Trivia: The son of an Ohio oil driller and farmer, American actor Clark Gable had a relatively sedate youth until, at age 16, he was talked into traveling to Akron with a friend to work at a tire factory. It was in Akron that Gable saw his first stage play, and, from that point on, he was hooked. Although he was forced to work with his father on the oil fields for a time, Gable used a 300-dollar inheritance he'd gotten on his 21st birthday to launch a theatrical career. Several years of working for bankrupt stock companies, crooked theater managers, and doing odd jobs followed, until Gable was taken under the wing of veteran actress Josephine Dillon. The older Dillon coached Gable in speech and movement, paid to have his teeth fixed, and became the first of his five wives in 1924. As the marriage deteriorated, Gable's career built up momentum while he appeared in regional theater, road shows, and movie extra roles. He tackled Broadway at a time when producers were looking for rough-hewn, down-to-earth types as a contrast to the standard cardboard stage leading men. Gable fit this bill, although he had been imbued with certain necessary social graces by his second wife, the wealthy (and, again, older) Ria Langham. A 1930 Los Angeles stage production of The Last Mile starring Gable as Killer Mears brought the actor to the attention of film studios, though many producers felt that Gable's ears were too large for him to pass as a leading man. Making his talkie debut in The Painted Desert (1931), the actor's first roles were as villains and gangsters. By 1932, he was a star at MGM where, except for being loaned out on occasion, he'd remain for the next 22 years. On one of those occasions, Gable was "punished" for insubordination by being sent to Columbia Studios, then a low-budget factory. The actor was cast by ace director Frank Capra in It Happened One Night (1934), an amiable comedy which swept the Academy Awards in 1935, with one of those Oscars going to Gable. After that, except for the spectacular failure of Gable's 1937 film Parnell, it seemed as though the actor could do no wrong. And, in 1939, and despite his initial reluctance, Gable was cast as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, leading him to be dubbed the "King of Hollywood." A happy marriage to wife number three, Carole Lombard, and a robust off-camera life as a sportsman and athlete (Gable enjoyed a he-man image created by the MGM publicity department, and perpetuated it on his own) seemed to bode well for the actor's future contentment. But when Lombard was killed in a 1942 plane crash, a disconsolate Gable seemed to lose all interest in life. Though far beyond draft age, he entered the Army Air Corps and served courageously in World War II as a tail-gunner. But what started out as a death wish renewed his vitality and increased his popularity. (Ironically, he was the favorite film star of Adolf Hitler, who offered a reward to his troops for the capture of Gable -- alive). Gable's postwar films for MGM were, for the most part, disappointing, as was his 1949 marriage to Lady Sylvia Ashley. Dropped by both his wife and his studio, Gable ventured out as a freelance actor in 1955, quickly regaining lost ground and becoming the highest paid non-studio actor in Hollywood. He again found happiness with his fifth wife, Kay Spreckels, and continued his career as a box-office champ, even if many of the films were toothless confections like Teacher's Pet (1958). In 1960, Gable was signed for the introspective "modern" Western The Misfits, which had a prestigious production lineup: co-stars Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach; screenwriter Arthur Miller; and director John Huston. The troubled and tragic history of this film has been well documented, but, despite the on-set tension, Gable took on the task uncomplainingly, going so far as to perform several grueling stunt scenes involving wild horses. The strain of filming, however, coupled with his ever-robust lifestyle, proved too much for the actor. Clark Gable suffered a heart attack two days after the completion of The Misfits and died at the age of 59, just a few months before the birth of his first son. Most of the nation's newspapers announced the death of Clark Gable with a four-word headline: "The King is Dead."

