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

Trivia: 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: The daughter of silent comedy film director Ray Grey, who died when she was eight, Virginia Grey debuted onscreen at age 10 as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). She did a few more juvenile roles in silents, then as a teenager she appeared in small roles in talkies before working her way up to leading lady in a number of second features; she also played second leads in a few major productions. Grey went on to a prolific, long-lived screen career over the next three-plus decades; she also worked occasionally on TV and for a time was a regular on the soap opera General Hospital. Though she never married, at one time she was romantically involved with actor Clark Gable, whom she reportedly came close to marrying.

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: Actor C. Aubrey Smith was, so far as many American moviegoers were concerned, the very personification of the British Empire. Even so, when young English journalist Alistair Cooke first travelled to Hollywood in the early 1930s to interview Smith, it was not to discuss the actor's four decades in show business, but to wax nostalgic on his athletic career. The son of a London surgeon, Smith played soccer for the Corinthians and cricket for Cambridge. For four years, "Round the Corner Smith" (so named because of his unique playing style) was captain of the Sussex County Cricket Club, playing championship matches throughout the Empire. When time came to choose a "real" vocation, Smith dallied with the notion of following in his dad's footsteps, then worked as a teacher and stockbroker. In 1892, at the age of 29, he finally decided to become an actor (not without family disapproval!), launching his stage career with the A. B. Tappings Stock Company. He made his London debut in 1895, and the following year scored his first significant success as Black Michael in The Prisoner of Zenda; also in 1896, he married Isobel May Wood, a union that endured for over fifty years. His subsequent stage triumphs included Shaw's Pygmalion, in which he succeeded Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree as Professor Henry Higgins. Despite the theatrical community's disdainful attitude towards the "flickers", Smith enthusiastically launched his film career in 1914. He was one of the co-founders of the short-lived but energetic Minerva Film Company, and by 1915 had begun making movies in America. It was his 1928 stage hit Bachelor Father that led to Smith's phenomenally successful career in talking pictures. For 18 years, he was perhaps Hollywood's favorite "professional Englishmen." He was at his best in martinet military roles, most memorably in a brace of 1939 productions: The Sun Never Sets, in which he used a wall-sized map to dutifully mark off the far-flung locations where his progeny were serving the Empire, and The Four Feathers, wherein he encapsulated his generation by crustily declaring "War was war in my day, sir!" Other notable roles in the Smith canon included Jane's father in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), a close-minded aristocrat who turns out to be an out-of-work actor in Bombshell (1933), the intensely loyal Colonel Zapt in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and an outraged murder-victim-to-be in Ten Little Indians (1945). Smith briefly returned to the stage in 1941, and throughout the war years could be seen in roles ranging from single-scene cameos (The Adventures of Mark Twain, Unconquered) to full leads (1945's Scotland Yard Inspector). A recipient of the Order of the British Empire in 1938, he was knighted by King George VI in 1944, largely because of the positive image of Mother England that the actor invariably projected. The undisputed leader of Tinseltown's "British Colony," Smith also organized the Hollywood Cricket Club, taking great pride in the fact that he hadn't missed a weekend match for nearly sixty years. Sir C. Aubrey Smith was still in harness when he died of pneumonia at the age of 85; his last film appearance as Mr. Lawrence in Little Women was released posthumously in 1949.

Trivia: After training at the University of Michigan School of Drama, Ruth Hussey worked as a fashion commmentator on a local radio station, then moved to New York, becoming a Powers model. In the mid '30s she performed in several plays with touring companies, and shortly thereafter was signed to a film contract with MGM. She debuted onscreen in 1937, and for the remainder of the decade she appeared in minor films. In 1940 she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in The Philadelphia Story, after which she became a leading lady; she was often cast as a graceful, sophisticated, intelligent woman. Her greatest success came on the stage, starring opposite Ralph Bellamy in the 1945 Broadway production State of the Union, after which she concentrated on the stage and made only sporadic film appearances, lastly in 1960. She is the mother of Oscar-winning filmmaker John William Longenecker.

