Trivia: A stage actress of long standing, Edythe Chapman entered films in 1915. Nearly always cast in matriarchal roles, Chapman became a favorite of director Cecil B. De Mille. She was afforded generous screen time in such De Mille productions as The Little American (1917), The Whispering Chorus (1918), Saturday Night (1922), and Manslaughter (1923). She is best remembered for her portrayal of Bible-thumping Ma MacTavish in De Mille's The Ten Commandments (1923), which featured Chapman's husband James Neill as Moses' brother Aaron in the flashback sequences. Edythe Chapman retired from films after the death of her husband in 1931.

Trivia: A former vaudevillian, Alfred Goulding entered films in 1918 as a director of Hal Roach's Harold Lloyd pictures. Goulding was then assigned to a series starring circus clown Toto, but after only five 2-reelers, Toto quit. To fill out the series, Goulding recommended a talented fellow vaudevillian named Stan Laurel. Thus began a warm friendship between Goulding and Laurel that would endure until Stan's death in 1965. Leaving Roach in the early 1920s, Goulding directed a handful of children's films like Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood, then moved on to Roach's rival Mack Sennett, where he helmed such frivolities as 1928's The Campus Vamp and The Swim Princess. In the talkie era, he worked with the Columbia short-subject unit, then spent several years making programmers in England. He returned to the Roach fold in 1939 to direct the Laurel and Hardy feature A Chump at Oxford; reportedly, it was Goulding who convinced a recalcitrant Stan Laurel to do the film's now-famous "maze" scene. After WW II, he resettled in England, where he directed such Saturday-matinee fare as Dick Barton (1948) and The Adventures of Jane (1949). One of Alfred Goulding's lengthier assignments of the 1950s went uncredited; at the request of old pal Stan Laurel, Goulding directed Laurel & Hardy's benighted final feature, the French-filmed Atoll K (aka Utopia, 1951).

Trivia: Slight, wizened British character-actor Edgar Norton entered films in 1914. Norton played a variety of aristocratic and authoritative roles during the silent era, notably Lutz in Ernst Lubitsch's Student Prince (1926). His best-remembered talkie appearance was as Henry Jekyll's faithful butler Poole in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a role he'd previously played on-stage in London and New York. Edgar Norton remained active until the early '40s, usually in bit roles but occasionally enjoying such juicy assignments as Basil Rathbone's family retainer in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Phineas Weed in House of the Seven Gables (1940).

Trivia: The younger brother of silent-film leading man Bobby Harron, John Harron began his own screen career in 1921, a year after his brother's accidental death. John most often played callow juveniles and lightweight romantic leads. His transition to talkies was a difficult one; except for worthwhile parts in such independent productions as White Zombie (1932), Harron was largely limited to nondescript minor roles. John Harron briefly rallied with a string of good character roles in Warner Bros.' "B" product of the late 1930s, but his comeback was cut short by his untimely death at the age of 37.

Trivia: Unlike her older sister Norma Talmadge, whose specialty was heavy drama, American silent film actress Constance Talmadge was most comfortable with bubbly light comedy. Beginning her career as a $5-a-day extra, Constance scored her first success as the tomboyish Mountain Girl in the Babylonian segment of director D.W. Griffith's gargantuan multi-episode production Intolerance (1916). So popular was her portrayal that, as a balm to audiences, Griffith refilmed the Moutain Girl's death scene for the Babylonian sequence when it was reissued separately in 1919 as The Fall of Babylon, allowing Talmadge a happy ending. The actress' brother-in-law, producer Joseph M. Schenck, set up the Constance Talmadge Film Company in 1917, giving her full control regarding script and costar approval. Though few of her films survive, Constance Talmadge is still remembered by her aging fans for such sprightly feature comedies as A Virtuous Vamp (1919), Polly of the Follies (1922) and Her Sister from Paris (1925), the last-mentioned film providing an early costarring opportunity for Ronald Colman. Not wishing to bother with the advent of talking pictures, Talmadge retired after shooting her last silent film, Venus (1929), in France. Too wealthy to worry about her fame passing, Constance Talmadge devoted her last years to her fourth husband and her charity work, never once entreating or even considering a movie comeback.

Trivia: Spanish actor Antonio Moreno was in films from 1912, and in the pre-1920 years had built himself up into one of the bigger stars of Vitagraph Studios. A beefy, handsome man who could spring into rugged action at the turn of a camera crank, Moreno also appeared in several silents serials, with titles like The House of Hate and Invisible Hands. Like many pioneer movie players, Moreno found his star waning in the early '20s, until the arrival of Rudolph Valentino created a demand in Hollywood for Latin Lover types. Moreno's career was revitalized, and by 1926 he was pitching woo to Greta Garbo and engaging in a bloody bullwhip duel (not with Garbo) in The Temptress. When talkies came in, Moreno was kept busy starring in Spanish-language versions of Hollywood film hits, and continued making films in his native tongue both in the USA and below the border. As an actor, Moreno was rather locked in the declamatory style of his Vitagraph days, as witness his florid performance as an amorous gypsy in Laurel and Hardy's The Bohemian Girl (1936). But he worked often, if not for the high salaries of his silent days, in character roles in such Hollywood costume epics as The Spanish Main (1945) and Captain from Castile (1948). John Ford devotees will be familiar with Moreno for his role as Emilio Figueroa in Ford's influential western epic The Searchers (1955). Antonio Moreno's final film was still another Spanish-language production, El Senora Faron y la Cleopatra (1958).

Trivia: After starting his acting career in Canadian summer stock, Nova Scotian Wallace MacDonald enlisted in the British Army during World War I. After the Armistice, MacDonald emigrated to America, where he continued his theatrical career. Making his first film in 1919, MacDonald became a moderately popular leading man, specializing in westerns after 1925. Talkies interrupted his career momentum, but MacDonald made a successful comeback in character roles in the early 1930s. In 1934, MacDonald forsook acting for writing, becoming script supervisor at the newly formed Republic Studios in 1935. One year later, he accepted a writer/producer post at Columbia Pictures. Wallace MacDonald remained a guiding force of Columbia's program westerns until the 1950s, also dabbling in early television work for Columbia's TV subsidiary Screen Gems.

Trivia: British stage actress Emily Fitzroy had two decades' experience behind her when she first appeared on screen in the 1916 version of East Lynne. Specializing in fussy, spinsterish roles, Fitzroy was prominently featured in several American productions of the 1920s, notably as Maria Poole in Griffith's Way Down East and reclusive mystery writer Cornelia Van Gorder in The Bat (1926). Her first talkie appearance was as Parthy Hawkes, the highly judgmental mother of heroine Magnolia Hawkes (Laura La Plante), in the 1929 version of Show Boat. She occasionally returned to England in the 1930s, playing such roles as Mrs. Sancho Panza in the multilingual production Don Quixote (1933). Emily Fitzroy made her last screen appearance in Forever and a Day (1943), a wartime morale-booster that called upon the talents of virtually every English-born actor in Hollywood.