Trivia: At the peak of his career in the early '30s, actor Bela Lugosi was the screen's most notorious personification of evil; the most famous and enduring Dracula, he helped usher in an era of new popularity for the horror genre, only to see his own fame quickly evaporate. Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó was born in Lugos, Hungary, on October 20, 1882. After seeing a touring repertory company as they passed through town, he became fascinated by acting, and began spending all of his time mounting his own dramatic productions with the aid of other children. Upon the death of his father in 1894, Lugosi apprenticed as a miner, later working on the railroad. His first professional theatrical job was as a chorus boy in an operetta, followed by a stint at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts. By 1901, he was a leading actor with Hungary's Royal National Theatre, and around 1917 began appearing in films (sometimes under the name Arisztid Olt) beginning with A Régiséggyüjtö. Lugosi was also intensely active in politics, and he organized an actors' union following the 1918 collapse of the Hungarian monarchy; however, when the leftist forces were defeated a year later he fled to Germany, where he resumed his prolific film career with 1920's Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook. Lugosi remained in Germany through 1921, when he emigrated to the United States. He made his American film debut in 1923's The Silent Command, but struggled to find further work, cast primarily in exotic bit roles on stage and screen. His grasp of English was virtually non-existent, and he learned his lines phonetically, resulting in an accented, resonant baritone which made his readings among the most distinctive and imitated in performing history. In 1924, Lugosi signed on to direct a drama titled The Right to Dream, but unable to communicate with his cast and crew he was quickly fired; he sued the producers, but was found by the court to be unable to helm a theatrical production and was ordered to pay fines totalling close to 70 dollars. When he refused, the contents of his apartment were auctioned off to pay his court costs -- an inauspicious beginning to his life in America, indeed. Lugosi's future remained grim, but in 1927 he was miraculously cast to play the title character in the Broadway adaptation of the Bram Stoker vampire tale Dracula; reviews were poor, but the production was a hit, and he spent three years in the role. In 1929, Lugosi married a wealthy San Francisco widow named Beatrice Weeks, a union which lasted all of three days; their divorce, which named Clara Bow as the other woman, was a media sensation, and it launched him to national notoriety. After a series of subsequent films, however, Lugosi again faded from view until 1931, when he was tapped to reprise his Dracula portrayal on the big screen. He was Universal executives' last choice for the role -- they wanted Lon Chaney Sr., but he was suffering from cancer -- while director Tod Browning insisted upon casting an unknown. When no other suitable choice arose, however, only Lugosi met with mutual, if grudging, agreement. Much to the shock of all involved, Dracula was a massive hit. Despite considerable studio re-editing, it was moody and atmospheric, and remains among the most influential films in American cinema. Dracula also rocketed Lugosi to international fame, and he was immediately offered the role of the monster in James Whale's Frankenstein; he refused -- in order to attach himself to a picture titled Quasimodo -- and the part instead went to Boris Karloff. The project never went beyond the planning stages, however, and in a sense Lugosi's career never righted itself; he remained a prolific screen presence, but the enduring fame which appeared within his reach was lost forever. Moreover, he was eternally typecast: Throughout the remainder of the decade and well into the 1940s, he appeared in a prolific string of horror films, some good (1932's Island of Lost Souls and 1934's The Black Cat, the latter the first of many collaborations with Karloff), but most of them quite forgettable. Lugosi's choice of projects was indiscriminate at best, and his reputation went into rapid decline; most of his performances were variations on his Dracula role, and before long he slipped into outright parodies of the character in pictures like 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was to be his last film for four years.As Lugosi's career withered, he became increasingly eccentric, often appearing in public clad in his Dracula costume. He was also the victim of numerous financial problems, and became addicted to drugs. In 1952, he returned from exile to star in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, followed later that year by the similarly low-brow My Son, the Vampire and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. By 1953, Lugosi was firmly aligned with the notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, widely recognized as the worst director in movie history; together they made a pair of films -- Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster -- before Lugosi committed himself in 1955 in order to overcome his drug battles. Upon his release, he and Wood began work on the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, but after filming only a handful of scenes, Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 15, 1956; he was buried in his Dracula cape. In the decades to come, his stature as a cult figure grew, and in 1994 the noted filmmaker Tim Burton directed the screen biography Ed Wood, casting veteran actor Martin Landau as Lugosi; Landau was brilliant in the role, and won the Oscar which Lugosi himself never came remotely close to earning -- a final irony in a career littered with bittersweet moments.

