Trivia: Paris-born actress Claudette Colbert was brought to New York at the age of seven by her banker father. She planned an art career after high school graduation, studying at the Art Student's League. Attending a party with actress Anne Morrison, the 18-year-old was offered a three-line bit in Morrison's new play The Wild Westcotts. That ended her art aspirations, and Colbert embarked on a stage career in 1925, scoring her first big critical success in the 1926 Broadway production of The Barker, in which she played a duplicitous snake charmer. One year later, the actress made her first film at Long Island's Astoria studio, For the Love of Mike (1927), but the film was unsuccessful and she enjoyed neither the experience nor her young director, Frank Capra. So back she went to Broadway, returning to films during the talkie revolution in The Hole in the Wall (1929), which was also the movie-speaking debut of Edward G. Robinson. Once again, Colbert disliked film acting; but audiences responded to her beauty and cultured voice, so she forsook the stage for Hollywood. Colbert's popularity (and salary) skyrocketed after she was cast as "the wickedest woman in history," Nero's unscrupulous wife Poppaea, in the Biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932). Colbert expanded her range as a street-smart smuggler's daughter in I Cover the Waterfront and in the pioneering screwball comedy Three-Cornered Moon (both 1933), but it was for a role she nearly refused that the actress secured her box-office stature. Virtually every other actress in Hollywood had turned down the role of spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews in Columbia's It Happened One Night (1934), and when director Frank Capra approached an unenthusiastic Colbert, she wearily agreed to appear in the film on the conditions that she be paid twice her normal salary and that the film be completed before she was scheduled to go on vacation in four weeks. Colbert considered the experience one of the worst in her life -- until the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony, in which It Happened One Night won in virtually all major categories, including a Best Actress Oscar for her. Colbert spent the next decade alternating between comedy and drama, frequently in the company of her most popular co-star, Fred MacMurray. She gained a reputation of giving 110 percent of her energies while acting, which compensated for her occasional imperviousness and her insistence that only one side of her face be photographed (which frequently necessitated redesigning movie sets just to accommodate her phobia about her "bad side"). Colbert remained a top money-making star until her last big hit, The Egg and I (1947), after which she lost some footing, partly because of producers' unwillingness to meet her demands that (under doctor's orders) she could only film a short time each day (her doctor was her husband). She hoped to jump-start her career in the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve, but those plans were squelched when she injured her back and had to relinquish the character to Bette Davis. Traveling the usual "fading star" route, Colbert made films in Europe and a budget Western in the U.S. before returning triumphantly to Broadway, first in 1956's Janus, then in the long-running 1958 comedy Marriage Go Round. The actress also appeared on television, although reportedly had trouble adjusting to live productions. In 1961, she returned to Hollywood as Troy Donahue's mother in Parrish. It would be her last film appearance until the 1987 TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles -- in which she far outclassed her material. Still a prominent figure in the Hollywood hierarchy, Colbert retired to her lavish home in California, where she frequently entertained her old friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Claudette Colbert died in 1996 in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 92.

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: Helen Westcott launched her stage career at the age of 5. It has long been presumed that she made only one screen appearance in her preteen years, as a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); in fact, she played a major role in the 1934 B western Thunder Over Texas, which starred Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. Be that as it may, Westcott would not achieve film prominence until the late 1940s--early 1950s, with such roles as Gregory Peck's ex-wife in The Gunfighter (1950) and the imperiled heroine of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). When her starring career in films faded, Helen Westcott turned to television, where she flourished as a character actress; her last screen appearance was as Mrs. Burrows in 1970's I Love My...Wife.

Trivia: A debonair British-born supporting player in Hollywood films from 1936, John Burton usually played men of wealth and prestige, such as Lord Nelson in Lloyds of London, Lafayette in Marie Antoinette (1938), and a Scotland Yard inspector in Phantom Raiders (1940), the latter an entry in MGM's brief "Nick Carter" series. During World War II, he was often cast as RAF officers and also did quite a bit of narration work for wartime short subjects. Burton's final film seems to have been Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1963), a Jerry Warren atrocity filmed in Mexico.

Trivia: American actor George Leigh was primarily a stage actor who appeared in productions in Southern California and New York. He also appeared in a few films during the '40s and '50s, most notably in The Fatal Witness (1945).

Trivia: In Hollywood from 1941, British actor Leslie Dennison played scores of military officers, secret service agents, and Scotland Yard detectives, often merely as part of the wartime ambience but well remembered for playing the detective tracking down Bela Lugosi's ghoul in The Return of the Vampire and as Alan-a-Dale in Bandits of Sherwood Forest (1946). Denison, who also did voice-over work, retired in the '60s.

Trivia: British actor Douglas Walton kept busy in the Hollywood of the 1930s playing upper-class twits, ineffectual weaklings, and other such highly coveted roles. Walton was most memorably cast as the genteelly depraved Percy Shelley in the prologue scenes of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also played the dull-witted, cowardly Darnley in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Douglas Walton remained in films until the late '40s, usually in bit parts but sometimes in such sizeable characterizations as Percival Priceless in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1947).

Trivia: Irish stage actor Patrick O'Moore began his film career in 1934, playing a few leads in English films before settling in Hollywood. A close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart, O'Moore was seen to good advantage in such Bogart features as Sahara (1943) and Conflict (1945). Otherwise, most of his film roles were unbilled bits as clerks, constables, government officials, and military men. He kept active into the 1980s, playing small parts in such TV productions as QB VII and theatrical features as The Sword and the Sorcerer. Patrick O'Moore was at one time married to Broadway musical-comedy star Zelma O'Neal.