Trivia: Born Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel in Racine, WI, he aspired to a career in business as a young man, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in economics after serving in the First World War as an artillery lieutenant. He entered the banking business in New York in 1920, working at what was then known as First National City Bank (now Citibank), but while recovering from an attack of appendicitis, he decided to give up banking and to try for a career on the stage. March made his debut that same year in Deburau in Baltimore, and also began appearing as an extra in movies being shot in New York City. In 1926, while working in a stock company in Denver, he met an actress named Florence Eldridge. At the very end of that same year, March got his first Broadway leading role, in The Devil in the Cheese. March and Eldridge were married in 1927 and, in lieu of a honeymoon, the two joined the first national tour of the Theatre Guild. Over the next four decades, the two appeared together in numerous theatrical productions and several films. March came along as a leading man just as Hollywood was switching to sound and scrambling for stage actors. His work in a West Coast production of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's satirical stage work The Royal Family in 1929, in which he parodied John Barrymore, got him a five-year contract with Paramount Pictures. March repeated the role to great acclaim (and his first Oscar nomination) in George Cukor's and Cyril Gardner's 1930 screen adaptation, entitled The Royal Family of Broadway. Over the next few years, March established himself as the top leading man in Hollywood, and in 1932, with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), became the first (and only) performer ever to win the Best Actor Academy Award for a portrayal of a monster in a horror film. He excelled in movies such as Design for Living (1933), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), and The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934). He showed off his skills to immense advantage in a pair of color productions in 1937, A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. In A Star Is Born, March was essentially reprising his Barrymore-based portrayal from The Royal Family of Broadway, but here he added more, most especially a sense of personal tragedy that made this film version of the story the most artistically successful of the four done to date. He received an Oscar nomination for his performance and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award. In the screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, by contrast, March played a brash, slightly larcenous reporter who cons, and is conned by, Carole Lombard, and who ends up running a public relations scam on the entire country. He also did an unexpectedly bold, dashing turn as the pirate Jean Lafitte in Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1939). In 1937, March was listed as the fifth highest paid individual in America, earning a half-million dollars. Unfortunately for his later reputation, A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred, and The Buccaneer, along with his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Les Miserables, and Smilin' Through, were all the subjects of remakes in the 1940s and '50s that came to supplant the versions in which he had starred in distribution to television; most were out of circulation for decades. March moved between big studio productions and independent producers, with impressive results in Victory (1940), So Ends Our Night (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), The Adventures of Mark Twain, and Tomorrow the World (both 1944). March's performances were the best parts of many of these movies; he was a particularly haunting presence in So Ends Our Night, as an anti-Nazi German aristocrat being hounded across Europe by the Hitler government. Although well-liked by most of his peers, he did have some tempestuous moments off-screen. March didn't suffer fools easily, and had an especially hard time working with neophyte Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch. His relationship with Tallulah Bankhead, with whom he worked in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, was also best described in language that -- based on a 1973 interview -- was best left unprinted. In both cases, however, the respective productions were very successful. March's appeal as a romantic lead waned after the Second World War, with a generational change in the filmgoing audience. This seemed only to free March -- then nearing 50 -- to take on more challenging roles and films, starting with Samuel Goldwyn's production of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which he won his second Academy Award, playing a middle-aged World War II veteran coping with the changes in his family and the world that have taken place since he went off to war. His next movie, An Act of Murder (1948), was years ahead of its time, dealing with a judge who euthanizes his terminally ill wife rather than allow her to suffer. March was chosen to play Willy Loman in the 1951 screen adaptation of Death of a Salesman. The movie was critically acclaimed, and he got an Oscar nomination and won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, but the film was too downbeat to attract an audience large enough to generate a profit, and it has since been withdrawn from distribution with the lapsing of the rights to the underlying play. He excelled in dramas such as Executive Suite (1954), The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1955), The Desperate Hours (1955), and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), and in costume dramas like Alexander the Great (1956).During this post-World War II period, March achieved the highest honor of his Broadway career, winning Tony awards for his work in Years Ago (1947) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), the latter marking the peak of his stage work. March entered the 1960s with a brilliant performance as Matthew Garrison Brady, the dramatic stand-in for the historical William Jennings Bryan, in Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind, earning an award at the Berlin Film Festival, although he was denied an Oscar nomination. March's own favorite directors were William Wellman and William Wyler, but late in his career, he became a favorite of John Frankenheimer, a top member of a new generation of directors. (Frankenheimer was born the year that March did The Royal Family of Broadway in Hollywood.) In Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964), he turned in a superb performance as an ailing president of the United States who is forced to confront an attempted military coup, and easily held his own working with such younger, more dynamic screen actors as Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and veteran scene-stealers like George Macready and Edmond O'Brien. March was equally impressive in Martin Ritt's revisionist Western Hombre (1967), and was one of the best things in Ralph Nelson's racial drama Tick, Tick, Tick (1970), playing the elderly, frightened but well-meaning mayor of a small Southern town in a county that has just elected its first black sheriff. March intended to retire after that film, and surgery for prostate cancer only seemed to confirm the wisdom of that decision. In 1972, however, he was persuaded by Frankenheimer to come out of retirement for one more movie, The Iceman Cometh (1973), playing the role of Harry Hope. The 240-minute film proved to be the capstone of March's long and distinguished career, earning him one more round of glowing reviews. He died of cancer two years later, his acting legacy secure and undiminished across more than 60 movies made over a period of more than 40 years.

