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: Welsh actor Ray Milland spent the 1930s and early 1940s playing light romantic leads in such films as Next Time We Love (1936); Three Smart Girls (1936); Easy Living (1937), in which he is especially charming opposite Jean Arthur in an early Preston Sturges script; Everything Happens at Night (1939); The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940); and the major in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor opposite Ginger Rogers. Others worth watching are Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Forever and a Day (1943), and Lady in the Dark (1944). He made The Uninvited in 1944 and won an Oscar for his intense and realistic portrait of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945). Unfortunately, it was one of his last good films or performances. With the exception of Dial M for Murder (1954), X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1953), Love Story (1970), and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), his later career was made up of mediocre parts in mostly bad films. One of the worst and most laughable was the horror film The Thing with Two Heads (1972), which paired him with football player Rosie Grier as the two-headed monster. Milland was also an uninspired director in A Man Alone (1955), Lisbon (1956), The Safecracker (1958), and Panic in Year Zero (1962).

Trivia: Educated in London and Paris, the breathtakingly beautiful Maureen O'Sullivan was discovered for films by director Frank Borzage while both were attending a horse show in Dublin. She made her screen debut in 1930 opposite Irish tenor John McCormick in Song O' My Heart, which earned her a contract with Fox studios. After appearing in such Fox blockbusters as Just Imagine (1930) and A Connecticut Yankee (1931), she moved to MGM, where her first assignment was the role of Jane Parker in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). She repeated this characterization in Tarzan and His Mate (1934), causing a minor sensation with her bikini-like costume and a nude swimming scene. Somewhat more modestly garbed, she went on to co-star in four more Tarzan pictures over the next eight years. Though MGM kept her busy in a variety of films, ranging from such costume dramas as The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and David Copperfield (1935) to the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937), she is best remembered for her appearances as Jane, a fact that has been a source of both pride and irritation for the actress (she liked her co-star Johnny Weissmuller but despised Cheeta the chimpanzee, who bit her more than once). She retired from films in 1942 to devote her time to her husband, director John Farrow, and her many children, two of whom grew up to be actresses Mia Farrow and Tisa Farrow. She returned to the screen in 1948, averaging a film every two years until 1958. An early arrival on TV, she hosted a local children's program in New York and the syndicated series Irish Heritage, and in 1964 was hired by NBC to co-anchor The Today Show (her replacement the following year was Barbara Walters). In 1964 she starred with Paul Ford in the Broadway production Never Too Late, playing a fortysomething suburbanite who suddenly finds herself pregnant; the following year she and Ford repeated their roles in the screen version. Widowed in 1963, she remarried 20 years later, sporadically reviving her screen activities in such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1985), in which she and Lloyd Nolan played the combative parents of her real-life daughter Mia Farrow. As regally beautiful as ever, Maureen O'Sullivan showed up again on TV in the mid-'90s as one of the interviewees in a Tarzan retrospective.

Trivia: A former pianist and radio actress, Rita Johnson was on Broadway from 1935 and in films from 1937. An extraordinarily versatile performer, Johnson managed to play virtually every sort of role open to an actress of above-average beauty and intelligence in the 1940s. Portraying standard heroines in such films as Edison the Man (1940) and My Friend Flicka (1943), Johnson brought far more warmth and humanity to the parts than the scripts provided. She was equally as persuasive as haughty murderess Julia Farnsworth in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and as the hissable "other woman" in films like The Major and the Minor (1944). It is positively criminal that no Academy Award came Johnson's way for her astonishing portrayal of the born-to-be-killed wife of unscrupulous Robert Young in 1947's They Won't Believe Me. Johnson's film career came to a screeching halt after a 1948 accident that required delicate brain surgery; thereafter, her screen time was extremely limited, in keeping with her radically reduced mobility and powers of concentration. Fifty-three-year-old Rita Johnson died of a brain hemorhage in her Hollywood home in 1965.

