiled (and often semi-comic) urban characters, including detectives, reporters, marine sergeants, gamblers, fight managers, and heroes' pals. In a series of films in the '30s, he had a recurring lead role as slow-witted police inspector Oscar Piper. James Gleason was married to actress Lucille Webster Gleason; their son was actor Russell Gleason.

Trivia: Erudite, silver-haired stage and screen actor Otto Kruger was a grandnephew of South African president Ohm Kruger. While attending the University of Michigan and Columbia University, Kruger switched his field of interest from music to acting. After several seasons in regional theatre, the 30-year-old Kruger made his Broadway bow in The Natural Law in 1915. That same year, he appeared in his first film, but did not actively pursue moviemaking until the talkie era. Kruger often exploited his respectable, sophisticated veneer to play villainous roles, such as the solid citizen-cum-Nazi ringleader in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). He was equally effective in parts calling for kindness and compassion, notably as Dr. Emil Behring, the real-life Nobel Prize winner, in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. During World War II, Kruger, an ardent home gardener, worked as a food coordinator for the Los Angeles Country Agricultural Department. While appearing in the pre-Broadway tryouts for Advise and Consent in 1960, Kruger suffered the first of several strokes that would eventually render him inactive. Otto Kruger made his last film, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1964; he died 10 years later, on his 89th birthday.

Trivia: A stage actress of long standing in her native England, aristocratic leading lady Isobel Elsom made her first Broadway appearance in 1926. Her biggest stage hit was in the role of the wealthy murder victim in 1939's Ladies in Retirement, a role she repeated (after a two-year, nonstop theatrical run) in the 1941 film version. Nearly always cast as a stately lady of fine breeding, Elsom played everything from Gary Cooper's soon-to-be mother-in-law in Casanova Brown (1946) to a movie studio executive in Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1962). She was also seen as Mrs. Eynesford-Hill in the 1964 movie adaptation of My Fair Lady. At one time married to director Maurice Elvey, Isobel Elsom was sometimes billed under the last name of another husband, appearing as Isobel Harbold.

Trivia: It was rare in 1940s Hollywood for actors to portray their real-life exploits, but Selena Royle was also a rare talent, who first became known to most moviegoers portraying herself, and her real-life work on behalf of America's war effort. Though nearly forgotten today, apart from her work in a handful of films, Selena Royle was one of the most respected actresses on the Broadway stage from the 1920s onward, and in Hollywood during the 1940s. The daughter of celebrated playwright Edwin Milton Royle (best remembered as the author of the play The Squaw Man, which was a hit on three separate occasions -- 1914, 1918, 1931 -- for Cecil B. DeMille and helped Samuel Goldwyn get a foothold in the movie business), Selena Royle embarked on a theatrical career over her parents' objections, earning her first professional acting credit playing Guinevere in a play that her father had written, Launcelot and Elaine. Her next few roles were, to her embarrassment, all in works written or produced by friends of her family, but she finally proved her own talent by winning a part (before her name was known to the producers) in the Theater Guild's production of Peer Gynt in 1923, opposite Joseph Schildkraut. Royle distinguished herself in long-running plays such as When Ladies Meet and Days Without End. She tried life in Hollywood in the early '30s, in The Misleading Lady (1932), but she quickly returned to New York where she spent ten more years on-stage, easing into maternal roles with grace and dignity, and also establishing herself on radio as a star of long-running series such as "Hilda Hope, M.D." and "Kate Hopkins." Royle also endeared herself to a generation of her colleagues by organizing the Actor's Dinner Club at the Hotel Woodstock in New York City, as a means of feeding members of her profession who were left out of work during the Great Depression. This experience served Royle in good stead 11 years later, after America's entry into WWII, when she organized the Stage Door Canteen, a Broadway institution that entertained and served millions of free meals to many hundreds of thousands of servicemen who passed through New York on their way to or from the world's battle-fronts. The canteen also brought Royle back into movies, playing herself in Frank Borzage's feature film Stage Door Canteen (1943). She spent the next 11 years in Hollywood, principally in maternal roles, most notably as the mother of the five young, doomed sailors in The Sullivans and Elizabeth Taylor's mother in Courage of Lassie, and in such famous movies of the period as Night and Day (the alleged Cole Porter biographical film) and The Harvey Girls. She remained busy throughout the 1940s and into the early '50s in every kind of movie, from big-budgeted epics such as Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc, small-scale psychological dramas such as Frank Borzage's Moonrise, William Wyler's high-profile literary adaptation The Heiress, and crime dramas such as He Ran All the Way. In 1951, however, her career came to a halt when Royle was denounced in the publication Red Channels as an alleged Communist sympathizer, and subsequently refused to appear before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's investigative committee. She was suddenly "wrong" for every role that she tested for and her screen career was effectively ended -- she sued Red Channels and the American Legion (who had published the Red Channels list of supposed subversives) and mounted a publicity campaign that ended with the Red baiters backing off. Royle had beaten the blacklist, but she only made two more movies, Phil Tucker's ultra-low-budget Robot Monster, and Edgar G. Ulmer's independently made Murder Is My Beat, neither of which was produced on a scale resembling the films of her earlier days. In 1954, seeing that she was no longer wanted or needed in Hollywood, Royle and her second husband, George Renavent, decided to leave the United States. They moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where they lived happily until his death in 1968. During her final 20 years, Royle was a successful author of books about cooking and about Mexico.

