Trivia: American actor John Halliday went the usual route of Brooklyn-born performers by hiding behind a stage British accent in his theatrical and film performances. Except for a few awkward early-talkie appearances where he's laying it on too thick (Perfect Understanding [1933]), Halliday pulled off his artifice so well that at least one knowledgable historian has pigeonholed the actor as Scottish! In films since 1920 and on stage for at least a decade prior to that, Halliday was one of the best of the gentleman villains of the screen: He'd never get the girl, but he could ruin her boyfriend in business, destroy the lives of her family, or kill her off altogether. In the little-seen horror gem Terror Aboard (1933), it's fairly obvious throughout that Halliday is the hidden killer, but he performs his perfidy with such grisly aplomb that the audience is half hoping he'll get away with it. As a subtler conniver in the 1936 Gary Cooper-Marlene Dietrich vehicle Desire, he is able to shift from suavity to menace so abruptly that it throws Dietrich's character momentarily off balance. Even when he was cast in the lead, as in Hollywood Boulevard (1936), his behavior as a Barrymore-like faded actor is caddish enough to get him murdered a reel before the fadeout. John Halliday was permitted a modicum of audience empathy in one of his last films: as Katharine Hepburn's gently philandering father in The Philadelphia Story (1940), he manages to invest humanity and a touch of wistfulness into a basically unsympathetic idle-rich stock character.

Trivia: One of the best-liked silent movie stars both on and off the screen, Mary Brian came to Hollywood in 1923 by way of a beauty contest. Her first screen role was Wendy in the 1924 version of Peter Pan, which resulted in a long-term contract with Paramount Pictures. Mary proved herself equal to the challenge of the microphone with her spirited portrayal of the frontier heroine in her first all-talkie, The Virginian (1929). Her career lost momentum in the early 1930s, though she briefly rallied with an amusing turn as W.C. Fields' faithful daughter in The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) (a repeat of her role in the 1927 silent Running Wild) and an uncharacteristic appearance as a heartbreaking femme fatale in the 1936 Henry Fonda vehicle Spendthrift. Mary retired in 1937, making sporadic comebacks in such low-budgeters of the 1940s as I Escaped from the Gestapo. Mary Brian's last on-camera assignment was as Ann Baker's mother on the 1954 syndicated sitcom Meet Corliss Archer.

Trivia: A regular on Broadway during the '20s and '30s, actress Kay Strozzi appeared in a few films, including Captain Applejack (1931). Later she became a popular radio-series guest-star and after that appeared sometimes on television.

Trivia: Befitting her triple-barreled name, actress Louise Closser Hale was regularly cast as domineering society matrons. Just as regularly, she was cast as a British aristocrat, and never mind that she actually hailed from Chicago. After a long stage career, Hale came to films at the dawn of the talkie era, co-starring with fellow Broadway veterans Edward G. Robinson and Claudette Colbert in Hole in the Wall. Hale was never more imperious or intimidating than when recreating her stage role of the "monster mom" in the filmization of Rose Franken's Another Language (1933). Not long after completing this picture, Louise Closser Hale died at age 60, as a result of injuries sustained in an accident.

Trivia: Briton Alec B. Francis spent the early part of his professional life as a barrister. He switched to acting in the 1890s, utilizing his delicate features and kindly demeanor to play a variety of middle-aged character parts. Emigrating to the U.S., he made his first films for the Vitagraph Company in 1911. His movie bow was in Vanity Fair, which starred Helen Gardner and John Bunny. Slight of stature, Francis often found himself cast as the hero's avuncular confidante or comic sidekick, as in the recently rediscovered 1915 version of Alias Jimmy Valentine. His most frequent screen persona was as the wise old man (be he pauper or prince) who'd garnered enough life experiences to solve all the problems of the younger leading characters; a typical Francis role was the happy-go-lucky blind gent in The Man Who Had Everything (1921). Francis effortlessly survived the transition to sound, surprising one and all as the mystery murderer in The Bishop Murder Case (1930), then appearing in such roles as Mr. Brownlow in the 1933 version of Oliver Twist and the King of Hearts in that same year's filmization of Alice in Wonderland. Alec B. Francis died after an emergency operation at the age of 65.

Trivia: Stage veteran Julia Swayne Gordon was one of the most popular members of the Vitagraph Studios acting ensemble of the early 'teens. Highly respected for her versatility, she was also beloved throughout the studio for her support and encouragement of newcomers. The Vitagraph executives seldom expressed their gratitude to Gordon in words, but every so often she'd find an extra fifteen dollars in her paycheck. In the 1920s, Gordon was much in demand as a character actress; even casual silent-film fans will remember her moving portrayal of Richard Arlen's mother in Wings (1927). Making a successful switchover to talkies, Julia Swayne Gordon continued acting until her death in 1933.

Trivia: Born in Armenia, Arthur Edmund Carewe enjoyed a brief Broadway career before his 1919 film bow in The World and Its Woman. Carewe spent much of his film career in adaptations of venerable stage and literary melodramas, usually as a caped mystery figure: the Duke D'Alba in The Ghost Breaker (1922), Svengali in Trilby (1923), the Persian in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and one of the red-herring suspects in The Cat and Canary (1927). In talkies, Carewe revelled in neurotic, wild-eyed characters, notably the tormented junkie Sparrow in The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Arthur Edmund Carewe committed suicide at the reported age of 43.

Trivia: Gangly, bald-pated stage actor Otto Hoffman inaugurated his screen career with producer Thomas Ince in 1916. After directing Ince's Secret of Black Mountain (1917), Hoffman concentrating on acting. He was seen as cadaverous, crafty, menacing, and sometimes near-moronic types in such silents as Human Wreckage (1918), The Eagle (1925), The Terror (1928) and Noah's Ark (1929). His ethnic range in talkies embraced the Riffian Hasse in Desert Song (1929), frontiersman Murch Rankin in Cimarron (1931), and Gandhi parody "Khook" in Eddie Cantor's Kid Millions (1934). Otto Hoffman spent his last film years in bit roles, most often cast as pawnbrokers or caretakers.

Trivia: Blunt, burly American actor William B. Davidson was equally at home playing gangster bosses, business executives, butlers and military officials. In films since 1914, Davidson seemed to be in every other Warner Bros. picture made between 1930 and 1935, often as a Goliath authority figure against such pint-sized Davids as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. In the early '40s, Davidson was a fixture of Universal's Abbott and Costello comedies, appearing in In the Navy (1941), Keep 'Em Flying (1941) and In Society (1944). In Abbott & Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941), Davidson shows up as Moose Matson, the dying gangster who sets the whole plot in motion. An avid golfer, William B. Davidson frequently appeared in the all-star instructional shorts of the '30s starring legendary golf pro Bobby Jones.

Trivia: Stereotyped early on as a "silly ass" Englishman, Claud Allister perpetuated that stereotype in countless British and American films from 1929 through 1953. Allister made his Hollywood debut as Algy in 1929's Bulldog Drummond, then headed back to England to play peripheral roles in such Alexander Korda productions as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). Back in America in 1936, Allister settled into a string of brief, frequently uncredited roles, nearly always as a supercilious high-society twit. The fruity vocal tones of Claud Allister were ideally suited to the title character in the 1941 Disney animated feature The Reluctant Dragon.