Trivia: Eccentric, high-voiced British comedienne/actress Elsa Lanchester started her career as a modern dancer, appearing with Isadora Duncan. Lanchester can be seen bringing unique and usually humorous interpretations to roles in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), opposite husband Charles Laughton; The Bride of Frankenstein (1934), where she appears both as a subdued Mary Shelley and a hissing bride; David Copperfield and Naughty Marietta (both 1935); Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Forever and a Day (1943), both with Laughton; Lassie Come Home (1943), in which she is unusually subdued as the mother; The Bishop's Wife (1947); The Inspector General and The Secret Garden (1949); and Come to the Stable (1949), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She and Laughton are riotous together in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, and she also appeared in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and the Disney films Mary Poppins (1964), as the departing nanny Katie Nanna, and in That Darn Cat (1965). One of her best late performances was in Murder by Death (1976). Lanchester was also an actress at London's Old Vic, an outlandish singer, and a nightclub performer; she co-starred on The John Forsythe Show (1965-66), and was a regular on Nanny and the Professor in 1971.

Trivia: Throughout Hollywood's golden age and TV's "typecasting" era of the '50s and '60s, there would always be a demand for American actor Dan Tobin. After all, somebody had to play all those stuffed-shirt executives, snotty desk clerks, officious male secretaries, tight-fisted bankers and tuxedoed, mustachioed stiffs to whom the heroine was unhappily engaged before the hero came along. Tobin was a welcome if slightly pompous presence in such films as Woman of the Year (1941), Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947) The Big Clock (1948) and The Love Bug Rides Again (1973). On television, Tobin had semiregular stints on I Married Joan, My Favorite Husband and Perry Mason, as well as innumerable guest bits on sitcoms and anthologies. Dan Tobin was also a frustrated screenwriter, at least according to scenarist George Clayton Johnson; while working together on a 1960 episode of Twilight Zone, Tobin cornered Johnson and described his concept for a fantasy script about a gambler who could read his opponent's minds -- a talent which failed when he came up against an opponent who couldn't speak English!

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: Recruited from the stage, Richard Webb was signed to a standard Paramount contract in 1941. After playing bits in such films as Among the Living (1941) Sullivan's Travels (1942) and I Wanted Wings (1942), Webb served as a Captain in World War II. Upon his return, he was briefly groomed for stardom. He played such sizeable supporting roles as Jim in Out of the Past (1947), Private Shipley in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Sir Galahad in A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur's Court, but his only top-billed assignment was the 1950 Republic serial The Invisible Monster. In 1952, Webb landed the role of Captain Midnight in the TV series of the same name, earning the hero worship of kids everywhere--and the animosity of the Captain Midnight producers when he refused to drink the sponsor's product, Ovaltine, in public (he hated the stuff!) Webb went on to star in the 1959 syndicated TVer US Border Patrol, then did guest spots on such series as Gunsmoke, Lassie and Get Smart. In the '70s Webb turned to writing, publishing four books on psychic phenomena, including the 1974 reincarnation study These Came Back. Suffering from cancer and a respiratory ailment, Richard Webb committed suicide in 1993.

Trivia: Brunette American actress Elaine Riley was signed by RKO Radio in 1942, where her first assignments included the studio's Leon Errol two-reel comedies. She went on to play minor roles in RKO's feature film product, showing up as hat check girls, waitresses, and chorus dancers. Larger parts came her way in the studio's Tim Holt Westerns, in which she was usually cast as a damsel in distress. After leaving RKO, Elaine Riley freelanced at Paramount, Monogram, and other studios until around 1956.

Trivia: Luis Van Rooten, he of the velvet voice and Mephistopholean countenance, was born in Mexico City and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. Van Rooten was a moderately successful architect before he decided upon an acting career. He was busiest in radio, playing the title role in The Adventures of Nero Wolfe, and appearing regularly on such series as Box 13, Bulldog Drummond, Chandu the Magician, The Damon Runyon Theater, Escape, John's Other Wife, and X Minus One. On television, Van Rooten was prominently featured on One Man's Family, Major Dell Conway of the Flying Tigers, and Wonderful John Acton, and was the frequent narrator of the 1960s documentary series Perspectives on Greatness. Off camera, Van Rooten enjoyed a reputation as an expert horticulturalist. Luis Van Rooten's film career began with 1944's The Hitler Gang and ended with 1961's Operation Eichmann; he played the same character, Nazi chieftan Heinrich Himmler, in both.

