Trivia: Swedish actor Warner Oland was educated in Boston, but proudly retained his Scandinavian roots throughout his life, even devoting time to translating the works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen into English for the benefit of theatrical scholars. Trained at Dr. Curry's Acting School, Oland took on a theatrical career, ultimately tackling the movie industry in 1915 with an appearance in Sin opposite Theda Bara. Oland's curious facial features enabled the occidental actor to specialize in oriental roles, most often as a villain. While his silent film appearances ranged from Cesar Borgia in Don Juan (1926) to Al Jolson's Jewish cantor father in The Jazz Singer (1927), Oland's oriental roles gained him the widest popularity, especially his portrayal as the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in three early talking pictures. In 1931, Oland was cast as the wily, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan Carries On for the Fox studios (later 20th Century-Fox). He would make annual appearances as Chan until 1934, when Fox decided to use the Earl Derr Biggers character as the focal point of a regular B-movie series; Oland would now be seen as Charlie Chan three times per year, and ultimately the actor would make a total of sixteen Chan pictures. From 1934 onward, Warner Oland was Charlie Chan - and vice versa. He remained in character on the set even when giving an interview or flubbing a line, and during a 1935 visit to China, Oland was mobbed by his enthusiastic Chinese movie fans, some of whom were so enchanted by his performance that (it is said) they actually believed Oland was genuinely Asian. During production of Charlie Chan at the Arena in 1938, Warner Oland died, and the movie was rearranged as a Peter Lorre vehicle, Mr. Moto's Gamble. The movie role of Charlie Chan was inherited by Sidney Toler, and later by Roland Winters.

Trivia: Handsome Hollywood "second lead" Donald Woods came from the stage to films in 1934. He played a few unremarkable roles before rising to prominence as Charles Darnay in the 1935 version of A Tale of Two Cities. He spent the 1940s and 1950s heading the cast of B-productions and serials and essaying supporting roles in top-of-the-bill features. On television, Woods played the title role in the 1952 syndicated series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist, hosted the 1955 anthology The Damon Runyon Theatre, and played a dignified recurring role on the 1965 sitcom Tammy; he also acted as "goodwill ambassador" for the latter program, making personal appearances and taping local promos. Throughout his career, Donald Woods supplemented his acting income as a real estate broker -- which indeed would have been an excellent film role for the businesslike Woods.

Trivia: The daughter of Mary Pickford's favorite cinematographer, Charles Rosher, little Nancy Ann used the moniker Dorothy Rosher when appearing as Gene Gauntier's baby in Hearts Aflame (1914) and in such Pickford vehicles as The Little Princess (1917), Daddy Long Legs (1919), and Tess of the Storm Country (1922). After achieving an education, Dorothy was rediscovered by director Frank Borzage who renamed her Joan Marsh and tested her for a role in Lucky Star (1929). She always maintained that the picture was indeed her "lucky star" because "Although I didn't get the part, other and better roles did materialize from the test." "Better roles" didn't come right away, however, and she merely "played" a girl on a poster in Universal's award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). But the Hollywood publicists did notice her platinum blonde allure and Marsh became one of the 13 lucky WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1931, an honor she shared with Joan Blondell and Marian Marsh (no relation). Always on the verge of bigger and better things, Joan Marsh spent the 1930s supporting such stars as: Greta Garbo (she was one of the bohemians in Inspiration [1930]); Joan Crawford (a brief appearance in Anna Karenina [1935]); and Loretta Young. Several critics thought she stole Three Girls Lost (1931) from the latter, but she remained mired in supporting roles in A-films and leads in such Grade-Z movies as High Gear (1933) with fallen star James Murray and Brilliant Marriage (1936) from poverty row company Invincible. After playing the ingenue in Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937) she married the film's writer, Charles Belden, a union that lasted until 1943. By then Marsh's screen career was all but over and she later ran a stationery shop in Hollywood.

Trivia: Tall, alluring actress Joan Woodbury was a professional dancer in the Los Angeles area before entering films in the early '30s. Almost exclusively confined to B-pictures, Woodbury had few pretensions about her "art" and disdained any sort of star treatment; while being interviewed for the leading role in the independently produced Paper Bullets (1941), Woodbury ignored the fact that the producers couldn't afford any office furniture and sat on the floor. While she claimed to have never made more than 300 dollars a week as an actress, Woodbury was a thorough professional, treating even the shabbiest assignment as a job of importance. She was proudest of the time when, while starring in the Columbia serial Brenda Starr, Reporter (1945), she prevented the film from going over budget by performing a complicated five-minute scene in a single take -- which earned her a spontaneous round of applause from the crew members. After retiring from films in the 1960s, Woodbury organized and maintained the Palm Springs-based Valley Player's Guild, staging plays which featured other veteran performers. Joan Woodbury was married twice, to actor/producer Henry Wilcoxon and actor Ray Mitchell.