Trivia: Universally regarded among the screen's greatest actors, Spencer Tracy was a most unlikely leading man. Stocky, craggy-faced, and gruff, he could never be considered a matinee idol, yet few stars enjoyed greater or more consistent success. An uncommonly versatile performer, his consistently honest and effortless performances made him a favorite of both audiences and critics throughout a career spanning well over three decades. Born April 5, 1900, in Milwaukee, WI, Tracy was expelled from some 15 different elementary schools prior to attending Rippon College, where he discovered and honed a talent for debating; eventually, he considered acting as a logical extension of his skills, and went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His first professional work cast him as a robot in a stage production of R.U.R. at a salary of ten dollars a week. He made his Broadway debut in 1923's A Royal Fandango and later co-starred in a number of George M. Cohan vehicles. Tracy's performance as an imprisoned killer in 1930's The Last Mile made him a stage star, and during its Broadway run he made a pair of shorts for Vitaphone, The Hard Guy and Taxi Talks. Screen tests for MGM, Universal, and Warners were all met with rejection, however, but when John Ford insisted on casting Tracy as the lead in his prison drama Up the River, Fox offered a five-year contract.Tracy's second film was 1931's Quick Millions, in which he portrayed a racketeer. He was frequently typecast as a gangster during his early career, or at the very least a tough guy, and like the majority of Fox productions throughout the early part of the decade, his first several films were unspectacular. His big break arrived when Warners entered a feud with Jimmy Cagney, who was scheduled to star in 1933's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing; when he balked, the studio borrowed Tracy, and the picture was a hit. His next two starring roles in The Face in the Sky and the Preston Sturges epic The Power and the Glory were also successful, earning very positive critical notice. Still, Fox continued to offer Tracy largely low-rent projects, despite extending his contract through 1937. Regardless, much of his best work was done outside of the studio grounds; for United Artists, he starred in 1934's Looking for Trouble, and for MGM starred as The Show-Off. After filming 1935's It's a Small World, executives cast Tracy as yet another heavy in The Farmer Takes a Wife; he refused to accept the role and was fired. Despite serious misgivings, MGM signed him on. However, the studio remained concerned about his perceived lack of sex appeal and continued giving the majority of plum roles to Clark Gable. As a consequence, Tracy's first MGM offerings -- 1935's Riff Raff, The Murder Man, and 1936's Whipsaw -- were by and large no better than his Fox vehicles, but he next starred in Fritz Lang's excellent Fury. For the big-budget disaster epic San Francisco, Tracy earned the first of nine Academy Award nominations -- a record for male stars -- and in 1937 won his first Oscar for his work in Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous. Around the release of the 1938 smash Test Pilot, Time magazine declared him "cinema's number one actor's actor," a standing solidified later that year by Boys' Town, which won him an unprecedented second consecutive Academy Award. After 1939's Stanley and Livingstone, Tracy starred in the hit Northwest Passage, followed by a turn as Edison the Man. With the success of 1941's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he even usurped Gable's standing as MGM's top draw.Tracy was happily married to actress Louise Treadwell when he teamed with Katharine Hepburn in 1942's Woman of the Year. It was the first in a long series of collaborations that established them as one of the screen's greatest pairings, and soon the two actors entered an offscreen romance which continued for the remainder of Tracy's life. They were clearly soulmates, yet Tracy, a devout Catholic, refused to entertain the thought of a divorce; instead, they carried on their affair in secrecy, their undeniable chemistry spilling over onto their onscreen meetings like Keeper of the Flame. Without Hepburn, Tracy next starred in 1943's A Guy Named Joe, another major hit, as was the following year's 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Without Love, another romantic comedy with Hepburn, premiered in 1945; upon its release Tracy returned to Broadway, where he headlined The Rugged Path. Returning to Hollywood, he appeared in three more films with Hepburn -- The Sea of Grass, Frank Capra's State of the Union, and George Cukor's sublime Adam's Rib -- and in 1950 also starred as Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride, followed a year later by the sequel Father's Little Dividend. On Hepburn's return from shooting The African Queen, they teamed with Cukor in 1952's Pat and Mike. Without Hepburn, Tracy and Cukor also filmed The Actress the following year. Venturing outside of the MGM confines for the first time in years, he next starred in the 1954 Western Broken Lance. The well-received Bad Day at Black Rock followed, but as the decade wore on, Tracy was clearly growing more and more unhappy with life at MGM -- the studio had changed too much over the years, and in 1955 they agreed to cut him loose. He first stopped at Paramount for 1956's The Mountain, reuniting with Hepburn for Fox's Desk Set a year later. At Warners, Tracy then starred in the 1958 adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a major box-office disaster; however, The Last Hurrah signalled a rebound. After 1960's Inherit the Wind, Tracy subsequently reunited with director Stanley Kramer for 1961's Judgment at Nuremburg and the 1963 farce It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The film was Tracy's last for four years. Finally, in 1967 he and Hepburn reunited one final time in Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; it was another great success, but a success he did not live to see. Tracy died on June 10, 1967, just weeks after wrapping production.