Trivia: Born in Iowa, Nat Pendleton was raised in New York, where he attended Columbia University. A champion wrestler in his college days, Pendleton joined the U.S. Olympic team in 1920, winning a silver medal for his grappling talents. He turned professional, becoming World's Champion in 1924. Around this time, Pendleton was hired to play a wrestler (what a stretch) in the Broadway play Naughty Cinderella. He decided to switch to acting full-time, heading to Hollywood in 1927. Some of his earlier film roles required him to merely look tough and flex his muscles while the stars around him made funny; as football player McHardie in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932), Pendleton isn't even given a screen credit. He finally graduated to leading roles in 1933, playing a wrestler (what, again?) in Deception, for which he wrote the screenplay. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Pendleton was one of Hollywood's busiest and best-liked character actors -- still specializing in brawny roles, but at last permitted to get some of the laughs himself rather than simply stooging for others. For his second appearance in a Marx Brothers film, 1939's At the Circus, Pendleton, decked in a handlebar mustache and Harpo-like wig, was prominently billed as crooked strongman Goliath. His best-remembered film roles included thick-eared ambulance driver Joe Wayland in MGM's Dr. Kildare films and blustering cop-turned-drill sergeant Mike Collins in Abbott and Costello's two Buck Privates efforts. Thanks to careful investments, Pendleton was able to retire from filmmaking in 1947, at the age of 52. Nat Pendleton was the brother of another busy character actor, Gaylord (Steve) Pendleton.

Trivia: Born in England of Irish stock, Patric Knowles had a few seasons' stage experience under his belt when he made his simultaneous British and American film debuts in 1936. Settling in Hollywood, Knowles signed with Warner Bros., where he alternated between full leads and stalwart "other man" support. He was often co-starred with Errol Flynn, presumably as "serious" ballast to Flynn's flamboyance. At Universal in the 1940s, Knowles was the studio's resident utility hero, forever providing a shoulder for the terrified heroine to cry on in such horror films as The Wolf Man (1941), The Strange Case of Dr. Rx (1942) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943); he also proved a good-humored foil to the antics of Abbott and Costello (Who Done It? [1942], Hit the Ice [1943]) and Olsen and Johnson (Crazy House [1943]). Free-lancing from 1946 until his retirement in 1973, Knowles could always be counted on for dignity and dependability, never more so than as Lindsey Woolsey, Mame Dennis' erstwhile through-the-years suitor, in Auntie Mame. In his last decades, Patric Knowles continued accepting film and TV character parts, wrote a novel (Even Steven), lectured at colleges, and even guested in a Kellogg's cereal commercial. Years after his retirement, Knowles often volunteered to work for the Motion Picture Country Home.

Trivia: Hollywood's quintessential low-budget film noir hero Tom Neal earned some notoriety at an early age when his banker father persuaded him to drop the idea of eloping with Inez Martin, a buxom former Follies girl and the mistress of slain mobster Arnold Rothstein. A former college athlete, the handsome, mustachioed Neal entered the theatrical profession playing summer stock at West Falmouth, MA, and went on to make his Broadway debut in the short-lived anti-war melodrama If This Be Treason (1935). He later performed opposite Maria Ouspenskaya in Daughters of Artreus, but although critically acclaimed, the play was yet another box-office failure and Neal hightailed it to Sunny California. Contracted by MGM, who obviously saw him as another Clark Gable, Neal bided his time in secondary assignments and loan-outs to other studios for such fare as the 1941 serial Jungle Girl. In 1943, a now freelancing Tom earned some recognition for playing a U.S.-educated Japanese in the propaganda film Behind the Rising Sun, but lasting fame had to wait until Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer's cult classic. Although dismissed when the cheaply made drama was released in 1945, Neal and Ann Savage's fiery chemistry did much to earn Detour a lasting place as the quintessential low-budget film noir and remains one of the few memorable films to emerge from PRC, the now infamous Poverty Row company that otherwise more than lived up to its nickname of "Pretty Rotten Crud."Along with another well-remembered but poverty-stricken Ulmer production, Club Havana (1945), Detour marked a definite decline in the actor's cinematic fortunes and by the early '50s he had become better known for his offscreen escapades. A very public brawl with actor Franchot Tone over the dubious charms of starlet Barbara Payton left Tone hospitalized with a fractured cheekbone, a broken nose, and brain concussion, and made Neal all but unemployable. He later worked as night manager of a restaurant in Palm Springs, CA, and for a while operated a landscaping business, but in 1965 he was arrested and charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of his second wife. A jury returned a verdict of involuntary manslaughter and Neal served a six-year prison term. Sadly, the former actor suffered a fatal heart attack a little more than eight months after being paroled in late 1971. His son, Tom Neal Jr. (born 1957), starred in a 1992 remake of Detour.

