Trivia: The quintessential tough guy, Humphrey Bogart remains one of Hollywood's most enduring legends and one of the most beloved stars of all time. While a major celebrity during his own lifetime, Bogart's appeal has grown almost exponentially in the years following his death, and his inimitable onscreen persona -- hard-bitten, cynical, and enigmatic -- continues to cast a monumental shadow over the motion picture landscape. Sensitive yet masculine, cavalier yet heroic, his ambiguities and contradictions combined to create a larger-than-life image which remains the archetype of the contemporary antihero. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born December 25, 1899, in New York City. Upon expulsion from Andover, Massachusetts' Phillips Academy, he joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a ship's gunner. While roughhousing on the vessel's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, a splinter becoming lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became among his most distinctive onscreen qualities. (For years his injuries were attributed to wounds suffered in battle, although the splinter story is now more commonly accepted.) After the war, Bogart returned to New York to accept a position on Broadway as a theatrical manager; beginning in 1920, he also started appearing onstage, but earned little notice within the performing community. In the late '20s, Bogart followed a few actor friends who had decided to relocate to Hollywood. He made his first film appearance opposite Helen Hayes in the 1928 short The Dancing Town, followed by the 1930 feature Up the River, which cast him as a hard-bitten prisoner. Warner Bros. soon signed him to a 550-dollars-a-week contract, and over the next five years he appeared in dozens of motion pictures, emerging as the perfect heavy in films like 1936's The Petrified Forest, 1937's Dead End, and 1939's The Roaring Twenties. The 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory, on the other hand, offered Bogart the opportunity to break out of his gangster stereotype, and he delivered with a strong performance indicative of his true range and depth as a performer. The year 1941 proved to be Bogart's breakthrough year, as his recent success brought him to the attention of Raoul Walsh for the acclaimed High Sierra. He was then recruited by first-time director John Huston, who cast him in the adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; as gumshoe Sam Spade, Bogart enjoyed one of his most legendary roles, achieving true stardom and establishing the archetype for all hardboiled heroes to follow. A year later he accepted a lead in Michael Curtiz's romantic drama Casablanca. The end result was one of the most beloved films in the Hollywood canon, garnering Bogart his first Academy Award nomination as well as an Oscar win in the Best Picture category. Bogart then teamed with director Howard Hawks for his 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, appearing for the first time opposite actress Lauren Bacall. Their onscreen chemistry was electric, and by the time they reunited two years later in Hawks' masterful film noir The Big Sleep, they had also married in real life. Subsequent pairings in 1947's Dark Passage and 1948's Key Largo cemented the Bogey and Bacall pairing as one of the screen's most legendary romances. His other key relationship remained his frequent collaboration with Huston, who helmed 1948's superb The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In Huston, Bogart found a director sympathetic to his tough-as-nails persona who was also capable of subverting that image. He often cast the actor against type, to stunning effect; under Huston's sure hand, he won his lone Oscar in 1951's The African Queen.Bogart's other pivotal director of the period was Nicholas Ray, who helmed 1949's Knock on Any Door and 1950's brilliant In a Lonely Place for the star's production company Santana. After reuniting with Huston in 1953's Beat the Devil, Bogart mounted three wildly different back-to-back 1954 efforts -- Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tearful The Barefoot Contessa, Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina, and Edward Dmytryk's historical drama The Caine Mutiny -- which revealed new, unseen dimensions to his talents. His subsequent work was similarly diffuse, ranging in tone from the grim 1955 thriller The Desperate Hours to the comedy We're No Angels. After completing the 1956 boxing drama The Harder They Fall, Bogart was forced to undergo cancer surgery and died in his sleep on January 14, 1957.

Trivia: Born Aldo DaRe. A leading man of Hollywood and some European films with a husky frame, thick neck, and raspy voice, he specialized in playing brawny but lovable tough guys. In World War Two he served as a Navy frog-man; later he was briefly the constable of Crockett, California, during the campaign for which he was spotted by Hollywood scouts. Ray debuted onscreen in the small role of a cynical football player in Saturday's Hero (1951), going on to frequently portray American rednecks and military men. His career went downhill rapidly in the '70s -- he made a string of low-budget films as a beefy character actor. His last film was Shock 'Em Dead (1990). Briefly married to actress Jeff Donnell, Ray is the father of actor Eric DaRe, best known as the character Leo in the TV series Twin Peaks.

