Trivia: Upon receiving a pair of skates for her sixth birthday, Norwegian entertainer Sonja Henie decided to forego a dancing career for a life on the ice. To refine her technique, Henie continued taking ballet lessons, at one point studying with a former teacher of Anna Pavlova. She won the first of her ten World Skating titles in Oslo at age 14; she went on to win honors at the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Olympics. In 1936 she turned professional, touring the world in her own ice show. Thus, Henie was already a very wealthy woman when she was signed to a Hollywood contract at 20th Century-Fox. From her American film debut in One in a Million (1936) onward, Henie was one of Fox's biggest box-office attractions. Her film career waned in the late 1940s, but Henie retained her popularity through her sellout appearances with the Hollywood Ice Capades and via sporadic television appearances. In 1960, Sonja Henie retired, a millionaire many times over; nine years later, she died of leukemia while flying on an ambulance plane from Paris to Oslo.

Trivia: The son of an opera soprana, he studied drama at Columbia and voice at Juilliard. He began his career as a singer, then did some acting in stock. He moved to Hollywood in 1935, playing leads in a number of Fox musicals by the '40s, often opposite Alice Faye or Betty Grable. Frequently appearing bare-chested, he was very popular with female fans, and for a time he was the top male pin-up. In the '50s, still muscular but no longer boyish, he switched to medium-budget Westerns and action movies. In 1957 he retired from the screen to star in the TV series The Restless Gun and appeared in only two more films. He directed one of his last films, They Ran for Their Lives (1968). He finished his career in a 1973 Broadway revival of the musical Good News, appearing opposite Alice Faye. He became wealthy with shrewd real estate investments in southern California. From 1937-43 he was married to actress Anne Shirley; their daughter is actress Julie Payne. From 1944-50 he was married to actress Gloria DeHaven.

Trivia: As the leader of one of the world's most popular bands of the '30s and '40s, it is small wonder that Glenn Miller and his players would occasionally be featured in Hollywood films. He also appeared as an actor in two features. In 1954, ten years after his death, the bandleader's life was immortalized in the excellent The Glenn Miller Story with James Stewart playing the title role.

Trivia: Few American comedians have had so aggressive a "stage mother" as did Milton Berle. Berle's mother Sarah dragged her son to New Jersey's Edison movie studios in 1914 to do extra work, then finessed the lad into supporting roles, including the part of a newsboy in the first-ever feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), which starred Charlie Chaplin. Under Sarah's powerhouse tutelage, Berle moved into vaudeville, making his debut at the prestigious Palace Theatre in 1921. Berle continued as a vaudeville headliner, with occasional stopovers on Broadway and in Hollywood, into the World War II years. His lengthy starring stint in the 1943 edition of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies established Berle as a brash, broad, wisecracking comedian par excellence, whose carefully publicized propensity for "lifting" other comedians' material earned him the nickname "the Thief of Bad Gags." After only moderate success on radio and in films, Berle made a spectacular television debut as star of NBC's Texaco Star Theatre in 1948, which was the single most popular comedy/variety series of TV's earliest years and earned the comedian one of the industry's first Emmy Awards. So valuable was Berle to NBC that the network signed him to a 30-year "lifetime contract" in 1951, which paid him 100,000 dollars annually whether he performed or not (Berle managed to outlive the contract). Though his TV stardom waned in the late '50s, Berle was still very much in demand as an emcee, lecturer, author, TV guest star, motion picture character actor, and nightclub comedian -- still using essentially the same material and delivery which made him a star over 60 years ago. Berle died March 27, 2002 of colon cancer, he was 93.

Trivia: The stepdaughter of a minister, Lynn Bari entered films as an anonymous dancer in MGM's 1933 superproduction Dancing Lady. Later that same year, she signed a contract with Fox studios, inaugurating a decade-long association with that studio. Though she yearned for parts of substance, the brunette actress was generally limited to "B" pictures and pin-up poses. In the studio's more expensive efforts, Lynn was usually cast as truculent "other women" and villainesses; one of her rare leading roles in an "A" picture was as Henry Fonda's likable vis-a-vis in The Magnificent Dope (1942). Lynn's excellent top-billed performance in the independently produced The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944) should have made her a star, but the film unfortunately tanked at the box office. Only a few of her later roles made full use of Lynn's talents; the best of her screen appearances in the 1950s was as Piper Laurie's social-climbing mother in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952). On TV, Ms. Bari starred in the early series Boss Lady and The Detective's Wife. Lynn Bari's last film appearance (before devoting the remainder of her career to theatrical productions) was as the mother of rebellious teenager Patty McCormick in The Young Runaways (1968); Lynn's horrified reaction to the word "sex" in this film should amuse anyone who remembered the actress' sultry, man-killing performances in her Fox days.

