Trivia: Born to a family of vaudevillians, Hardie Albright studied drama at Carnegie Tech and took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago before embarking upon his adult theatrical career. He made his New York debut with Eva Le Gallienne's company in 1926, and his motion picture bow in 1931. Though typed as a virile, athletic leading man, there was always the air of dishonesty surrounding Albright's performances; as such, he was better off playing unsympathetic roles. Since one of his trademarks was a fixed, insincere grin, it is altogether appropriate that his last Hollywood role was as the double-crossing "Smiley" in Angel on My Shoulder (1946). His final film appearance was in exploitation producer Kroger Babb's notorious Mom and Dad, a 1949 quickie about sex education. In his last years, Hardie Albright wrote several informative textbooks on the art of acting, and also taught drama classes at UCLA.

Trivia: In films from age nine, red-haired Ann Gillis excelled in spoiled brat roles for nearly a decade. She was somewhat more benignly cast as Becky Thatcher in 1938's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (though her "mad scene" when trapped in a bat-filled cave was one of the most terrifying scenes ever captured on film) and as the perky title character in 1939's Little Orphan Annie. When adulthood beckoned, Gillis found it hard to secure good roles; perhaps her best showing during her late teen years was as Lou Costello's spunky Irish sweetheart in The Time of Their Lives (1946). Retiring from films in 1947, she made sporadic comeback attempts throughout the next decade. In 1959, she briefly resurfaced on TV as hostess of a nationally telecast presentation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Thereafter, Ann Gillis retired to private life in England, save for one final appearance in Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey (1968) as the mother of astronaut Gary Lockwood.

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: Cherubic, pop-eyed character actor Otis Harlan came to films in the 1920s after extensive legitimate-stage and vaudeville experience. Though he essayed a variety of roles in silent films (he even appeared as a black family retainer in one effort), Harlan was most felicitously cast as a semi-regular in the Reginald Denny comedies at Universal. In 1929, he played Captain Andy in the first filmization of Edna Ferber's Show Boat. Most of his talkie assignments were bits, albeit memorable ones, including Starveling in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and small-town constable Hi Jenks in the 1937 "Our Gang" 1-reeler Roamin' Holiday. Generations of cartoon fans have revelled in Harlan's voiceover portrayal of "Happy" in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Otis Harlan was the uncle of silent-movie leading man Kenneth Harlan.

Trivia: For close to 50 years, Clarence Nash gave voice to Donald Duck, one of Disney's most popular characters. A native of Oklahoma, Nash had a natural gift for imitating animals and as a young man would perform them as part of a tour on the Chautauqua circuit. In the early '30s, he landed in Southern California where he performed radio advertisements for a dairy. Walt Disney heard the ad and called Nash in for an audition. He hired Nash. After hearing him read a quacked-up version of a nursery rhyme one day, the excited Disney knew he had found the right voice for his foul-tempered new character, Donald. Nash voiced over 100 Donald Duck cartoons and even performed them in several languages, thanks to phonetically written scripts. He remained the sole voice of Donald until his death in 1985. Nash also became the second voice of Jiminy Cricket after his originator, Cliff Edwards, died.