Trivia: A former accountant for the Gulf Oil Company, Dana Andrews made his stage debut with the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse in 1935. Signed to a joint film contract by Sam Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox in 1940, Andrews bided his time in supporting roles until the wartime shortage of leading men promoted him to stardom. His matter-of-fact, dead pan acting style was perfectly suited to such roles as the innocent lynching victim in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and laconic city detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944). For reasons unknown, Andrews often found himself cast as aviators: he was the downed bomber pilot in The Purple Heart (1944), the ex-flyboy who has trouble adjusting to civilian life in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and the foredoomed airliner skipper in Zero Hour (1957), The Crowded Sky (1960), and Airport 1975 (1974). His limited acting range proved a drawback in the 1950s, and by the next decade he was largely confined to character roles, albeit good ones. From 1963 to 1965, Andrews was president of the Screen Actors Guild, where among other things he bemoaned Hollywood's obsession with nudity and sordidness (little suspecting that the worst was yet to come!). An ongoing drinking problem seriously curtailed his capability to perform, and on a couple of occasions nearly cost him his life on the highway; in 1972, he went public with his alcoholism in a series of well-distributed public service announcements, designed to encourage other chronic drinkers to seek professional help. In addition to his film work, Andrews also starred or co-starred in several TV series (Bright Promise, American Girls, and Falcon Crest) and essayed such TV-movie roles as General George C. Marshall in Ike (1979). Dana Andrews made his final screen appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack.

Trivia: Canadian-born American actor Harold Russell was a paratrooper during WWII when a grenade explosion cost him both of his hands. Later, he appeared in The Diary of a Sergeant, an Army documentary chronicling the rehabilitation of a permanently injured soldier. In 1946, Russell played a veteran trying to readjust to civilian life without his hands in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives and for his realistic performance, Russell was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. At the same ceremony, Russell also received a special Oscar for "bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans." It was the only time that a performer has been awarded two Oscars for the same role. Russell later became a business executive after publishing his autobiography, Victory in My Hands, in 1949. President Johnson appointed Russell the chairman of the President's Committee on Hiring the Handicapped in 1964.

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

Trivia: Radiantly beautiful blonde actress Virginia Mayo was a chorus dancer when she began her film career as a bit player in 1942. She rose to face as Danny Kaye's leading lady in a series of splashy Technicolor musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Though never regarded as a great actress, she was disturbingly convincing as Dana Andrews' faithless wife in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and as James Cagney's sluttish gun moll in White Heat (1949). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mayo was one of the most popular female stars at Warner Bros., appearing in musicals, melodramas and westerns. Many of her characters were so outre that one wonders whether Mayo was having some sport with us: her turn as Jack Palance's paramour in The Silver Chalice (1955) and as Cleopatra in the guilty pleasure The Story of Mankind (1957) immediately come to mind. And it is Mayo who, in Warners' King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), utters the immortal high-camp line "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever do, Dick Plantagenet!" When her film career faltered in the 1960s, Mayo turned to stage work on the touring-company and dinner-theatre circuit; more recently, she has been a frequent interview subject on TV documentaries dealing with the old Hollywood studio system. Virginia Mayo is the widow of actor Michael O'Shea.

