Trivia: At age 11, Robert Donat began taking elocution lessons to overcome a stutter, going on to develop an exceptional and versatile voice. At 16 he debuted onstage and later played a number of Shakespearean and classical roles in repertory and touring companies; it was almost ten years, however, before he made his London debut. In the early '30s he attracted the attention of filmmakers, and signed a contract with Alexander Korda; almost immediately he was internationally famous for his romantic lead in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), his third film. He made one film in Hollywood but he didn't like the town or the prospect of becoming a conventional movie star. For his starring role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), in which he aged from 25 to 83 onscreen, he won the "Best Actor" Oscar. Although very successful, his career was hampered by chronic asthma and an insecure, self-doubting personality; he turned down many more films than he accepted, and for an actor of his time, his filmography is unusually thin. He appeared in only three films in the '50s, and was seriously ill during the production of his last, requiring oxygen tanks to complete his work. Donat died at 53. He was married to actress Renee Asherson.

Trivia: The daughter of an Austrian military officer and stepdaughter of an Italian nobleman, Elissa Landi was privately educated in England and Canada. Her acting career commenced with the 1924 London stage production The Storm; two years later, she appeared in her first film. She came to Broadway to play Catherine Barclay in an unsuccessful staging of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. Despite the failure of this production, Elissa was invited to come to Hollywood. She is best remembered for her ethereal, virtuous performance as the early-Christian heroine of DeMille's Sign of the Cross (1932), though she was even more effective as the leading lady in the historical satire The Warrior's Husband (1933). Her screen career came to an end in 1937, save for an unexpected return before the cameras in the 1943 war film Corregidor. Elissa Landi spent her last acting years on Broadway, devoting her spare time to writing poetry and novels; she died of cancer in 1948, at the age of 44.

Trivia: Born in New York City, Louis Calhern moved to St. Louis with his family as a child. There he played high-school football, and while engaged in gridiron activity he was spotted by a theatrical manager and hired as a supernumerary in a local stage troupe. Borrowing money from his father, Calhern headed to New York to pursue acting. Because World War I was going on at the time, the young actor thought it expedient to change his Teutonic given name of Carl Henry Vogt ("Calhern" was a rearrangement of the letters in his first and second names). After his first Broadway break in the 1923 George M. Cohan production Song and Dance Man, the tall, velvet-voiced Calhern became a matinee idol by virtue of a play titled The Cobra. In films from 1921, Calhern thrived in the early talkie era as a cultured, saturnine villain. For a time, Calhern battled alcoholism and lost several important stage and screen assignments because of his personal problems, but by the late 1940s, Calhern had gone cold turkey and completely cleaned up his act. He was brilliant as Oliver Wendell Holmes in both the Broadway and film versions of The Magnificent Yankee, and from 1950 onward made several well-reviewed appearances as Shakespeare's King Lear (his favorite role). An MGM contract player throughout the 1950s, Calhern was seen as Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun (1950), the above-suspicion criminal mastermind (and "uncle" of kept woman Marilyn Monroe) in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the title character in Julius Caesar (1953). Louis Calhern died of a sudden heart attack while filming The Teahouse of the August Moon in Japan; he was replaced by character actor Paul Ford.

Trivia: Sidney Blackmer had planned to study law at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, but football and amateur theatricals held more interest for him. Heading east to make his fortune as an actor, Blackmer accepted day work at various film studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, reportedly appearing in the pioneering Pearl White serial The Perils of Pauline (1914). After making his Broadway bow in 1917, Blackmer served as a lieutenant in World War I. His starmaking stage role was the title character in 1921's The Mountain Man. Eager to have a go at all branches of entertainment, Blackmer sang on radio in the 1920s, and participated in the first experimental dramatic presentations of the Allen B. DuMont television series. In films, Blackmer was usually cast as a smooth society villain, e.g. "The Big Boy" in the 1931 gangster flick Little Caesar. He appeared in both sinister and sympathetic roles in a handful of Shirley Temple pictures, and also starred as pulp-novel detective Thatcher Colt in the 1943 programmer The Panther's Claw. Blackmer is best remembered for his portrayals of President Theodore Roosevelt in over a dozen films, including This is My Affair (1937) and My Girl Tisa (1947). In 1950, Blackmer won the Tony award for his portrayal of the drink-sodden "Doc" in the William Inge play Come Back Little Sheba; he later created the role of Boss Finley in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. For several years, Blackmer served as the national vice president of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Sidney Blackmer was married twice, to actresses Lenore Ulric and Suzanne Kaaren.

