Trivia: Broderick Crawford was the typical example of "overnight" success in Hollywood -- the 1949 release of All the King's Men turned him into one of the most popular "character" leads in Hollywood, a successor to Wallace Beery and a model for such unconventional leading men to come as Ernest Borgnine. His "overnight" success, however, involved more than a decade of work in routine supporting roles in more than 20 movies, before he was ever considered as much more than a supporting player. Crawford was born into a performing family -- both of his maternal grandparents, William Broderick and Emma Kraus, were opera singers, and his mother, Helen Broderick, was a Broadway and screen actress, while his father, Lester Crawford, was a vaudeville performer. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he accompanied his parents on tour as a boy and later joined them on-stage. He attended the Dean Academy in Franklin, MA, and excelled in athletics, including football, baseball, and swimming. Crawford entered show business by way of vaudeville, joining his parents in working for producer Max Gordon. With vaudeville's decline in the later 1920s, he tried attending college but dropped out of Harvard after just three months, preferring to make a living as a stevedore on the New York docks, and he also later served as a seaman on a tanker. Crawford returned to acting through radio, including a stint working as a second banana to the Marx Brothers. He entered the legitimate theater in 1934 when playwright Howard Lindsay selected him for a role in the play She Loves Me Not, portraying a football player in the work's London run -- although the play only ran three weeks, that was enough time for Crawford to meet Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (then theater's leading "power couple" on either side of the Atlantic) and come to the attention of Noel Coward, who selected him for a role in his production of Point Valaine, in which the acting couple was starring. After a string of unsuccessful plays, Crawford went to Hollywood and got a part as the butler in the comedy Woman Chases Man, produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Crawford's theatrical breakthrough came in 1937 when he won the role of the half-witted Lennie in the theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. His performance won critical accolades from all of the major newspapers, and Crawford was on his way, at least as far as the stage was concerned -- when it came time to do the movie, however, the part went to Lon Chaney Jr.. In movies, Crawford made the rounds of the studios in one-off roles, usually in relatively minor films such as Submarine D-1, Undercover Doctor, and Eternally Yours. The murder mystery Slightly Honorable gave him a slight boost in both billing and the size of his role, but before he could begin to develop any career momentum the Second World War intervened. Crawford served in the U.S. Army Air Force and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned to civilian life, he immediately resumed his screen career with a series of fascinating films, including The Black Angel and James Cagney's production20of The Time of Your Life. True stardom however, still eluded him. That all changed when director-producer Robert Rossen selected Crawford to portray Willie Stark in All the King's Men. In a flash, Crawford became a box-office draw, his performance attracting raves from the critics and delighting audiences with its subtle, earthy, rough-hewn charm. His portrayal of the megalomaniac political boss of a small state, based on the life and career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, won Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor. He signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1949, which resulted in his starring in the comedy hit Born Yesterday (1950). That was to be his last major hit as a star, though Crawford continued to give solid and successful lead performances for much of the next five years, portraying a tough undercover cop in the crime drama T he Mob, and a villainous antagonist to Clark Gable in Vincent Sherman's Lone Star. During the early '50s, Crawford was Hollywood's favorite tough-guy lead or star antagonist, his persona combining something of the tough charm of Spencer Tracy and the rough-hewn physicality of Wallace Beery -- he could be a charming lunkhead, in the manner of Keenan Wynn, or dark and threatening, calling up echoes of his portrayal of Willie Stark. In the mid-'50s at 20th Century Fox, he added vast energy and excitement to such films as Night People and Between Heaven and Hell -- indeed, his performance in the latter added a whole extra layer of depth and meaning to the film, moving it from wartime melodrama into territory much closer to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with his character Waco serving as the dramatic stand-in for Kurtz. In 1955, after working on the melodrama Not As a Stranger and Fellini's Il Bidone (his portrayal of the swindler Augusto being one of his best performances), Crawford became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era to make the jump to television. He signed to do the series Highway Patrol for Ziv TV, which was a hit for three seasons. In its wake, however, Crawford was never able to get movies or roles of the same quality that he'd been offered in the early '50s. He did two more series, King of Diamonds and The Interns, and did play the title role in Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which attracted some offbeat notice; otherwise, Crawford's work during his final 30 years of acting involved roles as routine as the ones he'd muddled through while trying for his break at the other end of his career. One of his most visible screen appearances took place on television, in a 1977 episode of CHiPS that played off of his work in Highway Patrol, with Crawford making a gag appearance as himself, a motorist pulled over and cited for a moving violation by the series' motorcycle police officers.

