Trivia: Actress Ann Ayars launched her career as a singer in the 1930s. She started acting in the early '40s, and made her film debut in Dr. Kildare's Victory (1941). She appeared regularly in features through 1943, then left Hollywood to become the New York City Opera's leading lyric soprano. In 1951, Ayars played Antonia in the film version of The Tales of Hoffmann.

Trivia: A sort of poor man's Lupe Velez, exotic Armida was the Mexican-born daughter of stage actor Joaquin Vendrell, who brought her to Arizona when she was a child. Working up a dancing act with her sisters, Armida later appeared with a young Ray Bolger in the Gus Edwards skit Ritz Carlton and toured vaudeville. In Hollywood from 1929, the diminutive (4'11") spitfire was discovered by John Barrymore, who co-starred her as Fidelia, the spirited gypsy dancer in General Crack (1929). Armida's dancing expertise would stand her in good stead in the future when, rarely the leading lady, she would grace not a few B-Westerns with a Mexican dance specialty or two. She was very busy during World War II as part of Hollywood's "friendly neighbor" policy, but her screen career was for all intents and purposes over by the early '50s. In between screen assignments, Armida appeared on stage in Sigmund Romberg's Nina Rosa and performed on radio with Rudy Vallee.

Trivia: Spanish actor Antonio Moreno was in films from 1912, and in the pre-1920 years had built himself up into one of the bigger stars of Vitagraph Studios. A beefy, handsome man who could spring into rugged action at the turn of a camera crank, Moreno also appeared in several silents serials, with titles like The House of Hate and Invisible Hands. Like many pioneer movie players, Moreno found his star waning in the early '20s, until the arrival of Rudolph Valentino created a demand in Hollywood for Latin Lover types. Moreno's career was revitalized, and by 1926 he was pitching woo to Greta Garbo and engaging in a bloody bullwhip duel (not with Garbo) in The Temptress. When talkies came in, Moreno was kept busy starring in Spanish-language versions of Hollywood film hits, and continued making films in his native tongue both in the USA and below the border. As an actor, Moreno was rather locked in the declamatory style of his Vitagraph days, as witness his florid performance as an amorous gypsy in Laurel and Hardy's The Bohemian Girl (1936). But he worked often, if not for the high salaries of his silent days, in character roles in such Hollywood costume epics as The Spanish Main (1945) and Captain from Castile (1948). John Ford devotees will be familiar with Moreno for his role as Emilio Figueroa in Ford's influential western epic The Searchers (1955). Antonio Moreno's final film was still another Spanish-language production, El Senora Faron y la Cleopatra (1958).

Trivia: Born into a military family (his father was an officer in the Mexican revolution), Jorge Negrete attended the Mexican equivalent of West Point from 1925 to 1928. Upon graduation, however, Negrete became fascinated with music, taking singing lessons from the celebrated Jose Pierson. While still in his very early twenties, he became a star on clear-channel radio station XER, performing a mixture of Mexican and Cuban songs. Known to his fans as "El Charro Cantor," he made his first film in 1937, then headlined a Spanish-language network program in North America. His only Hollywood appearance was in the 1947 MGM musical Fiesta. Jorge Negrete was married to singer Elisa Chrisy and to Mexican film luminary Maria Felix, who became his widow when he died of cirrhosis at the age of 42.