Trivia: Direct from the University of Michigan, actress Martha Scott made her first professional appearance with the Globe Theatre troupe, performing abridged versions of Shakespeare at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair. Scott then worked extensively in stock and on radio before making her celebrated Broadway bow as Emily Webb in the original 1938 production of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning Our Town. She repeated the role of Emily in the 1940 film version, earning an Oscar nomination despite the fact that the film's tacked-on happy ending rendered Scott's famous "back from the dead" monologue pointless. Scott's subsequent film assignments, notably Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) and One Foot in Heaven (1941), found her portraying characters far older than herself with total credibility. Having previously played both the wife and the sister of Charlton Heston (nine years her junior) on stage and TV, Scott portrayed Heston's mother on the big screen in The Ten Commandments (1955) and Ben-Hur (1959). Her television resumé includes the 1954 anthology Modern Romance, which she hosted, and the roles of Mrs. Patricia Shepard and Margaret Millington in, respectively, Dallas and Secrets of Midland Heights. Her most intriguing TV assignment was the 1987 Murder She Wrote episode "Strangest of Bargains," wherein, with the help of extensive stock footage, Scott, Jeffrey Lynn and Harry Morgan reprised their roles from the 1949 film Strange Bargain. Dabbling in producing in the 1970s, Scott served as co-producer of the 1978 Broadway play First Monday in October, functioning in the same capacity when the play was turned into a film in 1981. Martha Scott was married for many years to musician Mel Powell.

Trivia: Actor William Gargan began his career in 1924, shortly after leaving high school, and made it to Broadway within a year. In 1932 he won great acclaim for his work in the play The Animal Kingdom, leading to an invitation from Hollywood where he made his film debut in 1932. During the '30s he played high-energy, gregarious leads in many "B"-movies and second leads in major films; later he moved into character roles. For his work in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he received a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination. He made few films after 1948, but from 1949 to 1951 he starred in the title role of the TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye then reprised the role in 1957 in The New Adventures of Martin Kane. He was stricken by cancer of the larynx, and in 1960 his voice box was removed in surgery, ending his career. He learned esophageal speech then taught this method for the American Cancer Society; the same group enlisted him as an anti-smoking campaigner. Two years after losing his speech, he gave his final performance, portraying a mute clown on TV in King of Diamonds. He authored an autobiography, Why Me? (1969), recounting his struggle with cancer. His brother was actor Edward Gargan.

Trivia: The son of a traveling British civil servant, Edmund Gwenn was ordered to leave his home at age 17 when he announced his intention to become an actor. Working throughout the British empire in a variety of theatrical troupes, Gwenn finally settled in London in 1902 when he was personally selected by playwright George Bernard Shaw for a role in Shaw's Man and Superman. Thanks to Shaw's sponsorship, Gwenn rapidly established himself as one of London's foremost character stars, his career interrupted only by military service during World War I. Gwenn's film career, officially launched in 1916, took a back seat to his theatrical work for most of his life; still, he was a favorite of both American and British audiences for his portrayals of blustery old men, both comic and villainous. At age 71, Gwenn was cast as Kris Kringle, a lovable old eccentric who imagined that he was Santa Claus, in the comedy classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947); his brilliant portrayal was honored with an Academy Award and transformed the veteran actor into an "overnight" movie star. Edmund Gwenn died shortly after making his final film, an oddball Mexican comedy titled The Rocket From Calabuch (1958); one of his surviving family members his cousin Cecil Kellaway, was a respected character actor in his own right.

Trivia: Sixteen-year-old Alabaman Mary Anderson made her first screen appearance as Maybelle Meriweather in Gone With the Wind (1939). As a 20th Century-Fox contractee in the mid-1940s, she was seen in Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1943) and in the lavish biopic Wilson (1944). She ended her film career in 1953, occasionally reemerging on television, notably in the role of Catherine Harrington on the prime-time soaper Peyton Place. Mary Anderson was married to cinematographer Leon Shamroy, whom she met on the set of Wilson. She passed away three days after turning 96, in 2014.

