Trivia: Born Emmanuel Goldenberg, Edward G. Robinson was a stocky, forceful, zesty star of Hollywood films who was best known for his gangsters roles in the '30s. A "little giant" of the screen with a pug-dog face, drawling nasal voice, and a snarling expression, he was considered the quintessential tough-guy actor. Having emigrated with his family to the U.S. when he was ten, Robinson planned to be a rabbi or a lawyer, but decided on an acting career while a student at City College, where he was elected to the Elizabethan Society. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship, and, in 1913, began appearing in summer stock after changing his name to "Edward G." (for Goldenberg). Robinson debuted on Broadway in 1915, and, over the next 15 years, became a noted stage character actor, even co-writing one of his plays, The Kibitzer (1929). He appeared in one silent film, The Bright Shawl (1923), but not until the sound era did he begin working regularly in films, making his talkie debut in The Hole in the Wall (1929) with Claudette Colbert. It was a later sound film, 1930's Little Caesar, that brought him to the attention of American audiences; portraying gangster boss Rico Bandello, he established a prototype for a number of gangster roles he played in the ensuing years. After being typecast as a gangster he gradually expanded the scope of his roles, and, in the '40s, gave memorable "good guy" performances as in a number of psychological dramas; he played federal agents, scientists, Biblical characters, business men, bank clerks, among other characters. The actor experienced a number of personal problems during the '50s. He was falsely linked to communist organizations and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (eventually being cleared of all suspicion). Having owned one of the world's largest private art collections, he was forced to sell it in 1956 as part of a divorce settlement with his wife of 29 years, actress Gladys Lloyd. Robinson continued his career, however, which now included television work, and he remained a busy actor until shortly before his death from cancer in 1973. His final film was Soylent Green (1973), a science fiction shocker with Charlton Heston. Two months after his death, Robinson was awarded an honorary Oscar "for his outstanding contribution to motion pictures," having been notified of the honor before he died. He was also the author of a posthumously published autobiography, All My Yesterdays (1973).

Trivia: American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was the son of film star Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Fairbanks Jr. made his acting debut in 1923's Stephen Steps Out, which was remarkable only in how quickly it went out of circulation. Young Fairbanks was more impressive as Lois Moran's fiancé in 1926's Stella Dallas, though it did give Fairbanks Sr. pause to see his teenaged son sporting a Fairbanksian mustache. Even as a youth, Fairbanks' restlessness would not be satisfied by mere film work; before he was 20 he'd written an amusing article about the Hollywood scene for Vanity Fair magazine. In 1927, Fairbanks appeared in a stage play, Young Woodley, which convinced detractors that he truly had talent and was not merely an appendage to his father's fame. When talking pictures came in, he demonstrated a well-modulated speaking voice and as a result worked steadily in the early 1930s. Married at that time to actress Joan Crawford, Fairbanks was a fixture of the Tinseltown social whirl, but he had a lot more going for him than suspected; in 1935 he offered the earliest evidence of his sharp business savvy by setting up his own production company, Criterion Films--the first of six such companies created under the Fairbanks imprimatur. Fairbanks had his best role in 1937's The Prisoner of Zenda, in which he was alternately charming and cold-blooded as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau. Upon his father's death in 1939, Fairbanks began to extend his activities into politics and service to his country. He helped to organize the Hollywood branch of the William Allen White Committee, designed to aid the allied cause in the European war. From 1939 through 1944, Fairbanks, ever an Anglophile, headed London's Douglas Voluntary Hospitals, which took special care of war refugees. Fairbanks was appointed by President Roosevelt to act as envoy for the Special Mission to South America in 1940, and one year later was commissioned as a lieutenant j.g. in the Navy. In 1942 he was chief officer of Special Operations, and in 1943 participated in the allied invasion of Sicily and Elba. Fairbanks worked his way up from Navy lieutenant to commander and finally, in 1954 to captain. After the war's end, the actor spent five years as chairman of CARE, sending food and aid to war-torn countries. How he had time to resume his acting career is anybody's guess, but Fairbanks was back before the cameras in 1947 with Sinbad the Sailor, taking up scriptwriting with 1948's The Exile; both films were swashbucklers, a genre he'd stayed away from while his father was alive (Fairbanks Sr. had invented the swashbuckler; it wouldn't have been right for his son to bank on that achievement during the elder Fairbanks' lifetime). Out of films as an actor by 1951 (except for a welcome return in 1981's Ghost Story), Fairbanks concentrated on the production end for the next decade; he also produced and starred in a high-quality TV anthology, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Presents (1952-55), which belied its tiny budget with excellent scripts and superior actors. Evidently the only setback suffered by Fairbanks in the last forty years was his poorly received appearance as Henry Higgins in a 1968 revival of My Fair Lady; otherwise, the actor managed to retain his status as a respected and concerned citizen of the world, sitting in with the U.S. delegation at SEATO in 1971 and accruing many military and humanitarian awards. He also published two autobiographies, The Salad Days in 1988 and A Hell of a War in 1993. Fairbanks, Jr. died on May 7, 2000, of natural causes.