Trivia: Harvey B. Dunn led a long and successful performing career as a radio announcer and stage, television, and movie character actor; although he appeared in small roles in a variety of mainstream films, he achieved a peculiar form of screen stardom and immortality in the larger parts that he portrayed in several notoriously bad (but fascinating) films directed by Edward D. Wood Jr. and Tom Graeff. A southerner by birth, Dunn's earliest professional engagements were as an announcer on WALB radio in Albany, GA, and WFLB in Fayetteville, NC. Later based in Chicago, his theatrical work included roles in The Front Page, The Late Christopher Bean (with Zazu Pitts), The Barker (with James Dunn), and Present Laughter (with Edward Everett Horton). He played in stock across the country and appeared as a dramatic actor on Colgate Theater on early television. In between was a lot of other work -- his own professional bio claimed experience in every area of theater "except medicine shows and grand opera." His earliest credited screen role was in MGM's 1951 Vengeance Valley, which was sort of that studio's answer to Universal's Winchester '73 released the prior year and he also had a small part in Billy Wilder's Sabrina in 1954. Starring roles beckoned Dunn, not from the likes of Wilder or anyone at MGM, but from director/producer Edward D. Wood Jr., who cast the avuncular actor as the police captain in Bride of the Monster (1956) -- Dunn gave what was probably the straightest performance in the film, with some odd little character touches that seemed natural and pleasing in their bizarre way (typical of a Wood script), such as his character's fascination with feeding his pet bird in the office. He also had a role in Wood's final film as a director, The Sinister Urge which was not widely distributed and in-between played the role of the genial grandfather in Tom Graeff's bizarre, low-budget sci-fi thriller Teenagers From Outer Space. He continued working in movies and on television into the early '60s in small parts, but never got the kind of screen time that Wood and Graeff had afforded this likable character actor, whose round face and genial manner recalled both Lloyd Corrigan and Hal Smith.

Trivia: George Becwar was a West Coast-based stage actor, who also did some character work and bit-parts on television and in low- to medium-budget feature films. He is best remembered today for his portrayal of Professor Vladimir Strowski, the self-described "expert in prehistoric monsters," in Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Bride of the Monster (1955). He also turned up, in a much better role and performance, in Bert I. Gordon's War of the Colossal Beast (1958), but mostly played smaller, often uncredited roles on the large and small screens. In terms of his brief association with Wood, Becwar was notable for filing a complaint about sub-standard working conditions on the set of Bride of the Monster.

Trivia: Paul Marco was a longtime Hollywood prop man and crew member, who achieved his greatest and most lingering fame as an actor in the movies of writer/director/producer Edward D. Wood, Jr. Born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1927 to Italian immigrant parents, he apparently got bitten by the acting bug early in life. Being raised in the film capital allowed him greater access to that field than any number of would-be performers from elsewhere in the country, and this ultimately paid off, at least in terms of getting him work. In 1944, at the age of 17 -- probably helped by the shortage of male bit-players due to the war -- Marco turned up in a small, unbilled part in the B musical Sweet and Low-Down. His next known screen appearance came eight years later, in the Monogram Pictures costume drama Hiawatha, starring a young Vince Edwards in the title role and directed by B-movie master Kurt Neumann. It was during this period that Marco became part of the circle of friends surrounding Criswell, a syndicated columnist who published predictions of the future, and who had lately moved into local television with his own show. According to some accounts, Marco was responsible for introducing Criswell to Edward D. Wood, Jr., a writer/producer/director of ultra-low-budget films; whoever introduced who to whom -- Criswell was later to become part of Wood's stock company of players -- but Marco was soon a member of Wood's coterie of regulars. In 1955, the aspiring actor got his first credited role -- and, indeed, his first major role, and his most enduring part, as Officer Kelton in Wood's Bride of the Monster, a feature film starring one-time horror film great Bela Lugosi. Marco's performance as the good-natured if slightly inept Kelton made him one of the more endearing supporting players in the movie (the most appealing qualities of which, as with most of Wood's movies, were its mistakes). The director apparently liked Marco's work sufficiently to cast him in the same role in his next movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space, with more dialogue thrown his way and more scenes. And Marco was once more back as Kelton in a third film, Night of the Ghouls (1959), which didn't get released until the mid-'80s, owing to Wood's inability to pay the laboratory bill. By the early '60s, he'd also turned up in small supporting roles in episodes of series such as The Donna Reed Show and 77 Sunset Strip and was working regularly as a property man in numerous lower budgeted Hollywood films. Marco still showed up as an actor as well on occasion, and in 2005, the year before his death, reprised the role of Kelton in Wayne Berwick and Ted Newsom's The Naked Monster, a spoof of horror movies that also featured such fixtures of 1950s shock cinema as John Agar, Robert Clarke, Robert Cornthwaite, John Harmon, and Jeanne Carmen.