Trivia: Paris-born actress Claudette Colbert was brought to New York at the age of seven by her banker father. She planned an art career after high school graduation, studying at the Art Student's League. Attending a party with actress Anne Morrison, the 18-year-old was offered a three-line bit in Morrison's new play The Wild Westcotts. That ended her art aspirations, and Colbert embarked on a stage career in 1925, scoring her first big critical success in the 1926 Broadway production of The Barker, in which she played a duplicitous snake charmer. One year later, the actress made her first film at Long Island's Astoria studio, For the Love of Mike (1927), but the film was unsuccessful and she enjoyed neither the experience nor her young director, Frank Capra. So back she went to Broadway, returning to films during the talkie revolution in The Hole in the Wall (1929), which was also the movie-speaking debut of Edward G. Robinson. Once again, Colbert disliked film acting; but audiences responded to her beauty and cultured voice, so she forsook the stage for Hollywood. Colbert's popularity (and salary) skyrocketed after she was cast as "the wickedest woman in history," Nero's unscrupulous wife Poppaea, in the Biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932). Colbert expanded her range as a street-smart smuggler's daughter in I Cover the Waterfront and in the pioneering screwball comedy Three-Cornered Moon (both 1933), but it was for a role she nearly refused that the actress secured her box-office stature. Virtually every other actress in Hollywood had turned down the role of spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews in Columbia's It Happened One Night (1934), and when director Frank Capra approached an unenthusiastic Colbert, she wearily agreed to appear in the film on the conditions that she be paid twice her normal salary and that the film be completed before she was scheduled to go on vacation in four weeks. Colbert considered the experience one of the worst in her life -- until the 1935 Academy Awards ceremony, in which It Happened One Night won in virtually all major categories, including a Best Actress Oscar for her. Colbert spent the next decade alternating between comedy and drama, frequently in the company of her most popular co-star, Fred MacMurray. She gained a reputation of giving 110 percent of her energies while acting, which compensated for her occasional imperviousness and her insistence that only one side of her face be photographed (which frequently necessitated redesigning movie sets just to accommodate her phobia about her "bad side"). Colbert remained a top money-making star until her last big hit, The Egg and I (1947), after which she lost some footing, partly because of producers' unwillingness to meet her demands that (under doctor's orders) she could only film a short time each day (her doctor was her husband). She hoped to jump-start her career in the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve, but those plans were squelched when she injured her back and had to relinquish the character to Bette Davis. Traveling the usual "fading star" route, Colbert made films in Europe and a budget Western in the U.S. before returning triumphantly to Broadway, first in 1956's Janus, then in the long-running 1958 comedy Marriage Go Round. The actress also appeared on television, although reportedly had trouble adjusting to live productions. In 1961, she returned to Hollywood as Troy Donahue's mother in Parrish. It would be her last film appearance until the 1987 TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles -- in which she far outclassed her material. Still a prominent figure in the Hollywood hierarchy, Colbert retired to her lavish home in California, where she frequently entertained her old friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Claudette Colbert died in 1996 in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 92.