Trivia: As a child actress, Marjorie Goodspeed was featured in such silent films as Scaramouche (1923). As a preteen, she acted and danced under the name Marjorie Moore in musicals like Collegiate (1935). Billed as Marjorie Reynolds from 1937 onward, she played bits in A-pictures like Gone With the Wind (1939) and co-starred in several bread-and-butter epics produced by such minor studios as Monogram and Republic. Her first leading role of consequence was as the dauntless girl reporter in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. Lightening her hair to blonde, Reynolds was signed by Paramount in 1942, getting off to a good start in Holiday Inn as the girl to whom Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas." She was also shown to good advantage in the Fritz Lang thriller Ministry of Fear (1944) before Paramount dropped her option in 1946. Her oddest assignment in her immediate post-Paramount years was as a Revolutionary-era ghost in Abbott and Costello's The Time of Their Lives (1946). In 1953, she replaced Rosemary DeCamp in the role of Mrs. Riley in the popular sitcom The Life of Riley, remaining with the series until its cancellation in 1958. After this lengthy engagement, Marjorie Reynolds was seen in character parts in such TV series as Leave It to Beaver and Our Man Higgins. Reynolds died of congestive heart failure in Manhattan Beach, CA, at the age of 76.

Trivia: Actor Barry Sullivan was a theater usher and department store employee at the time he made his first Broadway appearance in 1936. His "official" film debut was in the 1943 Western Woman of the Town, though in fact Sullivan had previously appeared in a handful of two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios in the late '30s. A bit too raffish to be a standard leading man, Sullivan was better served in tough, aggressive roles, notably the title character in 1947's The Gangster and the boorish Tom Buchanan in the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. One of his better film assignments of the 1950s was as the Howard Hawks-style movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Sullivan continued appearing in movie roles of varying importance until 1978. A frequent visitor to television, Barry Sullivan starred as Sheriff Pat Garrett in the 1960s Western series The Tall Man, and was seen as the hateful patriarch Marcus Hubbard in a 1972 PBS production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.

Trivia: Nicknamed "Big Boy" by his friend and frequent coworker Will Rogers, beefy Western star Guinn Williams was the son of a Texas congressman. After attending North Texas State College, Williams played pro baseball and worked as a rodeo rider before heading to Hollywood in his teens to try his luck in films. While he starred in several inexpensive silent and sound Westerns, Williams is better known for his comedy relief work in such films as Private Worlds (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Professor Beware (1938), and Santa Fe Trail (1940). "Big Boy" Williams is also a familiar name to devotees of Orson Welles; it was Williams who once accosted Welles in a parking lot and cut off the "boy wonder's" necktie.

Trivia: A law student at the University of Madrid, Fortunio Bonanova switched his major to music at Madrid's Real Conservatory and the Paris Conservatory. Bonanova inaugurated his operatic career as a baritone at the age of 17. By age 21 he was in films, producing, directing and starring in a silent production of Don Juan (1921). He spent most of the 1920s singing at the Paris opera and writing books, plays and short stories; he arrived in America in 1930 to co-star with Katherine Cornell on Broadway. At the invitation of his friend Orson Welles, Bononova portrayed the feverish singing teacher Signor Matisti in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Fortunio Bonanova remained gainfully employed in Hollywood as a character actor into the early 1960s.

Trivia: After stock experience in New England and a starring role in a Broadway flop, American actor John Kellogg was selected to play the lead in the road company of the long-running service comedy Brother Rat. He continued working steadily on stage until interrupted by World War II service. After a smattering of movie exposure at other studios, Kellogg signed a Columbia contract in 1946. Good-looking and dependable enough for secondary roles but not quite star material, Kellogg was seen in such films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1945), Johnny O'Clock (1947) and 12 O'Clock High (1949).

Trivia: It was once said of the versatile Louis Jean Heydt that he played everything except a woman. Born in New Jersey, the blonde, chiseled-featured Heydt attended Worcester Academy and Dartmouth College. He briefly served as a reporter on the New YorkWorld before opting for a stage career. Among his Broadway appearances was the lead in Preston Sturges' Strictly Dishonorable, establishing a long working relationship with Sturges that would extend to the latter's film productions The Great McGinty (1940) and The Great Moment (1942). Heydt's film characters often seemed destined to be killed off before the fourth reel, either because they were hiding something or because they'd just stumbled upon important information that could prove damaging to the villains. He was knocked off in the first three minutes of Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) and was shot full of holes just before revealing an important plot point to Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) (this after an unforgettable interrogation scene in which Heydt is unable to look Bogart straight in the eye). Heydt's many other assignments include the hungry soldier in Gone with the Wind (1939), Mentor Graham in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), a frustrated general practitioner in Tortilla Flat (1941), a squadron leader in Gung Ho (1943) and a loquacious rural family man in Come to the Stable (1949). Our Gang fans will recall Heydt as Bobby Blake's stepfather in the MGM "Gang" shorts Dad For a Day (1939) and All About Hash (1940). A ubiquitous TV actor, Louis Jean Heydt was seen on many anthology series, and as a semi-regular on the 1958 syndicated adventure weekly MacKenzie's Raiders.