Trivia: American actress Glenda Farrell, like so many other performers born around the turn of the century, made her stage debut in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her first adult professional job was with Virginia Brissac's stock company in San Diego, after which she worked up and down the California coast until leaving for Broadway in the late 1920s. Farrell's performance in the stage play Skidding established her reputation, and in 1929 she was wooed to Hollywood along with many other stage actors in the wake of the "talkie" revolution. Uncharacteristically cast as the ingenue in Little Caesar (1930), Farrell would thereafter be cast in the fast-talking, "hard-boiled dame" roles that suited her best. Though her characters had a tough veneer, Farrell was sensitive enough to insist upon script changes if the lines and bits of business became too rough and unsympathetic; still, she seemed to revel in the occasional villainess, notably her acid performance as Paul Muni's mercenary paramour in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang(1932). In 1937, Farrell was assigned by Warner Bros. to portray dauntless news reporter Torchy Blaine in a series of brisk "B" pictures. She was gratified by the positive fan mail she received for Torchy, and justifiably proud of her ability to spout out 390 words per minute in the role, but Farrell decided to leave Warners and free-lance after five "Torchy Blaines." The actress's character roles in the 1940s and 1950s may have been smaller than before, but she always gave 100 percent to her craft. Farrell moved into television with ease, appearing on virtually every major dramatic weekly series and ultimately winning an Emmy for her work on the two-part Ben Casey episode of 1963, "A Cardinal Act of Mercy." Farrell's exit from movies was the 1964 Jerry Lewis farce The Disorderly Orderly, an assignment she plunged into with all the enthusiasm and sheer professionalism that she'd brought to the rest of her screen career.

Trivia: The youngest of the three filmmaking Ince brothers, he was a child actor in theater and became a cartoonist at Vitagraph in 1906. He soon began acting in films and became a director in 1912. Continuing as an actor, Ince had a penchant for impersonating Abraham Lincoln, for other directors as well as in his own mid-teens films Lincoln the Lover and The Highest Law. He helmed numerous films in the '20s, several of which he also acted in, including Bigger Than Barnum's, The Sea Wolf (appearing as Jack London's Wolf Larsen) and Chicago After Midnight. Ince found few directing opportunities in Hollywood after the advent of sound, although he continued to act in others' films, including Little Caesar and Law and Order. He relocated to England in 1934 and helmed numerous features there until his untimely death in an auto accident in 1937.

Trivia: Probably no one came by the label "Runyon-esque" more honestly than Polish-born actor George E. Stone; a close friend of writer Damon Runyon, Stone was seemingly put on this earth to play characters named Society Max and Toothpick Charlie, and to mouth such colloquialisms as "It is known far and wide" and "More than somewhat." Starting his career as a Broadway "hoofer," the diminutive Stone made his film bow as "the Sewer Rat" in the 1927 silent Seventh Heaven. His most prolific film years were 1929 to 1936, during which period he showed up in dozens of Warner Bros. "urban" films and backstage musicals, and also appeared as the doomed Earle Williams in the 1931 version of The Front Page. He was so closely associated with gangster parts by 1936 that Warners felt obligated to commission a magazine article showing Stone being transformed, via makeup, into an un-gangsterish Spaniard for Anthony Adverse (1936). For producer Hal Roach, Stone played three of his oddest film roles: a self-pitying serial killer in The Housekeeper's Daughter (1938), an amorous Indian brave in Road Show (1940), and Japanese envoy Suki Yaki in The Devil With Hitler (1942). Stone's most popular role of the 1940s was as "the Runt" in Columbia's Boston Blackie series. In the late '40s, Stone was forced to severely curtail his acting assignments due to failing eyesight. Though he was totally blind by the mid-'50s, Stone's show business friends, aware of the actor's precarious financial state, saw to it that he got TV and film work, even if it meant that his co-stars had to literally lead him by the hand around the set. No one was kinder to George E. Stone than the cast and crew of the Perry Mason TV series, in which Stone was given prominent billing as the Court Clerk, a part that required nothing more of him than sitting silently at a desk and occasionally holding a Bible before a witness.

Trivia: Bulky, foghorn-voiced Stanley Fields was a professional prizefighter before becoming a vaudeville comedian. He came to Hollywood when the movies began to talk, establishing himself as a scowling villain. One of his biggest early film roles was the gang boss who gives torpedo Edward G. Robinson his first big break in Little Caesar (1931). Thereafter, Fields frequently popped up unbilled but never unnoticeable, as witness his spirited performance as a hillbilly theatre patron in Show Boat (1936). Fields' foreboding brutishness made him an excellent foil for such comedians as Wheeler and Woolsey (Cracked Nuts [1931] and Girl Crazy [1932]) Eddie Cantor (The Kid From Spain [1932]) and Laurel and Hardy (Way Out West [1937]). Evidently changing agents in the late 1930s, Stanley Fields enjoyed some of his most sizeable screen assignments in the years just prior to his death in 1941, notably the practical joke-playing crime czar in the 1939 John Garfield vehicle Blackwell's Island.