Trivia: Comedienne Joan Davis was the daughter of a Minnesota-based train dispatcher. A performer in local amateur productions since the age of 3, Joan sang, danced and clowned at summer camps, amusement parks, and small-time vaudeville houses, marrying her "straight man" Si Willis in 1931. While performing in Los Angeles, Joan strenuously campaigned for an opportunity to appear before the cameras; her first film was the 1935 educational two-reeler Way Up Thar, directed by Mack Sennett and co-starring several members of Buster Keaton's family. This led to her first feature film, Millions in the Air (1935). After a desultory RKO contract, Joan and her husband returned to vaudeville; she was rediscovered for pictures by 20th Century-Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast Joan in raucous Martha Raye-like slapstick roles in such films as Sonja Henie's Thin Ice (1937), the Ritz Bros.' Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and Alice Faye's Tail Spin (1939). In 1941, she became a regular on Rudy Vallee's radio program, and was memorably co-starred with Abbott and Costello in Hold That Ghost (1941). During the 1940s, Joan was top billed in several energetic "B" efforts like Kansas City Kitty (1944) and He Gets Her Man (1945), and was promoted to star of her own top-rated radio series for Sealtest dairy products. After her film career ended with the bottom-barrel Columbia farce Harem Girl, Joan formed her own production company to produce the popular TV sitcom I Married Joan, which ran from 1952 through 1955 on the networks, then seemingly forever in reruns. Co-starring on I Married Joan as Joan's sister was the actress' daughter, Beverly Wills. Joan Davis died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 53, shortly after completing the pilot film for a new TV series.

Trivia: Blunt, burly American actor William B. Davidson was equally at home playing gangster bosses, business executives, butlers and military officials. In films since 1914, Davidson seemed to be in every other Warner Bros. picture made between 1930 and 1935, often as a Goliath authority figure against such pint-sized Davids as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. In the early '40s, Davidson was a fixture of Universal's Abbott and Costello comedies, appearing in In the Navy (1941), Keep 'Em Flying (1941) and In Society (1944). In Abbott & Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941), Davidson shows up as Moose Matson, the dying gangster who sets the whole plot in motion. An avid golfer, William B. Davidson frequently appeared in the all-star instructional shorts of the '30s starring legendary golf pro Bobby Jones.

Trivia: African American actress, singer, dancer Dorothy Dandridge, the daughter of stage and screen actress Ruby Dandridge, began performing professionally in the song-and-dance duo "The Wonder Children" with her sister Vivian at age four; they toured parts of the South, performing at churches, schools, and social gatherings. In the 1930s her family relocated to Los Angeles, and she and her sister appeared briefly in the Marx brothers comedy A Day at the Races (1937). In their teens she and her sister enlisted a third singer and formed a new group, the Dandridge Sisters. They worked with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and Cab Calloway, appeared at the Cotton Club, and turned up with Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan in the film Going Places (1939). Dandridge started performing solo in the early '40s, appearing in a string of musical shorts made in 1941 and 1942; she also performed in several features in the same years, including Sun Valley Serenade (1942), during the production of which she met her first husband, the dancer Harold Nicholas. After her marriage she put her career on hold for a while, but the birth of a severely brain-damaged daughter strained her marriage and it soon ended in divorce, following which she put most of her energy into her career. She became popular and famous as a sultry nightclub entertainer, then began to make her mark in movies with her notable appearance in Tarzan's Peril (1951), in which she played a sexy African princess. For her work in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) she received a "Best Actress" Oscar nomination, becoming the first black women to do so. Three years went by before her next role, in Island in the Sun (1957), in which she again made history by being the first black actress cast romantically with a white actor in a film. For her work in Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1959) she won the Golden Globe Award as "Best Actress in a Musical." After a few more years she found it difficult to get lead roles in films, and went back to nightclubs. In 1965 she signed a new film contract, but her rebounding luck was short-lived -- she was found dead from an overdose of anti-depressants.

