Trivia: Expressive, dark-eyed child actress Edith Fellows made her movie debut in the Charley Chase two-reeler Movie Night (1929). She occasionally appeared with Hal Roach's Our Gang troupe in the very early talkie era, but was quickly snapped up by the bigger studios for feature-film work. Never a star, Fellows was allowed more versatility than many "bigger" movie moppets; her roles ranged from spoiled brats to pathetic street urchins. She was well-showcased in Bing Crosby's Pennies from Heaven (1936), which led to a series of leading roles in several Columbia programmers of the late 1930s. Fellows retired from films in 1942, opting for a quiet married life as the wife of agent/producer Freddie Fields. The advent of her divorce, coupled with a nervous breakdown, was followed by near-miraculous emotional recovery, which became the basis of one of Ralph Edwards's This is Your Life TV programs of the 1950s. Fellows began acting again in character roles in the 1960s; one of her best showings was in the role of famed costume designer Edith Head in the 1983 TV-movie biopic Grace Kelly. In 1985, actor-turned-director Jackie Cooper (himself a former child star in the Our Gang series) announced plans to do a biopic of Fellows, but the film never materialized.

Trivia: Stage actress Dorothy Peterson made her screen debut in 1930's Mothers Cry, a lachrymose domestic drama that required the 29-year-old actress to age nearly three decades in the course of the film. Mothers Cry instantly typecast Peterson in careworn maternal roles, which she continued to essay for the rest of her career. Most of her subsequent film assignments were supporting roles like Mrs. Hawkins in Treasure Island (1934); often as not she received no screen credit, not even for her touching cameo in 1943's Air Force. In 1942, she briefly replaced Olive Blakeney as Mrs. Aldrich in the comedy series entry Henry Aldrich for President. Her last screen appearance was as Shirley Temple's mother in That Hagen Girl (1947). Dorothy Peterson remained active on the New York TV and theatrical scene until the early '60s.

Trivia: Tommy Bond was five years old when he began posing for magazine ads in his native Dallas. Discovered by a talent scout for Hal Roach Studios in 1933, Bond and his grandmother headed to Hollywood where he was immediately put to work in Roach's Our Gang films. After playing a cherubic, tousle-headed kid named Tommy for two seasons, he left the Our Gang series to freelance at other studios, building up a reputation as one of Hollywood's most reliable movie brats. He was brought back into the Our Gang fold in 1937; this time around, he was cast as scowling neighborhood bully Butch, one of the series' most memorable and sharply-defined characters. He continued to play Butch in 1940, by which time Roach had sold Our Gang to MGM. During this period, he also bedeviled such adult comedians as Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, Laurel & Hardy, and Walter Catlett. Despite the nastiness of his movie characters, Bond was well known as one of the nicest and most well-adjusted juvenile actors in the business. His best friend was his onscreen "worst enemy," Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer; in fact, whenever Switzer began misbehaving or cutting up on the set, it was usually Bond who calmed him down. Long after their Our Gang days, Bond and Switzer co-starred in PRC's Gas House Kids films, a ripoff of Monogram's Bowery Boys. Though most of his 1940s roles were bit parts, Bond landed a meaty supporting role as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen in Columbia's Superman serials. Graduating from Los Angeles College in 1951, Bond left acting to work as a property master at L.A. TV station KTTV, a job that later expanded to all the TV outlets owned by KTTV's parent company Metromedia. Long married to a former Miss California, Bond retired in 1990. Still as nice and unassuming as ever, Tommy Bond has become a welcome addition to many a film and nostalgia convention, and has made innumerable personal appearances in connection with his 1993 autobiography, You're Darn Right It's Butch!

Trivia: New Jersey-born Victor Kilian drove a laundry truck before joining a New England repertory company when he was 18. His first break on Broadway came with the original 1924 production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. After making a few scattered appearance in East Coast-produced films, Kilian launched his Hollywood career in 1936. Often cast as a brutish villain (notably "Pap" in the 1939 version of Huckleberry Finn) Kilian duked it out with some of moviedom's most famous leading men; while participating in a fight scene with John Wayne in 1942's Reap the Wild Wind, Kilian suffered an injury that resulted in the loss of an eye. Victimized by the Blacklist in the 1950s, Kilian returned to TV and film work in the 1970s. Fans of the TV serial satire Mary Hartman Mary Hartman will have a hard time forgetting Kilian as Mary's grandpa, a.k.a. "The Fernwood Flasher." In March of 1979, Victor Kilian was murdered in his apartment by intruders, a scant few days after a similar incident which culminated in the death of another veteran character actor, Charles Wagenheim.