Trivia: The son of American actress Lillian Elliott, Lloyd Corrigan began working in films as a bit actor in the silent era. But Corrigan's heart was in writing and directing during his formative professional years. He was among Raymond Griffith's writing staff for the Civil War comedy Hands Up (1926), and later penned several of Bebe Daniels' Paramount vehicles. Corrigan worked on the scripts of all three of Paramount's "Fu Manchu" films (1929-30) starring Warner Oland; he also directed the last of the series, Daughter of the Dragon (1930). In contrast to his later light-hearted acting roles, Corrigan's tastes ran to mystery and melodrama in most of his directing assignments, as witness Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) and Night Key (1937). In 1938, Corrigan abandoned directing to concentrate on acting. A porcine little man with an open-faced, wide-eyed expression, Corrigan specialized in likable businessmen and befuddled millionaires (especially in Columbia's Boston Blackie series). This quality was often as not used to lead the audience astray in such films as Maisie Gets Her Man (1942) and The Thin Man Goes Home (1944), in which the bumbling, seemingly harmless Corrigan would turn out to be a master criminal or murderer. Lloyd Corrigan continued acting in films until the mid '60s; he also was a prolific TV performer, playing continuing roles in the TV sitcoms Happy (1960) and Hank (1965), and showing up on a semi-regular basis as Ned Buntline on the long-running western Wyatt Earp (1955-61).

Trivia: Beginning his stage career in his native Holland in 1927, Phil Van Zandt moved to America shortly afterward, continuing to make theatrical appearances into the late '30s. From his first film (Those High Gray Walls [1939]) onward, the versatile Van Zandt was typed as "everyday" characters whenever he chose not to wear his mustache; with the 'stache, however, his face took on a sinister shade, and he found himself playing such cinematic reprobates as evil caliphs, shady attorneys, and heartless Nazis. Because of deliberately shadowy photography, the audience barely saw Van Zandt's face at all in one of his best roles, as the Henry Luce-like magazine editor Rawlston in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Though many of his feature-film assignments were bits, Van Zandt was permitted generous screen time in his many appearances in two-reel comedies. Beginning with the Gus Schilling/Dick Lane vehicle Pardon My Terror (1946), Van Zandt was a fixture at the Columbia Pictures short subjects unit, usually playing crooks and mad scientists at odds with the Three Stooges. He established his own acting school in Hollywood in the 1950s, though this and other ventures ultimately failed. Philip Van Zandt died of a drug overdose at the age of 54.

Trivia: From 1939 until his death in 1960, gangly, balding Douglas Spencer could be spotted in unbilled film roles as doctors and reporters. By the early '50s, Spencer had graduated to supporting parts, often in films with a science fiction or fantasy theme. One of his lengthier assignments was Simms, the seance-busting reporter in Houdini (1953). Douglas Spencer's best-ever film role was bespectacled reporter Ned "Scotty" Scott in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing, wherein he closed the film with the immortal cautionary words "Keep watching the skies!"

Trivia: Moonfaced American actor Frank Orth came to films from vaudeville, where he was usually co-billed with wife Ann Codee. Orth and Codee continued appearing together in a series of two-reel comedies in the early '30s, before he graduated to features with 1935's The Unwelcome Stranger. From that point until his retirement in 1959, Orth usually found himself behind a counter in his film appearances, playing scores of pharmacists, grocery clerks and bartenders. He had a semi-recurring role as Mike Ryan in MGM's Dr. Kildare series, and was featured as a long-suffering small town cop in Warners' Nancy Drew films. Orth was an apparent favorite of the casting department at 20th Century-Fox, where he received many of his credited screen roles. From 1951 through 1953, Frank Orth was costarred as Lieutenant Farraday on the Boston Blackie TV series.