Trivia: A B-Western starlet, Virginia Carroll (née Broberg) sometimes played the heroine -- Oklahoma Terror (1939), opposite Jack Randall, and Johnny Mack Brown's Triggerman (1948) -- but more often than not appeared further down the cast list as the leading lady's sister or a saloon belle. Carroll did her fair share of serials, including G-Men vs. the Black Dragon (1943) and The Crimson Ghost (1946) but, again, never played the heroine. In fact, she was Martha Kent in the 15-chapter Superman (1948). Carroll continued to appear in small roles through 1959. She was married to actor Ralph Byrd, the screen's original Dick Tracy.

Trivia: American actor Dick Wessel had a face like a Mack Truck bulldog and a screen personality to match. After several years on stage, Wessel began showing up in Hollywood extra roles around 1933; he is fleetingly visible in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), and the Columbia "screwball" comedy She Couldn't Take It (1935). The size of his roles increased in the '40s; perhaps his best feature-film showing was as the eponymous bald-domed master criminal in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). He was a valuable member of Columbia Pictures' short subject stock company, playing a variety of bank robbers, wrestlers, jealous husbands and lazy brother-in-laws. Among his more memorable 2-reel appearances were as lovestruck boxer "Chopper" in The Three Stooges' Fright Night (1947), Andy Clyde's invention-happy brother-in-law in Eight Ball Andy (1948), and Hugh Herbert's overly sensitive strongman neighbor in Hot Heir (1947). Wessel was shown to good (if unbilled) advantage as a handlebar-mustached railroad engineer in the superspectacular Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and had a regular role as Carney on the 1959 TV adventure series Riverboat. Dick Wessel's farewell screen appearance was as a harried delivery man in Disney's The Ugly Dachshund (1965).

Trivia: Brassy, bleached-blonde Claire Carleton was a reliable supporting actress on Broadway, in films and on TV for nearly thirty years. Carleton's New York stage credits include The Body Beautiful, 20th Century and The Women. In films, she was usually cast as"B"-girls, strippers, gum-chewing manicurists and divorce correspondents: her character names were generally along the lines of Mamie, Tessie, Nellie or simply "The Blonde." She was afforded leading roles in the two-reelers of such comedians as The Three Stooges and Leon Errol, entering into the slapstick proceedings with relish and abandon: in the 1946 Columbia short Headin' for a Weddin', Carleton has a light bulb broken in her mouth, and in the final scene engages in a knock-down, drag-out fight with star Vera Vague. A frequent TV performer, Claire Carleton co-starred as Mickey Rooney's mother (she was eight years older than he!) in the 1955 sitcom Hey, Mulligan!, and played Alice Purdy on the 1958 western Cimarron City.

Trivia: New York-born actor Ted Hecht (also sometimes billed as Theodore Hecht) got his start in theater, and eventually moved up to the Broadway stage, where he worked in such plays as Congai (1928), The Great Man (1931), and Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935). Hecht made the move into motion pictures at the start of the 1940s in small uncredited roles -- with his dark, intense features and rough voice, he was quickly typed into playing "foreign" roles, often with a sinister edge, in movies at every stratum of Hollywood. In So Proudly We Hail! (1943), he played Dr. Jose Bardia, while in the Katharine Hepburn/Walter Huston vehicle Dragon Seed (1944), he portrayed Major Yohagi; he was Prince Ozira in Tarzan and the Huntress (1947), and Lieutenant Sarac in Istanbul (1957). Hecht was also heavily employed on television, again in exotic and sometimes nefarious parts. In three episodes of The Adventures of Superman he portrayed (East) Indians and Arabs, while he played Chinese characters in episodes of Terry and the Pirates. Hecht normally did one-shot appearances that didn't allow him much in the opportunities to develop his characters or his portrayals. The big exception in his career came during his work on the series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, where he appeared in seven episodes, portraying the notorious interplanetary outlaw and pirate Pinto Vortando. His work was, by turns, broad, sinister, and charming, a mix of stereotyped Mexican bandito with a little bit of Long John Silver thrown in, but it did evolve across the series. He starts out as a one-dimensional bad guy but convincingly softens from his contact with the youngest of the heroes, the boy space traveler Bobby (Robert Lyden), and, by his seventh episode, becomes one of the series' most likable villains, a rogue with a twinkle of goodness in his eye that he can't stamp out but must live with. Even 40 years later, watching the series, one couldn't help but be impressed with what he did with the one- (okay, maybe one-and-a-half-) dimensional role. Hecht retired at the end of the 1950s, and passed away in 1969.