Trivia: Born in Indiana, Raymond Walburn began his theatrical career in Oakland, California, where his actress mother had relocated. Walburn was 18 when he made his stage debut in MacBeth, for the princely sum of $5 a week; he immediately, albeit inadvertently, established himself as a comic actor when his line "Fillet of a fenny snake" came out as "Fillet of a funny snake." The following year, Walburn was acting in stock in San Francisco, where the old adage "the show must go on" was tested to the utmost when one of his performances was interrupted by the 1906 earthquake (at least, that was his story). In 1911, he made his Broadway bow in Greyhound; it was a flop, as were Walburn's subsequent New York appearances over the next five years. He finally managed to latch onto a hit when he was cast in the long-running Come Out of the Kitchen. Following his World War I service, Walburn hit his stride as a Broadway laughgetter, starring in the original production of George Kelly's The Show Off. After a tentative stab at moviemaking in 1928, Walburn settled in Hollywood full-time in 1934, where his bombastic, lovable-fraud characterizations made him a favorite of such directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Usually relegated to the supporting-cast ranks, Walburn was given an opportunity to star in Monogram's inexpensive "Henry" series in 1949, an assignment made doubly pleasurable because it gave him the opportunity to work with his lifelong pal Walter Catlett. Retiring after his final screen appearance in The Spoilers (1955), Raymond Walburn revived his Broadway career in 1962 when he was persuaded by producer Harold Prince to play Erronious in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

Trivia: Golden-voiced character actor O.P. Heggie has sometimes been described as a Scotsman; in truth, he was born in Australia of Scots parents. Trained for a musical career, Heggie began "trodding the boards" at the turn of the century. He had nearly 30 years' worth of stage experience when he made his film debut in 1928. His most notable film roles included Inspector Nayland Smith in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), Louis XI in The Vagabond King (1930), Edmond Dantes' cellmate Abbe Faria in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables (1934). Shortly after completing work on The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), the 56-year old Heggie died, the victim of a brief pneumonia outbreak in Los Angeles. It is a tribute to the artistry of O.P. Heggie that his portrayal of the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) remains powerful and moving even after Gene Hackman's devastating takeoff in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974).

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.

Trivia: Georgia Caine is best remembered today by film buffs for her work in most of Preston Sturges's classic films for Paramount Pictures, as well as the movies he subsequently made independently and at 20th Century Fox. She was practically born on stage, the daughter of George Caine and the former Jennie Darragh, both of whom were Shakespearean actors. As an infant and toddler, she was kept in the company of her parents as they toured the United States. Bitten by the theatrical bug, she left school before the age of 17 to become an actress and she started out in Shakespearean repertory. Caine quickly shifted over to musical comedy, however, and became a favorite of George M. Cohan, appearing in his plays Mary, The O'Brien Girls, and The Silver Swan, among others. In 1914, she also starred in a stage production of The Merry Widow in London. Caine was a favorite subject of theater columnists during the teens and '20s. By the end of that decade, however, after 30 years on stage, her star had begun to fade, and that was when Hollywood beckoned. The advent of talking pictures suddenly created a demand for actors and actresses who could handle spoken dialogue. She moved to the film Mecca at the outset of the 1930s, and Caine worked in more than 60 films over the next 20 years, usually playing mothers, aunts, and older neighbors. She also occasionally broke out of that mold to do something strikingly different, most notably in Camille (1937), in which she portrayed a streetwalker. Starting with Christmas in July in 1940, she was a regular member of Preston Sturges' stock company of players (even portraying a bearded lady in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock), appearing in most of his movies right up to his directorial swan song, The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949).

Trivia: American actor Walter Walker had already enjoyed an extensive theatrical career by the time he made his first film appearance in 1917. From that point onward until his death in 1941, Walker played dozens of judges, wardens, governors, and college deans. In the talkie era, he was often as not cast as an old-timer, inevitably named "Pop." Among his many one-scene roles of the 1930s was Benjamin Franklin in MGM's Marie Antoinette. Walter Walker's credits should not be confused with those of bit player/extra Wally Walker (1901-1975).

Trivia: Veteran British stage actor Lawrence Grant entered films in 1918, when his marked resemblance to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm made him a "natural" for such epics as To Hell with the Kaiser. An acknowledged expert in American Indian lore, Grant also took time in 1918 to produce an experimental color film about Native Americans. Sound proved no obstacle to Grant's film career, as he proved in his first talkie role, the scurrilous Dr. Lakington in Bulldog Drummond (1929). He later appeared with his Drummond co-star Ronald Colman in such films as The Unholy Garden (1931) and Lost Horizon (1937). Usually a villain, Grant enjoyed a sizeable sympathetic role as Sir Lionel Barton, the luckless aristocrat tortured to death by the insidious Boris Karloff, in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Active until 1945, Lawrence Grant could be seen in minor roles (often unbilled) in such horror efforts as Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and The Living Ghost (1944).

