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Angelo Rossitto

Standing only 2'11" tall, Angelo Rossitto was one of cinema's busiest dwarf actors. Yet he never gave up his Hollywood Boulevard pitch and returned to selling newspapers whenever acting work dried up. Indeed, he became such a familiar figure in Los Angeles that he ran for mayor in 1941, two years after he founded the Little People of America organization. In the silent era, Rossitto teamed with John Barrymore in "The Beloved Rogue" and Lon Chaney in "While the City Sleeps." Yet, despite playing Angeleno in Tod Browning's contentious 1932 horror, "Freaks," Rossitto often went uncredited for roles in such notable features as Cecil B. DeMille's "The Sign of the Cross," Harry Lachman's "Dante's Inferno," and William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He similarly received no on-screen notice for playing Shirley Temple's stand-in in several mid-1930s outings. Surviving further controversy after playing Angelo in Harry Revier's 1938 underage marriage saga "Child Bride," Rossitto teamed with Bela Lugosi on a trio of B movies between 1941 and 1947: "Spooks Run Wild"; "The Corpse Vanishes"; and "Scared to Death." Besides reunions with DeMille on "Samson and Delilah" and "The Greatest Show on Earth," Rossitto cropped up (mostly unbilled) over the next three decades in pictures as diverse as "Carousel," "Invasion of the Saucer Men," and "Dracula vs Frankenstein," as well as such 1970s TV shows as "H.R. Pufnstuf," "Lidsville," and "Baretta." He retired in 1986, a year after playing Master while almost blind in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome."