Trivia: The jury is still out as to whether or not curly haired Shirley Temple was the most talented child star in movie history; there is little doubt, however, that she was the most consistently popular. The daughter of non-professionals, she started taking singing and dancing classes at the age of three, and the following year began accompanying her mother on the movie audition circuit. Hired by the two-reel comedy firm of Educational Pictures in 1933, she starred in an imitation Our Gang series called the Baby Burlesks, performing astonishingly accurate impressions of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; she was also featured in the films of Educational's other stars, including Andy Clyde and Frank Coghlan Jr. In 1934 she was signed by Fox Pictures, a studio then teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. After a handful of minor roles she created a sensation by stopping the show with her rendition of "Baby Take a Bow" in Fox's Stand Up and Cheer. She was promptly promoted to her own starring features, literally saving Fox (and its successor 20th Century Fox) from receivership, and earned a special Oscar in 1934 "in grateful recognition to her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment." With such tailor-made vehicles as Bright Eyes (1934), Curly Top (1935), The Little Colonel (1935), Dimples (1936), and Heidi (1937), Temple was not only America's number one box-office attraction, but a merchandising cash cow, inspiring an unending cascade of Shirley Temple dolls, toys, and coloring books. She also prompted other studios to develop potential Shirley Temples of their own, such as Sybil Jason and Edith Fellows (ironically, the only juvenile actress to come close to Temple's popularity was 20th Century Fox's own Jane Withers, who got her start playing a pint-sized villain in Temples' Bright Eyes). Though the Fox publicity mill was careful to foster the myth that Temple was just a "typical" child with a "normal" life, her parents carefully screened her friends and painstakingly predetermined every move she made in public. Surprisingly, she remained an unspoiled and most cooperative coworker, though not a few veteran character actors were known to blow their stacks when little Temple, possessed of a photographic memory, corrected their line readings. By 1940, Temple had outgrown her popularity, as indicated by the failure of her last Fox releases The Blue Bird and Young People. The following year, MGM, who'd originally wanted Temple to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, cast her in Kathleen, another box-office disappointment which ended her MGM association almost before it began. Under the auspices of producers Edward Small and David O. Selznick, Temple enjoyed modest success as a teenaged actress in such productions as 1942's Miss Annie Rooney (in which Dickie Moore gave her first screen kiss) and 1944's Since You Went Away. Still, the public preferred to remember the Shirley Temple that was, reacting with horror when she played sexually savvy characters in Kiss and Tell (1945) and That Hagen Girl (1947). Perhaps the best of her post-child star roles was spunky army brat Philadelphia Thursday in John Ford's Fort Apache (1947), in which she co-starred with her first husband, actor John Agar (the union broke up after four years when Agar began to resent being labeled "Mr. Shirley Temple"). She returned to 20th Century Fox for her last film, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), in which played second fiddle to star Clifton Webb. Retiring on her trust fund in 1950, she wed a second time to business executive Charles Black, a marriage that would endure for several decades and produce a number of children. In 1958 she made a comeback as host of The Shirley Temple Storybook, a well-received series of children's TV specials. Her final show business assignment was the weekly 1960 anthology The Shirley Temple Show, which though not a success enabled her to play a variety of character roles -- including a toothless old witch in an hour-long adaptation of Babes in Toyland! The staunchly Republican Temple went into an entirely different field of endeavor when she entered politics in the mid-'60s. The bitter taste of an unsuccessful congressional bid was dissipated in 1968 when she was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ghana (1974-1976) and Czechoslovakia (1989), and during the Ford and Carter years kept busy as the U.S. Chief of Protocol. In the 1980s, she went public with information about her mastectomy, providing hope and inspiration for other victims of breast cancer. Still one of the most beloved figures in the world, Temple seemingly went to great pains to dispel her goody two-shoes image in her candid 1988 autobiography Child Star, in which she cast a frequently jaundiced eye on her lifelong celebrity status, revealing among other things that several well-known Hollywood moguls had tried and failed to force their manhood upon her once she was of legal age (and even before!). Temple received several lifetime achievement awards towards the end of her life, including the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the SAG life achievement award in 2005. She died in 2014, at the age of 85.