Trivia: Actor Taylor Holmes first made a theatrical name for himself on the Keith Vaudeville Circuit. In the course of his subsequent five-decade Broadway career, Holmes starred in over 100 plays, usually in light comedy roles. Making his film debut in 1917, he played the title role in the 1918 adaptation of Ruggles of Red Gap, then made scattered screen appearances before settling down in Hollywood permanently in 1947. Most often employed by 20th Century-Fox, he showed up in such flashy roles as gullible millionaire Ezra Grindle in the Tyrone Power melodrama Nightmare Alley (1947). He also played more than his share of shyster lawyers (most memorable in 1947's Kiss of Death) and absent-minded professors. Holmes was the father of actors Phillips and Ralph Holmes. Outliving his wife and both his sons, Taylor Holmes died at the age of 85; his last assignment was the voice of King Steffan in Disney's animated feature Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Trivia: Wisconsinite John Litel was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. When World War I broke out in Europe, Litel didn't feel like waiting until America became officially involved and thus joined the French army, serving valiantly for three years. Returning to America, Litel studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and entered into the peripatetic world of touring stock companies. His first film was the 1929 talkie The Sleeping Porch, which starred top-hatted comedian Raymond Griffith. He settled in Hollywood for keeps in 1937, spending the next three decades portraying a vast array of lawyers, judges, corporate criminals, military officers, and even a lead or two. Litel was a regular in two separate "B"-picture series, playing the respective fathers of Bonita Granville and James Lydon in the Nancy Drew and Henry Aldrich series. On television, John Litel was appropriately ulcerated as the boss of Bob Cummings on the 1953 sitcom My Hero.

Trivia: Horace McMahon dabbled in professional and semi-professional acting while attending Fordham University Law School, continuing to do so while holding down a day job as a newspaper reporter. He made acting his full-time vocation after his first Broadway appearance in 1931. In films from 1937, the growly, jowly MacMahon was initially typed in gangster roles. After scoring a personal success as Lieutenant Monaghan in the 1949 Broadway play Detective Story, MacMahon repeated the role in the 1951 film version -- and thereafter was pigeonholed in "cop" roles. Before beginning his five-year (1958-63) tenure as Lieutenant Mike Parker on the TV series The Naked City, MacMahon had been a semi-regular on Martin Kane (1950, as the newsstand owner who stocked nothing but the sponsor's cigarette) and Make Room for Daddy (1953, as Danny Thomas' agent). His last weekly TV assignment was as Hank McClure, police contact for public relations man Craig Stevens, in the short-lived Mr. Broadway. Having been born near Norwalk, Connecticut, Horace McMahon spent his retirement years in that community with his wife, former actress Louise Campbell.

Trivia: American actor Lee Bonnell got his start with RKO after he won a national talent contest on the radio. He made many films during the early '40s. During WW II, he did a stint in the Coast Guard and returned to films until 1948 when he retired and established a life-insurance business.

Trivia: African American actor Willie Best made his screen debut in Harold Lloyd's Feet First (1930). When Best, a veteran of a travelling show, came to Hollywood, he immediately fell prey to the stereotyping of the era. Promoted as a "new Stepin Fetchit," Best was transformed into a shuffling, "Yassuh boss" character billed as "Sleep 'N' Eat." Studio press releases of the 1930s made outrageous claims that not only did Best enjoy humiliating himself in "darkie" roles, but that the only compensation he wanted for his screen work was three square meals a day and a warm place to sleep. Despite the demeaning nature of his roles, Best performed them with consummate skill and razor sharp comic timing. Bob Hope, who worked with Best in The Ghost Breakers (1940) and Nothing But the Truth (1941), once referred to Willie as "the finest actor I knew." In the 1950s, Willie Best was a fixture at the Hal Roach Studios, playing supporting roles in such Roach-produced TV series as My Little Margie, The Stu Erwin Show and Mark Saber.