Trivia: The daughter of a Vienesse banker, Hedy Lamarr began her acting career at 16 under the tutelage of German impresario Max Reinhardt. She began appearing in German films in 1930, but garnered little attention until her star turn in Czech director Gustav Machaty's Extase (Ecstasy) in 1933. It wasn't just because Lamarr appeared briefly in the nude; Extase was filled to overflowing with orgasmic imagery, including tight close-ups of Lamarr in the throes of delighted passion. Though her first husband, Austrian businessman Fritz Mandl, tried to buy up and destroy all prints of Extase, the film enjoyed worldwide distribution, the result being that Lamarr was famous in America before ever setting foot in Hollywood. She was signed by producer Walter Wanger to co-star with Charles Boyer in the American remake of the French Pepe Le Moko, titled Algiers (1938). That Lamarr wasn't much of an actress was compensated with several scenes in which she was required to merely stand around silently and look beautiful (she would later downgrade these performances, equating sex appeal with "looking stupid"). The prudish Louis B. Mayer was willing to forgive Lamarr the "indiscretion" of Extase by signing her to a long MGM contract in 1939. Most of her subsequent roles were merely decorative (never more so than as Tondelayo in White Cargo [1940]), though she was first rate in the complex role of the career woman who "liberates" stuffy Bostonian Robert Young in H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1942). In 1949, Lamarr, tastefully under-dressed, appeared opposite the equally attractive Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). Lamarr's limited acting skills became more pronounced in her 1950s films, especially when she gamely tried to play Joan of Arc in the all-star disaster The Story of Mankind (1957). She disappeared from films in 1958. An autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, enabled her to pay many of her debts, though she'd later sue her collaborators for distorting the facts. In another legal action, Lamarr took on director Mel Brooks for using the character name "Hedley Lamarr" in his 1974 Western spoof Blazing Saddles. In 1990, Lamarr made an unexpected return before the cameras in the obscure low-budget Hollywood satire Instant Karma, in which she was typecast in the role of Movie Goddess.

Trivia: Years before he played The Wizard (and four other roles) in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Frank Morgan had a long career in silent film and was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for The Affairs of Cellini (1934). Although adept at flustered and bewildered comic roles, Morgan was also an excellent dramatic actor; he was an ever-present figure in many of MGM's classiest films of the period. Highlights of his career include: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1931), When Ladies Meet (1933), Bombshell (1933), Cat and the Fiddle (1934), The Good Fairy (1935), Naughty Marietta (1935), Dimples (1936), The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937), Saratoga (1937), Rosalie (1937), Boom Town (1940), Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), and The Three Musketeers (1948). He was especially effective in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), The Mortal Storm (1940), The Human Comedy (1943) and Summer Holiday (1948), the musical remake of Thornton Wilder's Ah, Wilderness. Morgan died while filming Annie Get Your Gun, in which he would have played Buffalo Bill. The most famous anecdote about Morgan is that while rehearsing for The Wizard of Oz, he went looking for a coat to help him feel like Prof. Marvel; the one he found in a second-hand shop turned out to have originally belonged to Wizard author L. Frank Baum.

Trivia: British actor Lionel Atwill was born into wealth and educated at London's prestigious Mercer School, where he planned to pursue a career as an architect; instead, he became a stage actor, working steadily from his debut at age 20, most often in the plays of Ibsen and Shaw. Establishing himself in America, Atwill continued his stage work, supplementing his income with silent film appearances, the first being Eve's Daughter(1918). Atwill's rich rolling voice made him a natural for talking pictures. Following a pair of Vitaphone short subjects in 1928, the actor made his talkie bow in The Verdict (1932). Most effective in roles as an aristocratic villain, Atwill found himself appearing in numerous melodramas and horror films, including the classic Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Atwill's career was threatened in 1940, when it was revealed that he'd thrown an "orgy" at his home, complete with naked guests and pornographic films. Atwill "lied like a gentleman" to protect his party guests at the subsequent trial, and was convicted of perjury. The ensuing scandal made Atwill virtually unemployable at most studios, but he found a semi-permanent home at Universal Pictures, which at the time was grinding out low budget horror films. Lionel Atwill died in harness in the middle of production of the 1946 Universal serial Lost City of the Jungle; viewers watching this serial today will no doubt notice how often Atwill's character turns his back to the camera, allowing the producers to cover his absence with a stand-in.

Trivia: He began performing in early childhood, going on to appear in tent shows, vaudeville, and stock throughout the Southwest. He formed Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys, a singing group in which he was the leader and bass vocalist, in the '30s. After appearing with the group in several Westerns, beginning with his screen debut, Bar 20 Rides Again (1935), he disbanded the group in 1938. For the next fifteen years he was busy onscreen as a character actor, but after 1953 his film work became less frequent. He provided the voice of Francis the Talking Mule in the "Francis" comedy series of films. In the '60s he starred in the TV series "Frontier Circus" and "The Rounders." For his work in The Alamo (1960) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975 he released a singing album--his first.

