Trivia: A longtime character actor/stuntman/leading man/director, Dave O'Brien (born David Barclay) was born in Big Springs, Texas, and entered movies in the early '30s as a stuntman and occasional character actor -- he is probably best remembered by college students of the late '60s and early '70s for his portrayal of the crazed marijuana smoker in the exploitation film Reefer Madness. During the late '30s and early '40s, O'Brien also played the title role in the serial Captain Midnight, and was the responsible adult in the East Side Kids series, but it was as the lead in MGM's Pete Smith Specialty comedy shorts -- which O'Brien also directed, under his real name David Barclay -- that he was best known to '40s moviegoers. The Pete Smith shorts, which were basically comedic looks at human foibles, took full advantage of O'Brien's background in stunt work, and hold up extremely well today. O'Brien still played occasional lead roles, especially in B-pictures such as The Man Who Walks Alone (1946), an unusual comedy with serious overtones about a veteran returning home from World War II, but by the early '50s had moved into supporting parts, such as that of the stage manager in Kiss Me Kate (1953), directed by his fellow Pete Smith alumnus George Sidney. O'Brien later became a writer for Red Skelton on television.

Trivia: Pittsburgh-born James Newill attended the University of Southern California where he excelled in music and sports. After graduation, Newill appeared as a baritone singer in vaudeville and on radio. His first film was Grand National's Something to Sing About (1937), which led indirectly to his being starred in five Renfrew of the Royal Mounted adventure flicks. He went on to play frontiersman Jim Steele in Monogram's Texas Rangers Western series, in which he appeared from 1943 until his retirement in 1945. During his Hollywood heyday, James Newill occasionally sang in the theatrical opera company managed by another famous singing cowboy, George Houston.

Trivia: Blonde Iris Meredith (née Shunn), a former Goldwyn Girl, was beautiful and talented enough to have risen to the top at her studio, Columbia Pictures. Instead, she became typecast as a B-Western heroine, albeit one of the best and busiest in history. Meredith would appear in no less than 31 sagebrush operas, from The Cowboy Star (1936) to The Kid Rides Again (1943), 20 of them opposite the studio's leading cowboy star Charles Starrett. Add to that a handful of serials and Iris had a busy seven years or so. Leaving Columbia in late 1940, Meredith landed at Poverty Row's infamous PRC, a ramshackle studio that quickly earned the nickname of "Pretty Rotten Crud." She did a couple of non-Westerns and a Buster Crabbe Billy the Kid before calling it quits to marry Columbia director Abby Berlin (1907-1965). Rather more brave than any of her screen heroines, a cancer-stricken and horribly disfigured Iris Meredith accepted an award at the 1976 Nashville Western Film Festival, her final public appearance. Appropriately, the veteran Western star received a standing ovation.

Trivia: "A very funny guy -- funnier than most gave him credit for," as one director described him, lanky, slow-moving Guy Wilkerson is fondly remembered for playing comedy sidekick Panhandle Perkins in the 1942-1945 PRC Texas Rangers film series, a low-rent competition for Republic Pictures' popular Three Mesquiteers Westerns. As Panhandle, Wilkerson's comedy was never intrusive and often used merely as a slow-witted counterpoint to the action. In Hollywood from at least 1937 (some sources claim he appeared onscreen as early as the 1920s), Wilkerson had honed his skills in minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, but away from his sidekick duties at PRC, he was usually seen playing less humorous characters, notably ministers or undertakers. Appearing in hundreds of feature films and television series over three decades, Guy Wilkerson was last seen in the crime thriller The Todd Killings in 1971, the year of his death from cancer.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: Though never officially billed as Charles "Blackie" King, American actor Charlie King played so many "Blackies" in B-westerns that one is astounded to discover that it wasn't his middle name. Drifting into films in the '20s, the squat, stubble-chinned, mustachioed King picked up minor roles as chauffeurs, interns and bridegrooms in the two-reel comedies of such performers as Our Gang, the Three Stooges and Leon Errol. It was during the B-western boom of the early talkie era that King really came into his own, showing up in virtually every other poverty-row oater as a gang boss, lynch-mob leader or sinister henchman. Evidently King felt the day was wasted if he wasn't dynamiting a dam, setting fire to homesteaders' shacks, or engaging the hero in a fistic battle. Outtakes of these westerns have revealed that this "human monster" was actually shy and soft-spoken, never reverting to profanity when blowing his lines (more than can be said for some of the "clean-living" western heroes of the era). In fact, King's private life was governed by his formidable wife, who had spies posted at the studio to make certain that King came home right away with his paycheck without any side trips to bars or gaming tables. Gaining a beard and excess weight in the late '40s, King began appearing less frequently as villains and more often as roly-poly comedy relief. King literally died with his boots on, suffering a heart attack after shooting a 1957 episode of Gunsmoke -- in which he played a corpse! William K. Everson's 1964 coffee-table book The Bad Guys was affectionately dedicated to the scurrilously prolific Charles "Blackie" King.