Trivia: Spanish-born character actor Luis Alberni spent most of his Hollywood career playing excitable Italians: waiters, janitors, stagehands, and shop proprietors. A short, elfish man usually decked out in a string tie and frock coat, Alberni worked on stage in Europe before heading for Broadway (and the movies) in 1921. He was busiest in the early-talkie era, appearing twice in large, juicy supporting roles opposite John Barrymore. In Svengali, Alberni is Barrymore's long-suffering assistant, while in Mad Genius, he's a dope-addicted stage manager who murders Barrymore in a baroque climax. During World War II, Alberni kept busy playing Italian mayors and peasants, both fascist and partisan. Luis Alberni's final film appearance was as the great-uncle of a "compromised" French peasant girl in John Ford's remake of What Price Glory? (1952)

Trivia: Likeable blonde leading lady Irene Hervey entered films as an MGM contract player in 1933. For her first few years before the camera, she did yeoman work as a bit player in features and supporting actress in MGM's short subjects. Free-lancing in the mid-1930s, Hervey worked her way up to leads; one of her more offbeat performances was as a Gilbert and Sullivan actress in 1936's The Girl Said No. From 1938 through 1943, Hervey worked at Universal, where she seemingly did everything she was asked: she appeared opposite James Stewart in the big-budget Destry Rides Again (1939), was top-billed in such "B"s as Frisco Lil (1942), looked frightened in the bottom-bill horror film Night Monster (1942), and even did a stint as a dauntless serial heroine in Gangbusters (1940). She took several years off to devote herself to her family, then returned before the cameras in supporting parts in the late 1940s. In 1965, Hervey was featured on a weekly basis as meddlesome Aunt Meg on the tongue-in-cheek private eye TV series Honey West. Married for several years to film star Allan Jones, Irene Hervey is the mother of singer Jack Jones.

Trivia: A popular attraction of the Ziegfeld Follies in the early 1920s, American-born Juliette Compton headed to England to perform in Cochran's Revues. While a British resident, Compton appeared in such films as Nell Gwynn. Returning to the U.S. in 1929, she launched her film career, playing a series of British grande dames (with a few waterfront floozies thrown in to break the monotony). Typical of her screen roles were the Duchess of Devonshire in Berkeley Square (1933) and Lady Spencer in That Hamilton Woman. Juliette Compton closed out her film career with 1947's The Unfaithful.

Trivia: British actor Douglas Walton kept busy in the Hollywood of the 1930s playing upper-class twits, ineffectual weaklings, and other such highly coveted roles. Walton was most memorably cast as the genteelly depraved Percy Shelley in the prologue scenes of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also played the dull-witted, cowardly Darnley in John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Douglas Walton remained in films until the late '40s, usually in bit parts but sometimes in such sizeable characterizations as Percival Priceless in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1947).

Trivia: Evidently weaned on a diet of pickles and vinegar, wizened screen sourpuss Clarence H. Wilson grimaced and glowered his way through over 100 films from 1920 until his death in 1941. Clarence Hummel Wilson was born in Cincinnati, OH. He began his 46-year acting career in Philadelphia in 1895, in a stock company, and spent years touring the United States and Canada in various road shows. On stage in New York, he later played supporting roles to such stars as James K. Hackett, Virginia Harned, Marguerite Clark, Amelia Bingham, Charles Cherry, and Wilton Lackaye. He entered motion pictures in 1920 and ultimately moved to Hollywood. With the coming of sound, his bald, mustachioed, stoop-shouldered persona, topped by a distinctive and annoying high, whining voice, and coupled with his broad approach to acting, made him an ideal villain. Wilson, whose slightly squinty yet hovering gaze seemed to invoke bad fortune upon whomever it landed, played dozens of irascible judges, taciturn coroners, impatient landlords, flat-footed process servers, angry school superintendents, miserly businessmen, and cold-hearted orphanage officials. Whenever he smiled, which wasn't often, one could almost hear the creak of underused facial muscles. Though he generally played bits, he was occasionally afforded such larger roles as the drunken sideshow-impresario father of heroine Helen Mack in Son of Kong (1933), with his pathetic trained animal act. He was the perfect over-the-top villain, a nastier male equivalent to Margaret Hamilton, and indispensable to comedy films, in which he served brilliantly as the humorless foil of such funmakers as W.C. Fields, Wheeler & Woolsey, Charley Chase, and especially the Our Gang kids. Although he appeared in such major films as the 1931 version of The Front Page (playing the corrupt sheriff) and the aforementioned Son of Kong, Wilson's most prominent screen roles for modern audiences were in a pair of short subjects in the Our Gang series of films: first as Mr. Crutch, the greedy orphanage manager who is undone when a pair of adults get transformed into children by a magical lamp in Shrimps for a Day (1934); and, at the other end of the series' history, as nasty schoolboard chairman Alonzo K. Pratt in Come Back, Miss Pipps (1941), his penultimate film release.