Trivia: The brassiest platinum blonde of them all, Marion Martin turned up in numerous films of the 1930s and 1940s, usually only for a moment or two but long enough to make an impression. Reportedly hailing from Philadelphia's Main Line, Martin had made her Broadway bow in a 1927 revival of Lombardi Ltd. but was rather more noticeable in burlesque where she vowed 'em with a voluptuous body and with a throaty singing voice to match. She began popping up in films around 1935 and went on to play a host of characters named Blondie, Fifi, Lola, and Dixie, rarely awarded a last name and usually only a line or two. But she almost always made the line count, as in Sinner in Paradise (1938), when he-man Bruce Cabot introduces himself with a terse "the name is Malone." "Does it make you happy," she quips, with that bored look she had come to favor. Martin's screen career lasted well into the 1950s but by then her once-statuesque build had turned quite blowsy. In her later years as the wife of a Southern California physician, she occasionally expressed a desire to return to show business but no projects materialized.

Trivia: During her twenty-one year Hollywood career, Minna Gombell was also billed as Winifred Lee and Nancy Carter. By any name, Gombell was usually typecast in brittle, hollow-eyed, hard-boiled character parts. Devoted Late Late Show fans will recall Gombell as one of the secondary murder victims in The Thin Man (1934), as Mrs. Oliver Hardy in Block-Heads (1938), as the Queen of the Beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and as clubfooted Joan Leslie's mother in High Sierra (1941). In 1935, Minna Gombell was afforded top billing in the above-average Monogram domestic drama Women Must Dress.

Trivia: Scottish actor Joe Yule had a long career as a burlesque and vaudeville performer before joining MGM in the late '30s to play character roles. He was often loaned out to other studios. Eventually Yule ended up at Monogram studios playing the cartoon character Jiggs in the Jiggs and Maggie series of B-movies. Yule's most enduring contribution to cinema may be that he fathered beloved actor Mickey Rooney.

Trivia: Succinctly described as "portly and pompous" by B-Western aficionado Don Miller, American character-actor Horace Murphy was the Eugene Pallette of the sagebrush. Spending most of his career in cowboy flicks, Murphy was usually cast as intrusive sheriffs, know-it-all doctors, and orotund snake-oil peddlers. In 1937, he made the first of several appearances as comedy-relief sidekick Stubby in the films of Western hero Tex Ritter. In non-Westerns, he could usually be found playing bartenders, burgomeisters, and train conductors. Horace Murphy made his last screen appearance in 1946.

Trivia: American actor and drama coach Roy Gordon made his first film appearance in 1938. A bit player for most of his Hollywood career, Gordon was at his best as corporate-executive types. He also played many a college dean, banker and military officer. Late Late Show habitues will remember Roy Gordon for his poignant cameo as doomed passenger Isidore Straus in Titanic (1953).

Trivia: A repertory actor since childhood, Wisconsin-born Richard Lane was singing and dancing in vaudeville by the time he reached his thirteenth birthday. Lane toured europe with a circus "iron jaw" act, then bluffed his way into a dance band job. After more vaudeville work, Lane began securing "legit" gigs on Broadway. He appeared with Al Jolson in the late-'20s musical Big Boy, and was a headliner with George White's Scandals when he was signed to an RKO movie contract in 1937. While at RKO, Lane developed his standard characterization of a fast-talking sharpster, which secured him a recurring role on Al Pearce's popular radio program. He played a variety of detectives, con artists and travelling salesmen throughout the '40s, most often at 20th Century-Fox, Universal and Columbia. He was featured in several Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy comedies during the decade, and costarred as Inspector Farraday in Columbia's Boston Blackie B-series; he also appeared in 11 Columbia 2-reel comedies, teamed with comic actor Gus Schilling. Though most closely associated with breezy, urban characters, Lane was also effective in slow-and-steady dramatic roles, notably the father in the 1940 sleeper The Biscuit Eater and baseball manager Clay Hopper in 1950's The Jackie Robinson Story. A television pioneer, Lane worked at Los Angeles' KTLA-TV as a newsman, sportscaster and used-car pitchman. For over twenty years, he was the mile-a-minute commentator on KTLA's nationally syndicated wrestling and roller derby matches. Significantly, Richard Lane's last screen appearances were in Raquel Welch's roller-derby epic Kansas City Bomber (1978) and Henry Winkler's pro-wrestling spoof The One and Only (1982).