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.

Trivia: If Dolores Fuller had ever thought in the 1970s, 1980s, or early '90s about what she would be known for professionally in the 21st century, it might well have been for writing songs for Elvis Presley and Peggy Lee or perhaps managing Tanya Tucker early in the singer's career. Instead, she is best known (downright famous, in fact) for her 40-years-past career as an actress, her mid-'50s relationship with director Edward D. Wood Jr., and the three movies that she made with him. The films were scarcely seen and virtually unreviewed at the time of their release and for decades after. Considering that one of those movies -- Glen or Glenda -- was the first American feature film dealing with the subject of transvestism and drew much of its content from one corner of Fuller's relationship with the cross-dressing Wood, her recognition for them seems all the more improbable, especially for a woman who started life in South Bend, IN, during the era of silent movies. Fuller was born there in 1923 (some sources say 1925), but her family moved to California when she was very young. Setting her sights on an acting career, she worked in school plays and later became a model, also succeeding in getting some television work in the early days of the medium. An attractive young woman (Fuller was a stand-in for Jayne Mansfield in the theatrical production of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter in the mid-'50s), she was a natural for set decoration on programs like Chevrolet Playhouse, Queen for a Day, and The Red Skelton Show. Not content to rely on her looks, however, she also studied acting in New York with Stella Adler. Fuller became a working actress, playing tiny roles in relatively high profile feature films, such as Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia, and getting larger roles in small movies, such as the notoriously low-budget Mesa of Lost Women. According to Greg Douglass' fall 2000 article in Filmfax, Fuller met Edward D. Wood Jr., the legendary anti-genius director, when the latter placed an ad announcing auditions for a film planned under the title of The Hidden Face (completed as Jail Bait), which was to be produced by Howco, the same outfit that bankrolled Mesa of Lost Women. Wood and Fuller became entangled romantically very early on and they apparently were a good match for each other, despite the fact that she didn't understand his fetish for dressing up as a woman or his special fixation on her white Angora sweaters; they both loved movies and were fascinated by the idea of writing them and making them, and simply loved to talk film. Still, it was difficult for her when Wood put them both, along with his transvestism, into his semi-autobiographical film Glen or Glenda; the personal nature of the movie and the fact that it so closely paralleled their private life (which she wanted kept private) mortally offended the actress. Despite her unhappiness with that film, Fuller stayed with Wood for another two years and was also responsible for bringing future Plan 9 From Outer Space leading lady Mona McKinnon into the director's orbit; early in her relationship with Wood, Fuller had shared an apartment with McKinnon, which resulted in the actress playing a small role in Jail Bait. Fuller was to have been the female lead in Wood's Bride of the Monster, but in order to secure his financing, the director was forced to replace her with actress Loretta King, while Fuller was given a much smaller role. That decision -- coupled with Wood's increasingly erratic personal behavior -- led to the breakup of their romantic relationship. In contrast to most of the other people who moved in Wood's close orbit, however, Fuller had real talent and a real career ahead of her, even when she lived with Wood, she was represented by Paul Kohner, one of the top talent agents in Hollywood, and she was getting steady work on television as well as roles in films from major studios. Thus, she never fell, as others did, upon leaving Wood's orbit and, indeed, only ascended. By the end of the 1950s, she'd started her own record company, Dee Records, and one of the talents that she discovered was a New York-born singer/guitarist named John Ramistella, who later became Johnny Rivers. Later on, her ability as a songwriter manifested itself through the intervention of her friend, producer Hal Wallis; Fuller had wanted to get an acting role in the Elvis Presley movie Blue Hawaii, which Wallis was producing, but instead he put her in touch with Hill & Range, the publisher that provided Presley with songs. Fuller went into a collaborative partnership with composer Ben Weissman and got one song, "Rock-A-Hula Baby," into Blue Hawaii. It was a beginning that eventually led to Presley recording a dozen of her songs. Fuller also had her music recorded by Nat "King" Cole, Peggy Lee, and other leading talents of the period. By the end of the 1960s, in addition to writing songs, Fuller had also moved into talent management and can take credit for discovering 13-year-old Tanya Tucker. Fuller's focus on acting receded rapidly as her music career took off, and for 30 years was best known in the entertainment business as a creative, behind-the-scenes personality. The 1994 release of Tim Burton's film Ed Wood, however, brought new attention to her onscreen career (or, at least, the part of it with Wood) -- although she is on record as not appreciating the portrayal that she received in the film from Sarah Jessica Parker. In 2000, she was the subject of a documentary on German television that focused as much on her music career as her work with Wood and was reported to be working on a Broadway musical based on her life with the director.