Trivia: Born in Hungary, actor J. Edward Bromberg moved with his family to the US while still an infant. Bromberg was certain from an early age that he would pursue an acting career, taking several odd jobs (silk salesman, candy maker, laundry worker) to finance his training. He studied with the Moscow Art Theatre, then made his American stage bow at age 23 at the Greenwich Village Playhouse. The corpulent Bromberg conveyed a perpetual air of ulcerated, middle-aged tension, allowing him to play characters much older than himself. He worked extensively with the Theatre Guild, coming to Hollywood's attention for his work in the 1934 Pulitzer Prize winning play Men in White. With 1936's Under Two Flags, Bromberg began his long association with 20th Century-Fox, playing a vast array of foreign villains, blustering buffoons and the occasional gentle philosopher. He made a triumphant return to Broadway in 1948 as a Louis Mayer-like movie mogul in Clifford Odets' The Big Knife, but the euphoria would not last. Accused of being a Communist sympathizer, Bromberg was blacklisted from Hollywood and forced to seek work in England. Though only 47 when he fled the country, Bromberg looked twenty years older due to the strain of withstanding the accusations of the witchhunters. J. Edward Bromberg died in London in 1951, at age 48; the reason given was "natural causes," since a broken heart is not officially regarded as a fatal condition.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: Given the fact that the mustachioed, beady-eyed Harold Huber looked as though he'd stepped right out of a Damon Runyon story, it's hard to believe that Huber could ever have hoped for a successful career as a lawyer. Yet it is true that Huber, a graduate of the Columbia University law school, did indeed briefly hang out an attorney's shingle. By the time he was in his mid-20s, however, Huber had switched to acting, often in shifty, underhanded roles of various nationalities. He showed up in a handful of Charlie Chan films, usually equipped with an unconvincing comic-opera foreign accent; he was, however, thoroughly convincing as the fast-talking New York police detective in 1937's Charlie Chan on Broadway. A busy radio and television performer, Harold Huber starred on the radio versions of Fu Manchu and Hercule Poirot, and was top-billed as Broadway columnist Johnny Warren on the 1950 TV series I Cover Times Square.

Trivia: Hollywood's favorite "dear old dad," Leon Ames began his stage career as a sleek, dreamy-eyed matinee idol in 1925. He was still billing himself under his real name, Leon Waycoff, when he entered films in 1931. His best early leading role was as the poet-hero of the stylish terror piece Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). In 1933, Ames was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, gaining a reputation amongst producers as a political firebrand--which may have been why his roles diminished in size during the next few years (Ironically, when Ames was president of the SAG, his conservatism and willingness to meet management halfway incurred the wrath of the union's more liberal wing). Ames played many a murderer and caddish "other man" before he was felicitously cast as the kindly, slightly befuddled patriarch in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). He would play essentially this same character throughout the rest of his career, starring on such TV series as Life With Father (1952-54) and Father of the Bride (1961). When, in 1963, he replaced the late Larry Keating in the role of Alan Young's neighbor on Mr. Ed, Ames' fans were astounded: his character had no children at all! Off screen, the actor was the owner of a successful, high profile Los Angeles automobile dealership. In 1963, he was the unwilling focus of newspaper headlines when his wife was kidnapped and held for ransom. In one of his last films, 1983's Testament, Leon Ames was reunited with his Life With Father co-star Lurene Tuttle.

