Trivia: Tortured but brilliant British actor Charles Laughton's unique performances made him a compelling performer both on stage and in film. After starting his career as an hotel manager, Laughton switched to acting. His performances in London's West End plays brought him early acclaim, which eventually led him to the Old Vic, Broadway and Hollywood. When he repeated his stage success in The Private Life of Henry VIII for Alexander Korda on film in 1933, he won a "Best Actor" Oscar. Known both for his fascination with the darker side of human behavior and for his comic touch, Laughton should be watched as a frightening Nero in Sign of the Cross (1932), the triumphant employee in If I Had a Million (1932), the evil doctor in Island of Lost Souls (1932), the incestuous father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), the irrepressible Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), the overbearing Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which garnered him another Oscar nomination, and the haunted hunchback in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with a very young Maureen O'Hara. During the war years, he played some light roles in Tales of Manhattan (1942), Forever and a Day (1943) and The Canterville Ghost (1944), among others. By the late '40s, Laughton sought greater challenges and returned to the stage in The Life of Galileo, which he translated from Bertolt Brecht's original and co-directed. As stage director and/or performer, he made Don Juan in Hell in 1951, John Brown's Body in 1953, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in 1954, and Shaw's Major Barbara in 1956, all in New York. When he returned to England in 1959, he appeared in Stratford-upon-Avon productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and King Lear. Later film appearances include O. Henry's Full House (1952), Hobson's Choice (1954), Witness for the Prosecution (1957) (which gave him another Oscar nomination), Spartacus (1960) and Advise and Consent (1962). Laughton was married from 1929 to his death to actress Elsa Lanchester, with whom he occasionally appeared. His direction of the film The Night of the Hunter (1955) is critically acclaimed.

Trivia: Thanks to the strenous efforts of her mother, a former dancer, American child actress Margaret O'Brien won her first film role at age four in the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical Babes on Broadway (1941). MGM was so impressed by the child's expressiveness and emotional range that she was given the title role in the wartime morale-booster Journey For Margaret (1942). She was so camera-savvy by the time she appeared in Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case (1943) that the film's star Lionel Barrymore declared that had this been the Middle Ages, O'Brien would have been burned at the stake! Some of her coworkers may secretly have wished that fate on O'Brien, since she reportedly flaunted her celebrity on the set, ostensibly at the encouragement of her parents. Famed for her crying scenes, O'Brien really let the faucets flow in her best film, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), in which her character also predated Wednesday Addams by two decades with a marked fascination for death and funerals. In 1944, O'Brien was given a special Academy Award, principally for work in Meet Me In St. Louis. As she grew, her charm faded; by 1951's Her First Romance, she was just one of a multitude of Hollywood teen ingenues. A comeback attempt in the 1956 film Glory was servicable, but the film was badly handled by its distributor RKO Radio and failed to re-establish the actress. A more fruitful role awaited her in a 1958 TV musical version of Little Women, in which O'Brien played Beth, the same role she'd essayed in the 1949 film version. In 1960, O'Brien had a strong supporting part in the period picture Heller in Pink Tights (1960), ironically playing a onetime child actress whose stage mother is trying to keep her in "kid" roles. In between summer theatre productions, O'Brien would resurface every so often in another TV show, reviewers would welcome her back, and then she'd be forgotten until the next part. The actress gained a great deal of weight in the late 1960s, turning this debility into an asset when she appeared in a "Marcus Welby MD" TV episode (starring her Journey for Margaret costar Robert Young) in which she played a woman susceptible to quack diet doctors. A bit thinner, and with eyes as wide and expressive as ever, O'Brien has recently appeared in a handful of episodes of "Murder She Wrote," that evergreen refuge for MGM luminaries of the past.