Trivia: After apprenticing at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, MA, she debuted on Broadway in 1938 as the lead's understudy in Our Town; the following year her performance in the ingénue part in Life With Father caught film mogul Samuel Goldwyn's attention, and he signed her to a screen contract. Wright debuted onscreen in The Little Foxes (1941), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The following year she was nominated in both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories for her third and fourth films, The Pride of the Yankees and Mrs. Miniver, respectively; she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She remained busy onscreen through 1959, after which she appeared in only a handful of films during the next three decades. From 1942 to 1952, she was married to novelist and screenwriter Niven Busch; later she married, divorced, and remarried playwright Robert Anderson. In the '70s, she appeared in TV dramas. Her later stage work included Mary, Mary (1962) and the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman (1975).

Trivia: Cathy O'Donnell was signed to a movie contract by Sam Goldwyn after a brief flurry of stage activity. Cathy's first film assignment would remain her best: in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), she sensitively essayed the very difficult role of Wilma Cameron, high school sweetheart of double amputee Harold Russell. She spent most of her Goldwyn contract on loan to other studios: one of her better films was RKO'sThey Live By Night (1947), a Bonnie and Clyde precursor starring fellow Goldwyn contractee Farley Granger. In her mid-30s, O'Donnell was still youthful-looking enough to portray Charlton Heston's leprosy-ridden younger sister in Ben-Hur (1959), the actress' next-to-last film. After eleven years' retirement, the 46-year-old Cathy O'Donnell died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Trivia: Actor/singer/composer Hoagy Carmichael was taught piano by his mother in his native Bloomington, Indiana. Carmichael worked his way through the University of Indiana law school by performing with his own three-piece band. His first published song, written while he was in college, was "Riverboard Shuffle." Even while trying to set up a law practice in Florida, Carmichael's composition "Riverboat Shuffle" was being turned into a modest hit by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Finally giving in to the inevitable, Carmichael began making records as an orchestra leader; among his musicians were the Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, and Carmichael's personal hero and closest friend, jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. In 1931, Hoagy and lyricist Michael Parish cooked up a little something called "Stardust," which soon became a standard and made Carmichael a millionaire. He followed this with a steady stream of easygoing hit tunes, including "Up the Lazy River," "Lazybones" and "Rocking Chair." His first movie work occurred in 1936's Anything Goes; one year later he played an unbilled cameo in Topper, for which he wrote an original number, "Old Man Moon." His first "dramatic" role was in To Have and Have Not (1944), followed by laid-back character parts in such films as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Night Song (1947), Young Man with a Horn (1951) (an a clef version of Bix Beiderbecke's life story) and Belles on Their Toes (1952). His bony, angular on-screen presence made quite an impression on author Ian Fleming, who in his first James Bond novel Casino Royale described Bond as closely resembling Hoagy. In 1946, Carmichael received an Academy Award nomination for his song "Old Buttermilk Sky" (from the 1946 western Canyon Passage), and in 1952 won an Oscar for "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (from Here Comes the Groom). Carmichael's TV work included a regular role on the TV western Laramie (1959-63), and a pen-and-ink "guest" appearance on a 1961 episode of the cartoon series The Flintstones, for which he contributed a song titled (what else?) "Yabba Dabba Doo." Though he wrote his last hits in the 1950s, Hoagy Carmichael lived in comfortable retirement thanks to his song royalties and wise real estate investments.

Trivia: The daughter of a British Shakespearean actor, Gladys George was born while her parents' touring stock company was playing an engagement in Patten, Maine. On stage from age three, Gladys toured with her parents in a vaudeville act called The Three Clares. She won her first Broadway role in the 1914 production The Betrothal. Six years later she tried to launch a film career in Red Hot Dollars (1920), but her incipient stardom was halted when she was severely burned in an accident. She went back into stock, returning to Broadway in the early 1930s through the influence of her wealthy second husband Edward H. Fowler. Screen-tested by Paramount in 1934, George was signed by MGM instead; ironically, it was while on loan-out to Paramount that she scored her biggest film hit, 1936's Valiant is the Word for Carrie. For the next several years, George alternated between "weepers" and truculent roles in films: the title role in Madame X (1937), Madame DuBarry in Marie Antoinette (1938), the Texas Guinan counterpart in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and the unfaithful Iva Archer in The Maltese Falcon (1941). She didn't really like Hollywood much, but the money was better than on Broadway. She essayed character parts in her last years in Hollywood, culminating with a good comedy role in It Happens Every Thursday (1953) and a smattering of television. Gladys George's relatively early death may have been the result of a barbiturate overdose, though she'd been suffering from throat cancer for quite some time.