Trivia: Oklahoma-born William Benedict is fondly remembered by fans for his shock of unkempt blond hair; ironically, he lost his first job at a bank because he refused to use a comb. Stagestruck at an early age, the skinny, ever-boyish Benedict took dancing lessons while in high school and appeared in amateur theatricals. After phoning a 20th Century-Fox talent scout, the 17-year-old Benedict hitchhiked to Hollywood and won a film contract (if for no other reason than nerve and persistence). He appeared in the first of his many office-boy roles in his debut film, $10 Raise (1935), and spent the next four decades popping up in bits as bellboys, caddies, hillbillies, delivery men and Western Union messengers. He portrayed so many of the latter, in fact, that Western Union paid tribute to Benedict by giving him his own official uniform -- an honor bestowed on only one other actor, Benedict's lifelong friend Frank Coghlan Jr. (the two actors costarred in the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel). In 1939, Benedict played a bicycle messenger in the Little Tough Guys film Call a Messenger; four years later he appeared with another branch of the Little Tough Guys clan, the East Side Kids, in Ghosts on the Loose. He remained with the Kids as "Skinny," then stayed on when the East Siders transformed into the Bowery Boys in 1946. As "Whitey," Benedict was the oldest member of the team, a fact occasionally alluded to in the dialogue -- though Leo Gorcey, two months younger than Benedict, was firmly in charge of the bunch. Benedict left the Bowery Boys in 1951, gradually easing out of acting; for several years, he worked as an assistant designer of miniature sets for movie special-effects sequences. He returned to performing in the 1960s, still playing the newsboy and delivery man roles he'd done as a youth. Film and TV fans of the 1970s might recall Billy Benedict as a world-weary croupier in the early scenes of The Sting (1973), and in the regular role of Toby the Informant on the 1975 TV series The Blue Knight.

Trivia: Ben Frommer was the epitome of the successful character actor. Across a screen career totaling more than 40 years, he worked in over 100 film roles and possibly twice as many parts on television, ranging from just a few seconds of screen time in feature films to regular work on one of the more popular western series of the mid-1960s. And in virtually all of it, as with so many of the best people in his profession, he melted so well into the parts he played that audiences were seldom possessed to even ask his name. Ironically, it was in one of the cheapest -- and perhaps THE cheapest -- production on which he ever worked, in a part scarcely larger, or of longer duration than his typical background and supporting role, that Frommer earned his lingering name recognition. Born in Poland in 1913, Frommer arrived in Hollywood as an actor in the early 1940s, making his screen bow with an uncredited appearance in the 1943 Olsen & Johnson vehicle Crazy House. He next showed up in a bit part in the Laurence Tierney-starring film noir Born To Kill (1947). Frommer's short stature and fireplug-like physique, coupled with his rough-hewn features, made him ideal for playing working-class background parts such as deliverymen and taxi drivers. Most of his work was in lower-budgeted films, including exploitation fare such as Sid Melton's Bad Girls Do Cry (shot in the mid-1950s but not issued till much later). And it was in low-budget films -- some of the lowest budgeted ever made, in fact -- that Frommer would achieve a form of immortality as an actor.It was writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who gave Frommer the opportunity to play a slightly wider range of parts. In Bride Of the Monster, Frommer was cast as a surly drunk, while in Wood's magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, he is the mourner who is charged by the script with providing the explanation as to why the old man (played by Bela Lugosi in footage shot for a movie that was never made) is buried in a crypt, while his wife (Maila "Vampira" Nurmi) is buried in the ground. The dialogue is as awkward as anything else in the notoriously poorly made (but thoroughly entertaining) movie, but Frommer does his best to deliver it convincingly, in what was almost certainly one very rushed take. Around this time, Frommer also showed up in the horror film Cult of the Cobra and the outsized production of Around The World In 80 Days, and a lot more television as well -- he also began providing voices for animated productions, a professional activity that would occupy ever more of his time later in his career. He worked in pictures by John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain), and Mervyn LeRoy (Gypsy), but it was during this same period, from 1965 through 1967, that Frommer achieved his widest weekly exposure on television, when he was cast in the comedic western series F-Troop in the role of Smokey Bear, the squat, chunky (and uncredited) member of the Hekawi Indian tribe. He usually did little more than hold the reigns of the horses ridden by Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch's characters, but he was impossible to miss in a shot.Frommer remained a very busy character actor and voice-actor over the next two decades, and only slowed down during his final years in the profession. During that time, he took on the new profession of publicist for his fellow actors. He died in 1992 at the age of 78.