Trivia: Apple-cheeked comic actor Benny Baker was a moderately popular Broadway musical comedy performer when he headed to Hollywood in 1934. After his first film, Annapolis Farewell, Baker brightened several Paramount musicals, usually in milquetoastish support of such performers as Martha Raye. After his first brush with moviemaking, Baker returned to Broadway, co-starring in such major productions as DuBarry Was a Lady and Let's Face It. He returned to Tinseltown as a character actor, often in whoops-you-missed-him unbilled roles. Shortly before his retirement in the early 1970s, Benny Baker was featured along with a host of other venerable performers in the SRO Broadway revival of No, No Nanette.

Trivia: American actor Walter Walker had already enjoyed an extensive theatrical career by the time he made his first film appearance in 1917. From that point onward until his death in 1941, Walker played dozens of judges, wardens, governors, and college deans. In the talkie era, he was often as not cast as an old-timer, inevitably named "Pop." Among his many one-scene roles of the 1930s was Benjamin Franklin in MGM's Marie Antoinette. Walter Walker's credits should not be confused with those of bit player/extra Wally Walker (1901-1975).

Trivia: John Phillips is a British character player, active in films from 1954. He has been seen in such roles as the Duke of Norfolk in Olivier's Richard III (1954), as authority figures in the sci-fi movies Village of the Damned (1960) and Man in the Moon (1961), and as the prosecutor at the Esterhazy trial in I Accuse (1958). Phillips has also shown up in several TV miniseries (Jesus of Nazareth, Masada), and was cast as MacGown in the internationally syndicated The Forsyte Saga. This John Phillips is no relation to the American actor or the musical composer who share his name.

Trivia: In films from 1931, Alan Bridge was always immediately recognizable thanks to his gravel voice, unkempt moustache and sour-persimmon disposition. Bridge spent a lot of time in westerns, playing crooked sheriffs and two-bit political hacks; he showed up in so many Hopalong Cassidy westerns that he was practically a series regular. From 1940's Christmas in July onward, the actor was one of the most ubiquitous members of writer/director Preston Sturges' "stock company." He was at his very best as "The Mister," a vicious chain-gang overseer, in Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, and as the political-machine boss in the director's Hail the Conquering Hero, shining brightly in an extremely lengthy single-take scene with blustery Raymond Walburn. Alan Bridge also essayed amusing characterizations in Sturges' Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946), Unfaithfully Yours (1948, as the house detective) and the director's final American film, The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949).

Trivia: Scratch a banker, businessman, or state senator, and in 1940s Hollywood you would more than likely find George Carleton. Bespectacled, balding, and self-important despite his small stature, Carleton was all over the place during World War II and beyond, from portraying Dr. Paul Meredith, the inventor of a new oxygen respirator, in the Republic serial The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) to playing General Finney in Billy Wilder's witty A Foreign Affair (1948). Coming to films rather late in life, Carleton was a well-known Broadway and stock company actor who had originated the role of the Coroner in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1934). He had come to Hollywood in the early '30s as a dialogue director and coach. The veteran actor died in from a heart attack in 1950.