Trivia: With her scrawny body and puckered-persimmon face, Almira Sessions successfully pursued a six-decade acting career. Born into a socially prominent Washington family, Sessions almost immediately followed her "coming out" as a debutante with her first stage appearance, playing a sultan's wizened, ugly wife in The Sultan of Sulu. She briefly sang comic songs in cabarets before pursuing a New York stage career. In 1940, she traveled to Hollywood to play Cobina of Brenda and Cobina, an uproariously if cruelly caricatured brace of man-hungry spinsters who appeared regularly on Bob Hope's radio show (Elvia Allman was Brenda). Sessions' first film was the 1940 Judy Garland vehicle Little Nellie Kelly. Until her retirement in 1971, she played dozens of housekeepers, gossips, landladies, schoolmarms, maiden aunts, and retirement-home residents. Usually appearing in bits and minor roles, Almira Sessions was always given a few moments to shine onscreen, notably as an outraged in-law in Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), the flustered high school teacher in the observatory scene in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and the hero's inquisitive neighbor in Willard (1971).

Trivia: In films from 1937, silver-haired American actor Forbes Murray could be described as a less-costly Claude Rains. Murray lent his middle-aged dignity to such serials as The Spider's Web (1938), Mandrake the Magician (1940), Lone Ranger (1938), Perils of Nyoka (1942), Manhunt of Mystery Island (1945), and Radar Patrol vs. Spy King (1950). He also showed up in quite a few comedies, notably as the bank president who finances the college education of Laurel and Hardy ("Diamonds in the rough," as he describes them) in A Chump at Oxford (1940). Forbes Murray was active at least until 1955.

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

Trivia: For two decades, the diminutive American actor ChesterClute played a seemingly endless series of harassed clerks, testy druggists, milquetoast husbands, easily distracted laboratory assistants and dishevelled streetcar passengers. A New York-based stage actor, Clute began his movie career at the Astoria studios in Long Island, appearing in several early-talkie short subjects. He moved to the West Coast in the mid '30s, remaining there until his final film appearance in Colorado Territory (1952). While Chester Clute seldom had more than two or three lines of dialogue in feature films, he continued throughout his career to be well-served in short subjects, most notably as Vera Vague's wimpish suitor in the 1947 Columbia 2-reeler Cupid Goes Nuts.

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: Tall, distinguished-looking Eddie Kane was never remotely a star in movies or television, but he played just about every kind of important supporting and bit role that there was to portray in a Hollywood career that stretched over a quarter century. Born in 1889, Kane entered show business by way of vaudeville and rose to the top of that field as a member of the team of Kane & Herman. Hollywood beckoned with the coming of sound and his first role was typical of the kind of work that he would do for the next 25 years. In MGM's The Broadway Melody, although uncredited, Kane played the important supporting role of Francis Zanfield (a thin burlesque of Ziegfeld), the theatrical producer whose interest in one of the two sisters, played by Anita Page and Bessie Love, gets the backstage plot rolling. In later films, the actor's parts varied from anonymous head waiters and hotel managers to essential supporting roles, small but telling in the plot. He was apparently at least a nodding acquaintance of James Cagney, playing important bit parts in two of Cagney's movies: in Something To Sing About, Kane portrayed the San Francisco theater manager who shelters Cagney from the crowds swarming around him on his return from an ocean voyage; in Yankee Doodle Dandy he played the actor in Little Johnny Jones who tells Cagney's George M. Cohan, in the title role of Jones, of the plan to fire a rocket from the ship when the evidence clearing him has been found. Kane's range of roles ran from business executives and impressarios to maitre d's and as he grew older and more distinguished-looking, his delivery grew even sharper onscreen. Kane is probably best known to audiences from the 1950s and beyond for his portrayal (uncredited, as usual) of Mr. Monahan, Ralph Kramden's boss at the Gotham Bus Company, in The Honeymooners' episode in which Kramden impersonates a bus company executive to impress an old rival. Kane retired from movies and television after the 1950s and died in 1969 of a heart attack at his home.

Trivia: Actress Lynne Roberts began her film career in minor roles in 1936. Upon being signed by Republic, she co-starred with the studio's newest singing cowboy Roy Rogers. From 1939 to 1942, she was billed as Mary Hart, reportedly so that Republic could advertise their own "Rogers and Hart" screen team. During this period she was also a regular in the studio's Higgins Family series, co-starring with James, Lucille, and Russell Gleason. Upon moving to 20th Century Fox in 1942, she became Lynne (or Lynn) Roberts again, and remained so until her retirement in 1953.