Trivia: Not to be confused with lachrymose child actor Bobs Watson (1931-1999), Robert "Bobby" Watson was a musical comedy actor who came to films in 1925. At the advent of talkies, the short, ebullient Watson played a few leads in such musicals as Syncopation (1929), then spent the 1930s essaying bit roles as glib reporters and fey "pansy" types. For a while, he emulated Broadway star Bobby Clark, adopting horn-rimmed glasses, a wide-brimmed hat, and a perpetual air of bug-eyed lechery. Watson found his true niche in the 1940s, when his startling resemblance to Adolf Hitler assured him plenty of screen work. He alternately portrayed Der Führer as a raving madman in such serious films as The Hitler Gang (1942) and as a slapsticky buffoon in such comedies as The Devil With Hitler (1942) and That Nazty Nuisance (1943). Legend has it that he faced so much hostility on the set while made up as Hitler that he had to remain locked in his dressing room between takes. After the war, Watson fell from prominence, playing a few sizeable character roles in films like The Paleface (1948) and Red, Hot and Blue (1949) before settling into such uncredited minor parts as the voice coach ("Moses supposes his toeses are roses") in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Until the end of his life, Bobby Watson remained "on call" for one-scene appearances as Hitler in films ranging from The Story of Mankind (1957) to Danny Kaye's On the Double (1961).

Trivia: American actress Frances Morris was seen in small utility roles from 1934 to 1961. At first, Morris was cast as gun molls, stewardesses, secretaries, receptionists, and maids. She was exceptionally busy in the 1940s, essaying a variety of WAVES and WACs. The following decade, she was seen in maternal roles (some of them actually given character names) in both films and TV. One of Frances Morris' better assignments was the sympathetic prison warden in the 1952 Loretta Young starrer Because of You.

Trivia: American actress Theresa Harris made her screen debut as one of the sullen "camp followers" in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco. Like most black performers working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, Harris was generally limited to servant roles. One of the more artistically rewarding of these was Josephine, the object of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson's affections in the Jack Benny vehicle Buck Benny Rides Again (1940). Harries and Anderson worked so well together that they were reteamed in the same roles in another Benny comedy, Love Thy Neighbor (1940). Evidently a favorite of RKO producer Val Lewton, Harris was prominently cast in several of Lewton's productions of the 1940s, most entertainingly as the cheerfully sarcastic waitress in Cat People (1943). Theresa Harris remained in films until 1958, her characters slowly moving up the social ladder to include nurses and governesses.

Trivia: American actor James Burke not only had the Irish face and brogueish voice of a New York detective, but even his name conjured up images of a big-city flatfoot. In Columbia's Ellery Queen series of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Burke was cast exquisitely to type as the thick-eared Sergeant Velie, who referred to the erudite Queen as "Maestro." Burke also showed up as a rural law enforcement officer in such films as Nightmare Alley (1947), in which he has a fine scene as a flint-hearted sheriff moved to tears by the persuasive patter of carnival barker Tyrone Power. One of the best of James Burke's non-cop performances was as westerner Charlie Ruggles' rambunctious, handlebar-mustached "pardner" in Ruggles of Red Gap (135), wherein Burke and Ruggles engage in an impromptu game of piggyback on the streets of Paris.

Trivia: Diminutive, baby-faced actress Noel Neill entered films as a Paramount starlet in 1942. Though she was showcased in one of the musical numbers in The Fleet's In (1944) and was starred in the Oscar-nominated Technicolor short College Queen (1945), most of her Paramount assignments were thankless bit parts. She fared better as one of the leads in Monogram's Teen Agers series of the mid- to late '40s. In 1948 she was cast as intrepid girl reporter Lois Lane in the Columbia serial The Adventures of Superman, repeating the role in the 1950 chapter play Atom Man vs. Superman. At the time, she regarded it as just another freelance job, perhaps a little better than her cameos in such features as An American in Paris (in 1951 as the American art student) and DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1953). But someone was impressed by Neill's appealingly vulnerable interpretation of Lois Lane, and in 1953 she was hired to replace Phyllis Coates as Lois in the TV version of Superman. She remained with the series for 78 episodes, gaining an enormous fan following (consisting primarily of ten-year-old boys) if not a commensurately enormous bank account. Retiring to private life after the cancellation of Superman in 1958, she was brought back into the limelight during the nostalgia craze of the 1970s. She made countless lecture appearances on the college and film convention circuit, and in 1978 returned to films as Lois Lane's mother in the big-budget Superman: The Movie: alas, most of her part ended up on the cutting-room floor, and neither she nor fellow Adventures of Superman alumnus Kirk Alyn received billing. Noel Neill's last TV appearance to date was a guest spot in a 1991 episode of the syndicated The Adventures of Superboy; she made a cameo appearance in 2006's Superman Returns. Neill died in 2016, at age 95.

