Trivia: After being raised in several parts of Europe Duncan Renaldo arrived in the U.S. in the early '20s, having secured his passage as a stoker on a Brazilian coal ship (other sources say it was a Rumanian freighter that caught fire in Baltimore and left its crew stranded). He failed at his attempt to be a portrait painter, then tried to become a producer of short films; soon, however, he took up acting, signing with MGM in 1928. He played Latin lovers in late talkies and early silents. In 1932 he spent almost a year in prison on illegal entry charges filed by immigration authorities; he was later pardoned by President Roosevelt. After his release, he continued playing leads and supporting roles in minor films and serials. In the early '40s he was chosen as one of the Three Mesquiteers in a series of popular western films; within a few years he was starring in his own western series as The Cisco Kid, the role for which he is best known. He played the Cisco Kid in a popular TV series in the '50s, rarely appearing on the big-screen after 1950.

Trivia: Leo Carrillo was descended from a long-established, aristocratic California family. His great-grandfather was the first provisional governor of California, while his father was the first mayor of Santa Monica. His parents wanted him to be a priest, but Carrillo decided to go for an engineering degree while attending Loyola University. A talented caricaturist, Carrillo secured a job as a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Examiner. At the encouragement of his fellow employees, Carrillo decided to parlay his gift for mimicry and dialects into a vaudeville career. He went on to provide comedy relief for several stage plays and musical productions, starring in one tailor-made vehicle, Lombardi Ltd. In films from 1929, Carrillo was frequently cast as excitable, malaprop-ridden Spaniards and Italians; in only a few instances, notably John Ford's The Fugitive (1947), did Carrillo perform in his normal California cadence, sans dialect. From 1950 through 1955, Carrillo co-starred with Duncan Renaldo in the popular TV western series The Cisco Kid, playing Cisco's sidekick Pancho. Though well into his seventies, Carrillo claimed to be in his mid-fifties so that the Cisco Kid company would qualify for insurance coverage. As active in California politics and civic affairs as his forebears, Leo Carrillo was in charge of the annual Fiesta de Santa Barbara, and at one juncture was appointed to the State Park Commission; there still exists a California beach named in Carrillo's honor.

Trivia: A graduate of Juilliard and a former member of the famed Pasadena Playhouse, diminutive American screen actress Jane Adams (born Betty Jane Bierce) is mainly remembered as the most beautiful of all Universal's monster creations, the hunchbacked Nina of House of Dracula (1945). It was really a pity that the studio should promote Adams as merely one of the ghoulish attractions in this monster-rally, especially since the deformed and self-sacrificing nurse offered the sensationalistic horror opus its one genuine character. She was rather more conventionally cast in yet another horror film, The Brute Man (1946), starring real life acromegalia victim Rondo Hatton, but this low-budget effort proved so poor that Universal ended up unloading it to Poverty Row company PRC. Sporting a new moniker, Poni Adams, she also appeared opposite the studio's resident B-Western star, Kirby Grant but was back to Jane for Lost City of the Jungle (1946), a rough-and-tumble serial noted as the swan song of veteran villain Lionel Atwill. She was Vicky Vale in yet another serial, 1949's Batman and Robin, but did mostly television thereafter. Except for appearances at various classic film fairs, Adams retired completely from show business in 1953 in order to travel with her husband, Major General Thomas Turnage, later an advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Trivia: In the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance," Gig Young comments that he thinks he's seen drugstore counterman Byron Foulger before. "I've got that kind of face" was the counterman's reply. Indeed, Foulger's mustachioed, bespectacled, tremble-chinned, moon-shaped countenance was one of the most familiar faces ever to grace the screen. A graduate of the University of Utah, Foulger developed a taste for performing in community theatre, making his Broadway debut in the '20s. Foulger then toured with Moroni Olsen's stock company, which led him to the famed Pasadena Playhouse as both actor and director. In films from 1936, Foulger usually played whining milksops, weak-willed sycophants, sanctimonious sales clerks, shifty political appointees, and the occasional unsuspected murderer. In real life, the seemingly timorous actor was not very easily cowed; according to his friend Victor Jory, Foulger once threatened to punch out Errol Flynn at a party because he thought that Flynn was flirting with his wife (Mrs. Foulger was Dorothy Adams, a prolific movie and stage character actress). Usually unbilled in "A" productions, Foulger could count on meatier roles in such "B" pictures as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Panther's Claw (1943). In the Bowery Boys' Up in Smoke (1957), Foulger is superb as a gleeful, twinkly-eyed Satan. In addition to his film work, Byron Foulger built up quite a gallery of portrayals on television; one of his final stints was the recurring role of engineer Wendell Gibbs on the popular sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: Don C. Harvey's screen acting career was launched when he signed a Columbia contract in 1949. An all-purpose villain, Harvey showed up in most of Columbia's serials of the era, including Atom Man vs. Superman (1949), Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), Batman and Robin (1949), Captain Video (1950), and the studio's final chapter play, Blazing the Overland Trail (1956). He also appeared in Columbia's "A" product (Picnic), "B" pictures (Women's Prison) and two-reel comedies (the Three Stooges' Merry Mavericks). Fans of 1950s horror films may recall Harvey as Mac in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Lester Banning in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). Don C. Harvey was married to actress June Harvey.