Trivia: Roman Bohnen studied at the prestigious Munich Business School, then completed his education in his home state at the University of Minnesota. Rechannelled into an acting career, Bohnen worked in many a Broadway and Theatre Guild production before being brought to films by producer Walter Wanger in 1938. Generally cast as rheumy-eyed, defeated old men, Bohnen was brilliant as the pathetic Candy in Of Mice and Men (1939) and the disastrously well-intentioned prison warden in Brute Force (1947). His other screen roles included the title character's father in Song of Bernadette (1943), Captain Ernst Roehm in The Hitler Gang (1944) and Pat Denny in The Best Years of Our Lives. A co-founder of the politically controversial Actors Lab, Roman Bohnen died on stage while appearing in the Lab's production Distant Isle.

Trivia: A descendant of one of California's pioneer families, American actor Ray Collins' interest in the theatre came naturally. His father was drama critic of the Sacramento Bee. Taking to the stage at age 14, Collins moved to British Columbia, where he briefly headed his own stock company, then went on to Broadway. An established theatre and radio performer by the mid-1930s, Collins began a rewarding association with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He played the "world's last living radio announcer" in Welles' legendary War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938, then moved to Hollywood with the Mercury troupe in 1939. Collins made his film debut as Boss Jim Gettys in Welles' film classic Citizen Kane (1940). After the Mercury disbanded in the early 1940s, Collins kept busy as a film and stage character actor, usually playing gruff business executives. Collins is most fondly remembered by TV fans of the mid-1950s for his continuing role as the intrepid Lt. Tragg on the weekly series Perry Mason.

Trivia: The son of a California lumberman, actor Steve Cohran spent his youth in Laramie, Wyoming, where he graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1939. After learning his craft at the Barter Theatre and the Carmel (California) Shakespeare Festival, he went on to work at Detroit's Federal Theatre, and was co-starred in the touring companies of Without Love and My Sister Eileen before his Broadway debut in the eight-performance flop Hickory Stick. During the war, Cochran directed Army camp shows. From 1945 through 1948, he was under contract to Sam Goldwyn, mostly playing secondary roles as gangsters. He left Hollywood to co-star with Mae West in Catherine Was Great and Diamond Lil; perhaps as a reward for not being acted off the stage by the formidable West, Cochran was signed by Warner Bros., where from 1949 through 1952 he was seen in rugged leading roles. In 1953, Cochran formed his own production company, Robert Alexander Productions, but he would not be seen in another film until 1956's Come Next Spring, which he produced for Republic Studios. He then headed for Europe, where he was given a starring assignment in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Outcry. In 1965, after several years of unimpressive movie and TV appearances, Cochran revived his production company and headed for Central and South America to scout locations. He hired three women, ages 14 through 25, to work as assistants, then headed for Costa Rica aboard his forty-foot yacht. On June 25, 1965, the yacht drifted into Port Champerico, Guatemala; on board were the three very distraught women--and the body of Steve Cochran, who had died some ten days earlier of a lung affection. Steve Cochran's last film project, Tell Me in the Sunlight (which he had produced, directed, written, scored and starred in back in 1964), was reedited and released posthumously.

Trivia: During her twenty-one year Hollywood career, Minna Gombell was also billed as Winifred Lee and Nancy Carter. By any name, Gombell was usually typecast in brittle, hollow-eyed, hard-boiled character parts. Devoted Late Late Show fans will recall Gombell as one of the secondary murder victims in The Thin Man (1934), as Mrs. Oliver Hardy in Block-Heads (1938), as the Queen of the Beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and as clubfooted Joan Leslie's mother in High Sierra (1941). In 1935, Minna Gombell was afforded top billing in the above-average Monogram domestic drama Women Must Dress.