Trivia: Enjoying a stage, screen, and television career that lasted almost seven decades, former child actress Edna Holland (often billed Edna M. Holland) appeared on stage under the management of the legendary David Belasco -- just like Mary Pickford, whom Holland followed into films in 1915. Cast as "The Other Woman," Holland menaced Pickford's rival Mary Miles Minter in Always in the Way (1915) and was equally intolerant of Hazel Dawn in The Feud Girl (1916), Marjorie Rambeau in Mary Moreland (1917), and Ruth Stonehouse in The Masked Rider (1919). The latter was a blood-and-thunder serial in 15 chapters and Holland played Juanita, scheming with arch villain Paul Panzer against the lissome Miss Stonehouse. By 1920, she was billing herself the rather formidable Mrs. E.M. Holland and returned to the stage. Surprisingly, Holland was back in films by the late '30s, now mostly playing professional women, such as teachers, nurses or secretaries. Making her television debut on the Lone Ranger program in 1949, Holland went on to appear on such popular shows as Lassie, Annie Oakley and The Andy Griffith Show. She retired after a bit part in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and died from a ruptured aneurysm in 1982.

Trivia: A genuine westerner, Lane Chandler, upon leaving Montana Wesleyan College, moved to LA and worked as a garage mechanic while seeking out film roles. After several years in bit parts, Chandler was signed by Paramount in 1927 as a potential western star. For a brief period, both Chandler and Gary Cooper vied for the best cowboy roles, but in the end Paramount went with Cooper. Chandler made several attempts to establish himself as a "B" western star in the 1930s, but his harsh voice and sneering demeanor made him a better candidate for villainous roles. He mostly played bits in the 1940s, often as a utility actor for director Cecil B. DeMille. The weather-beaten face and stubbly chin of Lane Chandler popped up in many a TV and movie western of the 1950s, his roles gradually increasing in size and substance towards the end of his career.

Trivia: General purpose actor Lester Dorr kept himself busy in every size role there was in Hollywood, in a screen career lasting nearly 35 years. Born in Massachusetts in 1893, he was working on Broadway in the late 1920s, including the cast of Sigmund Romberg's New Moon (1928). The advent of talking pictures brought Dorr to Hollywood, where, working mostly as a day-player, he began turning up in everything from two-reel shorts (especially from Hal Roach) in the latter's heyday) to major features (including Michael Curtiz's Female and Raoul Walsh's The Bowery, both 1933), in which he usually had tiny parts, often in crowd scenes, with an occasional line or two of dialogue -- in the mid-1930s he was literally appearing in dozens of movies each year, though usually with scarcely more than a minute's screen time in any one of them. Dorr was also one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild.He was almost as busy after World War II, and starting in 1951 he also started working in television, ranging from westerns to anthology series. He slowed down significantly in the 1960s, by which time he was in his seventies. Among his rare screen credits are two of his most oft-repeated large- and small-screen appearances -- in W. Lee Wilder's Killers From Space, the public domain status of which has made it a ubiquitous presence on cable television and low-priced VHS and DVD releases, he is the gas station attendant who spots fugitive scientist Peter Graves' car; and in The Adventures of Superman episode The Mind Machine, repeated for decades as part of the ever-popular series, Dorr plays the hapless but well-intention school bus driver whose vehicle (with three kids inside) is stolen by mentally unhinged mob witness Harry Hayden. His last three appearances were in full-blown feature films: Richard Quine's Hotel (1967), Gene Kelly's Hello Dolly (1969), and Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love (1975).