Trivia: Chicago-born Robert Young carried his inbred "never give up" work ethic into his training at the Pasadena Playhouse. After a few movie-extra roles, he was signed by MGM to play a bit part as Helen Hayes' son in 1931's Sin of Madelon Claudet. At the request of MGM head Irving Thalberg, Young's role was expanded during shooting, thus the young actor was launched on the road to stardom (his first-released film was the Charlie Chan epic Black Camel [1931], which he made while on loan to Fox Studios). Young appeared in as many as nine films per year in the 1930s, usually showing up in bon vivant roles. Alfred Hitchcock sensed a darker side to Young's ebullient nature, and accordingly cast the actor as a likeable American who turns out to be a cold-blooded spy in 1936's The Secret Agent. Some of Young's best film work was in the 1940s, with such roles as the facially disfigured war veteran in The Enchanted Cottage (1945) and the no-good philanderer in They Won't Believe Me (1947). In 1949, Young launched the radio sitcom Father Knows Best, starring as insurance salesman/paterfamilias Jim Anderson (it was his third weekly radio series). The series' title was originally ironic in that Anderson was perhaps one of the most stupidly stubborn of radio dads. By the time Father Knows Best became a TV series in 1954, Young had refined his Jim Anderson characterization into the soul of sagacity. Young became a millionaire thanks to his part-ownership of Father Knows Best, which, despite a shaky beginning, ran successfully until 1960 (less popular was his 1961 TV dramedy Window on Main Street, which barely lasted a full season). His second successful series was Marcus Welby, M.D. (1968-1973). Young's later TV work has included one-shot revivals of Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, and the well-received 1986 TV-movie Mercy or Murder, in which Young essayed the role of a real-life pensioner who killed his wife rather than allow her to endure a painful, lingering illness. Young passed away from respiratory failure at his Westlake Village, CA, home at the age of 91.

Trivia: Actor William Gargan began his career in 1924, shortly after leaving high school, and made it to Broadway within a year. In 1932 he won great acclaim for his work in the play The Animal Kingdom, leading to an invitation from Hollywood where he made his film debut in 1932. During the '30s he played high-energy, gregarious leads in many "B"-movies and second leads in major films; later he moved into character roles. For his work in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), he received a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination. He made few films after 1948, but from 1949 to 1951 he starred in the title role of the TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye then reprised the role in 1957 in The New Adventures of Martin Kane. He was stricken by cancer of the larynx, and in 1960 his voice box was removed in surgery, ending his career. He learned esophageal speech then taught this method for the American Cancer Society; the same group enlisted him as an anti-smoking campaigner. Two years after losing his speech, he gave his final performance, portraying a mute clown on TV in King of Diamonds. He authored an autobiography, Why Me? (1969), recounting his struggle with cancer. His brother was actor Edward Gargan.

Trivia: British actor Reginald Owen was a graduate of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his stage bow in 1905, remaining a highly-regarded leading man in London for nearly two decades before traversing the Atlantic to make his Broadway premiere in The Swan. His film career commenced with The Letter (1929), and for the next forty years Owen was one of Hollywood's favorite Englishmen, playing everything from elegant aristocrats to seedy villains. Modern viewers are treated to Owen at his hammy best each Christmas when local TV stations run MGM's 1938 version of The Christmas Carol. As Ebeneezer Scrooge, Owen was a last-minute replacement for an ailing Lionel Barrymore, but no one in the audience felt the loss as they watched Owen go through his lovably cantankerous paces. Reginald Owen's film career flourished into the 1960s and 1970s. He was particularly amusing and appropriately bombastic as Admiral Boom, the cannon-happy eccentric neighbor in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).

Trivia: Before plunging into show business, comedian Rags Ragland was a truck driver, a boxer (which explains his cauliflower ears), and a movie projectionist. He entered burlesque in his twenties, working his way up to "top banana" at Minsky's. Among his fellow burlesque performers, Ragland was famous (or notorious) for his wild ad-libs, his unpredictable intrusions into other comics' acts, and his healthy off-stage libido. In 1940, he graduated to the big time in Ethel Merman's Broadway musical Panama Hattie. Shortly afterward, he became a contract player at MGM, where he gained popularity as Red Skelton's cohort in the Whistling movies (Whistling in the Dark, Whistling in Dixie, and Whistling in Brooklyn). Rags Ragland died suddenly of uremia at the age of 40.