Trivia: In films from 1938's Tenth Avenue Kid, American actor Paul Bryar remained a durable character player for over thirty years, usually in police uniform. Among his screen credits were Follow Me Quietly (1949), Dangerous When Wet (1952), Inside Detroit (1955) and The Killer is Loose (1956). He also showed up in one serial, Republic's Spy Smasher (1942), and was a regular in Hollywood's B factories of the 1940s (he made thirteen pictures at PRC Studios alone, three of them "Michael Shayne" mysteries). Television took advantage of Bryar's talents in a number of guest spots, including the unsold pilot The Family Kovack (1974). He had somewhat better job security as a regular on the 1965 dramatic series The Long Hot Summer, playing Sheriff Harve Anders, though he and everyone else in the cast (from Edmond O'Brien to Wayne Rogers) were back haunting the casting offices when the series was cancelled after 26 episodes. One of Paul Bryar's last screen appearances was as one of the card players (with future star Sam Elliott) in the opening scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: Bald, cadaverous, hollow-eyed, doom-voiced actor Milton Parsons began appearing in films in the late 1930s. In an era wherein being typecast in Hollywood assured an actor a steady paycheck, Parsons fattened his bank account by playing dozens of undertakers and morticians. He was also an effective psychotic type, most notably as the lead in 1942's The Hidden Hand. Parsons entered the "film noir" hall of fame in the tiny role of the jury foreman in 1947's They Won't Believe Me; the film's unforgettable final image was a screen-filling close-up of Parsons, gloomily intoning an all-too-late "Not Guilty." Active into the 1970s, Parsons showed up in TV series ranging from Twilight Zone to The Dick Van Dyke Show, his morbid appearance enhanced by the addition of a satanic goatee. Even in his last roles, Milton Parsons adhered strictly to type; in the 1976 TV movie Griffin and Phoenix, for example, he portrayed a guest lecturer at a support group for terminally ill cancer victims.

Trivia: Possessed of an excellent comic sneer and a variety of goofy grimaces, Eddie Gribbon first arrived on the Mack Sennett lot in 1916 and remained a reliable Sennett player throughout the 1920s. At other studios, he was usually cast as a dumb detective, never more effectively than in the 1926 version of the war-horse stage melodrama The Gorilla. In the talkie era, Gribbon played major roles in 2-reelers and minor ones in features. He was given generous screen time as one of Adenoid Hynkel's storm troopers in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and as Canvasback the trainer in Monogram's "Joe Palooka" series of the late 1940s. Eddie Gribbon was the brother of another Sennett veteran, character actor Harry Gribbon.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer by Marge Champion's father Ernest Belcher, Iris Adrian began her performing career at age 13 by winning a "beautiful back" contest. Working as a New York chorus girl (she briefly billed herself as "Jimmie Joy"), Iris's big break came with the 1931 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, which led to featured nightclub and comedy revue work in the U.S. and Europe. In the Kaufman/Hart Broadway play The Fabulous Invalid, Adrian raised the temperatures of the tired businessmen in the audiences by performing a strip-tease--this at a time (the late 1930s) when the standard burlesque houses had been banned from New York by Mayor LaGuardia. Brought to films by George Raft, Adrian made her first screen appearance in Raft's 1934 vehicle Rhumba. This led to dozens of supporting roles in subsequent feature films; Iris' standard characterization at this time was the brassy, gold-digging dame who never spoke below a shout. Often appearing in one-scene bits, Adrian received more sizeable roles in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936), Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948), Milton Berle's Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) and Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1961). Through the auspices of director William Wellman, who had a fondness for elevating character actors to larger roles, Adrian gave a rollicking performance as Bonnie Parker wannabe Two Gun Gertie in 1942's Roxie Hart. She launched her TV career in 1949 on Buster Keaton's LA-based weekly comedy series. Some of her most memorable work for the small screen was on the various TV programs of Jack Benny, Adrian's favorite comedian and co-worker. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Iris Adrian kept very active in the comedy films of the Walt Disney studio, including That Darn Cat (1965) and The Love Bug (1968); and in 1978, she was superbly cast in the regular role of the sarcastic secretary for a New York escort service on The Ted Knight Show.

Trivia: The father of actors Houseley Stevenson Jr. and Onslow Stevens, Houseley Stevenson Sr. was one of the founders and principal directors of the famed Pasadena Playhouse. After a four-decade-plus stage career, Stevenson came to films in 1936. At first, he played bits, but as he moved into his sixties the size of his roles increased. The hollow-cheeked, stubble-chinned actor was especially adept at playing elderly derelicts whose dialogue usually ran along the lines of "Whatsa matter, son? Hidin' from the law?" Houseley Stevenson was at his very best in two Humphrey Bogart films: In Dark Passage (1947), he played the seedy plastic surgeon Dr. Coley, while in Knock on Any Door he was seen as the philosophical rummy "Junior."

Trivia: Screenwriter/playwright Joseph A. Fields was the son of comedian Lew Fields (of Weber and Fields fame) and the brother of writers Herbert and Dorothy Fields. After attending N.Y.U., Fields served with the AEF in World War I, remaining in Paris to live and work until 1922. He wrote for magazines and musical revues, moving up the ladder to The Ziegfeld Follies in the late '20s. His first screenplay was for the 1931 film The Big Shot. Fields almost always worked in collaboration, most frequently with Jerome Chodorov, with whom he wrote such Broadway hits as My Sister Eileen and Junior Miss. Other collaborators included Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Flower Drum Song). In 1955, Fields made his Broadway directorial debut with The Desk Set. Joseph Fields' last screen credit was the 1962 cinema version of his 1959 Broadway production Flower Drum Song, which he co-produced.