Trivia: Lee Phelps was a longtime resident of Culver City, California, the home of several film studios, including MGM and Hal Roach. Whenever the call went out for street extras, Phelps was always available; his Irish face and shiny pate can be easily spotted in such silent 2-reelers as Laurel and Hardy's Putting Pants on Phillip. Phelps was active in films from 1921 through 1953, often in anonymous bit or atmosphere parts, usually playing a cop or a delivery man. Lee Phelps has found his way into several TV movie-compilation specials thanks to his participation in two famous films of the early '30s: Phelps played the cowering speakeasy owner slapped around by Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931), and also portrayed the waterfront waiter to whom Greta Garbo delivers her first talking-picture line ("Gif me a viskey, baby...etc.") in Anna Christie (1930).

Trivia: The grandson of a governor of New Mexico, pioneering screen cowboy Edmund Cobb began his long career toiling in Colorado-produced potboilers such as Hands Across the Border (1914), the filming of which turned tragic when Cobb's leading lady, Grace McHugh, drowned in the Arkansas River. Despite this harrowing experience, Cobb continued to star in scores of cheap Westerns and was making two-reelers at Universal in Hollywood by the 1920s. But unlike other studio cowboys, Cobb didn't do his own stunts -- despite the fact that he later claimed to have invented the infamous "running w" horse stunt -- and that may actually have shortened his starring career. By the late '20s, he was mainly playing villains. The Edmund Cobb remembered today, always a welcome sign whether playing the main henchman or merely a member of the posse, would pop up in about every other B-Western made during the 1930s and 1940s, invariably unsmiling and with a characteristic monotone delivery. When series Westerns bit the dust in the mid-'50s, Cobb simply continued on television. In every sense of the word a true screen pioneer and reportedly one of the kindest members of the Hollywood chuck-wagon fraternity, Edmund Cobb died at the age of 82 at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: "Ask any stunt man who his favorite stunt man is," wrote film historian Alan Barbour in 1970, "and chances are nine out of ten of them will answer David Sharpe. " In vaudeville from childhood, Sharpe was a superb athlete, the winner of the A.A.U. tumbling championship and several other competitions. Beginning his film career in his teens, Sharpe could literally double for anybody, be they husky he-men like Allan Lane and Kane Richmond or petite actresses like Kay Aldridge and Frances Gifford. His work in such Republic serials as The Adventures of Captain Marvel (love that back-flip!) and Spy Smasher has entered the realm of legend. A personable actor, Sharpe was one of the leads in Hal Roach's "Boy Friends" 2-reelers of the early 1930s. Remaining active into the 1970s, Sharpe doubled for Tony Curtis in Blake Edwards' The Great Race and made innumerable appearances on Red Skelton's TV show, usually cast as a somersaulting little old lady. Sadly, David Sharpe spent his last years in complete immobility, suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.