Trivia: Whenever Ellen Corby or Mary Field weren't available to play a timid, spinsterish film role, chances are the part would go to Dorothy Adams. Though far from a shrinking violet in real life, Ms. Adams was an expert at portraying repressed, secretive women, usually faithful servants or maiden aunts. Her best-remembered role was the overly protective maid of Gene Tierney in Laura (1944). Dorothy Adams was the wife of veteran character actor Byron Foulger; both were guiding forces of the Pasadena Playhouse, as both actors and directors. Dorothy and Byron's daughter is actress Rachel Ames, who played Audrey March on TV's General Hospital.

Trivia: Dapper, rotund character actor Don Beddoe was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati, where his father headed the Conservatory of Music. Beddoe's professional career began in Cincinnati, first as a journalist and then an actor. He made his Broadway debut in the unfortunately titled Nigger Rich, which starred Spencer Tracy. Beddoe became a fixture of Columbia Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s, playing minor roles in "A"s like Golden Boy, supporting parts ranging from cops to conventioneers in the studio's "B" features, and flustered comedy foil to the antics of such Columbia short subject stars as The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde and Charley Chase. Beddoe kept busy until the mid-1980s with leading roles in 1961's The Boy Who Caught a Crook and Saintly Sinners, and (as a singing leprechaun) in 1962's Jack the Giant Killer.

Trivia: Legend has it that Orson Welles saw his first theatrical production at age seven, when a touring company of Mr. Pim Passes By played in Welles' hometown of Kenosha, WI. Invited backstage, young Welles was effusively greeted by the play's leading man, Erskine Sanford, whose kind and encouraging words inspired Welles to pursue an acting career himself. Whether this story is true or not, the fact remains that, in 1936, Erskine Sanford left the Theatre Guild after a 15-year association to join Orson Welles' experimental Mercury Theatre. When Welles took the Mercury Players to Hollywood in 1940 to film Citizen Kane, Sanford was assigned the small but plum role of Herbert Carter, the sputtering, apoplectic former editor of the New York Inquirer. The actor went on to appear prominently in such Welles-directed films as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, as Mr. Bronson), Lady From Shanghai (1947, as the judge), and MacBeth (1948, as King Duncan). Outside of his Mercury Theatre activities, Erskine Sanford played featured roles in such mainstream Hollywood productions as Ministry of Fear (1943) and Angel on My Shoulder (1946) before his retirement in 1950.

Trivia: American actor Charles Halton was forced to quit school at age 14 to help support his family. When his boss learned that young Halton was interested in the arts, he financed the boy's training at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next three decades, Halton appeared in every aspect of "live" performing; in the '20s, he became a special favorite of playwright George S. Kaufman, who cast Halton in one of his most famous roles as movie mogul Herman Glogauer in Once in a Lifetime. Appearing in Dodsworth on Broadway with Walter Huston, Halton was brought to Hollywood to recreate his role in the film version. Though he'd occasionally return to the stage, Halton put down roots in Hollywood, where his rimless spectacles and snapping-turtle features enabled him to play innumerable "nemesis" roles. He could usually be seen as a grasping attorney, a rent-increasing landlord or a dictatorial office manager. While many of these characterizations were two-dimensional, Halton was capable of portraying believable human beings with the help of the right director; such a director was Ernst Lubitsch, who cast Halton as the long-suffered Polish stage manager in To Be or Not to Be (1942). Alfred Hitchcock likewise drew a flesh and blood portrayal from Halton, casting the actor as the small-town court clerk who reveals that Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard are not legally married in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1942). Charles Halton retired from Hollywood after completing his work on Friendly Persuasion in 1956; he died three years later of hepatitis.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: A former professional baseball player, Pat Flaherty was seen in quite a few baseball pictures after his 1934 screen debut. Flaherty can be seen in roles both large and small in Death on the Diamond (1934), Pride of the Yankees (1942), It Happened in Flatbush (1942), The Stratton Story (1949, as the Western All-Stars coach), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Winning Team (1952, as legendary umpire Bill Klem). In 1948's Babe Ruth Story, Flaherty not only essayed the role of Bill Corrigan, but also served as the film's technical advisor. Outside the realm of baseball, he was usually cast in blunt, muscle-bound roles, notably Fredric March's taciturn male nurse "Cuddles" in A Star is Born (1937). One of Pat Flaherty's most unusual assignments was Wheeler and Woolsey's Off Again, On Again (1937), in which, upon finding his wife (Patricia Wilder) in a compromising position with Bert Wheeler, he doesn't pummel the hapless Wheeler as expected, but instead meekly apologizes for his wife's flirtatiousness!

