Trivia: According to her own account, actress ZaSu Pitts was given her curious cognomen because she was named for two aunts, Eliza and Susan. Born in Kansas, Pitts moved with her family to California, where at age 19 she began her film career. Her first starring role was as an ugly duckling who finds true love in 1919's Better Times. Her calculated vagueness and fluttery hand gestures earned Pitts comedy roles from the outset, but director Erich Von Stroheim saw dramatic potential in the young actress. He cast her as the grasping, money-mad wife in his masterpiece Greed (1924), and she rose to the occasion with a searing performance. Except for a couple of later collaborations with Von Stroheim, Pitts returned to predominately comic assignments after Greed. One exception was her portrayal of Lew Ayres' ailing mother in the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a brilliant piece of work that unfortunately fell victim to the editors' scissors when a preview audience, conditioned to Pitts' comedy roles, broke out in loud laughter when she came onscreen (she was replaced by Beryl Mercer in the domestic version of All Quiet, though reportedly her scenes were retained for some European versions). Established as a top character comedian by the '30s (her oft-imitated catchphrase was "Oh, dear, oh my!"), Pitts co-starred with Thelma Todd in a series of Hal Roach two-reelers, was top-billed in such feature programmers as Out All Night (1933) and The Plot Thickens (1935), and showed up in select character roles in A-pictures. During the '40s and '50s, she toured in Ramshackle Inn, a play written especially for her by George Batson. From 1956 through 1960, Pitts played Elvira "Nugey" Nugent on the popular Gale Storm TV sitcom Oh, Susanna. ZaSu Pitts died in 1963, shortly after completing her final film appearance in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and just a few days after her last TV guest assignment on Burke's Law.

Trivia: Shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1920, Aline MacMahon made her New York debut in The Madras House. She was lavishly praised by the Manhattan critics for her starring turn in the 1926 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon. After appearing in the 1930 Kaufman-Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime, MacMahon was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role in the film version. Production delays allowed her to work elsewhere, thus her screen bow was in Warner Bros.' Five Star Final (1931). She was stuck in a "wisecracking dame" rut until her moving portrayal of philandering silver tycoon Edward G. Robinson's careworn wife in Silver Dollar (1932). In 1944, she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Katharine Hepburn's Chinese mother in Dragon Seed. More than a decade later, MacMahon appeared as James Agee's grandmother in both the stage and screen versions of All the Way Home. Retiring from films in 1963, Aline MacMahon continued performing on stage, joining New York's Lincoln Repertory troupe just after turning 65.

Trivia: Bowman attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began a career as a stage actor and radio singer in the '30s. Beginning with his debut in Internes Can't Take Money (1937), he spent seven years playing second leads, often as a playboy thanks to his suave, elegant style and dapper, handsome looks. Bowman hit his stride in the mid '40s, notably in Smash-Up (1947) opposite Susan Hayward. Never a major star, he began concentrating more on his stage work in the late '40s. He briefly starred in the TV series The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-51). After the mid '50s Bowman retired from the screen (except for a role in Youngblood Hawke in 1964), after which he went on to become the radio and TV consultant for the Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committee in Washington and later for Bethlehem Steel, coaching politicians and businessmen in speaking and on-camera techniques.

Trivia: Suzanne Carnahan was billed under her own name when she made her entree into films in 1940. As Susan Peters, she was signed as an MGM contract player in 1942, earning an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Kitty in MGM's Random Harvest. In 1944, she was paralyzed from the waist down in a hunting accident, and was thereafter confined to a wheelchair. Peters made a courageous film comeback in 1948, playing a vicious, conniving invalid in Sign of the Ram. In 1951, she starred as a female lawyer in the Philadelphia-based daily TV serial Miss Susan. The pressures of live television exacerbated Peters' already precarious physical condition, forcing her to retire from the series; not long afterward, she died of a variety of medical complications at the age of 31. From 1943 to 1948, Susan Peters was married to writer/director Richard Quine.

