Old Hollywood Trivia
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120 free Old Hollywood trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
64 free Old Hollywood trivia questions with answers. Old Hollywood was more than the movies. It was a company town run by moguls like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, policed by the Hays Code, chronicled by gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, and lived out in places like the Brown Derby, the Chateau Marmont and Schwab's Pharmacy. This quiz covers that whole world, from the silent era of Valentino, Pickford and Fatty Arbuckle to the fall of the studio system and the last of the great stars. Expect questions about the people rather than just the films: Clark Gable's ears, Marilyn Monroe's real name, the mail-order stage name of Joan Crawford, Hedy Lamarr's wartime invention, Cary Grant's stilt-walking past and Grace Kelly's handbag. There are scandals (the Arbuckle trials, the William Desmond Taylor murder, the Lana Turner stabbing), the blacklist, the first fifteen-minute Academy Awards, and the studio lion chosen as a college tribute. The set runs from easy warm-ups to expert stumpers about magazines, murders and studio contracts. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and other reference sources, so it works for a movie night, a pub quiz round or settling a family argument about who was really discovered at Schwab's.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Motion Picture Production Code of 1934–1968 is popularly named after which industry president?
Will H. Hays
Will H. Hays was hired in 1922 to polish Hollywood's scandal-hit image; his 1930 code had no teeth until 1934, when Catholic pressure and the threat of federal censorship forced real enforcement.
Q 02What replaced the Production Code in 1968?
The MPAA film rating system
The MPAA film rating system classified films by audience instead of censoring them, and within two years the X-rated Midnight Cowboy had won Best Picture.
Q 03Which administrator enforced Hollywood's Production Code from 1934 to 1954?
Joseph Breen
Joseph Breen's office could demand script changes on any film, and releasing one without its seal of approval meant a $25,000 fine.
Q 04What was Marilyn Monroe's birth name?
Norma Jeane Mortenson
Norma Jeane Mortenson took the screen name in 1946 for her first Twentieth Century-Fox contract: 'Marilyn' came from Broadway star Marilyn Miller and 'Monroe' was her mother's maiden name.
Q 05Marilyn Monroe was on the cover of which magazine's first issue, published in December 1953?
Playboy
Playboy never photographed her: Hugh Hefner bought a nude shot from an old calendar session, taken before her career took off, and ran it inside the issue.
Q 06Which gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper's arch-rival, is credited as America's first movie columnist?
Louella Parsons
Louella Parsons won her job with William Randolph Hearst by tirelessly praising his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, in her column.
Q 07Which actor, often called the 'King of Hollywood', won his only Oscar for It Happened One Night (1934)?
Clark Gable
Clark Gable struggled to land Hollywood roles at first because his ears were thought too big for a leading man; once MGM signed him, his popularity soared.
Q 08Which screwball star, wife of the 'King of Hollywood', died in a 1942 plane crash after a war bond tour?
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard had just raised some $2 million in war bonds in her home state of Indiana and, impatient to get home, took a plane rather than the train.
Q 09Which 1930 film, Greta Garbo's first talkie, did MGM sell with the tagline 'Garbo talks!'?
Anna Christie
Anna Christie keeps Garbo off screen for about a quarter of an hour, and her first spoken line turns out to be an order for whiskey.
Q 10Which silent-screen 'Latin Lover' died in 1926 aged 31, drawing 100,000 to his Manhattan funeral?
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino's funeral set off a day of rioting by fans, and the Fascist honour guard said to have been sent by Mussolini had in fact been hired by the funeral home.
Q 11Which star, born Frances Ethel Gumm, died of an accidental barbiturate overdose in 1969 at 47?
Judy Garland
Judy Garland said MGM kept its young actors on pep pills to get through long shoots and sleeping pills at night, a dependence that followed her for the rest of her life.
Q 12In 1964 Elizabeth Taylor married which co-star from Cleopatra, one of their 11 films together?
Richard Burton
Richard Burton and Taylor began their affair on the Cleopatra set while both were married to others; they divorced in 1974, remarried the next year and divorced again in 1976.