Trivia: The archetypal side-of-the-mouth Runyonesque gangster, Sheldon Leonard's actual mean-streets experience was confined to travelling with a fairly benign teenaged gang in a New York suburb. In fact, if we are to believe his future business partner Danny Thomas, Leonard never met a bonafide gangster until Thomas introduced him to one in the mid-1950s! A graduate of Syracuse University, Leonard began his acting career on radio and the stage, appearing in such Broadway productions as Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Having Wonderful Time. Starting with 1939's Another Thin Man, Leonard made a good living as a movie mob boss, henchman, and all-around tough guy. He played a rare leading role (and a romantic lead, to boot) in PRC's Why Girls Leave Home (1944). Leonard was also a regular on radio's Jack Benny Program, playing a laconic racetrack tout. During the 1950s and 1960s, Leonard became a successful television producer, overseeing such sitcoms as The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Gomer Pyle USMC. He also spearheaded I Spy, the first TV action series with an African American star (Bill Cosby). His television activities extended to the domain of Saturday morning cartoons, as the voice of animated character Linus the Lionhearted. Sheldon Leonard continued producing into the mid-1970s, renaming his production company Deezdemandoze, in honor of his patented gangster patois. Leonard passed away in his home at age 89.

Trivia: American stage actor Don Costello was brought to films via an MGM contract in 1939. A valuable screen menace, Costello played such steely-eyed toughies as "Noose" in Red Skelton's Whistling in the Dark (1941). He moved to 20th Century-Fox in 1942, where among other things he was seen as the elderly--but no less criminally inclined--Doc Lake in Laurel and Hardy's A-Haunting We Will Go (1942). Perhaps his frequent association with comedians enabled his screen characters to develop a sense of humor, albeit a wicked one. In the Republic "Red Ryder" western The Great Stagecoach Robbery (1945), he scores several solid laughs as an outlaw leader posing as a schoolteacher, assuring an anxious mother that he'll learn to love her children, then muttering "If they live that long...." Don Costello died suddenly at the age of 44; his last appearance was in the Alan Ladd thriller The Blue Dahlia (1946).

Trivia: Though born in the Midwest, character actor Harry Bellaver spent the better part of his screen career playing New York- or Brooklyn-bred cops, cabbies, doormen and petty thieves. His four-decade career began with MGM's Another Thin Man (1939), and ended when he retired after 1980's Hero at Large. An inescapable guest-star presence on 1950s and 1960s television, Harry Bellaver also played Sergeant Frank Arcaro on the weekly New York-filmed cop series The Naked City (1959-63).

Trivia: Blonde stage actress Muriel Hutchison (The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, 1937) enjoyed a brief screen career at MGM in the late '30s, playing Norma Shearer's maid in The Women) and Sheldon Leonard's moll in Another Thin Man (1939).

Trivia: Born in Milwaukee, Abner Biberman migrated to Philadelphia, where after a he launched his acting career at the Hedgerow Theatre. Biberman wrote magazine articles and taught acting classes while establishing himself as both an actor and director on Broadway. His shifty eyes and disreputable appearance enabled Biberman to play villains of all nations: an Italian gangster in His Girl Friday (1940) an East Indian fanatic in Gunga Din (1939), a hostile Native American in any number of films. From the mid-1940s onward, Biberman was drama coach at Universal Pictures, which led to his first film directorial assignment, The Looters (1955). While Abner Biberman's theatrical films were mostly routine melodramas, his TV work embraced such prestige programs as The Twilight Zone, Ben Casey and Ironside. Abner Biberman was the husband of actress Joanna Barnes.