Trivia: Scratchy-voiced American character actress who appeared in dozens of Hollywood vehicles following years on the Chautauqua and Orpheum circuits, Marjorie Main eventually worked with W.C. Fields on Broadway, where she appeared in several productions. Widowed in 1934, she entered films in 1937, repeating her Broadway stage role as the gangster's mother in Dead End (1937). Personally eccentric, Main had an almost pathological fear of germs. Best known among her close to 100 film appearances, most for MGM, are Stella Dallas (1937), Test Pilot (1938), Too Hot to Handle (1938), The Women (1939), Another Thin Man (1939), I Take This Woman (1940), Susan and God (1940), Honky Tonk (1941), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Murder, He Says (1945), The Harvey Girls (1946), Summer Stock (1950), The Long, Long Trailer (1954), Rose Marie (1954), and Friendly Persuasion (1956). Starting with their appearances in The Egg and I (1947), which starred Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, Main and Percy Kilbride became starring performers as Ma and Pa Kettle in a series of rural comedies.

Trivia: It is possible that when actor Guy Kibbee portrayed newspaper editor Webb in the 1940 film version of Our Town, he harked back to his own father's experiences as a news journalist. The cherubic, pop-eyed Kibbee first performed on Mississippi riverboats as a teenager, then matriculated to the legitimate stage. The 1930 Broadway play Torch Song was the production that brought Kibbee the Hollywood offers. From 1931 onward, Kibbee was one of the mainstays of the Warner Bros. stock companies, specializing in dumb politicos (The Dark Horse [1932]), sugar daddies (42nd Street [1933]) and the occasional straight, near-heroic role (Captain Blood [1935]). In 1934, Kibbee enjoyed one of his rare leading roles, essaying the title character in Babbitt (1934), a role he seemed born to play. During the 1940s, Kibbee headlined the Scattergood Baines B-picture series at RKO. He retired in 1949, after completing his scenes in John Ford's Three Godfathers. Kibbee was the brother of small-part play Milton Kibbee, and the father of Charles Kibbee, City University of New York chancellor.

Trivia: Actor-turned-director Richard Quine, born in Detroit, began his professional life in vaudeville before turning the the legitimate stage and then movies (his films as an actor include Counselor-At-Law, perhaps John Barrymore's best movie, from 1933), first as an actor and, from 1948 onward, as a director. The best of his films, My Sister Eileen (1955), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), Operation Mad Ball (1957), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), and It Happened to Jane (1958), all date from the middle and late '50s, and are all comedies. Sex and the Single Girl (1964) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965) were the last of his genuine hits, after which changing attitudes left his movies ever further from the public's taste.

Trivia: The daughter of silent comedy film director Ray Grey, who died when she was eight, Virginia Grey debuted onscreen at age 10 as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). She did a few more juvenile roles in silents, then as a teenager she appeared in small roles in talkies before working her way up to leading lady in a number of second features; she also played second leads in a few major productions. Grey went on to a prolific, long-lived screen career over the next three-plus decades; she also worked occasionally on TV and for a time was a regular on the soap opera General Hospital. Though she never married, at one time she was romantically involved with actor Clark Gable, whom she reportedly came close to marrying.

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

Trivia: A reliable British stage, screen, and radio actor, Gerald Oliver Smith came to Hollywood in 1937 and played scores of bit parts, often proper English gentlemen complete with monocle and haughty demeanor. Smith, who played the butler in Deanna Durbin's One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), Colonel Fitzwilliam in Pride and Prejudice (1940), and Constance Bennett's major domus in As Young as You Feel (1951), retired in the mid-'50s. At the time of his death, Smith was a resident at the Motion Picture House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

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: A major figure of the motion picture industry's formative years, American actor/director King Baggot was the son of a prominent St. Louis real estate investor. He intended to become a baseball player, but settled instead for a theatrical career. After a few years as a stock-company juvenile, Baggot scored his first success with the lead in More to Be Pitied Than Scorned. In 1909 Baggot entered films by joining Carl Laemmle's fledgling Universal company. His specialty was virile action roles, but Baggot was also at home with such classics as Ivanhoe (1912); he also thrived in dual roles, examples of which could be found in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913) and The Corsican Brothers (1915). As age caught up with him, Baggot began concentrating on directing. His most celebrated assignment was William S. Hart's Tumbleweeds, for which Baggot and Hart shared directorial credit. Returning to acting as "King Baggott," he was reduced to bit roles in features (a doorman in Topaze [1933], a gambler in Mississippi [1935]) and supporting parts in such cheap two-reelers as Harry Langdon's The Big Flash (1932). In 1933, Baggot was one of several silent-film veterans to be awarded a lifetime contract by MGM -- a symbolic gesture at best, since he was seldom seen in a sizeable part and drew a meager weekly salary of 75 dollars. The name of King Baggot has been perpetuated by his namesake grandson, a prolific cameraman of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Trivia: Nora Cecil's earliest known screen credit was 1918's Prunella. Chances are Cecil played then what she'd play in most of her talkie efforts: the tight-lipped, sternly reproving old biddy. She made a good living essaying dozens of battle-ax mothers-in-law, welfare workers, landladies, schoolmistresses and maiden aunts. One of her largest parts was boarding-house keeper Mrs. Wendelschaffer in W.C. Fields' The Old Fashioned Way (1934). Nora Cecil also served as an excellent foil for screen comedians as varied as Laurel and Hardy (1932's Pack Up Your Troubles) and Will Rogers (1933's Dr. Bull).