Trivia: Orphaned as a child, Colorado-born Spring Byington became a professional actress with the Elitch Garden stock company at age 14. Even as a young woman, Ms. Byington specialized in portraying middle-aged dowagers, fussbudgets, flibbertigibbets and small-town gossips. Her first Broadway success was in the role of Louella Parsons clone Helen Hobart in Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime (1930). Three years later, she made her film debut as Marmee in Little Women. Her myriad of film credits included You Can't Take It With You (1938), for which she was Oscar-nominated. Her TV acting credits include her portrayal of Lily Ruskin on the popular sitcom December Bride, which ran from 1954 through 1959; she then rather unexpectedly popped up as a regular on a western, Laramie. One of Spring Byington's last performances was as society dowager "J. Pauline Spaghetti" on a 1967 episode of Batman.

Trivia: Though a British subject through and through, actor Nigel Bruce was born in Mexico while his parents were on vacation there. His education was interrupted by service in World War I, during which he suffered a leg injury and was confined to a wheelchair for the duration. At the end of the war, Bruce pursued an acting career, making his stage debut in The Creaking Door (1920). A stint in British silent pictures began in 1928, after which Bruce divided his time between stage and screen, finally settling in Hollywood in 1934 (though he continued to make sporadic appearances in such British films as The Scarlet Pimpernel). Nigel's first Hollywood picture was Springtime for Henry (1934), and soon he'd carved a niche for himself in roles as bumbling, befuddled middle-aged English gentlemen. It was this quality which led Bruce to being cast as Sherlock Holmes' companion Dr. Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), a pleasurable assignment in that the film's Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was one of Bruce's oldest and closest friends. While Bruce's interpretation of Watson is out of favor with some Holmes purists (who prefer the more intelligent Watson of the original Conan Doyle stories), the actor played the role in 14 feature films, successfully cementing the cinema image of Sherlock's somewhat slower, older compatriot - even though he was in fact three years younger than Rathbone. Bruce continued to play Dr. Watson on a popular Sherlock Holmes radio series, even after Rathbone had deserted the role of Holmes in 1946. Bruce's last film role was in the pioneering 3-D feature, Bwana Devil (1952). He fell ill and died in 1953, missing the opportunity to be reunited with Basil Rathbone in a Sherlock Holmes theatrical production.

Trivia: Sloe-eyed character actress whose icy persona lent itself to the portrayal of villainous women, Sondergaard took up acting after college, paying her dues with several years in stock and then reaching Broadway in the late '20s. In 1930 she married director Herbert Biberman, whom she followed to Hollywood in the mid 1930s. Reluctantly, she accepted a role in Anthony Adverse (1936), her screen debut; for her work she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (the first ever awarded). For the next decade-plus she specialized in playing evil women, though occasionally her characters were warm-hearted. In the late '40s she became yet another victim of the Red Scare witch hunts -- her husband was one of the "Hollywood Ten" sentenced to prison terms following appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and neither he nor she could get any more work. Sondergaard returned to acting in 1965 with Woman, an off-Broadway one-woman show. Her first film appearance in 20 years was in Slaves (1969) -- the last film her husband ever directed. After Slaves she appeared in two more movies throughout the next fifteen years.

Trivia: After a considerable career on stage as an actor and director, Dublin-born Edwin Maxwell made his screen debut as Baptista in the Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford version of Taming of the Shrew (1929). The stocky, balding Maxwell spent the 1930s specializing in oily bureaucrats, crooked businessmen and shyster lawyers. Once in a while, he'd play a sympathetic role, notably the scrupulously honest Italian-American detective in Scarface. More often (especially in the films of director Frank Capra), his characters existed merely as an easily deflatable foil. One of Maxwell's most flamboyant performances was as the maniacal serial killer, in Night of Terror(1933), who rose from the dead at fade-out time to warn the audience not to reveal the end of the film or else! Essaying more benign characters in 1940s, he was seen as William Jennings Bryan in Wilson (1944) and as Oscar Hammerstein in The Jolson Story (1946). From 1939 to 1942, Maxwell served as dialogue director for the films of Cecil B. DeMille. Edwin Maxwell holds the distinction of appearing in four Academy Award-winning films: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and You Can't Take It With You (1938).