Trivia: Bespectacled American actor Walter Baldwin was already a venerable stage performer at the time he appeared in his first picture, 1940's Angels over Broadway. With a pinched Midwestern countenance that enabled him to portray taciturn farmers, obsequious grocery store clerks and the occasional sniveling coward, Baldwin was a familiar (if often unbilled) presence in Hollywood films for three decades. Possibly Baldwin's most recognizable role was as Mr. Parrish in Sam Goldwyn's multi-Oscar winning The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which the actor received thirteenth billing. He also had a prime opportunity to quiver and sweat as a delivery man whose truck is commandeered by homicidal prison escapee Robert Middleton in The Desperate Hours (1955). Seemingly ageless, Walter Baldwin made his last film appearance three years before his death in 1969's Hail Hero.

Trivia: Howland Chamberlain was the quintessential character actor who turned his expertise at playing nervous, fidgety roles into an array of memorable portrayals in some of the most important movies of the late '40s and early '50s. At that time, just as he'd appeared in one of the most acclaimed movies of the decade, High Noon, his screen career came to a halt after he was called as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify. Chamberlain, whose name was sometimes spelled Chamberlin in film credits (and in his Variety obituary), was born in New York City and moved to California in the 1930s, where he went to work with the WPA's Federal Theater Project in Los Angeles and met his future wife Leona. According to a 1976 SoHo Weekly News article by Jennifer Merlin, they delayed their wedding as a matter of economic survival, as a married couple couldn't both have jobs with the WPA. In the late '30s, Chamberlain became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse, which was something of a minor league "farm team" for aspiring Hollywood actors. In the mid-'40s, Chamberlain began appearing onscreen in character roles, starting with The Best Years of Our Lives as Mr. Thorpe. His career over the next six years carried him into the casts of a surprising number of crime dramas and film noirs, among them Michael Gordon's The Web, Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, Fritz Lang's House by the River, and Hugo Haas' Pickup; these were broken up by work in the occasional comedy, such as A Song Is Born (in which he played a nervous lawyer). Chamberlain also did television work. One example which has endured as his best work was as a pair of identical twins involved in a radium smuggling scheme in the episode "Double Trouble" from The Adventures of Superman. His two most notable screen appearances were in Force of Evil and High Noon, as the vengeful hotel clerk who wishes harm to Marshal Kane. In 1956, after the House Un-American Activities Committee incident, Chamberlain and his family moved to New York, where he resumed his acting career on the stage. Chamberlain appeared in dozens of plays on tour (including A Raisin in the Sun), on Broadway and off-Broadway (in Children of Darkness and The Courageous One), and the Festival in the Park (including Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra). The Chamberlains later acted together in off-Broadway theater as well, including a production of Morton Lichter's Old Timer's Sexual Symphony (and other notes). He had appeared in small roles again on television as early as 1960, on programs like Bonanza, and by the mid-'70s he was acting regularly in Los Angeles, including productions at the Mark Taper Forum. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s, with Kramer vs. Kramer (in which he played Judge Atkins), 27 years after his last film appearance, that Chamberlain did any more movie work. He kept working in movies such as Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa and Steve Barron's Electric Dreams, until his death from heart and related problems in the late summer of 1984.

Trivia: A distinguished member of Broadway's famed Group Theater, with whom he appeared in Casey Jones (1938) and Night Music (1940), Clancy Cooper entered films with Warner Bros. in 1941. But despite his distinctive theater pedigree, Cooper's busy screen career proved middling at best and he mainly played bit roles. A notable exception came in the 1944 serial Haunted Harbor, as one of hero Kane Richmond's two sidekicks. A veteran of more than 100 feature films, the veteran actor went on to also embrace television, appearing in over 200 episodes in shows such as The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Gunsmoke, Twilight Zone, Maverick, Dr. Kildare, and The Wild Wild West. Married to novelist Elizabeth Cooper, Clancy Cooper died of a heart attack while driving in Hollywood.

