Advanced search

Wavy-haired, articulate, quietly-spoken Bardette was one of Hollywood's archetypal villains of westerns and cliffhanger serials. He initially aspired to become a mechanical engineer after graduating from Oregon State University in June 1925. However, by the late 1920s, he had changed his name from Terva Gaston Hubbard to Trevor Bardette and embarked on a brief, unremarkable acting career on the East Coast stage, before moving to Hollywood in 1937. Though he went on to essay the occasional sheriff, rustic, frontiersman or hero's sidekick, his stoney features and deep-set, cold eyes ensured that he would invariably be cast as a ruthless heavy, sneaky spy, swindler, gangster or double-crosser. In the course of a thirty year career, the majority of his characters rarely survived until the final scene.

A hard-working character player, Bardette took on just about any role offered him. Between 1938 and 1940 alone, he appeared in some 33 films, including bits in prestige pictures like Jezebel (1938), Marie Antoinette (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). At the smaller studios and later for television, he fared rather better in terms of screen time. Serials, especially, gave him the opportunity to chew the scenery at his most menacing: as the scar-faced Pegleg (aka Mitchell) of Overland with Kit Carson (1939), the icily controlled, preening killer Raven of Winners of the West (1940); and the deceptively meek Jensen, head of a Nazi spy ring, in The Secret Code (1942). On TV, he was Old Man Clanton, cattle rustler and perpetual nemesis of law and order in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955) (though, in actual fact, N.H. Clanton never faced the Earps, having met his fate earlier at the hands of Mexican cowboys in Guadalupe Canyon). Then there were recurring roles in series like Lassie (1954), Cheyenne (1955) and Gunsmoke (1955), to name but a few.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Bardette bought his own ranch in Green Valley, Arizona, where he spent his remaining years after retiring from acting in 1970. In interesting footnote is his authorship (under his original name) of a short story entitled "The Phantom Photoplay", published in the August 1927 issue of Weird Tales magazine. His first name Terva, evidently sounded sufficiently feminine to be included among the publication's list of lady writers.

Sugarfoot Anderson was born on 10 February 1920 in Nashville, Arkansas, USA. He was an actor, known for The Story of Seabiscuit (1949). He died on 8 March 2017 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

B. R. (Bobby) Harwell was born in Nashville, Arkansas on August 22, 1931. His first real taste of adventure came when, at the age of 18, he and his brother Bill signed on a Swedish freighter heading for India. The ship was forced to stop in Bermuda when a smoldering fire was discovered in the hold where he and Bill participated in an attempt to save the life of their trapped First Mate. The two of them later signed off the ship in India without proper papers. Considered illegals and getting no help from the US Embassy, their problem was solved by a caring Brit who was an agent for the Swedish ship they had recently left. B.R.'s adventures continued in Korea where he served in a combat medical group similar to the unit portrayed in the hit movie and TV series MASH. After the military he used the GI Bill to graduate Cum Laude from the University of Arkansas. Having a free spirit, he became a peregrinating observer of life, tasting it through an eclectic potpourri that included such diverse jobs as commercial fishing, hanging draperies, driving cabs, working in a skid row blood bank and teaching elementary school in a Miami ghetto. In the early eighties B. R. did his first print modeling job. From there he moved up to TV commercials and small roles in TV and film. At the age of 78 he wrote "Flawed", his first novel, which describes the frivolity of Hollywood commingled with incest, murder and betrayal.