Trivia: Supporting actress Gladys Blake first appeared onscreen in the late 1930s. In Warren Meyers' Who is That?, a picture book devoted to Hollywood's favorite character actors, Blake is lumped together with such cinematic tarts as Veda Ann Borg and Olga San Juan in a chapter titled "My, Isn't She Cheap?" In truth, Blake's appearances as "naughty ladies" were limited. During her 12-year (1938-1950) screen career, she was most often seen as a garrulous telephone operator, most memorably in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It? (1942). Gladys Blake's final screen role was, appropriately enough, "The Talkative Woman" in Paid in Full (1950).

Trivia: Lean, lightly mustached general purpose actor John Eldredge came to films after several successful seasons with the New York Civic Repertory. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1934, Eldredge became a handy man to have around whenever the script called for a weakling or cad. He played Bette Davis' good-for-nothing husband in Dangerous (1935), and later offered a variation of the theme as Joan Leslie's callow beau in High Sierra (1941). Only rarely, as in Oil for the Lamps of China (1935), was he permitted to play a character with substance and intestinal fortitude. Even after the expiration of his Warners contract, he specialized in such namby-pamby characterizations as Walter W. Walker III in Columbia's Eve Knew Her Apples (1944). As he grew older and grayer, Eldredge's characters often assumed a weary dignity; one of his more rewarding later assignments was the part of Captain Collins in the sci-fi "sleeper" I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958). A busy TV performer in the 1950s, Eldredge could be seen playing slimy villains in virtually every other cop or adventure series of the era; on a more respectable note, he played the heroine's father in the 1954 syndicated sitcom Meet Corliss Archer. John Eldredge is one of the few character actors of Hollywood's Golden Era to be afforded his own Internet website, which can be found under the heading "The Man Without Qualities."

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

Trivia: A handsome, mature actress who usually played society ladies, Lois Austin is remembered for one role in particular: that of "Mom," whose failure to provide innocent daughter June Carlson with the necessary guidance leads the young girl down the garden path in the "sexploitation thriller" Mom and Dad (1944). Produced and exhibited by low-brow showman Kroger Babb, Mom and Dad played the grind-house circuits for decades, titillating rather more than educating its huge audience. Austin's other roles were miniscule and by 1947 she was already listed as "elderly woman" in Joan Fontaine's Ivy. Austin retired from screen work in 1953, her final released film, 1957's Jet Pilot, having been filmed years earlier.

Trivia: Hearty character actor Ralph Sanford made his first screen appearances at the Flatbush studios of Vitaphone Pictures. From 1933 to 1937, Sanford was Vitaphone's resident Edgar Kennedy type, menacing such two-reel stars as Shemp Howard, Roscoe Ates, and even Bob Hope. He moved to Hollywood in 1937, where, after playing several bit roles, he became a semi-regular with Paramount's Pine-Thomas unit with meaty supporting roles in such films as Wildcat (1942) and The Wrecking Crew (1943). He also continued playing featured roles at other studios, usually as a dimwitted gangster or flustered desk sergeant. One of his largest assignments was in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945), in which he plays vengeance-seeking Richard K. Muldoon, who threatens at every opportunity to (literally) skin Stan and Ollie alive; curiously, he receives no screen credit, despite the fact that his character motivates the entire plot line. Busy throughout the 1950s, Ralph Sanford was a familiar presence on TV, playing one-shot roles on such series as Superman and Leave It to Beaver and essaying the semi-regular part of Jim "Dog" Kelly on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Silent film star Frank Mayo was in movies as early as 1913 when he began a long association with the World Film Company of New Jersey; later he was most closely linked with Universal Pictures. Equally impressive in a dinner jacket or rugged outdoor garb, Mayo was a dependable strong-and-stalwart hero in such Hollywood films as The Brute Breaker (19), Afraid to Fight (22) and Souls for Sale (23). Toward the end of the silent era, Mayo married actress Dagmar Godowsky, whose star began ascending even as her husband's eclipsed; the marriage was annulled in 1928. Confined to bit and extra roles in the 1930s and 1940s, Frank Mayo was frequently hired by producer Jack Warner and director Cecil B. DeMille, both of whom regularly employed the faded stars of the silent years; Mayo's final appearance was in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (49).