Trivia: Trained at Iowa's Morningside College for a career as a musician, American actor Emory Parnell spent his earliest performing years as a concert violinist. He worked the Chautauqua and Lyceum tent circuits for a decade before leaving the road in 1930. For the next few seasons, Parnell acted and narrated in commercial and industrial films produced in Detroit. Determining that the oppurtunities and renumeration were better in Hollywood, Emory and his actress wife Effie boarded the Super Chief and headed for California. Endowed with a ruddy Irish countenance and perpetual air of frustration, Parnell immediately landed a string of character roles as cops, small town business owners, fathers-in-law and landlords (though his very first film part in Bing Crosby's Dr. Rhythm [1938] was cut out before release). In roles both large and small, Parnell became an inescapable presence in B-films of the '40s; one of his better showings was in the A-picture Louisiana Purchase, in which, as a Paramount movie executive, he sings an opening song about avoiding libel suits! Parnell was a regular in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle film series (1949-55), playing small town entrepreneur Billy Reed; on TV, the actor appeared as William Bendix' factory foreman The Life of Riley (1952-58). Emory Parnell's last public appearance was in 1974, when he, his wife Effie, and several other hale-and-hearty residents of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital were interviewed by Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Actor Pierre Watkin looked as though he was born to a family of Chase Manhattan executives. Tall, imposing, imbued with a corporate demeanor and adorned with well-trimmed white mustache, Watkin appeared to be a walking Brooks Brothers ad as he strolled through his many film assignments as bankers, lawyers, judges, generals and doctors. When director Frank Capra cast the actors playing US senators in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) using as criteria the average weight, height and age of genuine senators, Watkin fit the physical bill perfectly. Occasionally Watkin could utilize his established screen character for satirical comedy: in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, he portrayed Lompoc banker Mr. Skinner, who extended to Fields the coldest and least congenial "hearty handclasp" in movie history. Serial fans know Pierre Watkin as the actor who originated the role of bombastic Daily Planet editor Perry White in Columbia's two Superman chapter plays of the late '40s.

Trivia: A child prodigy from New Zealand, Ra Hould (born Richard Arthur Hould) began his long screen career as a sort of poor man's Freddie Bartholomew at Republic Pictures, for whom he starred in Dangerous Holiday (1937). He basically played himself, a ten-year-old violinist, and several commented on his likeness to MGM's Bartholemew, Variety opining: "Likeness may bring Hould attention for a time but will probably react against his chances in the end." When Bartholomew became entangled in a contract dispute with Metro, Hould replaced him in Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937), earning above-title billing along with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. The studio changed his name to Ronald Sinclair and under that moniker he went on to portray Edward IV as a boy in Universal's quasi-horror show Tower of London (1939) and Jasper King, the rich boy in Columbia's Five Little Peppers series (1939-1940). Adolescence, however, reared its ugly head and Hould/Sinclair eventually found a new career as a film editor. From 1954, he worked closely with maverick producer/director Roger Corman and low-budget director Bert I. Gordon, editing such camp classics as Swamp Woman (1955), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1958), and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965).

Trivia: Walter Soderling never evinced an interest in drama while attending the University of Chicago, Northwestern, or Harvard. After graduation, however, Soderling plunged into the theater world with a vengeance, chalking up credits with Chicago's Dearborn and Hopkins stock companies before making his turn-of-the-century Broadway debut. He came to films late in life -- to be exact, he was 63 -- but made up for lost time by working steadily in Hollywood until his death in 1948. Playing characters with names like Old Muck, Abner Thriffle, and Grumpy Andrews, the balding, pickle-pussed Walter Soderling was one of filmdom's foremost grouches.