Trivia: A sadly neglected supporting actress, Ann Doran played everything from Charley Chase's foil in Columbia two-reelers of the late '30s to James Dean's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and also guest starred in such television shows as Superman, Petticoat Junction, Bewitched, and The A Team. A former child model and the daughter of silent screen actress Rose Allen (1885-1977), Doran made her screen bow in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922) but then spent the next 12 years or so getting herself an education. She returned to films in 1934 and joined the Columbia short subject department two years later. While with Columbia, Doran worked on all of Frank Capra's films save Lost Horizon (1937) and she later toiled for both Paramount and Warner Bros., often receiving fine reviews but always missing out on the one role that may have made her a star. Appearing in more than 500 films and television shows (her own count), Doran worked well into the 1980s, often unbilled but always a noticeable presence.

Trivia: To call child actor Spec O'Donnell homely, a critic once wrote, "would imply that your home was in grave need of repair." Alarmingly freckled and having beady little eyes, O'Donnell (real name Walter) was Hollywood's premiere enfant terrible in the 1920s. Although he bravely defended Mary Pickford's honor in Little Annie Rooney (1925), he was decidedly up to no good in her 1927 release Sparrows. As the spoiled son of baby mill owners, Spec is all but irredeemable in that classic melodrama, but offscreen Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks were his biggest boosters, the latter once calling him "the greatest child star" of the day. The boy Spec grew into a gawky young man who would play innumerable elevator boys, call boys, telegram boys, and so on. He remained homely, though, as attested by the description of his role in Life Begins in College (1937), which simply, and rather brutally, read: Ugly Student. O'Donnell's career, one of the longest in Hollywood, lasted at least until 1978, when he played a bit in the action comedy-drama Convoy. He passed away at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: A rather bland RKO contract player of the 1940s, Bruce Edwards (born Edward Lester Smith) had appeared with the Bliss Hayden Art Theatre Group in Los Angeles prior to making his screen debut in 1941. A typical 4-F leading man, Edwards often played military officers in wartime melodramas. Because of his resemblance to Republic stunt performer Tom Steele, Edwards was awarded the starring role as novelist Steve Colt battling yet another megalomaniac in the 1947 serial The Black Widow. A far-from-spectacular serial hero, Edwards was demoted to a supporting role in Federal Agents vs. Underworld, Inc. (1949) and spent most of the following decade appearing in such television series as The Lone Rider and Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.

Trivia: Vaudevillian John "Skins" Miller was a Hollywood habitue from the early 1930s until his retirement in 1951. Miller's biggest screen role was the Comedy Hillbilly in 1934's Stand Up and Cheer; holding Stepin Fetchit at bay with a shotgun, the bearded, barefooted Miller sings a love song to his gargantuan sweetheart Sally, then inexplicably falls flat on his back. During the 1930s, he was briefly under contract to MGM, where one of his duties was to imitate Groucho Marx during rehearsals of such Marx Bros. films as Day at the Races at At the Circus, so that Groucho could decide whether or not the material written for him would "play." Some sources have incorrectly listed John "Skins" Miller as a member of the original Three Stooges, in truth, he appeared in 1934's Gift of Gab as one-third of another team calling themselves the Three Stooges, who never worked together before or since (for the record, Miller's fellow "stooges" were Sid Walker and Jack Harling).

Trivia: During Hollywood's pre-"politically correct" era, it was not uncommon for African-American performers to be saddled with such demeaning professional monikers as "G. Howe Black," "Stepin Fetchit," and "Sleep 'n' Eat." One of the more egregious racially oriented nicknames was bestowed upon a talented black character actor named Fred Toones. From 1931 until his retirement in 1948, Toones was usually billed as "Snowflake," often playing a character of the same name. His standard characterization, that of a middle-aged "colored" man with high-pitched voice and childlike demeanor, was nearly as offensive as his character name. True to the Hollywood typecasting system of the 1930s and 1940s, "Snowflake" was generally cast as redcaps, bootblacks, and janitors. He appeared in dozens of two-reelers (including the Three Stooges' first Columbia effort, 1934's Woman Haters) and scores of B-Westerns. During the early '40s, Fred Toones was a semi-regular in the zany comedies of producer/director/writer Preston Sturges.