Trivia: Immense, sad-eyed character actor George Humbert made his first film appearance in 1921. Humbert almost always played an Italian restaurateur, waiter, chef or street vendor. His screen characters usually answered to such names as Tony, Luigi, Mario, and Giueseppi. A rare digression from this pattern was his portrayal of "Pancho" in Fiesta (1947). George Humbert made his last appearance as Pop Mangiacavallo (his name was longer than his part!) in The Rose Tattoo (1955).

Trivia: Boasting a colorful show-biz background as a circus and vaudeville performer, Robert Emmet O'Connor entered films in 1926. Blessed with a pudgy Irish mug that could convey both jocularity and menace, O'Connor was most often cast as cops and detectives, some of them honest and lovable, some of them corrupt and pugnacious. His roles ranged from such hefty assignments as the flustered plainclothesman Henderson in Night at the Opera (1935) to such bits as the traffic cop who is confused by Jimmy Cagney's barrage of Yiddish in Taxi! (1932). One of his most famous non-cop roles was warm-hearted bootlegger Paddy Ryan in Public Enemy. During the 1940s, O'Connor was a contract player at MGM, showing up in everything from Our Gang comedies to the live-action prologue of the Tex Avery cartoon classic Who Killed Who? (1944). Robert Emmet O'Connor's last film role was Paramount studio-guard Jonesy in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Twelve years later, he died of injuries sustained in a fire.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Arthur Space was active in films from 1940. Tall, tweedy, and usually sporting a mustache, Space played just about every kind of supporting role, from Western banker to big-city detective to jewel thief. One of his largest film roles was as the delightfully eccentric inventor Alva P. Hartley in the 1944 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Big Noise. As busy on television as in films, Arthur Space was seen on a weekly basis as Herbert Brown, the father of horse-loving teenager Velvet Brown, in the TV series National Velvet (1960-1961).

Trivia: Stately stage leading man Howard C. Hickman entered films through the auspices of producer Thomas H. Ince. Hickman starred as Count Ferdinand, the Messianic protagonist of Ince's Civilization (1916). He co-starred with his actress wife Bessie Barriscale in several productions before returning to the theatre. In the talkie era, he accepted innumerable featured and bit roles as doctors, judges, ministers, senators, and executives. Generations of filmgoers will remember Howard Hickman for his brief appearance as John Wilkes, father of Ashley Wilkes and father-in-law of Melanie Hamilton, in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Trivia: The son of actors, William Farnum was 12 years old when he joined his parents and his brother Dustin and Marshal in the family business. Dustin (1874-1929) made it to motion-picture stardom first, as leading man of Cecil B. DeMille's first feature, 1914's The Squaw Man. That same year, William made his movie debut in another popular western, The Spoilers (1914). The climactic fight scene between Farnum and co-star Tom Santschi made stars out of both men, though only Farnum graduated to matinee-idol status. Signing with Fox films in 1915, Farnum became one of that studio's most popular leading men, thanks to such solid vehicles as Tale of Two Cities (1917), Les Miserables (1917) and If I Were King (1920). At his peak, Farnum was pulling down $10,000 dollars per week. He briefly returned to Broadway in 1925 to star in The Buccaneer. Later in 1925, Farnum suffered a serious injury on the set of The Man Who Fights Alone; as a result, he was confined to supporting roles for the rest of career. While many of these roles were sizeable (notably King Arthur in the 1931 Will Rogers version of A Connecticut Yankee), Farnum would never again recapture the glory of his silent stardom. William Farnum remained a busy character actor up until his death in 1952, often playing minor roles in remakes of his silent triumphs--including the 1942 remake of The Spoilers.