Trivia: One of the many unheralded stuntmen of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Carl Mathews (born Carl Davis Mathews) doubled cowboy crooner Fred Scott at Spectrum and Ray "Crash" Corrigan at Republic. Nicknamed "Cherokee" and of Native American heritage, the burly Mathews later supported Al "Lash" LaRue at PRC, usually playing henchmen. His career lasted well into the television era.

Trivia: Actor Harry Harvey Sr. started out in minstrel shows and burlesque. His prolific work in Midwestern stock companies led to film assignments, beginning at RKO in 1934. Harvey's avuncular appearance (he looked like every stage doorman named Pop who ever existed) won him featured roles in mainstream films and comic-relief and sheriff parts in B-westerns. His best known "prestige" film assignment was the role of New York Yankees manager Joe McCarthy in the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic Pride of the Yankees. Remaining active into the TV era, Harry Harvey Sr. had continuing roles on two series, The Roy Rogers Show and It's a Man's World, and showed up with regularity on such video sagebrushers as Cheyenne and Bonanza.

Trivia: A dignified-looking young character actor, Lynton Brent began his career on the stage, appearing in plays such as The Student Prince, Paid in Full, and as Laertes in Hamlet before entering films in 1930. Handsome enough in an average kind of way, Brent played such supporting roles as reporters (King Kong [1933]), radio operators (Streamline Express [1935]), and again Laertes, in the play-within-the-film I'll Love You Always ([1935], Garbo's interpreter Sven Hugo Borg was Hamlet!). Today, however, Brent is mainly remembered for his many roles in Columbia short subjects opposite the Three Stooges. His dignity always in shambles by the denouement, Brent was a welcome addition to the stock company, which at the time also included such comparative (and battle scarred) veterans as Bud Jamison and Vernon Dent. Leaving the short subject department in the early '40s, Brent played everyone from henchmen to lawmen in scores of B-Westerns and action melodramas, more often than not unbilled. He worked well into the television era, retiring in the late '60s. Offscreen, Brent was an accomplished architect and painter.

Trivia: One of the most popular, and recognizable, character actors in B-Western history, pudgy, mustachioed Bud Osborne (real name Leonard Miles Osborne) was one of the many Wild West show performers who parlayed their experiences into lengthy screen careers. Especially noted for his handling of runaway stagecoaches and buckboards, Osborne began as a stunt performer with Thomas Ince's King-Bee company around 1912, and by the 1920s he had become one of the busiest supporting players in the business. Rather rakish-looking in his earlier years, the still slender Osborne even attempted to become a Western star in his own right. Produced by the Bud Osborne Feature Film Company and released by low-budget Truart Pictures, The Prairie Mystery (1922) presented Osborne as a romantic leading man opposite B-movie regular Pauline Curley. Few saw this little clunker, however, and Osborne quickly returned to the ranks of supporting cowboys, often portraying despicable villains with names like Satan Saunders, Piute Sam, or Bull McKee. Playing an escaped convict masquerading as a circuit rider in both the 1923 Leo Maloney short Double Cinched and Shootin' Square, a 1924 Jack Perrin feature Western, Osborne even demonstrated an affinity for comedy. The now veteran Bud Osborne continued his screen career into the sound era and became even busier in the 1930s and 1940s. As he grew older and his waistline expanded, Osborne's roles became somewhat smaller and instead of calling the shots himself, as he often had in the silent era, he now answered to the likes of Roy Barcroft and Charles King. But he seems to pop up in every other B-Western and serial released in those years, appearing in more than 65 productions for Republic Pictures alone. By the 1950s, the now elderly Osborne became one of the many veteran performers courted by maverick filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr., for whom he did Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1954), an unsold television pilot, Jailbait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Night of the Ghouls (1958). When all is said and done, it was a rather dismal finish to a colorful career.