Trivia: The faces of most movie extras are unmemorable blurs in the public's memory. Not so the elegant, statuesque Bess Flowers, who was crowned by appreciative film buffs as "Queen of the Hollywood Dress Extras." After studying drama (against her father's wishes) at the Carnegie Inst of Technology, Flowers intended to head to New York, but at the last moment opted for Hollywood. She made her first film in 1922, subsequently appearing prominently in such productions as Hollywood (1922) and Chaplin's Woman of Paris (1923). Too tall for most leading men, Flowers found her true niche as a supporting actress. By the time talkies came around, Flowers was mostly playing bits in features, though her roles were more sizeable in two-reel comedies; she was a special favorite of popular short-subject star Charley Chase. Major directors like Frank Lloyd always found work for Flowers because of her elegant bearing and her luminescent gift for making the people around her look good. While generally an extra, Flowers enjoyed substantial roles in such films as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's Private Worlds and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937). In 1947's Song of the Thin Man, the usually unheralded Flowers was afforded screen billing. Her fans particularly cherish Flowers' bit as a well-wisher in All About Eve (1950), in which she breaks her customary screen silence to utter "I'm so happy for you, Eve." Flowers was married twice, first to Cecil B. DeMille's legendary "right hand man" Cullen Tate, then to Columbia studio manager William S. Holman. After her retirement, Bess Flowers made one last on-camera appearance in 1974 when she was interviewed by NBC's Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Ralph Dunn used his burly body and rich, theatrical voice to good effect in hundreds of minor feature-film roles and supporting appearances in two-reel comedies. He came to Hollywood during the early talkie era, beginning his film career with 1932's The Crowd Roars. A huge man with a withering glare, Dunn was an ideal "opposite" for short, bumbling comedians like Lou Costello in the 1944 Abbott and Costello comedy In Society, Dunn plays the weeping pedestrian who explains that he doesn't want to go to Beagle Street because that's where a two-ton safe fell on his head and killed him. A frequent visitor to the Columbia short subjects unit, Dunn shows up in the Three Stooges comedy Mummie's Dummies as the ancient Egyptian swindled at the Stooges' used chariot lot. Ralph Dunn kept busy into the '60s, appearing in such TV series as Kitty Foyle and such films as Black Like Me (1964).

Trivia: The husband of silent screen serial heroine Marie Walcamp, with whom he did the 1920 chapterplay Dragon's Net, American general-purpose actor Harland Tucker (sometimes given as Harlan Tucker) came from the New York stage. Usually cast in villainous roles in the silent era, Tucker played everything from mobsters to attorneys to military officers in the sound era, always minor bit parts and usually unbilled. Widowed since 1936 when Walcamp committed suicide, Tucker died of a heart attack in his Los Angeles home.

Trivia: Harry Rosenthal was an unlikely actor, mostly because he never set out to be one -- but that didn't stop him from being busy in movies for more than 15 years, or getting mentioned on the Broadway and Hollywood gossip pages with surprising frequency. A composer, pianist, and bandleader, he left his native Ireland for a successful career in music in London in the 1920s, during which he wrote several successful operettas, and then headed for New York. He found success as a performer beginning in 1930 when he appeared in the musical June Moon, written by Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman, in the role of a wisecracking pianist. A subsequent appearance at a reception for Edward, the Prince of Wales, led to his touring the world with the would-be heir to the British throne. Rosenthal appeared in movies beginning in 1931, and he worked onscreen right up through The Big Clock in 1948, but most of his best work was concentrated in the early/mid-'40s in the films of writer/director Preston Sturges, who used the pianist/actor in various roles in his films from The Great McGinty (1940) through The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). Even in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the only Sturges film at Paramount in which Rosenthal didn't appear, his name can be seen on a poster announcing music attractions, in the background of the shot introducing the Marines led by William Demarest in the movie's opening minutes. Rosenthal often added a wry, comical element to any scene that he was in, and, because of his Broadway stage background, he was a favorite subject of columnists, far beyond the size of the parts he often played. His passing in 1953 was noted by far more journalists than would have been usual for character actors in that era.