Trivia: Actor Armand Kaliz was a reasonably successful vaudeville performer when he made his first film appearance in The Temperamental Wife (1919). Kaliz would not return to filmmaking on a full-time basis until 1926. At first, he enjoyed sizeable screen roles: along with most of the cast, he essayed a dual role in Warners' Noah's Ark (1928), and was given featured billing as DeVoss in Little Caesar (1930). Thereafter, Armand Kaliz made do with minor roles, usually playing hotel clerks, tailors and jewelers.

Trivia: The son of famed Yiddish actor Maurice Moscovitch (1871-1940), Noel Madison was educated at the University of Laussane in Switzerland and Loudoun House in London. At first billed as Nat Madison, he established his reputation on Broadway as an actor and director. In films from 1930, he was usually cast as a smooth-talking gangster. He left Hollywood in 1937 for a brief sojourn to England, where he was prominently featured in three Jessie Mathews musicals. Once back in America, it was business as usual for Madison, who returned to screen villainy. During World War II, the actor's unique facial features permitted him to play both German and Japanese bad guys. One of Noel Madison's rare sympathetic roles was Carl Rothschild in the 1934 George Arliss vehicle House of Rothschild.

Trivia: Coming to films from the stage in 1914, actress Lucille LaVerne had a career which endured for over twenty years. She seemed to dote on playing tattered old hags, staggering tosspots, time- and care-worn slum mothers and indomitable frontierswomen. She was delightful in her own nasty way as the old harridan who forces blind Dorothy Gish to sing in the streets in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1922). Successfully making the transition to sound, she was seen as petty-crook James Cagney's overprotective mother in Sinner's Holiday (1930), a slatternly underworld fence in Little Caesar (1930) and "The Vengeance," the toothless, cackling insurrectionist in Tale of Two Cities (1935). A more benign LaVerne was seen as a hillbilly matriarch who's set her cap for old blowhard Noah Beery Sr. in Wheeler & Woolsey's Kentucky Kernels (1934). Lucille LaVerne's most famous screen role, was one in which her face was never seen: she served as voice and model of the Wicked Queen in the 1937 Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Trivia: The son of stage actor Ben Hendricks, Ben Hendricks Jr. was 17 when he first stepped before a movie camera. During the 1920s, the younger Hendricks was a semi-regular in the Reginald Denny comedies at Universal, usually cast as Denny's slick, mustachioed brother-in-law. He made his first talkie appearance in 1929's The Wild Party, then went on to a handful of sizeable roles like Handsome Charlie in Girl of the Golden West (1930) before settling into bit roles. One of Ben Hendricks Jr.'s larger film assignments was the role of gangster Bugs Moran in The Public Enemy (1931), a part that was cut from all reissue prints due to legal pressure from the family of the real Bugs Moran.

Trivia: A tall, dark-haired, often elegant silent screen actor, Larry Steers had appeared with the famous Bush Temple Stock Company and opposite matinee idol Robert Edeson prior to making his film debut with Paramount in 1917. Extremely busy in the 1920s, Steers usually played professional men, doctors, lawyers, and politicians, typecasting that continued well into the sound era, albeit in much diminished circumstances. By the mid-'30s, the veteran actor had become a Hollywood dress extra.

Trivia: The film career of actor Louis Natheaux spanned 19 years (1921-1940). At first, the slender, mustachioed Natheaux was cast as pomaded city slickers and shifty-eyed con artists. After a burst of activity in the first years of the talkies, he was consigned to bit parts, usually as a jaded croupier or snap-brim-hatted crook. He played larger roles in the two-reelers of such Hal Roach comedians as Charley Chase, Thelma Todd, and Patsy Kelly, and was occasionally featured as murder suspects in Poverty Row mysteries like Sinister Hands (1932). Louis Natheaux was also an off-and-on utility actor for Cecil B. De Mille, essaying minor parts in King of Kings (1929), Union Pacific (1939), and Northwest Mounted Police (1940).

Trivia: Kernan Cripps was recruited from the Broadway stage to play Trask in the early talkie melodrama Alibi (1929). This proved to be Cripps' most extensive screen role; thereafter, he was consigned to bits and minor roles, usually as muscle-bound cops, bodyguards and bartenders. Looking quite comfortable in uniform, he essayed such roles as the umpire in the baseball comedy Ladies Day (1943) and the train conductor in the noir classic Double Indemnity (1944). Kernan Cripps also proved to be a handy man to have around in such action-packed fare as the Republic serial Federal Operator 99.

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: Thomas Jackson's first stage success was in the role of the non-speaking Property Man in the original 1912 production of Yellow Jacket. He was starring as police detective Dan McCorn in the lavish Broadway production Broadway when he was tapped to repeat his role in the even more spectacular 1929 film version. For the rest of his career, which lasted into the 1960s, Jackson more or less played variations on Dan McCorn, notably as the soft-spoken "copper" Flaherty in 1931's Little Caesar. When he wasn't playing detectives, Thomas Jackson could be seen in dozens of minor roles as newspaper editors, bartenders, doctors and Broadway theatrical agents.

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.