Trivia: Scratchy-voiced American character actress who appeared in dozens of Hollywood vehicles following years on the Chautauqua and Orpheum circuits, Marjorie Main eventually worked with W.C. Fields on Broadway, where she appeared in several productions. Widowed in 1934, she entered films in 1937, repeating her Broadway stage role as the gangster's mother in Dead End (1937). Personally eccentric, Main had an almost pathological fear of germs. Best known among her close to 100 film appearances, most for MGM, are Stella Dallas (1937), Test Pilot (1938), Too Hot to Handle (1938), The Women (1939), Another Thin Man (1939), I Take This Woman (1940), Susan and God (1940), Honky Tonk (1941), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Murder, He Says (1945), The Harvey Girls (1946), Summer Stock (1950), The Long, Long Trailer (1954), Rose Marie (1954), and Friendly Persuasion (1956). Starting with their appearances in The Egg and I (1947), which starred Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, Main and Percy Kilbride became starring performers as Ma and Pa Kettle in a series of rural comedies.

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

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

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

Trivia: Bald-domed, prominently chinned American character actor Joe Devlin was seen in bits in major films, and as a less-costly Jack Oakie type in minor pictures. Devlin usually played two-bit crooks and sarcastic tradesmen in his 1940s appearances. The actor's uncanny resemblance to Benito Mussolini resulted in numerous "shock of recognition" cameos during the war years, as well as full-fledged Mussolini imitations in two Hal Roach "streamliners," The Devil With Hitler (1942) and That Nazty Nuisance (1943). In 1950, Joe Devlin was cast as Sam Catchem in a TV series based on Chester Gould's comic-strip cop Dick Tracy.

Trivia: Wizened character actor Paul E. Burns tended to play mousey professional men in contemporary films and unshaven layabouts in period pictures. Bob Hope fans will recall Burns' con brio portrayal of boozy desert rat Ebeneezer Hawkins in Hope's Son of Paleface (1952), perhaps his best screen role. The general run of Burns' screen assignments can be summed up by two roles at both ends of his career spectrum: he played "Loafer" in D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and "Bum in Park" in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

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: Short, portly, and possessed of a high-pitched laugh that cuts through the air like a buzzsaw, Massachussetts-born Dick Elliott had been on stage for nearly thirty before making his screen bow in 1933. Elliott was a frequent visitor to Broadway, enjoying a substantial run in the marathon hit Abie's Irish Rose. Physically and vocally unchanged from his first screen appearance in the '30s to his last in 1961, Elliott was most generally cast in peripheral roles designed to annoy the film's principal characters with his laughing jags or his obtrusive behavior; in this capacity, he appeared as drunken conventioneers, loud-mouthed theatre audience members, and "helpful" pedestrians. Elliott also excelled playing small-scale authority figures, such as stage managers, truant officers and rural judges. Still acting into his mid 70s, Dick Elliott appeared regularly as the mayor of Mayberry on the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, and was frequently cast as a department-store Santa in the Yuletide programs of such comics as Jack Benny and Red Skelton.

Trivia: The son of veteran vaudeville headliner Julius Tannen and the brother of actor Charles Tannen, William Tannen entered films as a Columbia contractee in 1934. Along with several other young stage-trained performers, Tannen was "discovered" by MGM in 1938's Dramatic School. During his subsequent years at MGM, he was briefly associated with three top comedy teams: He played Virginia Grey's brother in the Marx Brothers' The Big Store (1941), a Nazi flunkey in Laurel and Hardy's Air Raid Wardens (1943), and a "hard-boiled" assistant director in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945). On TV, William Tannen was seen in the recurring role of Deputy Hal on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: His European/Scandinavia heritage notwithstanding, actor Martin Garralaga was most effectively cast in Latin American roles. Many of his screen appearances were uncredited, but in 1944 he was awarded co-starring status in a series of Cisco Kid westerns produced at Monogram. Duncan Renaldo starred as Cisco, with Garralaga as comic sidekick Pancho. In 1946, Monogram producer Scott R. Dunlap realigned the Cisco Kid series; Renaldo remained in the lead, but now Garralaga's character name changed from picture to picture, and sometimes he showed up as the villain. Eventually Garralaga was replaced altogether by Leo Carrillo, who revived the Pancho character. Outside of his many westerns, Martin Garralaga could be seen in many wartime films with foreign settings; he shows up as a headwaiter in the 1942 classic Casablanca.