Trivia: Hirsute, puckish "renaissance man" Peter Ustinov was born in England to parents of Russian lineage. Trained at the London Theatre Studio, Ustinov was on stage from the age of 17, performing sketches written by himself in the 1939 revue Late Joys. In 1940, the year that his first play, Fishing for Shadows, was staged, the 19-year-old Ustinov appeared in his first film. Just before entering the British army, Ustinov penned his first screenplay, The True Glory (1945). School for Secrets (1946) was the first of several films starring, written, and directed by Ustinov; others include Vice Versa (1946), Private Angelo (1949), Romanoff and Juliet (1961) (adapted from his own stage play), and Lady L (1965). Perhaps Ustinov's most ambitious film directorial project was Billy Budd (1962), a laudable if not completely successful attempt to transfer the allegorical style of Herman Melville to the screen. As an actor in films directed by others, Ustinov has sparkled in parts requiring what can best be described as "justifiable ham" -- he was Oscar-nominated for his riveting performance as the addled Nero in 1951's Quo Vadis and has won the Best Supporting Actor prize for Spartacus (1961) and Topkapi (1964). Never one to turn down a good television assignment, Ustinov has appeared on American TV in such guises as King George and Dr. Samuel Johnson, winning the first of his three Emmy awards for the latter characterization; he is also a frequent talk show guest, regaling audiences with his droll wit and his mastery over several dialects. While he has never starred on-camera in a weekly TV series, his voice could be heard essaying virtually all the roles on the 1981 syndicated cartoon series Dr. Snuggles. The closest he has come to repeating himself was with his frequent theatrical film and TV-movie appearances as Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in the late '70s and early '80s. The author of several plays (the most popular of which included Love of Four Colonels and Photo Finish) and books (including two autobiographies), Peter Ustinov was still going strong into the 1990s, making a long-overdue return to Hollywood in the 1992 film Lorenzo's Oil.

Trivia: The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.

Trivia: South African-born Basil Rathbone was the son of a British mining engineer working in Johannesburg. After a brief career as an insurance agent, the 19-year-old aspiring actor joined his cousin's repertory group. World War I service as a lieutenant in Liverpool Scottish Regiment followed, then a rapid ascension to leading-man status on the British stage. Rathbone's movie debut was in the London-filmed The Fruitful Vine (1921). Tall, well profiled, and blessed with a commanding stage voice, Rathbone shifted from modern-dress productions to Shakespeare and back again with finesse. Very much in demand in the early talkie era, one of Rathbone's earliest American films was The Bishop Murder Case (1930), in which, as erudite amateur sleuth Philo Vance, he was presciently referred to by one of the characters as "Sherlock Holmes." He was seldom more effective than when cast in costume dramas as a civilized but cold-hearted villain: Murdstone in David Copperfield (1934), Evremonde in Tale of Two Cities (1935), and Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (Rathbone was a good friend of Robin Hood star Errol Flynn -- and a far better swordsman). Never content with shallow, one-note performances, Rathbone often brought a touch of humanity and pathos to such stock "heavies" as Karenin in Anna Karenina (1936) and Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Pompeii (1936). He was Oscar-nominated for his portrayals of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and the crotchety Louis XVI in If I Were King (1938). In 1939, Rathbone was cast as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first of 14 screen appearances as Conan Doyle's master detective. He also played Holmes on radio from 1939 through 1946, and in 1952 returned to the character (despite his despairing comments that Holmes had hopelessly "typed" him in films) in the Broadway flop The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was written by his wife, Ouida Bergere. Famous for giving some of Hollywood's most elegant and elaborate parties, Rathbone left the West Coast in 1947 to return to Broadway in Washington Square. He made a movie comeback in 1954, essaying saturnine character roles in such films as We're No Angels (1955), The Court Jester (1956), and The Last Hurrah (1958). Alas, like many Hollywood veterans, Rathbone often found the pickings lean in the 1960s, compelling him to accept roles in such inconsequential quickies as The Comedy of Terrors (1964) and Hillbillies in the Haunted House (1967). He could take consolation in the fact that these negligible films enabled him to finance projects that he truly cared about, such as his college lecture tours and his Caedmon Record transcriptions of the works of Shakespeare. Basil Rathbone's autobiography, In and Out of Character, was published in 1962.

Trivia: Leo G. Carroll was the son of an Irish-born British military officer. The younger Carroll had intended to follow in his father's footsteps, but his World War I experiences discouraged him from pursuing a military career. On the British stage from the age of sixteen, Carroll settled in the U.S. in 1924, playing such plum theatrical roles as the title character in The Late George Apley. In films from 1934, Carroll often portrayed shy, self-effacing Britishers who, in "Uriah-Heep" fashion, used their humility to hide a larcenous or homicidal streak. Reportedly Alfred Hitchcock's favorite actor, Carroll was seen in half a dozen Hithcock films, notably Spellbound (1946) (as the scheming psychiatrist) and North by Northwest (1959) (as the dry-witted CIA agent). A "method actor" before the term was invented, Carroll was known to immerse himself in his roles, frequently confounding strangers by approaching them "in character." Leo G. Carroll was always a welcome presence on American television, starring as Topper in the "ghostly" sitcom of the same name, and co-starring as Father Fitzgibbons in Going My Way (1962) and Alexander Waverly on The Man From UNCLE (1964-68).