Trivia: After attending City College of New York, Marc Lawrence studied acting with Eva Le Gallienne. Among the many stage productions in which Lawrence appeared were Sour Mountain and Waiting for Lefty. First signed for films by Columbia in 1932, Lawrence's scarred face and growly voice made him indispensable for gangster parts, though he generally displayed an intelligence far higher than the average goon or gunman. Though usually limited to villainy, Lawrence was not always confined to urban roles, as witness his successful portrayals of a mountaineer in Shepherd of the Hills (1942) and a western saddle tramp in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). The actor's own favorite role was Corio in 1947's Captain from Castille. During the House UnAmerican Activities Committee investigations of the 1950s, Lawrence reluctantly offered testimony implicating several of his coworkers as alleged communist sympathizers; the experience virtually destroyed his American career and left him embittered and defensive (he would always refuse to be interviewed by historians of the "Blacklist" era, referring to them as "ghouls"). Lawrence was forced to seek out work in Europe, where he'd emerge in the early 1960s as a director of crime films and spaghetti westerns. Back in the U.S. in the 1980s, Lawrence made several TV appearances and showed up in such films as The Big Easy (1987) and Newsies (1992), typecast once more as gangsters. In 1993, Lawrence privately published his memoirs, in which for the first time in print he addressed his dark days as an HUAC "friendly witness."

Trivia: With her China doll appearance and trademark bangs, Toshia Mori was the only non-Caucasian ever voted a WAMPAS Baby Star, an annual selection of promising starlets that lasted 1922-1934. Mori's year was 1932 and although she had been an alternate selection and promoted only when Lillian Miles of Reefer Madness fame dropped out, the Japanese actress was highly visible in such films as Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), in which she played second fiddle to the exotic makeup of Swedish actor Nils Asther, and as the girlfriend of Charlie Chan's Number One son. Born Toshiye Ichioka, under which moniker she danced in several Japanese and Hollywood silent films, Mori also appeared in films as Shia Jung. She left films in 1937 and later worked as a research assistant on Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not short subject series.

Trivia: Charles Williams looked like a mature Beaver Cleaver. Short of stature, high-pitched of voice, and usually sporting a toothbrush mustache and coke-bottle glasses, Williams was the perfect nerd/buttinsky in many a Hollywood film. Williams began his career at Paramount's New York studios in 1922, dabbling in everything from writing to assistant directing. When talkies arrived, Williams found his true calling as a supporting actor; he was seemingly cast as a nosey reporter or press photographer in every other picture released by Hollywood. In one film, Hold That Co-Ed (1938), gentleman-of-the-press Williams is so obstreperous that, as a comic punchline, he is run over by a car and killed! Charles B. Williams will be instantly recognizable to Yuletide TV viewers as Cousin Eustace in the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Trivia: Many research sources arbitrarily begin the list of French actor Eugene Borden's films in 1936. In fact, Borden first showed up on screen as early as 1917. Seldom afforded billing, the actor was nonetheless instantly recognizable in his many appearances as headwaiters, porters, pursers and coachmen. Along with several other stalwart European character actors, Borden was cast in a sizeable role in the above-average Columbia "B" So Dark the Night (1946). Musical buffs will recall Eugene Borden as Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant's landlord in An American in Paris (1951).

Trivia: Silent-film leading man Creighton Hale was brought to America from his native Ireland via a theatrical touring company. While starring in Charles Frohman's Broadway production of Indian Summer, Hale was spotted by a representative of the Pathe film company and invited to appear before the cameras. His first film was the Pearl White serial The Exploits of Elaine, after which he rose to stardom in a series of adventure films and romantic dramas. Director D.W. Griffith used Hale as comedy relief in his films Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922)--possibly Hale's least effective screen appearances, in that neither he nor Griffith were comedy experts. Despite his comparative failure in these films, Hale remained a popular leading man throughout the 1920s. When talking pictures arrived, Hale's star plummeted; though he had a pleasant, well-modulated voice, he was rapidly approaching fifty, and looked it. Most of Hale's talkie roles were unbilled bits, or guest cameos in films that spotlighted other silent movie veterans (e.g. Hollywood Boulevard and The Perils of Pauline). During the 1940s, Hale showed up in such Warner Bros. productions as Larceny Inc (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1943); this was due to the largess of studio head Jack Warner, who kept such faded silent favorites as Hale, Monte Blue and Leo White on permanent call. Creighton Hale's final appearance was in Warners' Beyond the Forest (1949).