Trivia: Actor Earle Hodgins has been characterized by more than one western-film historian as a grizzled, bucolic Bob Hope type. Usually cast as snake-oil salesmen, Hodgins would brighten up his "B"-western scenes with a snappy stream of patter, leavened by magnificently unfunny wisecracks ("This remedy will give ya a complexion like a peach, fuzz 'n' all..."). When the low-budget western market died in the 1950s, Hodgins continued unabated on such TV series as The Roy Rogers Show and Annie Oakley. He also made appearances in such "A" films as East of Eden (55), typically cast as carnival hucksters and rural sharpsters. In 1961, Earle Hodgins was cast in the recurring role of wizened handyman Lonesome on the TV sitcom Guestward Ho!

Trivia: In films from 1941, American character actor Norman Leavitt spent much of his career in uncredited bits and supporting roles. Leavitt can briefly be seen in such "A" pictures of the 1940s and 1950s as The Inspector General (1949) and Harvey (1950). His larger roles include Folsom in the 1960 budget western Young Jesse James. Three Stooges fans will immediately recognize Norman Leavitt from The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), in which he player scientist Emil Sitka's sinister butler--who turned out to be a spy from Mars!

Trivia: American silent-film actress Julia Faye made her film bow in The Lamb (1915), which also represented the first film appearance of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Though she photographed beautifully, Faye's acting skills were limited. It's possible she would have quickly faded from the scene without the sponsorship of producer/director Cecil B. DeMille. Faye appeared in sizeable roles in most of DeMille's extravaganzas of the '20s; her assignments ranged from the supporting part of an Aztec handmaiden in The Woman God Forgot (1918) to the wife of Pharoah in The Ten Commandments (1923). Offscreen, Faye became DeMille's mistress. The actress continued to work in DeMille's films into the sound era, at least until the personal relationship dissolved. By the '40s, Faye was washed up in films and hard up financially. DeMille responded generously by putting Faye on his permanent payroll, casting her in minor roles in his films of the '40s and '50s, and seeing to it that she was regularly hired for bit parts at the director's home studio of Paramount. Julia Faye's final appearance was in 1958's The Buccaneer, which also happened to be the last film ever produced by Cecil B. DeMille (it was directed by DeMille's son-in-law, Anthony Quinn).

Trivia: The scion of a wealthy Argentine family, boyishly handsome Barry Norton came to Hollywood in 1926, where he was promptly signed to a Fox Studios contract. Stardom came fairly rapidly for Norton with his poignant performance as "mama's boy" Private Lewisohn in the 1927 WWI drama What Price Glory? He followed this triumph with excellent performances in such films as Legion of the Condemned and Four Devils (1928). He had difficulty weathering the change to talking pictures, not because his voice was inadequate, but because he'd never truly mastered the English language. In the early talkie era, Norton starred in Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films (he played the David Manners part in the Spanish Dracula), occasionally doubling as director. His last important screen role was the South American fiancé of ingénue Jean Parker in Frank Capra's Lady for a Night (1933). In 1935, he was given a comeback opportunity as the romantic lead in Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), but he was replaced during rehearsals, reportedly because he couldn't keep apace of Stan and Ollie's improvisations. Norton spent the remainder of his Hollywood career as a bit player and extra, taking whatever job came his way without complaint or regret. An excellent dancer, he frequently showed up in nightclub and ballroom scenes, occasionally giving between-takes dance lessons to such male stars as Humphrey Bogart. One of Barry Norton's last screen appearances was as a priest in the 1952 remake of What Price Glory?

Trivia: Roman studied acting at the Bishop Lee Dramatic School and worked on stage before becoming a leading lady of Hollywood films in the mid '40s. (She later moved into character roles.) The film for which she first received good reviews and critical attention was Champion (1949). She tended to play determined, strong-willed characters who are cold externally but inwardly passionate. She is best remembered for her starring role in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) opposite Farley Granger. During the rest of the '50s she primarily appeared in routine films. She has also done much TV work, including the series The Long Hot Summer.