Trivia: The living image of the man on the Monopoly cards, Thurston Hall began his six-decade acting career on the New England stock-company circuit. Forming his own troupe, Hall toured America, Africa and New Zealand. On Broadway, he was starred in such venerable productions as Ben-Hur and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. In films from 1915, Hall appeared in dozens of silents, notably the 1917 Theda Bara version of Cleopatra, in which he played Mark Antony. After 15 years on Broadway, Hall returned to films in 1935, spending the next 20 years portraying many a fatuous businessman, pompous politician, dyspeptic judge or crooked "ward heeler." From 1953 through 1955, Hall was seen as the choleric bank president Mr. Schuyler on the TV sitcom Topper. Towards the end of his life, a thinner, goateed Thurston Hall appeared in several TV commercials as the Kentucky-colonel spokesman for a leading chicken pot pie manufacturer.

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: The lengthy screen career of actress Claire DuBrey got under way in 1917. Alternating between leading roles and choice character parts, DuBrey appeared in such major productions as The Sea Hawk (1924). When talkies came in, she could be seen in dozens of minor roles as waitresses, nurses, landladies and Native Americans. She also played three of the least fortunate wives in screen history: the raving Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934), Mrs. Bob "Dirty Little Coward" Ford in Jesse James (1939), and Emma Smith, widow of slain Mormon leader Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Frontiersman (1940). A busy television performer, DuBrey was a regular during the 1953-54 season of The Ray Bolger Show. Retiring in 1958 at the age of 76, Claire DuBrey died in 1993, just a month shy of her 101st birthday.

Trivia: Trained in prep school for a career as a businessman, Baltimore-born Russell Hicks chucked his predestined lifestyle for a theatrical career, over the protests of his family. As an actor, Hicks came full circle, spending the bulk of his career playing businessmen! Though he claimed to have appeared in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), Hicks' earliest recorded Hollywood job occured in 1920, when he was hired as an assistant casting director for Famous Players (later Paramount). Making his stage debut in It Pays to Smile, Hicks acted in stock companies and on Broadway before his official film bow in 1934's Happiness Ahead. The embodiment of the small-town business booster or chairman of the board, the tall, authoritative Hicks frequently used his dignified persona to throw the audience off guard in crooked or villainous roles. He was glib confidence man J. Frothingham Waterbury in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940) ("I want to be honest with you in the worst way!"), and more than once he was cast as the surprise killer in murder mysteries. Because of his robust, athletic physique, Hicks could also be seen as middle-aged adventurers, such as one of The Three Musketeers in the 1939 version of that classic tale, and as the aging Robin Hood in 1946's Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946). Russell Hicks continued accepting film assignments until 1956's Seventh Cavalry.

Trivia: German-born vaudeville entertainer Al Shean entered show business folklore as one-half of the comedy team of Gallagher and Shean. Few people can remember the team's jokes or routines, but many can recite from memory the duo's signature song, "Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher? Postively, Mr. Shean." Of more significance to the film world, Shean was the younger brother of Minnie Marx, who in turn was the mother of the Marx Brothers. When the merry Marxes were struggling in vaudeville in the World War I years, it was Uncle Al Shean who wrote several of the team's best and most popular sketches; he also decided that Harpo Marx would be a more effective comedian if he didn't try to speak on stage. The Marx Brothers returned the favor by seeing to it that the aging, impecunious Al Shean was cast in substantial character roles in such MGM films as San Francisco (1936), The Great Waltz (1938), and Ziegfeld Girl (1941).

Trivia: Best known for his association with the acclaimed, long-running television comedy/drama M*A*S*H, director Gene Reynolds started out as a juvenile actor. He made his debut at age 11 when he was cast as Bobby Smith in the comedy Thank You, Jeeves (1936). He continued his career as a supporting actor through the late '50s. Reynolds began directing television shows in 1958 and became a producer a decade later. In 1972 he created M*A*S*H, which he based on Robert Altman's adaptation of Richard Hooker's satirical novel. He and writer Larry Gelbert produced the show for its first four years and then Reynolds served as co-executive producer with Gelbert for the fifth year and then left the series to executive produce Lou Grant (1977). Since then Reynolds has only been sporadically involved in producing and directing.