Trivia: Famed for his country-bumpkin features and fruity vocal intonations, American actor Sterling Holloway left his native Georgia as a teenager to study acting in New York City. Working through the Theatre Guild, the young Holloway was cast in the first Broadway production of songwriters Rodgers and Hart, Garrick Gaieties. In the 1925 edition of the revue, Holloway introduced the Rodgers-Hart standard "I'll Take Manhattan;" in the 1926 version, the actor introduced another hit, "Mountain Greenery." Hollywood beckoned, and Holloway made a group of silent two-reelers and one feature, the Wallace Beery vehicle Casey at the Bat (1927), before he was fired by the higher-ups because they deemed his face "too grotesque" for movies. Small wonder that Holloway would insist in later years that he was never satisfied with any of the work Hollywood would throw his way, and longed for the satisfaction of stage work. When talkies came, Holloway's distinctive voice made him much in demand, and from 1932 through the late '40s he became the archetypal soda jerk, messenger boy, and backwoods rube. His most rewarding assignments came from Walt Disney Studios, where Holloway provided delightful voiceovers for such cartoon productions as Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Ben and Me (1954) and The Jungle Book (1967). Holloway's most enduring role at Disney was as the wistful voice of Winnie the Pooh in a group of mid-'60s animated shorts. On the "live" front, Holloway became fed up of movie work one day when he found his character being referred to as "boy" - and he was past forty at the time. A few satisfactory film moments were enjoyed by Holloway as he grew older; he starred in an above-average series of two reel comedies for Columbia Pictures from 1946 to 1948 (in one of these, 1948's Flat Feat, he convincingly and hilariously impersonated a gangster), and in 1956 he had what was probably the most bizarre assignment of his career when he played a "groovy" hipster in the low-budget musical Shake, Rattle and Rock (1956). Holloway worked prodigiously in TV during the '50s and '60s as a regular or semi-regular on such series as The Life of Riley, Adventures of Superman and The Baileys of Balboa. Edging into retirement in the '70s, Sterling Holloway preferred to stay in his lavish hilltop house in San Laguna, California, where he maintained one of the most impressive and expensive collections of modern paintings in the world.

Trivia: Sidney Blackmer had planned to study law at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, but football and amateur theatricals held more interest for him. Heading east to make his fortune as an actor, Blackmer accepted day work at various film studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, reportedly appearing in the pioneering Pearl White serial The Perils of Pauline (1914). After making his Broadway bow in 1917, Blackmer served as a lieutenant in World War I. His starmaking stage role was the title character in 1921's The Mountain Man. Eager to have a go at all branches of entertainment, Blackmer sang on radio in the 1920s, and participated in the first experimental dramatic presentations of the Allen B. DuMont television series. In films, Blackmer was usually cast as a smooth society villain, e.g. "The Big Boy" in the 1931 gangster flick Little Caesar. He appeared in both sinister and sympathetic roles in a handful of Shirley Temple pictures, and also starred as pulp-novel detective Thatcher Colt in the 1943 programmer The Panther's Claw. Blackmer is best remembered for his portrayals of President Theodore Roosevelt in over a dozen films, including This is My Affair (1937) and My Girl Tisa (1947). In 1950, Blackmer won the Tony award for his portrayal of the drink-sodden "Doc" in the William Inge play Come Back Little Sheba; he later created the role of Boss Finley in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. For several years, Blackmer served as the national vice president of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Sidney Blackmer was married twice, to actresses Lenore Ulric and Suzanne Kaaren.

Trivia: Stage actress Dorothy Peterson made her screen debut in 1930's Mothers Cry, a lachrymose domestic drama that required the 29-year-old actress to age nearly three decades in the course of the film. Mothers Cry instantly typecast Peterson in careworn maternal roles, which she continued to essay for the rest of her career. Most of her subsequent film assignments were supporting roles like Mrs. Hawkins in Treasure Island (1934); often as not she received no screen credit, not even for her touching cameo in 1943's Air Force. In 1942, she briefly replaced Olive Blakeney as Mrs. Aldrich in the comedy series entry Henry Aldrich for President. Her last screen appearance was as Shirley Temple's mother in That Hagen Girl (1947). Dorothy Peterson remained active on the New York TV and theatrical scene until the early '60s.

Trivia: Actor Donald Douglas came to Hollywood in 1934 to play the small role of "Mac" in the film version of Sidney Kingsley's Men in White (1934). Though occasionally a villain, the Scottish-born Douglas was usually cast in bland good-guy roles (e.g. his portrayal of the dull detective at odds with Dick Powell's Philip Marlowe in 1944's Murder My Sweet). One of his few leading roles in film was the title character in the Columbia serial Deadwood Dick (1940). Douglas was given more of a chance to shine on radio; in the 1943 Mutual network mystery anthology Black Castle, Douglas played all the parts, including the announcer. Donald Douglas died suddenly at the age of 40, not long after completing work on Gilda (1946), in which he played Thomas Langford.