Trivia: The younger brother of actress Jobyna Howland, Olin Howland established himself on Broadway in musical comedy. The actor made his film debut in 1918, but didn't really launch his Hollywood career until the talkie era. Generally cast as rustic characters, Howland could be sly or slow-witted, depending on the demands of the role. He showed up in scores of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, most amusingly as the remonstrative Dr. Croker (sic) in The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934). A favorite of producer David O. Selznick, Howland played the laconic baggage man in Nothing Sacred (1937), the grim, hickory-stick wielding schoolmaster in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and an expansive Yankee businessman in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1940s, he could often as not be found at Republic, appearing in that studio's westerns and hillbilly musicals. One of his best screen assignments of the 1950s was the old derelict who kept shouting "Make me sergeant in charge of booze!" in the classic sci-fier Them (1954). Howland made several TV guest appearances in the 1950s, and played the recurring role of Swifty on the weekly Circus Boy (1956). In the latter stages of his career, Olin Howland billed himself as Olin Howlin; he made his final appearance in 1958, as the first victim of The Blob.

Trivia: There's a bit of a cloud surrounding the origins of character actor Harry Cording. The 1970 biographical volume The Versatiles lists his birthplace as New York City, while the exhaustive encyclopedia Who Was Who in Hollywood states that Cording was born in England. Whatever the case, Cording made his mark from 1925 through 1955 in distinctly American roles, usually portraying sadistic western bad guys. A break from his domestic villainy occurred in the 1934 Universal horror film The Black Cat, in which a heavily-made-up Harry Cording played the foreboding, zombie-like servant to Satan-worshipping Boris Karloff.

Trivia: Versatile character actor Lucien Littlefield attended a military academy before making his first stage appearance at the age of 17, and his first film in 1913. Short and balding even in his teens, Littlefield began impersonating old men before he was of voting age. In 1925, he played the grizzled comedy relief sidekick of William S. Hart (27 years Littlefield's senior!) in Tumbleweeds; three years later he portrayed the sore-footed father of Mary Pickford (born two years before Littlefield) in My Best Girl. His most memorable silent role was as the menacing red-herring doctor in the "old dark house" mystery The Cat and the Canary (1927). When talkies came in, Littlefield was able to provide a fresh new voice for each characterization. He starred in his own Vitaphone short subjects series, The Potters, and played roles both large and small in any number of feature films. He was veterinarian Horace Meddick in Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert (1934), a prissy office manager in W.C. Fields' The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), the snobbish Belknap-Jackson in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), and an ancient rustic sheriff in Whistling in Brooklyn (1942). In Paramount's Henry Aldrich "B"-picture series of the 1940s, Littlefield played the recurring role of ill-tempered schoolteacher Mr. Crosley. He also wrote several screenplays, most notably the Charlie Ruggles/Mary Boland vehicle Early to Bed (1936). Reversing the usual process, Lucien Littlefield's characters became younger as he grew older, as witness his spirited performances on such TV series as Superman and The Abbott and Costello Show.

Trivia: When actor Robert H. Barrat moved from stage to films in the early 1930s, he found himself twice blessed: He was dignified-looking enough to portray business and society types, but also athletic enough to get down and dirty in barroom-brawl scenes. An ardent physical-fitness advocate in real life, Barrat was once described by his friend and frequent co-worker James Cagney as having "a solid forearm the size of the average man's thigh"; as a result, the usually cautious Cagney was extra careful during his fight scenes with the formidable Barrat. The actor's size and menacing demeanor served him well when pitted against such comparatively pint-sized comedians as the Marx Bros. (in Go West). When not intimidating one and all with his muscle power, the actor was fond of playing roles that called for quaint, colorful accents, notably his Lionel Barrymore-ish turn as a suicidal baron in the 1934 Grand Hotel derivation Wonder Bar. Robert H. Barrat's last film appearance was in the rugged western Tall Man Riding (55).

Trivia: Six-foot-tall American actor Rory Mallinson launched his screen career at the end of WW II. Mallinson was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1945, making his first appearance in Price of the Marines. In 1947, he began free-lancing at Republic, Columbia and other "B"-picture mills. One of his larger roles was Hodge in the 1952 Columbia serial Blackhawk. Rory Mallinson made his last film in 1963.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Strappingly handsome leading man Grant Withers worked as an oil company salesman and newspaper reporter before he turned to acting in 1926. One of the more popular second echelon stars of the early '30s, Withers was unable to sustain his celebrity. By the end of the 1930s, Withers was pretty much limited to character roles and bits, with such notable exceptions as the recurring role of the brash Lt. Street in Monogram's Mr. Wong series. In 1930, Withers eloped with 17-year-old actress Loretta Young, but the marriage was later annulled. Some of Withers' later screen appearances were arranged through the auspices of his friends John Ford and John Wayne. Grant Withers committed suicide in 1959, leaving behind a note in which he apologized to all the people he'd let down during his Hollywood days.