Trivia: Actor Stanley Andrews moved from the stage to the movies in the mid 1930s, where at first he was typed in steadfast, authoritative roles. The tall, mustachioed Adrews became familiar to regular moviegoers in a string of performances as ship's captains, doctors, executives, military officials and construction supervisors. By the early 1950s, Andrews had broadened his range to include grizzled old western prospectors and ageing sheriffs. This led to his most lasting contribution to the entertainment world: the role of the Old Ranger on the long-running syndicated TV series Death Valley Days. Beginning in 1952, Andrews introduced each DVD episode, doing double duty as commercial pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax; he also became a goodwill ambassador for the program and its sponsor, showing up at county fairs, supermarket openings and charity telethons. Stanley Andrews continued to portray the Old Ranger until 1963, when the US Borax company decided to alter its corporate image with a younger spokesperson -- a 51-year-old "sprout" named Ronald Reagan.

Trivia: A native of Capetown, South Africa, actress Sybil Jason appeared in several American films during the 1930s. She made her debut as a child in the British film Barnacle Bill in the early 1930s. A talented girl, Warner Brothers signed a contract and brought her to Hollywood in 1935 in hopes of usurping the reign of the town's current little princess Shirley Temple. Unfortunately, Jason, despite her considerable abilities, failed to capture American hearts and ended up relegated to small roles in Temple films. She temporarily relocated to South Africa following The Blue Bird, but by then WWII had broken out. When it finally ended, and Jason returned to America, she was well on her way to adulthood and had diffculty reviving her initial screen popularity. Instead, she married, started a family, and authored two musical shows and - eventually - an autobiography. Jason died in August 2011.

Trivia: One of the first stars to emerge from the old Edison film company, Canadian-born actor Edward Earle had toured in vaudeville and stock before settling on movies in 1915. The blonde, muscular Earle quickly rose to the rank of romantic lead in films like Ranson's Folly (1915), The Gates of Eden (1916), and East Lynne (1921). In the '20s he could be seen supporting such luminaries as George Arliss (The Man Who Played God [1922]) and Lillian Gish (The Wind [1928]). In talkies, Earle became a character player. Though his voice was resonant and his handsome features still intact, he often as not played unbilled bits, in everything from prestige pictures (Magnificent Obsession [1935]) to B-items (Laurel and Hardy's The Dancing Masters [1943] and Nothing but Trouble [1944]). In Beware of Blondie, Earle assumed the role of Dagwood's boss, Mr. Dithers -- but his back was turned to the camera and his voice was dubbed by the Blondie series' former Dithers, Jonathan Hale. Earle's best sound opportunities came in Westerns and serials; in the latter category, he was one of the characters suspected of being the diabolical Rattler in Ken Maynard's Mystery Mountain (1934). Edward Earle retired to the Motion Picture Country Home in the early '60s, where he died at age 90 in 1972.

Trivia: Born in the waning months of the Civil War, Jessie Ralph made her stage debut with a Providence, RI, stock company in 1880. Her extensive Broadway experience ranged from Shakespearean classics to George M. Cohan musicals. She had appeared in films as early as 1915, but did not become a permanent Hollywood resident until 1933. For the most part, Ralph was cast as kindly grandmas, sagacious maids, and stern but loving governesses; her finest screen performances included Peggoty in 1934's David Copperfield and a benign sorceress in 1940's The Blue Bird. Her gift for exuding imperious abrasiveness was amply demonstrated in such films as After the Thin Man (1936), and W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick (1940), appearing in the latter as Fields' gorgon mother-in-law, Mrs. Hermisillio Brunch. Jessie Ralph retired in 1941 after enduring a leg amputation.