Trivia: Rotund, ruddy-faced character actor Ferdinand Munier first showed up in films around 1923. Blessed with a rich, rolling voice that perfectly matched his portly frame, Munier flourished in the talkie era, playing scores of pompous foreign ambassadors, gouty aristocrats, and philandering businessmen. His many screen assignments included King Louis XIII in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and the aptly named Prince Too-Much-Belly in Diamond Horseshoe. A perfect Santa Claus type, Ferdinand Munier was frequently cast as Saint Nick, most amusingly in Laurel and Hardy's Babes in Toyland (1934) and Hope and Crosby's Road to Utopia (1945).

Trivia: A former circus and minstrel-show performer, British actor Holmes Herbert toured on the provincial-theatre circuit as a juvenile in the early 1900s. Born Edward Sanger, Herbert adopted his professional first name out of admiration for Sherlock Holmes -- a role which, worse luck, he never got to play. Herbert never appeared in films in his native country; he arrived in Hollywood in 1918, appeared in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1918), and never looked homeward. Talking pictures enabled Holmes Herbert to join such countrymen as Reginald Denny and Roland Young in portraying "typical" British gentlemen. The stately, dynamic-featured Herbert nearly always appeared in a dinner jacket, selflessly comforting the heroine as she pined for the man she really loved. He received some of his best roles in the early-talkie era; he appeared as a soft-spoken police inspector in The Thirteenth Chair (1929), then recreated the role for the 1937 remake. Herbert also appeared as Dr. Lanyon, Henry Jekyll's closest friend and confidante in the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). By the '40s, many of Herbert's roles were uncredited, but he was still able to make a maximum impression with a minimum of lines in such roles as the village council head in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Herbert's second wife was another supporting-cast stalwart of the '30s, Beryl Mercer (best remembered as James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy [1931]). Holmes Herbert remained in films until 1952's The Brigand; reportedly, he also appeared in a few early west-coast television productions.

Trivia: Husky actor Mitchell Lewis attended Annapolis and Syracus University before making his stage debut in 1902. Lewis went on tour with such theatrical heavyweights as William Collier, Dustin Farnum and Alla Nazimova. He made his film bow in 1914 at the old Thanhouser Company. Specializing in ethnic roles, Lewis spent both the silent and talkie era playing menacing gypsies (The Cuckoos, The Bohemina Girl), Arab potentates (he was horse-loving Sheik Iderim in the 1926 version of Ben-Hur), East Indian warriors and Native American chiefs. He even donned blackface to portray "Tambo" in Al Jolson's Big Boy (1930). In 1937, Lewis was signed to an MGM lifetime contract, which assured him steady if not always stellar work for the next eighteen years. One of his many MGM bit-part assignments was the green-skinned Winkie Captain ("You've killed her! She's dead! Long live Dorothy!") in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Active throughout his career in charitable pursuits, Mitchell Lewis served on the original board of the Motion Picture Relief Fund.

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: Black actor of Hollywood films, onscreen from 1929. He graduated from law school, but in his early '30s he abandoned law to work as an actor in New York with the Lincoln Players; he co-founded his next acting company, the Lafayette Players. He was offered a role in the all-black film musical Hearts in Dixie (1929), and accepted after the studio signed him for $1250 a week. He made films for almost five decades, and much of the time he was busy almost constantly; he often played Uncle Tom types, but also gave many performances that were invested with considerable dignity and intelligence. In 1973 he was inducted in the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

Trivia: Stout, bushy-eyebrowed British actor Lionel Belmore capped a lengthy theatrical career with his entry into Hollywood films at the dawn of the talkie era. He was most often cast as innkeepers and burgomeisters, generally appearing in films set in England and Europe. Belmore was an off-and-on regular in Universal's Frankenstein films, appearing as the huffy-puffy mayor in the original Frankenstein (1931) and later showing up on the village council in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). (He was killed off in Son, but reappeared in the same role in Ghost as though nothing had happened). The actor also came in handy in Warner Bros.' Errol Flynn swashbucklers, notably Prince and the Pauper (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Belmore's oddest part was also one of his shortest. Though given good billing in Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935) -- and made the subject of several lengthy write-ups in the film's promotional material -- Lionel Belmore's role as a blacksmith was cut down to a single gag, wherein he taps out the Laurel and Hardy theme song on his anvil!