Trivia: In films from 1926, former vaudevillian and stage actor/playwright Alphonse Martell was one of Hollywood's favorite Frenchmen. While he sometimes enjoyed a large role, Martell could usually be found playing bits as maitre d's, concierges, gendarmes, duelists, and, during WW II, French resistance fighters. In 1933, he directed the poverty-row quickie Gigolettes of Paris. Alphonse Martell remained active into the 1960s, guest-starring on such TV programs as Mission: Impossible.

Trivia: Born in Puerto Rico, actor Alberto Morin received his education in France. While in that country he worked briefly for Pathe Freres, a major film distribution firm, then studied theatre at the Escuela de Mimica in Mexico. Upon the advent of talking pictures, Morin was signed by Fox Pictures to make Spanish-language films for the South American market. He remained in Hollywood as a character actor, seldom getting much of a part but nearly always making an impression in his few seconds of screen time. Morin also worked steadily in radio and on such TV weeklies as Dobie Gillis and Mr. Roberts, sometimes billed as Albert Morin. During his five decades in Hollywood, Alberto Morin contributed uncredited performances in several of Tinseltown's most laudable achievements: he played Rene Picard in the Bazaar sequence in Gone With the Wind (1939), was a French military officer at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca (1942), and showed up as a boat skipper in Key Largo (1947).

Trivia: Nestor Paiva had the indeterminate ethnic features and gift for dialects that enabled him to play virtually every nationality. Though frequently pegged as a Spaniard, a Greek, a Portuguese, an Italian, an Arab, an even (on radio, at least) an African-American, Paiva was actually born in Fresno, California. A holder of an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Paiva developed an interest in acting while performing in college theatricals. Proficient in several languages, Paiva made his stage bow at Berkeley's Greek Theatre in a production of Antigone. His subsequent professional stage career was confined to California; he caught the eye of the studios by appearing in a long-running Los Angeles production of The Drunkard, which costarred another future film player of note, Henry Brandon. He remained with The Drunkard from 1934 to 1945, finally dropping out when his workload in films became too heavy. Paiva appeared in roles both large and small in so many films that it's hard to find a representative appearance. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby can take in a good cross-section of Paiva's work via his appearances in Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1945) and Road to Rio (1947); he has a bit as a street peddler in Morocco, is desperado McGurk in Utopia, and plays the Brazilian theatre manager who isn't fooled by the Wiere Brothers' attempt to pass themselves off as Americans ("You're een the groove, Jackson") in Rio. During his busiest period, 1945 through 1948, Paiva appeared in no fewer than 117 films. The familiar canteloupe-shaped mug and hyperactive eyebrows of Nestor Paiva graced many a film and TV program until his death in 1966; his final film, the William Castle comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967), was released posthumously.

Trivia: American character actor Frank Sully worked as a vaudeville and Broadway comedian before drifting into movies in 1935. Often typecast as musclebound, doltish characters, the curly-haired, lantern-jawed Sully was seen in a steady stream of hillbilly, GI and deputy sheriff roles throughout the '40s and '50s. He was prominently cast as Noah in John Ford's memorable drama The Grapes of Wrath (1940), one of the few times he essayed a non-comic role. During the '50s, Sully accepted a number of uncredited roles in such westerns as Silver Lode (1954) and was a member in good standing of the Columbia Pictures 2-reel "stock company," appearing as tough waiters, murderous crooks and jealous boyfriends in several short comedies, including those of the Three Stooges (Fling in the Ring, A Merry Mix-Up etc.) Frank Sully's last screen appearance was a bit as a bartender in Barbra Streisand's Funny Girl (1968).