Trivia: Perky brunette leading lady Sheila Ryan became a television pioneer when, in 1938, she appeared on camera in an experimental Los Angeles broadcast. In 1940, Ryan was signed by 20th Century Fox, where she played energetic if unmemorable roles in such films as The Gay Caballero (1940) and Dressed to Kill (1941). She also appeared opposite Laurel and Hardy in two of their Fox vehicles, Great Guns (1941) and A-Haunting We Will Go (1942). Her best opportunity at Fox came in The Gang's All Here (1943), in which she was not only permitted to sing, but was afforded a special-effects "curtain call" in the film's finale. By the late '40s, Ryan's career had dwindled to B-pictures at the lesser studios. While co-starring with Gene Autry in 1950s Mule Train, Ryan fell in love with Autry's sidekick, Pat Buttram; they were married shortly afterward, and remained that way until Ryan's death in 1975. Sheila Ryan retired in 1958 after a handful of TV appearances and a featured role in something called Street of Darkness.

Trivia: Baby boomers will recall silver-maned actor William Forrest as Major Swanson, the brusque but fair-minded commander of Fort Apache in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. This character was but one of many military officers portrayed by the prolific Forrest since the late 1930s. Most of his film appearances were fleeting, and few were billed, but Forrest managed to pack more authority into 30 seconds' film time than many bigger stars were able to manage in an hour and a half. Outside of Rin Tin Tin, William Forrest is probably most familiar as the sinister fifth-columnist Martin Crane in the 1943 Republic serial The Masked Marvel.

Trivia: Dora Clement (sometimes credited as Dora Clemant) spent most of her professional acting career in the far west of the United States, where she was born, in Spokane, WA, in 1891. The tall, elegant actress -- who made one think of Frieda Inescourt -- was in almost 700 plays before making her Broadway debut in November 1944 in the original cast of Harvey as Betty Chumley (the role played by Nana Bryant in the 1950 movie). By that time, she was no longer doing movies, having been in some 73 of them (usually in uncredited roles) between 1934 and 1942. Most of her movie work involved small roles with no more than a day -- or, at most, a few days' -- shooting at a time, and Clement was able to squeeze them in around acting in the theater and also lecturing and teaching about theater. She usually played smaller roles that required dignity and distinctly middle-aged beauty -- mothers, society matrons, middle-level female executives, and secretaries -- in bigger movies, such as a saleslady in Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living (1937) or the woman under the sunlamp in George Cukor's The Women (1939). She was called by all of the major studios at one time or another, including Fox, MGM, Paramount, and Columbia, but she seemed to get some of her best roles at Universal, most notably in Buck Privates (1941), Abbott & Costello's debut starring vehicle. She actually had three major scenes in that picture (one of them excellent) as Miss Durling, the woman in charge of the camp hostesses (which include co-stars Jane Frazee and the Andrews Sisters). And Clement's most important movie role in terms of plot -- also at Univeral -- was in one of the lowest budgeted vehicles in which she ever appeared, as Ann Zorka, the beloved wife of Bela Lugosi's mad scientist Alex Zorka, in the serial The Phantom Creeps (1939). Her character's death, caused accidentally by her husband in the second chapter -- when he disables a plane carrying the government agents pursuing him (on which his wife, unbeknownst to him, also happens to be traveling) -- pushes Zorka over the edge, to seek revenge on the entire world for the next 10 chapters. In the early '50s, she made a few appearances in various early television dramas and on anthology shows such as Philco Television Playhouse and Goodyear Television Playhouse, but she had retired from that medium, as well, by the middle of the decade. She reportedly passed away a quarter century later in Washington, D.C.

Trivia: Hearty character actor Ralph Sanford made his first screen appearances at the Flatbush studios of Vitaphone Pictures. From 1933 to 1937, Sanford was Vitaphone's resident Edgar Kennedy type, menacing such two-reel stars as Shemp Howard, Roscoe Ates, and even Bob Hope. He moved to Hollywood in 1937, where, after playing several bit roles, he became a semi-regular with Paramount's Pine-Thomas unit with meaty supporting roles in such films as Wildcat (1942) and The Wrecking Crew (1943). He also continued playing featured roles at other studios, usually as a dimwitted gangster or flustered desk sergeant. One of his largest assignments was in Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945), in which he plays vengeance-seeking Richard K. Muldoon, who threatens at every opportunity to (literally) skin Stan and Ollie alive; curiously, he receives no screen credit, despite the fact that his character motivates the entire plot line. Busy throughout the 1950s, Ralph Sanford was a familiar presence on TV, playing one-shot roles on such series as Superman and Leave It to Beaver and essaying the semi-regular part of Jim "Dog" Kelly on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).