Trivia: Corpulent, booming-voiced actor Paul Maxey, in films from 1941, was given sizeable roles (in every sense of the word) in such "B" pictures as Sky Dragon (1949) and The Narrow Margin (1952), often cast as an obstreperous villain. After appearing as composer Victor Herbert in MGM's Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), he was kept "on call" at MGM for uncredited character parts in such major productions as An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and It's Always Fair Weather (1955). Active until 1962, Paul Maxey is best-remembered by 1950s TV addicts as the irascible Mayor Peoples on the Jackie Cooper sit-com The People's Choice (1955-58).

Trivia: The pint-sized American actor Jimmy Conlin preceded his film career as a vaudeville headliner on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, where he appeared with his wife Muriel Glass in a song-and-dance turn called "Conlin and Glass." After starring in the 1928 Vitaphone short Sharps and Flats, Conlin began regularly appearing in movie bit roles in 1933. Writer/director Preston Sturges liked Conlin's work and saw to it that the actor received sizeable roles--with good billing--in such Sturges projects as Sullivan's Travels (1941), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). Conlin's all-time best role was as Wormy, the birdlike barfly who persuades Harold Lloyd to have his first-ever drink in Sturges' The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946). When Sturges' fortunes fell in the 1950s, Conlin and his wife remained loyal friends, communicating on a regular basis with the former top director and helping out in any way they could. In 1954, Conlin had a regular role as Eddie in the syndicated TV series Duffy's Tavern. Jimmy Conlin remained a Hollywood fixture until 1959, when he appeared in his last role as an elderly habitual criminal in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.

Trivia: A distinguished gray-haired stage actor, John Elliott appeared sporadically in films from around 1920. But Elliott became truly visible after the advent of sound, when he found his niche in B-Westerns. As versatile as they come, he could play the heroine's harassed father with as much conviction as he would "boss heavies." Doctors, lawyers, assayers, prospectors, clergymen -- John Elliott played them all in a screen career that lasted until 1956, the year of his death. His final screen appearance was in Perils of the Wilderness (1956) which, coincidentally, was the second-to-last action serial produced in the United States.

Trivia: Working in virtual anonymity throughout his film career, the sharp-featured, gangly character actor Harry Strang was seldom seen in a feature film role of consequence. From 1930 through 1959, Strang concentrated on such sidelines characters as soldiers, sentries, beat cops and store clerks. He was given more to do and say in 2-reel comedies, notably in the output of RKO Radio Pictures, where he appeared frequently in the comedies of Leon Errol and Edgar Kennedy. Harry Strang will be remembered by Laurel and Hardy fans for his role as a desk clerk in Block-Heads (1938), in which he was not once but twice clobbered in the face by an errant football.

Trivia: Wisconsonite actor Stanley Blystone was the brother of director John G. Blystone and assistant director Jasper Blystone. Entering films in 1915, the burly, muscular, mustachioed Blystone excelled in gruff, villainous roles; he was particularly menacing as a crooked ringmaster in Tom Mix's The Circus Ace (1927). In the talkie era, Blystone was busiest at the 2-reel comedy mills of RKO, Columbia and Hal Roach, often cast as brutish authority figures at odds with the comedy leads. In the Three Stooges' Half Shot Shooters (1936), he plays the sadistic Sgt. McGillicuddy, who reacts to the Stooges' ineptness by taking aim with a long-range cannon and blowing the three comedians right out of their boots! Blystone was much in demand as both "action" and "brains" heavies in Columbia's westerns and serials of the 1940s. Extending his activities to television in the 1950s, the 71-year-old Stanley Blystone was en route to Desilu Studios to play a small role on the TV series Wyatt Earp when he collapsed on the sidewalk and died of heart failure.

Trivia: After a substantial stage career, American actor Cliff Clark entered films in 1937. His movie credits ranged from Mountain Music to the 1953 Burt Lancaster/Virginia Mayo affair South Sea Woman. The weather-beaten Clark usually played surly city detectives, most frequently in RKO's Falcon series of the 1940s. In 1944, Clark briefly ascended from "B"s to "A"s in the role of his namesake, famed politico Champ Clark, in the 20th Century-Fox biopic Wilson. And in the 1956 TV series Combat Sergeant, Cliff Clark was second-billed as General Harrison.