Trivia: Of many "John Kellys" in films, this John Kelly was the most prolific. Actor John Kelly was usually cast as boxers, cabbies, sailors and street cops. He made his first film in 1927, and his last in 1946. John Kelly's parts ranged from microscopic--he has one line as Captain Sidney Toler's first mate in Our Relations (1936)--to meaty; many will no doubt remember him best as dim-witted deputy sheriff Elmer in Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938).

Trivia: Supporting actor Murray Alper's earliest screen credit was 1930's The Royal Family of Broadway. For the next 35 years, Alper was an inescapable movie presence, playing dozens of cab drivers, bookies, cops and GIs. One of his few credited appearances in an "A" picture was in The Maltese Falcon; he plays the friendly cabbie who drives Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) on a mid-film wild goose chase. Frequently seen in comedies, Alper showed up in eight Bowery Boys farces of the 1940s and 1950s, and was prominently featured in the Three Stooges' Trick Dicks (1953) and The Outlaws is Coming (1965, as Chief Crazy Horse!). One of Murray Alper's least characteristic roles was the judo instructor in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor (1963).

Trivia: Brooklyn-born comedian Shemp Howard was the oldest of five sons of a Lithuanian immigrant couple. Shemp was a prankish kid who used humor to obscure the fact that he lived in mortal fear of practically everything, from automobiles to oceans. It is fortunate that he chose show business as profession, since he proved time and again to be utterly incapable of succeeding in any other line of work. Following the lead of his younger brother Moe, Shemp went into vaudeville with a blackface act. In 1922, Shemp and Moe were hired as stooges for comedian Ted Healy; three years later, Larry Fine joined the act, which graduated from vaudeville to Broadway. Since Healy liked his stooges to look as ridiculous as possible, he insisted that they each adopt an eccentric hairstyle. Shemp chose to part his hair down the middle and slick it into place with vaseline, a style he'd retain for the rest of his career. Shemp struck out on his own in 1932. Throughout the '30s, he was starred or featured in dozens of Vitaphone 2-reel comedies, where his growly delivery of lines, his incessant adlibbing and his homely "kisser" never failed to elicit loud laughter. In 1940, he signed a contract with Universal pictures, appearing in such films as Hellzapoppin' (1941), Pittsburgh (1942) and Arabian Nights (1942). Shemp was invariably hilarious in these films -- too hilarious for the tastes of such comedians as W.C. Fields and Lou Costello, who insisted that many of Shemp's best bits be consigned to the cutting room floor. While headlining his own series of Columbia 2-reelers in 1946, Shemp was asked by his brother Moe and Larry Fine to rejoin their old act, which by now had gained fame as The Three Stooges. Shemp's replacement in the act, his kid brother Curly, had suffered a stroke, and a new "patsy" was required to act as the target of Moe's physical assaults. Shemp remained with the Three Stooges from 1946 thorugh 1955, appearing in two-reelers, stage presentations, TV guest spots, and one feature film (Gold Raiders [1951]). Shemp Howard died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 60; even after his death, Shemp "starred" in four Three Stooges comedies, courtesy of stock footage from earlier films and a stand-in by the name of Joe Palma.

Trivia: Actor Edward Hearn's Hollywood career extended from 1916 to 1951. A leading man in the silent era, Hearn was seen in such roles as Philip Nolan, the title character in Man without a Country (1925). His first talkie effort was Frank Capra's The Donovan Affair (1929). Capra never forgot Hearn, securing minor roles for the actor when his star faded in the early 1930s. Edward Hearn spent his last two decades in films playing dozens of cops, jurors, and military officers, essaying bits in features and supporting roles in serials and short subjects.