Trivia: American actress Marsha Hunt, born Marcia Hunt, attended the Theodore Irving School of Dramatics while still a teenager. Simultaneously, she worked as a Powers model until she debuted onscreen in The Virginia Judge (1935) at age 18. Hunt went on to become a very busy screen actress through the early '50s. In the '30s she appeared in supporting roles such as bridesmaids and coeds, while in the '40s she played leads in second features and second leads and supporting roles in major productions. In the early '50s, during the heyday of the McCarthy Era "witch hunts," she was blacklisted by the studios for her liberal political beliefs, and after 1952 she appeared in only a handful of films, as well as the TV series Peck's Bad Girl. Through the '80s, however, she still turned up occasionally in character roles on TV. From 1938-43 she was married to editor (now director) Jerry Hopper. After 1946 she was married to movie/TV scriptwriter Robert Presnell Jr., who died in 1986. She remains active in social issues, lending her help to organizations involved with such issues as peace, poverty, population, and pollution; she is a frequent speaker on the issues that concern her, and she serves on nearly a dozen Boards of Directors. She was last onscreen in Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

Trivia: From her earliest stage work onward, American actress Rosemary DeCamp played character roles that belied her youth and fresh-scrubbed attractiveness. On radio, DeCamp developed the vocal timbre that enabled her to portray a rich variety (and age-range) of characters. A peripheral performer on One Man's Family at 21, DeCamp showed up on several radio soap operas and anthologies before settling into the role of secretary Judy Price on the Dr. Christian series in 1937. DeCamp made her film bow in Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), in which she and most of the cast were required to "age" several decades. With The Jungle Book (1941), the actress played the first of her many mother roles. The most famous examples of DeCamp's specialized film work are Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which she was the Irish-American mother of George M. Cohan (James Cagney, who was 14 years her senior), and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), in which she played George Gershwin's Jewish mother (Gershwin was impersonated by Robert Alda, who was one year younger than DeCamp). Even when playing a character close to her own age, such as the Red Cross worker in Pride of the Marines (1945), DeCamp's interest in the leading man (in this case the same-aged John Garfield) was strictly maternal. On television, DeCamp was Peg Riley to Jackie Gleason's Chester A. Riley on the original 1949 run of The Life of Riley. She also played rakish Bob Cummings' levelheaded sister Margaret in Love That Bob (1955-59), and later was seen as Marlo Thomas' mother on That Girl (1966-70). In 1965, Rosemary subbed for her old friend Ronald Reagan as host on Death Valley Days; FCC rules of the time compelled the removal of Reagan's scenes when the show was telecast in California, where he was running for governor. Upon Reagan's election, Robert Taylor took over as host, but DeCamp was installed as permanent commercial spokesperson for 20 Mule Team Borax. Semi-retired for several years, DeCamp reemerged in 1981 for a "de-campy" cameo part in the horror spoof Saturday the 14th.

Trivia: American actor John Arledge, played second leads and character roles during the '30s. Prior to coming to films he performed on vaudeville and on stage.

Trivia: Born John Mulhall, he sang with a traveling show as a boy and later toured in stock and vaudeville. He moved to New York to study art, and while there appeared in several silent films. In 1914 he moved to Los Angeles and soon became a leading man in films, starring in numerous productions opposite major actresses; for a time he earned $3000 a week, but lost his considerable fortune in the first year of the Great Depression. In the early sound era he continued to play leads for a time, mostly in routine films and serials; in the mid '30s he moved into supporting roles, and continued a fairly steady screen career through the mid '40s, after which he appeared in only a few more films.

Trivia: Stately stage leading man Howard C. Hickman entered films through the auspices of producer Thomas H. Ince. Hickman starred as Count Ferdinand, the Messianic protagonist of Ince's Civilization (1916). He co-starred with his actress wife Bessie Barriscale in several productions before returning to the theatre. In the talkie era, he accepted innumerable featured and bit roles as doctors, judges, ministers, senators, and executives. Generations of filmgoers will remember Howard Hickman for his brief appearance as John Wilkes, father of Ashley Wilkes and father-in-law of Melanie Hamilton, in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Trivia: The son of actors, William Farnum was 12 years old when he joined his parents and his brother Dustin and Marshal in the family business. Dustin (1874-1929) made it to motion-picture stardom first, as leading man of Cecil B. DeMille's first feature, 1914's The Squaw Man. That same year, William made his movie debut in another popular western, The Spoilers (1914). The climactic fight scene between Farnum and co-star Tom Santschi made stars out of both men, though only Farnum graduated to matinee-idol status. Signing with Fox films in 1915, Farnum became one of that studio's most popular leading men, thanks to such solid vehicles as Tale of Two Cities (1917), Les Miserables (1917) and If I Were King (1920). At his peak, Farnum was pulling down $10,000 dollars per week. He briefly returned to Broadway in 1925 to star in The Buccaneer. Later in 1925, Farnum suffered a serious injury on the set of The Man Who Fights Alone; as a result, he was confined to supporting roles for the rest of career. While many of these roles were sizeable (notably King Arthur in the 1931 Will Rogers version of A Connecticut Yankee), Farnum would never again recapture the glory of his silent stardom. William Farnum remained a busy character actor up until his death in 1952, often playing minor roles in remakes of his silent triumphs--including the 1942 remake of The Spoilers.

