Trivia: Hardcase leading man Howard Duff built his reputation on radio, where among several other assignments he was cast as Dashiell Hammett's two-fisted private eye Sam Spade. He made so vivid an impression in this role that, when cast in his first film Brute Force (1947), he was given special billing in the credits as "radio's Sam Spade." His burgeoning film career was slowed down in the early 1950s by the iniquities of the Hollywood Blacklist. Duff's no-nonsense image was softened into sitcom buffoonery when, in 1957, he was cast in TV's Mr. Adams and Eve. His co-star was his then-wife Ida Lupino, and the series' producer was Lupino's previous husband Collier Young. Ida was a frequent director for Duff's subsequent TV series Dante (1960), in which he more-or-less reprised his Sam Spade characterization. Duff's later TV assignments included a three-year starring stint on Felony Squad (1966-69) and supporting roles in the prime time serials Flamingo Road and Knot's Landing. In the 1970s, Howard Duff returned to filmmaking as a character actor, scoring critical successes with his roles as an eternally inebriated relative in Altman's A Wedding (1978) and as Dustin Hoffman's attorney in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

Trivia: After a rough-and-tumble adolescence, Victor Jory attended high school in California, studying acting with Gilmor Brown at the Pasadena Playhouse. Jory's subsequent tenure at the University of California lasted all of one year before he was bitten by wanderlust; he joined the coast guard, where he distinguished himself as a champion in several contact sports. Sharp-featured, muscular, and possessed of a rich theatrical voice, Jory made his New York stage bow in 1929, and one year later co-starred in the original Broadway production of Berkeley Square. Inaugurating his film career with Renegades (1930), Jory spent the next five decades in roles ranging from romantic leads to black-hearted villains. Highlights in his screen career include a sinister but strangely beautiful performance as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); the vicious Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); white-trash carpetbagger Jonas Wilkerson in Gone With the Wind (1939); Texas patriot William Travis in Man of Conquest (1939); the hissable, crippled patriarch in The Fugitive Kind (1960); the taciturn father of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962); and the ancient South American Indian chief in Papillon (1973). In 1940, Jory starred in the Columbia serial The Shadow (1940), essaying the dual role of the mind-clouding Shadow and his alter ego Lamont Cranston (with several disguise sequences along the way). The outspoken Jory was supremely confident of his talents, remarking on several occasions that he was "damn good" -- though he was tougher than any movie critic in assessing his lesser performances. He was also more than generous with young up-and-coming actors (except for self-involved "method" performers), and was a veritable fountain of Broadway and Hollywood anecdotes, some of which were actually true. An occasional theatrical director and playwright, Jory wrote the Broadway production Five Who Were Mad. On TV, Jory starred in the popular syndicated detective series Manhunt (1959-1960) and guested on dozens of other programs. Long married to actress Jean Innes, Victor Jory was the father of Jon Jory, who for many years was artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

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: Don C. Harvey's screen acting career was launched when he signed a Columbia contract in 1949. An all-purpose villain, Harvey showed up in most of Columbia's serials of the era, including Atom Man vs. Superman (1949), Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), Batman and Robin (1949), Captain Video (1950), and the studio's final chapter play, Blazing the Overland Trail (1956). He also appeared in Columbia's "A" product (Picnic), "B" pictures (Women's Prison) and two-reel comedies (the Three Stooges' Merry Mavericks). Fans of 1950s horror films may recall Harvey as Mac in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Lester Banning in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). Don C. Harvey was married to actress June Harvey.

Trivia: Vaudeville and stage performer Pat O'Malley was a mere lad of seventeen (or thereabouts) when he inaugurated his film career at the Edison company in 1907. A dependable "collar-ad" leading man possessed of an athlete's physique, O'Malley rose to stardom at the Kalem Studios during the teens. From 1918 to 1927, O'Malley hopscotched around Hollywood, appearing at Universal, First National, Vitagraph and Paramount; he starred in war films (Heart of Humanity [1918]), westerns (The Virginian [1922]) and adaptations of bestsellers (Brothers Under the Skin [1922]). His talkie debut in 1929's Alibi would seem to have heralded a thriving sound career, but O'Malley had aged rather suddenly, and could no longer pass as a romantic lead. He worked in some 400 films in bits and supporting roles, frequently showing up in "reunion" films in the company of his fellow silent screen veterans (Hollywood Boulevard [1936], and A Little Bit of Heaven [1941]). O'Malley remained "on call" into the early '60s for such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and such films as The Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Pat O'Malley's film credits are often confused with those of Irish comedian/dialectian J. Pat O'Malley (1901-1985) and Australian performer John P. O'Malley (1916-1959).

Trivia: Hearty character actor Ralph Sanford made his first screen appearances at the Flatbush studios of Vitaphone Pictures. From 1933 to 1937, Sanford was Vitaphone's resident Edgar Kennedy type, menacing such two-reel stars as Shemp Howard, Roscoe Ates, and even Bob Hope. He moved to Hollywood in 1937, where, after playing several bit roles, he became a semi-regular with Paramount's Pine-Thomas unit with meaty supporting roles in such films as Wildcat (1942) and The Wrecking Crew (1943). He also continued playing featured roles at other studios, usually as a dimwitted gangster or flustered desk sergeant. One of his largest assignments was in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945), in which he plays vengeance-seeking Richard K. Muldoon, who threatens at every opportunity to (literally) skin Stan and Ollie alive; curiously, he receives no screen credit, despite the fact that his character motivates the entire plot line. Busy throughout the 1950s, Ralph Sanford was a familiar presence on TV, playing one-shot roles on such series as Superman and Leave It to Beaver and essaying the semi-regular part of Jim "Dog" Kelly on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: George Mather wore many hats during his tenure in Hollywood. Best-known as a character actor, he also periodically functioned as a director, producer, and a production supervisor for certain special visual effects on George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) as well as a director of photography. As an actor, he appeared in a handful of B-movies from the '50s through the early '80s. His television credits include appearances on Death Valley Days, Hazel, Ben Casey, and The Farmer's Daughter. Before coming to Hollywood in mid-1954, the Long Island, NY, native graduated from the Chicago Art Institute. During WWII and the Korean conflict, Mather was a fighter pilot. He made his feature film debut playing a sergeant in Atomic Kid (1954). Subsequent films include Outside the Law (1956) and Ring of Terror (1964). By the mid-'60s, Mather had turned almost exclusively to behind-the-scenes work. During the mid- to late '70s, he occasionally acted as second unit director on such television series as Love Boat, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and The Fall Guy. He became the production supervisor for Boss Film Corporation in the mid-'80s and was partly responsible for the special effects used in Ghostbusters (1984) and Poltergeist II (1986). At age 77, Mather died of an apparent heart attack.

Trivia: Diminutive, frequently mustached character actor Charles Wagenheim made the transition from stage to screen in or around 1940. Wagenheim's most memorable role was that of "The Runt" in Meet Boston Blackie (1941), a part taken over by George E. Stone in the subsequent "Boston Blackie" B-films. Generally cast in unsavory bit parts, Wagenheim's on-screen perfidy extended from Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) to George Stevens' Diary of Anne Frank (1959), in which, uncredited, he played the sneak thief who nearly gave away the hiding place of the Frank family. Wagenheim kept his hand in the business into the 1970s in films like The Missouri Breaks (1976). In 1979, 83-year-old Charles Wagenheim was bludgeoned to death by an intruder in his Hollywood apartment, five days before another veteran actor, Victor Kilian, met the same grisly fate.