Trivia: The daughter of stage and film actress Charlotte Walker, Sara Haden's own theatrical work included several seasons with Walter Hampden's Shakespearean Repertory Company. She entered films in 1934 with a character role in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. The majority of her screen characterizations were as stern schoolteachers, town gossips and harried secretaries. Sara Haden is most familiar to filmgoers for her portrayal of spinsterish, ever-disapproving Aunt Millie in MGM's Andy Hardy series of the 1930s and 1940s; indeed, her final screen appearance was in the 1958 "revival" picture Andy Hardy Comes Home.

Trivia: Moonfaced American actor Frank Orth came to films from vaudeville, where he was usually co-billed with wife Ann Codee. Orth and Codee continued appearing together in a series of two-reel comedies in the early '30s, before he graduated to features with 1935's The Unwelcome Stranger. From that point until his retirement in 1959, Orth usually found himself behind a counter in his film appearances, playing scores of pharmacists, grocery clerks and bartenders. He had a semi-recurring role as Mike Ryan in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, and was featured as a long-suffering small town cop in Warners' Nancy Drew films. Orth was an apparent favorite of the casting department at 20th Century-Fox, where he received many of his credited screen roles. From 1951 through 1953, Frank Orth was costarred as Lieutenant Farraday on the Boston Blackie TV series.

Trivia: Tall, commanding actor Frank McGlynn Sr. made his 1896 stage debut in The Gold Bug. Eleven years later, McGlynn entered films as a member of the Edison Company. His professional future was secured when, in 1919, he starred on Broadway in John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln. Thereafter, McGlynn was best known as Hollywood's foremost Lincoln impersonator. He was cast as Honest Abe in Are We Civilized? (1934), Hearts in Bondage (1935), The Littlest Rebel (1935), Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), The Plainsman (1936), Wells Fargo (1937), The Lone Ranger (1939) and the Warner Bros. historical short Lincoln at the White House (1939). The actor's non-Lincoln screen roles included David Gamut in Last of the Mohicans (1920) and Patrick Henry in D.W. Griffith's America. In the 1930 musical Good News, McGlynn was afforded a rare opportunity to play comedy as a sarcastic college dean. Frank Glynn Sr.'s son Frank McGlynn Jr. was also a busy film actor, usually seen in hillbilly roles.

Trivia: German actor Curt Bois took to the stage at age seven. After experience as a cabaret performer, Bois worked with the legendary impresario Max Reinhardt and appeared in 25 German films. He left Germany to escape Hitler in 1933, then re-established himself on the Broadway stage. His first film, in which he was seen in his standard characterization of a slick, self-important European, was 1937's Tovarich. Bois' best-known film appearance was brief: he played the obsequious pickpocket ("There are vultures everywhere) in the 1942 classic Casablanca. As a result, he spent many of his last years being interviewed on the subject of that film, his stories improving with each telling. Bois went on to work with such directors as Lubitsch and Ophuls before returning to Germany in 1950. Here he continued to appear in films, and in 1955 directed the feature Ein Polterabend. One of Curt Bois' last performances was as the wizened historian who endlessly wanders Berlin in hopes of properly capturing the city on paper in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1988).

Trivia: American actor Dick Curtis may have started out as an extra, and it's true that he seldom rose above the ranks of western supporting actors, but he still managed to get himself a full-page photo spread as a "typical" villain in the 1957 coffee table book The Movies. In this book, as in most of his movies, Curtis was seen squaring off in a series of bare-knuckle bouts with his perennial opponent, cowboy star Charles Starrett. Most of Curtis' career was centered at Columbia Pictures, where he scowled and skulked his way through bad guy roles in the studio's "B" pictures, westerns, serials, and two-reel comedies. Sometimes he'd get to wear a business suit instead of frontier garb, as in his role of a jury foreman in the Boris Karloff thriller The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), but even here he was unpleasant, unsympathetic, and fully deserving of an untimely end. A more lighthearted (but no less menacing) Dick Curtis can be seen in his many two-reel appearances with Charley Chase, Hugh Herbert and The Three Stooges. As Badlands Blackie in the Stooges' Three Troubledoers (1946), Curtis' acting is gloriously overbaked, and perhaps as a reward for long and faithful service to Columbia he is permitted to deliver outrageous "double takes" which manage to out-Stooge his co-stars.