Trivia: Satanic-featured British actor Brandon Hurst was once singled out by a prominent film historian as one of the five finest villains of the silent screen. He started out as a Philology student, gravitating to the stage in the 1880s. He was 50 years old at the time of his first film appearance in Via Wireless (1916), and 54 when he portrayed the first in his gallery of memorable screen heavies, Sir George Carewe in the 1920 Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Other reprobates in Hurst's cinematic repertoire included the sadistic Jehan in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), the wicked Caliph in The Thief of Baghdad (1924), the diabolical court jester in The Man Who Laughs (1928) and the insidious Merlin in A Connecticut Yankee (1931). Most of his talkie appearances were in such minor roles as condescending butlers and grouchy coroners. Brandon Hurst continued to pop up briefly in films like The Princess and the Pirate (1944) and House of Frankenstein (1945) until his death at the age of 80.

Trivia: A busy child and juvenile actress of the 1930s and 1940s, Ann E. Todd (née Mayfield) added the initial "E" in order not to be confused with British leading lady Ann Todd. It didn't work and the British Miss Todd is often still listed as having appeared in such incongruous fare as Homesteaders of Paradise Valley (1947), an Allan Lane "Red Ryder" Western, and The Lion Hunters (1951), a "Bomba the Jungle Boy" series entry. These credits of course belong to the American Ann Todd who earlier had played Linda Darnell as a child in Blood and Sand (1940), Ceinwen in How Green Was My Valley (1941), Dorothy Lamour as a young girl in Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), and Margie's daughter Joyce in Margie (1946). She retired after the Bomba film.

Trivia: When Scotty Beckett was three years old, his father was hospitalized in Los Angeles. During a visit, Beckett entertained his convalescing dad by singing several songs. A Hollywood casting director overheard the boy and suggested to his parents that Beckett had movie potential. The wide-eyed, tousle-haired youngster made his screen debut opposite Ann Harding and Clive Brook in 1933's Gallant Lady. In 1934, he was signed by Hal Roach for the Our Gang series; in the 13 two-reelers produced between 1934 and 1935, Beckett appeared as the best pal and severest critic of rotund Gang star Spanky McFarland. This stint led to such choice feature-film assignments as Anthony Adverse (1936) (in which Beckett played the out-of-wedlock son of Fredric March and Olivia De Havilland), Marie Antoinette (1938) (as the Dauphin) and My Favorite Wife (1940) (as one of the two kids of Cary Grant and his long-lost wife Irene Dunne). In 1939, Beckett briefly returned to the Our Gang fold, playing "Alfalfa" Switzer's brainy Cousin Wilbur in a brace of one-reelers. Beckett was frequently called upon for "the leading man as a child" roles, playing youthful versions of Louis Hayward in My Son, My Son (1940), Don Ameche in Heaven Can Wait (1943), and Jon Hall in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1940). As he matured, Beckett was often cast as obnoxious younger brothers, notably in the 1943 Broadway play Slightly Married and the 1948 Jane Powell vehicle A Date with Judy (playing the sibling of none other than Elizabeth Taylor). On radio, Beckett played Junior Riley in the popular William Bendix sitcom The Life of Riley, and on television he was seen as Cadet Winky in the early sci-fi series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Scotty Beckett's last film was 1956's Three For Jamie Dawn.

Trivia: The daughter of an actress and a backstage carpenter, Laura Hope Crews entered the theatre in 1883 at the tender age of four. She left the stage to complete her education, then returned to play ingenue roles. A firmly entrenched character actress by the '20s, Laura fought hard to retain her place in the spotlight, and brooked no nonsense from anyone who didn't take the theatre seriously; at one point, she called for the dismissal of a frivolous newcomer named Bette Davis (Ironically, Crews' last movie role--which had to be cut because the film was running overtime--was in The Man Who Came to Dinner [1941], which top-billed Bette Davis). Laura arrived in Hollywood in 1929, not as an actress, but as a vocal coach for untrained silent-film stars. Easing into films in maternal roles, Crews scored a personal success as the selfish mother in The Silver Cord (1933). The comparative subtlety of her performance in this film is in direct contrast to her outrageously overplayed roles in such pictures as Camille (1936) and The Blue Bird (1940). But Laura Hope Crews was merely giving her fans, and her indulgent directors, what they expected when she commenced to chew the scenery while playing one of her many society matrons, gossips or hypochondriacs.