Trivia: Best remembered as one of silent screen star Barbara La Marr's many husbands, handsome Jack Daugherty (or Dougherty as it was sometimes spelled) began his career starring in minor action melodramas for low-budget producer Benjamin F. Wilson. Although most of Wilson's cheap fare only played the grind-houses, Daugherty came to the attention of Universal who paired him with newcomer Laura La Plante in a series of Western two-reelers. But true Western stardom eluded him and he did much better in serials, of which he made no less than nine, seven of which were produced for Universal. But La Marr's sensational death from an apparent drug overdose would forever taint Daugherty's reputation and he was playing supporting roles, mostly villainous, by the end of the decade. A second marriage to former WAMPAS Baby Star Virginia Brown Faire ended in divorce after only one year and Daugherty was all but forgotten by moviegoers when he committed suicide in May 1938.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: American actor James Flavin was groomed as a leading man when he first arrived in Hollywood in 1932, but he balked at the glamour treatment and was demonstrably resistant to being buried under tons of makeup. Though Flavin would occasionally enjoy a leading role--notably in the 1932 serial The Airmail Mystery, co-starring Flavin's wife Lucille Browne--the actor would devote most of his film career to bit parts. If a film featured a cop, process server, Marine sergeant, circus roustabout, deckhand or political stooge, chances are Jimmy Flavin was playing the role. His distinctive sarcastic line delivery and chiselled Irish features made him instantly recognizable, even if he missed being listed in the cast credits. Larger roles came Flavin's way in King Kong (1933) as Second Mate Briggs; Nightmare Alley (1947), as the circus owner who hires Tyrone Power; and Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), as a long-suffering homicide detective. Since he worked with practically everyone, James Flavin was invaluable in later years as a source of on-set anecdotes for film historians; and because he evidently never stopped working, Flavin and his wife Lucille were able to spend their retirement years in comfort in their lavish, sprawling Hollywood homestead.

Trivia: Following his film debut in the 1916 adaptation of King Lear, actor Edwin Stanley returned to his first love, the stage. Stanley's next appearance was a featured role in the 1932 Columbia "special" Virtue. He spent the next 14 years playing military officers, theatrical producers, and other dignified take-charge characters. A familiar figure on the serial scene, Edwin Stanley played such chapter-play roles as Odette in Dick Tracy (1937), General Rankin in Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), Dr. Mallory in The Phantom Creeps (1939), and Colonel Bevans in The Mysterious Dr. Satan (1940).

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.

Trivia: A veteran vaudeville performer from Kentucky, wavy-haired Sam Ash was fairly busy in Broadway musicals of the 1910s and 1920s, including the hugely successful Katrinka (1915), Some Party (1922; with Jed Prouty and De Wolf Hopper), and The Passing Show of 1922. Third-billed in his screen debut as one of the suspects in the Craig Kennedy mystery Unmasked (1929), Ash went on to play literally hundreds of bit parts as waiters, news vendors, ship stewards, reporters, and the like. He was popular with the Republic Pictures serial units in the 1940s, playing one of the reporters swooping down on poor Louise Currie in The Masked Marvel (1944) and a florist in Captain America (1944), to mention but two of many chapterplay roles. His final film, the Warner Bros. Western The Big Sky (1952), was released posthumously.

Trivia: Actor/writer Robert Middlemass was most closely associated with George M. Cohan during his Broadway years, appearing in such Cohan productions as Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Tavern. Before the 1920s were over, Middlemass had written or co-written several plays and one-act sketches, the most famous of which was The Valiant. Though he appeared in the 1918 feature film 5000 a Week, his screen career proper didn't begin in 1934, when he showed up as a foil for the Ritz Brothers in the New York-filmed comedy short Hotel Anchovy. For the next decade, Middlemass was based in Hollywood, essaying various authority figures in approximately two dozen films. Robert Middlemass' better screen roles include the flustered sheriff in the Marx Bros. Day at the Races (1937) and impresario Oscar Hammerstein in The Dolly Sisters (1945).

Trivia: Stage actor Lee Shumway first gave the upstart movie industry a try in 1909. He returned to picture-making on a more regular basis in the mid-teens, remaining in Hollywood until his retirement in 1947. On both sides of the talkie revolution, Shumway was most gainfully employed in Westerns and serials, switching from comparative heroics to villainy after the movies learned to talk. Lee Shumway may well be the only actor to have ever appeared with both Bela Lugosi (1935's Mystery of Mr. Wong) and Lou Gehrig (1938's Rawhide).

Trivia: American small-part player Billy Wayne was active from 1935 to 1955. Wayne spent most of his film career at Universal, with a few side trips to Fox and Paramount. He was often cast as a chauffeur, usually an all-knowing or sarcastic one. Billy Wayne also played more than his share of cabbies, sailors, reporters, photographers, and assistant directors (vide W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break).