Trivia: The daughter of a California dry-cleaning establishment owner, Gloria Talbott was dancing and singing almost from the time she could walk and talk. As a child and adolescent, she played unbilled bits in such films as Maytime (1937) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). During her teen years, she won a high school acting trophy, and was voted "Miss Glendale" in 1947. Her first big professional break was in a Los Angeles stage production of One Fine Day, which starred the screen team of Charles Ruggles and Mary Boland. Restarting her film career in 1953, Talbott's first screen role of consequence was as the daughter of Leo G. Carroll and Joan Bennett in the delightful "comedy of murders" We're No Angels (1955). She truly came into her own as the nervous but self-reliant heroine of such B horror gems as The Cyclops (1957), The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1957) and The Leech Woman (1960). On a less fearsome note, she was seen in the recurring role of Abbie Crandall on the 1950s TV western Wyatt Earp. Though it might appear to the casual viewer that Talbott accepted any role that came her way, the claustrophobic actress was known to turn down parts that required her to swim underwater or to be trapped in small, enclosed places. She retired from acting in 1966 to spend more time with her family, emerging publicly only to appear at various science-fiction and nostalgia conventions around the country. In 1985, Gloria was co-starred with several other horror-flick veterans in the tongue-in-cheek thriller Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: French character actor Louis Mercier was in American films from 1929's Tiger Rose until well into the 1970s. Mercier was particularly busy at 20th Century-Fox's "B"-picture unit in the 1930s and 1940s, usually cast as detectives and magistrates. He can be seen fleetingly in Casablanca (1942) as a smuggler in the first "Rick's Café Americain" sequence. Louis Mercier's later credits include An Affair to Remember (1957, in which he was given a character name--a rarity for him), The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and Darling Lili (1970).

Trivia: Sour-visaged Danish actor Torben Meyer entered films as early as 1913, when he was prominently featured in the Danish super-production Atlantis. Despite his Scandinavian heritage, Meyer was usually typecast in Germanic roles after making his American screen debut in 1933. Many of his parts were fleeting, such as the Amsterdam banker who is offended because "Mister Rick" won't join him for a drink in Casablanca (1942). He was shown to excellent advantage in the films of producer/director Preston Sturges, beginning with Christmas in July (1940) and ending with The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949). Evidently as a private joke, Sturges nearly always cast Meyer as a character named Schultz, with such conspicuous exceptions as "Dr. Kluck" in The Palm Beach Story (1942). Torben Meyer made his last movie appearance in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), playing one of the German judges on trial for war crimes; Meyer's guilt-ridden inability to explain his actions was one of the film's most powerful moments.

Trivia: Actor John Smith may best be remembered for starring in the television westerns Cimarron City (1958-60) and Laramie (1959-63), but he also played supporting roles in numerous feature films. Smith was born Robert Earl Van Orden in Los Angeles. He began his career singing with the Bob Mitchell Choir Boys. The musical group appeared in two Bing Crosby efforts Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1946). While one might think a distinguished-sounding name such as Robert Van Orden has as star quality all its own, the actor himself didn't agree and partially as a jest decided to change his name to the more generic John Smith. Accompanied by agent Henry Willson (the man who provided Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson with their stage names), Van Orden went before a skeptical judge. When asked why he would adopt such a plain-jane name, Van Orden claimed that he would be the only actor in Hollywood with that name. Thus far, he has been right. As John Smith, his film credits include The Kettles on Old Mac Donald's Farm (1957), Circus World (1964) and Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1981).

Trivia: It is usually axiomatic that any actor who uses the nickname "Tiny" is anything but. Such was the case of tall, stockily built Paul "Tiny" Newlan. Born in Nebraska, Newlan began his acting career in repertory at the Garden Theater in Kansas City. After attending the University of Missouri, he played pro football and basketball, then returned to acting. In films from 1935, he signed a two-year Paramount contract in 1938, leading to dozens of tiny roles as bartenders, bouncers, stevedores, and the like. The size of his screen roles increased in the late '40s-early '50s, though Newlan didn't start landing truly important parts until he entered television. Paul Newlan is best remembered for his recurring appearances as Captain Grey on the TV cop show M-Squad (1957-1960).