Trivia: American filmmaker Blake Edwards was the grandson of J. Gordon Edwards, director of such silent film epics as The Queen of Sheba (1922). Blake started his own film career as an actor in 1943; he played bits in A-movies and leads in B-movies, paying his dues in such trivialities as Gangs of the Waterfront and Strangler of the Swamp (both 1945). He turned to writing radio scripts, distinguishing himself on the above-average Dick Powell detective series Richard Diamond. As a screenwriter and staff producer at Columbia, Edwards was frequently teamed with director Richard Quine for such lightweight entertainment as Sound Off (1952), Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1953), and Cruisin' Down the River (1953). He also served as associate producer on the popular syndicated Rod Cameron TV vehicle City Detective the same year. Given his first chance to direct a movie in 1955, Edwards turned out a Richard Quine-like musical, Bring Your Smile Along; ironically, as Edwards' prestige grew, his style would be imitated by Quine. A felicitous contract at Universal led Edwards to his first big box-office successes, including the Tony Curtis film Mister Cory (1957) and Cary Grant's Operation Petticoat (1959).In 1958, Edwards produced, directed, and occasionally wrote for a hip TV detective series, Peter Gunn, which was distinguished by its film noir camerawork and driving jazz score by Henry Mancini. A second series, Mr. Lucky (1959), contained many of the elements that made Peter Gunn popular, but suffered from a bad time slot and network interference. (Lucky was a gambler, a profession frowned upon by the more sanctimonious CBS executives.) The show did, however, introduce Edwards to actor Ross Martin, who later appeared as an asthmatic criminal in Edwards' film Experiment in Terror (1962). Continuing to turn out box-office bonanzas like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Edwards briefly jumped on the comedy bandwagon of the mid-'60s with the slapstick epic The Great Race (1965), which the director dedicated to his idols, "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy." (Edwards' next homage to the duo was the far less successful 1986 comedy A Fine Mess). In 1964, Edwards introduced the bumbling Inspector Clouseau to an unsuspecting world in The Pink Panther, leading to a string of money-spinning Clouseau films starring Peter Sellers; actually, The Pink Panther was Edwards' second Clouseau movie, since A Shot in the Dark, although released after Panther, was filmed first. Despite the carefree spirit and great success of his comedies, Edwards hit a snag with Darling Lili (1969), a World War I musical starring Edwards' wife Julie Andrews. The film was a questionable piece to begin with (audiences were asked to sympathize with a German spy who cheerfully sent young British pilots to their deaths), but was made incomprehensible by Paramount's ruthless editing. Darling Lili sent Edwards career into decline, although he came back with the 1979 comedy hit 10 and the scabrous satirical film S.O.B. (1981). Edwards' track record in the 1980s and '90s was uneven, with such films as Blind Date (1987), Sunset (1988), and Switch (1991). The director was also unsuccessful in his attempts to revive the Pink Panther comedies minus the services of Sellers (who had died in 1980) as Clouseau. Still, Edwards always seemed able to find someone to bankroll his projects. And he left something of a legacy to Hollywood through his actress daughter Jennifer Edwards and screenwriter son Geoffrey Edwards.In 2004, just when the world began to think it might never again hear from Edwards, the filmmaker gave a slapsticky acceptance speech in response to an honorary Academy Award. He died six years later, of complications from pneumonia, at the age of 88.

Trivia: Child actor Teddy Infuhr made his first screen appearance as one of Charles Laughton's kids in 1942's The Tuttles of Tahiti. Long associated with Universal Pictures, Infuhr garnered a great deal of critical attention for his brief appearance as a mute, semi-autistic pygmy in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman (1944). Later on, he showed up as one of the anonymous children of Ma and Pa Kettle (Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride) in Universal's The Egg and I; when the Kettles were spun off into their own long-running movie series, Infuhr remained with the backwoods brood, usually cast as either George or Benjamin Kettle. One of his many free-lance assignments was Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), in which the poor boy suffered one of the most horrible deaths ever inflicted upon a movie juvenile. Teddy Infuhr's film career came to a quiet close in the early 1950s. He died in June 2007 at age 70.

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).