Trivia: The son of a Los Angeles minister, three-year-old Matthew Beard won out of 350 kids to replace Allen "Farina" Hoskins as the resident black child in Hal Roach's Our Gang comedies. Nicknamed Hercules in his first two-reeler, Teacher's Pet (1930), Beard was thereafter known as Stymie because of his innocent offscreen habit of confounding his elders. Wearing an oversized derby hat (borrowed from Roach comedian Stan Laurel), the clever, resourceful, eternally grinning Stymie quickly became one of the most popular Our Gang kids. After appearing in 36 Our Gang shorts, Beard began freelancing in 1935, playing small roles in big films like Captain Blood (1935), Jezebel (1938), The Great Man Votes (1939), and Stormy Weather (1943). Alas, after dropping out of high school in 1945, he fell into a bad crowd, spending the next two decades in and out of jails for committing crimes to feed his drug habit. Miraculously, Beard completely turned his life around in the mid-'60s when he entered the drug rehab organization Synanon. Looking remarkably like the eternally optimistic Stymie of old, Matthew Beard made a successful show business comeback in the 1970s, appearing in such films as The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and such weekly TV series as Good Times and The Jeffersons.

Trivia: Nicknamed "Echo," Dorothy De Borba was the little brunette with the festive hair bows in the 1930-1933 Our Gang comedy shorts. De Borba arrived in the series at the dawn of sound, along with Jackie Cooper, Chubby Chaney, Stymie Beard, and Mary Ann Jackson, and her first series entries were released in both talkie and silent versions. Although the grown-up De Borba often complained that the boys were awarded the best lines, she certainly enjoyed her full share of quips in perhaps her best short, Love Business (1931), the one in which Jackie Cooper gets a fiery crush on Miss Crabtree (June Marlowe. De Borba, who had made her screen debut in the comedy-drama A Royal Romance (1930), left films after playing an autograph-hound in Jean Harlow's Bombshell (1933).

Trivia: American actor Spanky McFarland (born George Emmett McFarland in Forth Worth, TX) was the most popular member of the Our Gang children's comedy troupe. He got his start while still a baby as an advertising model for a bakery in Dallas because he looked so fat and happy. It was his pudginess as a toddler that led him to the Our Gang series of shorts when he was hired to replace Joe Cobb as the tubby child. In addition to appearing in that series, McFarland also appeared in a few feature films and in other shorts. By the mid-'40s, his acting career was over and he found gainful employment elsewhere.

Trivia: Actor Sherwood Bailey is best known for playing the rusty-headed befreckled boy Spud in the Our Gang series. As an adult, Bailey left acting and became a civil engineer.

Trivia: Donald Haines was eight years old when he joined Hal Roach's "Our Gang" troupe in 1929. Haines appeared in Roach shorts until 1931; one of these was The First Seven Years (1930), in which he fought with Jackie Cooper over the affections of Mary Ann Jackson. The adversarial Haines-Cooper screen relationship would extend over a decade, with Donald and Jackie coming to blows (or threatening to do so) in such features as Skippy (1931), A Feller Needs a Friend (1932) and Seventeen (1940). Haines' other roles of note included Jerry Cruncher Jr. in Tale of Two Cities (1935), Alabama in Boys Town (1938) and Men of Boys Town (1940), and Skinny in six of Monogram's East Side Kids films. Donald Haines died while serving in WW II.

Trivia: Tall, rotund, popular comedic supporting actor Billy Gilbert is best remembered for his ability to sneeze on cue. The son of opera singers, he was 12 when he started performing. Later, in vaudeville and burlesque, he perfected a suspenseful sneezing routine; this became his trademark as a screen actor (he provided the voice of "Sneezy," one of the Seven Dwarfs, in Disney's feature cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, [1938]). Gilbert appeared in some silent films, then began a busier screen career during the sound era, eventually appearing in some 200 feature films and shorts where he was usually cast in light character roles as comic relief to straight performers and as support for major comedians, notably Laurel and Hardy. He also frequently had accented roles, including Field Marshall Herring in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). In the late '40s, Gilbert directed two Broadway shows; he also wrote a play, Buttrio Square, which was produced in New York in 1952. Billy Gilbert rarely appeared in films after the early '50s.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: A dapper-looking supporting comic from St. Louis, Otto H. Fries came to films in the early 1910s with a varied background in medicine shows and vaudeville. By 1915, he was with Keystone and a lifelong friendship with Stan Laurel led to appearances in that star comedian's early films for Bronco Billy Anderson. Not surprisingly, Fries later landed at Roach, where he supported not only Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase but also such lesser lights as Max Davidson and James Finlayson. Sound proved no hindrance and Fries would appear in many of Roach's German-language talkies. Often cast as inebriates, Fries played scores of bit parts and walk-ons in grade-A films until the year of his death. A German actor with a similar surname (Otto Friese) acted in British films of the 1950s.

Trivia: Gangly, 6'1" screen comic Eddie Baker acted in his father's stock company before obtaining a position as a prop boy with the old Biograph Company in 1913. He went in front of the camera for the first time not as a Keystone Kop, as is often reported, but in Joker comedies starring comedian Gale Henry. Baker later worked for Hal Roach, often as a sheriff (Laurel & Hardy's Bacon Grabbers from 1929, in which he sends the boys off to serve a summons on dour Edgar Kennedy is a good example) or police detective. Offscreen, Baker became the first secretary/treasurer of the Screen Actors Guild. He continued to play minor bits in talkies through the mid-'60s, often playing a motorcycle cop, a reporter, or billed simply as "man."

Trivia: Tall, stocky comic actor Dell Henderson left his stage career behind when he and his actress wife Florence joined D. W. Griffith's Biograph players in 1909. He was frequently co-starred with fellow Biograph contractee Mack Sennett, and when Sennett set up his own Keystone studio, Henderson went along as an actor and director. He continued directing into the 1920s, also functioning as producer on such features as Gambling Wives (1924), Quick Change (1925) and Rough Stuff (1925). In 1927, Henderson resumed his acting career; one of his best late-silent performances was as Marion Davies' father in 1928's Show People. During the talkie era, Henderson appeared in dozens of two-reel comedies produced by Sennett, Hal Roach and Columbia. Most of his feature-film roles at this time were bits, with such notable exceptions as the kindly used-car dealer in Leo McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) and the night court judge in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936). Del Henderson's last public appearance was on a 1954 This is Your Life TV installment honoring his former colleague Mack Sennett.

Trivia: Best remembered as the abused nursemaid in perhaps Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's best short comedy, the award-winning The Music Box (1932), this British-born singer played more parlor, nurse, and bar maids than anybody else in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. Occasionally, moviegoers got to enjoy Irene's voice as well, memorably in Betty Grable's Sweet Rosie O'Grady where, as Grace, she sings "Battle Cry."