Trivia: A tall (6'2"), gangly supporting actor onscreen from the early '30s, Roger Gray played James Cagney's sailor pal in the "Shanghai Lil" number in Footlight Parade (1933) and was Celano, a Philippine bandit masquerading as a sailor (named "Brooklyn," no less), in Come on Marines (1934). Those were perhaps the highlights of a career mainly constituted by unbilled, bit roles as cops, military officers, small-time gangsters, and even the occasional sheriff (Oh, Susannah!, 1936). Gray made his final screen appearance in yet another unbilled bit part in Gaslight (1944). He also appeared on television in the early '50s, and made his final screen appearance in 1958's Gang War.

Trivia: Sometimes he was Hal Price, other times he was Harry Price. Sometimes (in fact, much of the time) he wasn't billed at all. Whatever the case, Hal Price was one of the more ubiquitous performers in the field of B-Westerns and serials. He was the bald, mustachioed frontiersman who usually said something like, "We got a nice, quiet town here, stranger...and we aim to keep it that way."

Trivia: Portly British character actor Rex Evans made a name for himself in the mid-1920s as a comic performer in London cabarets and music halls. Evans came to Broadway the following decade, where he would appear opposite the likes of Cornelia Otis Skinner (in Lady Windemere's Fan) and Carol Channing (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Concurrent with his New York stage career, he found time to appear in Hollywood films, where at first he was cast as corpulent "sugar daddies" and millionaires. After making a strong impression as the family butler in The Philadelphia Story (1940), he found himself typecast as dignified menservants. Occasionally he broke this stereotype by adopting a handlebar mustache and playing such unsavory roles as the grumpy innkeeper in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) and the principal villain in the 1946 "Sherlock Holmes" opus Pursuit to Algiers. After his retirement from films in the early 1960s, Rex Evans devoted his energies to the thriving art gallery that he'd been running for years on Hollywood's La Cienega Boulevard.

Trivia: Scratch a sniveling prison "stoolie" or cowardly henchman and if he were not Paul Guilfoyle or George Chandler, he would be the diminutive Ernie S. Adams, a ubiquitous presence in scores of Hollywood films of the 1930s and '40s. Surprisingly, the weasel-looking Adams had begun his professional career in musical comedy -- appearing on Broadway in such shows as Jerome Kern's Toot Toot (1918) -- prior to entering films around 1919. A list of typical Adams characters basically tells the story: "The Rat" (Jewels of Desire, 1927), "Johnny Behind the 8-Ball" (The Storm, 1930), "Lefty" (Trail's End, 1935), "Jimmy the Weasel" (Stars Over Arizona, 1937), "Snicker Joe" (West of Carson City, 1940), "Willie the Weasel" (Return of the Ape Man, 1944) and, of course "Fink" (San Quentin, 1937). The result, needless to say, is that you didn't quite trust him even when playing a decent guy, as in the 1943 Columbia serial The Phantom. One of the busiest players in the '40s, the sad-faced, little actor worked right up until his death in 1947. His final four films were released posthumously.

Trivia: In films from 1915 to 1948, British stage veteran Wyndham Standing's heyday was in the silent era. During this time, Standing appeared in stiff-collar, stuffed-shirt roles in films like The Dark Angel and The Unchastened Woman (both 1925). His early-talkie credits include the squadron leader in Hell's Angels (1931) and Captain Pyke in A Study in Scarlet (1933). Thereafter, Standing showed up in such one-scene bits as King Oscar in Madame Curie (1943); he was also one of several silent-screen veterans appearing as U.S. senators in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Wyndham Standing was the brother of actors Sir Guy Standing and Herbert Standing.

Trivia: British character actor in Hollywood films, onscreen from the late '20s.

Trivia: Relocating from England to the U.S. in the 1920s, dapper, mustachioed Eddie Laughton worked in vaudeville until he was signed by Columbia Pictures in 1935. Laughton spent most of his time in the studio's two-reel comedies, earning his $55 per day in an exhausting variety of roles: hotel clerks, gangsters, snobbish socialites, jealous lovers, train conductors, and, sometimes, just one of the crowd. The Three Stooges, Columbia's top two-reel attraction, were so impressed by Laughton that they hired him as his straight man for their stage appearances. After toting up hundreds of credits in both shorts and features, Laughton left Columbia in 1945 to free-lance. Retiring in 1949, Eddie Laughton died of pneumonia three years later at the age of 49.