Trivia: A cool and beautiful brunette, Barbara Bedford (born Violet Rose) appeared opposite William S. Hart in one of her earliest films, The Cradle of Courage (1920). It was not a large part, but director Maurice Tourneur liked her and cast her later that year as Cora Munro in his beautiful version of The Last of the Mohicans. Cora's death scene made her a star -- at least for a little while. Hart used her again, this time as his leading lady in Tumbleweeds (1925), the great cowboy's last film, and there were several roles opposite the rising star John Gilbert. She should have made the transition to talkies with ease, but a surprisingly throaty voice proved completely at odds with her ingenue image. The result was a trip down Poverty Row studios (Chesterfield, Peerless, and Monogram) in bit parts. She turned up in Our Gang shorts as Alfalfa's mother and was billed as "USO Manager" in The Clock (1945), her final credited film. Bedford was at one time married to actor Alan Roscoe, who had co-starred as Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans.

Trivia: From his first film, Don Quickshot of the Rio Grande (1923), to his last, Fancy Pants (1950) American supporting player Hank Bell specialized in westerns. While still relatively young, Bell adopted the "grizzled old desert rat" characterization, that sustained him throughout his career, simply by removing his teeth and growing a thick, inverted handlebar mustache. Though occasionally given lines to speak, he was usually consigned to "atmosphere roles:" if you'll look closely at the jury in the Three Stooges 2-reeler Disorder in the Court, you'll see Bell in the top row on the left, making swimming motions when Curly douses the jurors with a fire hose. A fixture of "B"-pictures, Hank Bell occasionally surfaced in "A" films like Abraham Lincoln (1930), Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), The Plainsman (1936), Geronimo (1939) and My Little Chickadee (1940).

Trivia: With two solid decades of stage experience to his credit, Charles D. Brown made his talking-picture bow in 1929's The Dance of Life. At first, Brown's bland features and flat voice made him difficult to cast, but by the time he'd reached his fifties, he was very much in demand for authoritative roles. Brown was frequently cast as a detective, though his unruffled demeanor made him a valuable "surprise" killer in more than one murder mystery. Charles D. Brown died in 1948, not long after completing his role in RKO's Follow Me Quietly (1950).

Trivia: Actress Marietta Canty appeared on stage and screen during the '40s and '50s. In film she usually played maids or cooks. She left acting in 1955 to care for her father.

Trivia: Best known today for her recurring role as the floor nurse Parker in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, brunette actress Nell Craig had begun her long screen career with Essanay in Chicago in 1913. By 1914, she was starring or co-starring in such melodramas as In the Palace of the King (1915), from F. Marion Crawford's popular novel, and The Breaker (1916). She played a girl detective in the latter and both films were directed by her husband, Fred E. Wright. The 1920s brought mainly supporting roles, notably that of Mary Todd Lincoln opposite George A. Billings in the low-budget Abraham Lincoln (1924), but she was reduced to walk-ons in talkies. Like several of her contemporaries, Craig was rescued by Louis B. Mayer of MGM, who awarded her a player contract. Craig, who also appeared semi-regularly in Paramount's Henry Aldrich series, retired from films in the late '40s and spent her final years as a resident of the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Although he appeared in more than 40 films, Ralph Bushman never became as well known as his father, silent-movie star Francis X. Bushman. He made his screen debut under his own name in 1920 in It's a Great Life, but soon gave way to billing himself as Francis X. Bushman Jr. By the 1930s, he was reduced to playing bit parts, often taking advantage of his 6'4" frame to play some sort of hulking presence. While Ralph Bushman's film career ended in the mid-'40s, ironically his father's career would outlast his own by another two decades.