Trivia: With the body of a scarecrow, the contemptuous stare of a house detective, and the voice of an air-raid siren, Irish-born Una O'Connor was one of filmdom's most unforgettable character actresses. Beginning her career with Dublin's Abbey Players and extending her activities to the London's West End and Broadway, O'Connor was cast as the socially conscious housekeeper in Noel Coward's 1932 London production Cavalcade; it was this role which brought her to Hollywood in 1933. She rapidly became a favorite of two prominent directors, James Whale and John Ford, neither of whom were inclined to ask her to tone down her film performances. For Whale, O'Connor screeched her way through two major 1930s horror films, The Invisible Man (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); for Ford, O'Connor played the grieving mother of martyred IRA activist Wallace Ford in The Informer (1935) and Mrs. Grogan in The Plough and the Stars (1936). For those detractors who believe that O'Connor never gave a subtle, controlled performance in her life, refer to Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946), wherein Ms. O'Connor spoke not a single word as the glowering mother of upper-class twit Richard Haydn. Fourteen years after portraying Charles Laughton's overprotective mother in This Land Is Mine (1943), Una O'Connor once more appeared opposite Laughton in 1957's Witness for the Prosecution, playing a hard-of-hearing housekeeper; it was her last screen performance.

Trivia: American actor Frank Faylen was born into a vaudeville act; as an infant, he was carried on stage by his parents, the song-and-dance team Ruf and Clark. Traveling with his parents from one engagement to another, Faylen somehow managed to complete his education at St. Joseph's Prep School in Kirkwood, Missouri. Turning pro at age 18, Faylen worked on stage until getting a Hollywood screen test in 1936. For the next nine years, Faylen played a succession of bit and minor roles, mostly for Warner Bros.; of these minuscule parts he would later say, "If you sneezed, you missed me." Better parts came his way during a brief stay at Hal Roach Studios in 1942 and 1943, but Faylen's breakthrough came at Paramount in 1945, where he was cast as Bim, the chillingly cynical male nurse at Bellevue's alcoholic ward in the Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend. Though the part lasted all of four minutes' screen time, Faylen was so effective in this unpleasant role that he became entrenched as a sadistic bully or cool villain in his subsequent films. TV fans remember Faylen best for his more benign but still snarly role as grocery store proprietor Herbert T. Gillis on the 1959 sitcom Dobie Gillis. For the next four years, Faylen gained nationwide fame for such catch-phrases as "I was in World War II--the big one--with the good conduct medal!", and, in reference to his screen son Dobie Gillis, "I gotta kill that boy someday. I just gotta." Faylen worked sporadically in TV and films after Dobie Gillis was canceled in 1963, receiving critical plaudits for his small role as an Irish stage manager in the 1968 Barbra Streisand starrer Funny Girl. The actor also made an encore appearance as Herbert T. Gillis in a Dobie Gillis TV special of the 1970s, where his "good conduct medal" line received an ovation from the studio audience. Faylen was married to Carol Hughes, an actress best-recalled for her role as Dale Arden in the 1939 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and was the father of another actress, also named Carol.

Trivia: Despite his Irish background, no one could play the typical British gentleman, or gentleman's gentleman, better than Lumsden Hare. There was definitely something aristocratic about the erect, dignified 6'1" Hare, who played the Prince Regent in The House of Rothschild (1934) and the King of Sweden in Cardinal Richelieu (1935), not to mention countless military officers, doctors, and lawyers. A leading man in his younger days to Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, Nance O'Neil, and Maxine Elliott, Hare made his screen debut, as F. Lumsden Hare, in 1916 and continued to mix film with Broadway appearances through the 1920s. Relocating to Hollywood after the changeover to sound, Hare became one of the era's busiest, and finest, character actors, appearing in hundreds of film and television roles until his retirement in 1960.

Trivia: Though typecast as a dull-witted brute, Austrian-born Mike Mazurki was the holder of a Bachelor of Arts degree from Manhattan College. During the 1930s, he was a professional football and basketball player, as well as a heavyweight wrestler. His clock-stopping facial features enabled Mazurki to pick up bit and supporting roles in such films as The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Dr.Renault's Secret (1943). Larger parts came his way after his indelible portrayal of psychotic brute Moose Malloy in 1944's Murder My Sweet. His trademarked slurred speech was reportedly the result of an injury to his Adam's apple, incurred during his wrestling days. While villainy was his bread and butter, Mazurki enjoyed working with comedians like Jerry Lewis and Lou Costello; he was particularly fond of the latter because the diminutive Costello treated him with dignity and respect, defending big Mike against people who treated the hulking actor like a big dumb lug. Mazurki's many TV appearances included a regular role on the short-lived 1971 sitcom The Chicago Teddy Bears. In 1976, Mike Mazurki was effectively cast as a kindly trapper in the family-oriented "four-waller" Challenge to Be Free, which ended up a cash cow for the veteran actor.