Trivia: Born and educated in Pennsylvania, John Hamilton headed to New York in his twenties to launch a 25-year stage career. Ideally cast as businessmen and officials, the silver-haired Hamilton worked opposite such luminaries as George M. Cohan and Ann Harding. He toured in the original company of the long-running Frank Bacon vehicle Lightnin', and also figured prominently in the original New York productions of Seventh Heaven and Broadway. He made his film bow in 1930, costarring with Donald Meek in a series of 2-reel S.S.Van Dyne whodunits (The Skull Mystery, The Wall St. Mystery) filmed at Vitaphone's Brooklyn studios. Vitaphone's parent company, Warner Bros., brought Hamilton to Hollywood in 1936, where he spent the next twenty years playing bits and supporting roles as police chiefs, judges, senators, generals and other authority figures. Humphrey Bogart fans will remember Hamilton as the clipped-speech DA in The Maltese Falcon (1941), while Jimmy Cagney devotees will recall Hamilton as the recruiting officer who inspires George M. Cohan (Cagney) to compose "Over There" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Continuing to accept small roles in films until the mid '50s (he was the justice of the peace who marries Marlon Brando to Teresa Wright in 1950's The Men), Hamilton also supplemented his income with a group of advertisements for an eyeglasses firm. John Hamilton is best known to TV-addicted baby boomers for his six-year stint as blustering editor Perry "Great Caesar's Ghost!" White on the Adventures of Superman series.

Trivia: Actor Pierre Watkin looked as though he was born to a family of Chase Manhattan executives. Tall, imposing, imbued with a corporate demeanor and adorned with well-trimmed white mustache, Watkin appeared to be a walking Brooks Brothers ad as he strolled through his many film assignments as bankers, lawyers, judges, generals and doctors. When director Frank Capra cast the actors playing US senators in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) using as criteria the average weight, height and age of genuine senators, Watkin fit the physical bill perfectly. Occasionally Watkin could utilize his established screen character for satirical comedy: in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, he portrayed Lompoc banker Mr. Skinner, who extended to Fields the coldest and least congenial "hearty handclasp" in movie history. Serial fans know Pierre Watkin as the actor who originated the role of bombastic Daily Planet editor Perry White in Columbia's two Superman chapter plays of the late '40s.

Trivia: Dutch-born character actor Charles Judels' expertise with dialects served him well throughout his fifty-year career. After several seasons in vaudeville, Judels made his Broadway debut as a snotty Frenchman in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1912. He went on to provide comedy relief for such stage musicals as Nobody Home (1914) and George M. Cohan's Mary (1920). In films from 1915, Judels was a fixture of the Vitaphone short-subject product in the early 1930s, starring in his own series of 2-reelers and providing support to such comedians as Jack Haley and Shemp Howard. His feature-film assignments found him playing Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Germans and Spaniards (he also served as dialogue director for 1928's Mother Knows Best, which curiously contained no dialect humor whatsoever!) Film buffs will remember Charles Judels as the cheese-store proprietor in Laurel & Hardy's 1938 effort Swiss Miss (his musical number with Stan and Ollie was, alas, left on the cutting room floor), the plot-motivating murder victim in the early "film noir" Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and the voice of Stromboli and the Coachman in the Disney cartoon feature Pinocchio (1940).

Trivia: Gangly L.A.-born Rand Brooks made his first film appearance in 1938. The following year, he gained a small niche in film history with his performance as Charles Hamilton, ill-fated first husband of Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), in Gone With the Wind (1939). He spent the next several years in Westerns, most frequently appearing as Lucky Jenkins in the Hopalong Cassidy series. On television, Brooks was seen as Corporal Boone on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1956-1958). Rand Brooks was at one time married to comedian Stan Laurel's daughter Lois, with whom he operated a successful emergency ambulance service. As the 1970s wound to a close, Brooks disappeared entirely from the screen.On September 1, 2003, the man who gave legendary bombshell Marilyn Monroe her first screen kiss died of cancer at his Santa Ynez, CA home. He was 84.

Trivia: American actor Charles Smith is best remembered for playing the wiggly eared Basil "Dizzy" Stevens in the Henry Aldrich films during the 1940s.