Trivia: Egyptian actor Alex D'Arcy made his first film in Europe in 1928, and shortly thereafter appeared in Hitchcock's Champagne (1928). Frequently cast as urbane gentleman or smooth rogues, D'Arcy appeared prominently in such French films as A Nous a Liberte (1931) and Carnival in Flanders (1937) before crossing the ocean to make movies in Hollywood. D'Arcy's best English-speaking screen role of the '30s was as Irene Dunne's amorous music teacher in The Awful Truth (1937), in which he was hilariously beaten to a pulp by jealous husband Cary Grant. After his turn as Marilyn Monroe's "dream husband" in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), D'Arcy's roles lessened in importance; perhaps his gigolo image was out of step with the more down-to-Earth '50s. By 1962, he was more often cast in tiny roles in Hollywood comedies like Jerry Lewis' Way...Way Out (1967) and character parts in such European sleaze as Fanny Hill (1964). He also showed up in horror films, notably It's Hot in Paradise (1962) and in the title role of Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969). Evidently a favorite of such cult directors as Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and Sam Fuller, D'Arcy was given a few shining moments in Corman's St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), Meyer's The Seven Minutes (1971) and Fuller's Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972). Alex D'Arcy was married several times during his long career; one of his wives was '30s leading lady Arleen Whelan.

Trivia: Best known today for her recurring role as the floor nurse Parker in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, brunette actress Nell Craig had begun her long screen career with Essanay in Chicago in 1913. By 1914, she was starring or co-starring in such melodramas as In the Palace of the King (1915), from F. Marion Crawford's popular novel, and The Breaker (1916). She played a girl detective in the latter and both films were directed by her husband, Fred E. Wright. The 1920s brought mainly supporting roles, notably that of Mary Todd Lincoln opposite George A. Billings in the low-budget Abraham Lincoln (1924), but she was reduced to walk-ons in talkies. Like several of her contemporaries, Craig was rescued by Louis B. Mayer of MGM, who awarded her a player contract. Craig, who also appeared semi-regularly in Paramount's Henry Aldrich series, retired from films in the late '40s and spent her final years as a resident of the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Thomas Jackson's first stage success was in the role of the non-speaking Property Man in the original 1912 production of Yellow Jacket. He was starring as police detective Dan McCorn in the lavish Broadway production Broadway when he was tapped to repeat his role in the even more spectacular 1929 film version. For the rest of his career, which lasted into the 1960s, Jackson more or less played variations on Dan McCorn, notably as the soft-spoken "copper" Flaherty in 1931's Little Caesar. When he wasn't playing detectives, Thomas Jackson could be seen in dozens of minor roles as newspaper editors, bartenders, doctors and Broadway theatrical agents.

Trivia: Milton Kibbee was the younger brother of prominent stage and screen character actor Guy Kibbee. Looking like a smaller, skinnier edition of his brother, Milton followed Guy's lead and opted for a show business career. The younger Kibbee never reached the professional heights enjoyed by Guy in the '30s and '40s, but he was steadily employed in bit parts and supporting roles throughout the same period. Often cast as desk clerks, doctors and park-bench habitues, Milton Kibbee was most frequently seen as a pencil-wielding reporter, notably (and very briefly) in 1941's Citizen Kane.

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: It is usually axiomatic that any actor who uses the nickname "Tiny" is anything but. Such was the case of tall, stockily built Paul "Tiny" Newlan. Born in Nebraska, Newlan began his acting career in repertory at the Garden Theater in Kansas City. After attending the University of Missouri, he played pro football and basketball, then returned to acting. In films from 1935, he signed a two-year Paramount contract in 1938, leading to dozens of tiny roles as bartenders, bouncers, stevedores, and the like. The size of his screen roles increased in the late '40s-early '50s, though Newlan didn't start landing truly important parts until he entered television. Paul Newlan is best remembered for his recurring appearances as Captain Grey on the TV cop show M-Squad (1957-1960).

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

Trivia: Asta was a popular canine star in the original "Thin Man" series of feature films co-starring Myrna Loy and William Powell. The vivacious wire-haired fox terrier also appeared in other films during the '30s and early '40s. In reality, Asta was played by different generations of dogs. In the 1950s, one of the original's relatives reprised the role in the "Thin Man" television series.