Trivia: The son of veteran vaudeville headliner Julius Tannen and the brother of actor Charles Tannen, William Tannen entered films as a Columbia contractee in 1934. Along with several other young stage-trained performers, Tannen was "discovered" by MGM in 1938's Dramatic School. During his subsequent years at MGM, he was briefly associated with three top comedy teams: He played Virginia Grey's brother in the Marx Brothers' The Big Store (1941), a Nazi flunkey in Laurel and Hardy's Air Raid Wardens (1943), and a "hard-boiled" assistant director in Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945). On TV, William Tannen was seen in the recurring role of Deputy Hal on the weekly Western Wyatt Earp (1955-1961).

Trivia: Peter Lawford was a bushy-browed, slender, aristocratic, good-looking British leading man in Hollywood films. At age eight he appeared in the film Poor Old Bill (1931); seven years later he visited Hollywood and appeared in a supporting role as a Cockney boy in Lord Jeff (1938). In 1942 he began regularly appearing onscreen, first in minor supporting roles; by the late 1940s he was a breezy romantic star, and his studio promised him (incorrectly) that he would be the "new Ronald Colman." His clipped British accent, poise, looks, and charm made him popular with teenage girls and young women, but he outgrew his typecast parts by the mid '50s and spent several years working on TV, starring in the series Dear Phoebe and The Thin Man. Off screen he was known as a jet-setter playboy; a member of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack," he married Patricia Kennedy and became President John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law. From the 1960s he appeared mainly in character roles; his production company, Chrislaw, made several feature films, and he was credited as executive producer of three films, two in co-producer partnership with Sammy Davis Jr. In 1971-72 he was a regular on the TV sitcom The Doris Day Show. He divorced Kennedy in 1966 and later married the daughter of comedian Dan Rowan. He rarely acted onscreen after the mid-'70s.

Trivia: Inaugurating her acting career in her native London, Elizabeth Risdon studied at the RADA, and later taught there. She made her Broadway bow in the 1912 production Fanny's First Play. She then returned to England, where she was voted 1915's most popular silent film star. The tiny but resilient actress spent the 1920s alternating between the New York and London stages. After a lengthy association with the Theatre Guild, Risdon settled in Hollywood in 1934. Her talkie career consisted mostly of iron-willed matriarchs, but she also played a few frivolous comedy roles; her screen credits ranged from the lofty heights of Mourning Becomes Electra to such homely divertissement as Roy Rogers Westerns. Elizabeth Risdon was married to director George Loane Tucker and actor Brandon Evans.

Trivia: Launching his theatrical career in his native Germany, actor/director Frank Reicher worked in London before coming to the US in 1899. His entree into the movies was as co-director of the 1915 production The Clue; he continued to direct in Hollywood before returning to the stage in 1921. At the dawn of the talkie era, Reicher was brought back to California to direct German-language versions of American films. For his acting bow before the microphones, Reicher was cast in the title role of Napoleon's Barber (1928) a Fox Movietone two-reeler which represented the first talkie for director John Ford. Reicher specialized at this time in humorless, wizened authority figures: college professors, doctors, scientists, cabinet ministers. In 1933 he was cast as Captain Engelhorn in the classic adventure fantasy King Kong; director Ernest Schoedsack later characterized Reicher as "the best actor we had" in a cast which included Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray. He repeated the Engelhorn role, with a modicum of uncharacteristic humor added, in Son of Kong (1933). The remainder of Reicher's film career was devoted to brief character roles, often as murder victims. He was killed off at least twice by Boris Karloff (Invisible Ray [1936] and House of Frankenstein [1944]), and was strangled by Lon Chaney Jr. at the very beginning of The Mummy's Ghost (1944) (When Chaney inadvertently cut off his air during the feigned strangulation, Reicher subjected the star to a scorching reprimand, reducing Chaney to a quivering mass of meek apologies). During the war, Reicher's Teutonic name and bearing came in handy for the many anti-Nazi films of the era, notably To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Mission to Moscow (1944). In 1946, Reicher had one of his largest parts in years as the general factotum to hypnotist Edmund Lowe in The Strange Mr. Gregory (1946); that the part may have been written for the venerable actor is evidenced by the fact that his character name was Reicher. Frank Reicher retired in 1951; he died fourteen years later, at age 90.