Q 13Which future star reached America at 16 with an English acrobatic troupe, then walked on stilts at Coney Island?
Cary Grant
Q 21The 1947 Hollywood blacklist began after ten writers and directors refused to answer which body?
The House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Un-American Activities Committee had all ten cited for contempt of Congress and they went to prison, while the studio heads suspended them and pledged to hire no known Communists.
Q 22The first Academy Awards were presented in May 1929 at which Los Angeles hotel?
The Hollywood Roosevelt
The Hollywood Roosevelt dinner cost guests $5 a ticket, and nobody was in suspense: the winners had been announced three months earlier.
Q 23Which swashbuckling silent star, the first screen Zorro, hosted the first Academy Awards?
Cary Grant, then Archie Leach of Bristol, stayed behind in New York when the Pender Troupe's 1920 tour ended and spent years in vaudeville before Hollywood called.
Q 14Which 19-year-old ex-model debuted opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) and married him a year later?
Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall got her screen test after the director's wife spotted her on a Harper's Bazaar cover, and her chin-down stare, 'The Look', began as a way to stop herself shaking with nerves.
Q 15Grace Kelly won her Best Actress Oscar for which 1954 film, playing Bing Crosby's long-suffering wife?
The Country Girl
The Country Girl put the famously glamorous Kelly in plain cardigans as the dowdy, neglected wife of an alcoholic singer, and two years later she left films to become Princess of Monaco.
Q 16Which fashion house made the 'Kelly bag' Princess Grace used in 1956 to shield her pregnancy?
Hermès
Hermès had sold the style since the 1930s under another name; photographs of the princess carrying it made it so famous that it became known as the Kelly, and the house adopted the name.
Q 17Which 1940s 'Love Goddess', star of Gilda, was born Margarita Carmen Cansino?
Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth danced professionally in her father's act from the age of 12, and took the new surname and auburn hair on the advice of her first husband, who was also her manager.
Q 18Which Vienna-born film star co-invented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system with George Antheil?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr had picked up her knowledge of weapons from her first husband, an Austrian munitions maker, and neither she nor the composer ever earned anything from the patent.
Q 19Which silent comedian was acquitted after three trials over the 1921 death of Virginia Rappe?
Fatty Arbuckle
Fatty Arbuckle was cleared within minutes by a third jury that added a written apology, yet a week later the industry barred him from the screen and he turned to directing under a false name.
Q 20Which blacklisted Hollywood Ten member did Kirk Douglas publicly credit as Spartacus's screenwriter in 1960?
Dalton Trumbo
Dalton Trumbo had spent the blacklist years writing under fronts and false names, and two of those scripts, Roman Holiday and The Brave One, won Oscars he could not collect.
Douglas Fairbanks
He and his wife Mary Pickford ruled Hollywood society from their Pickfair estate.
Q 24Which salad was reportedly improvised from leftovers at the Hollywood Brown Derby for Sid Grauman?
Cobb
Cobb salad is named for Robert Cobb, the Hollywood Brown Derby's owner, though tellings differ on whether he or his chef first made it, and for whom.
Q 25In which Sunset Boulevard hotel, built in 1929, did John Belushi die in Bungalow 3?
Chateau Marmont
Chateau Marmont was modelled on the Château d'Amboise, where Leonardo da Vinci is buried, and began as an apartment house before the Depression turned it into a hotel.
Q 26The stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are made of brass and which coral-pink material?
Terrazzo
Terrazzo in coral and charcoal won out after a brown-and-blue scheme was vetoed, reportedly for clashing with a developer's new building; Stanley Kramer's star was the first laid, in 1960.
Q 27Which film first paired Astaire and Rogers?
Flying Down to Rio
Flying Down to Rio starred Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond, but the dancing pair stole the picture and RKO rushed them into starring vehicles of their own.
Q 28Child star Shirley Temple later served as United States ambassador to Ghana and to which other country?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was where she had been caught in Prague by the Soviet-led invasion of 1968; she returned as ambassador in 1989, in time to see its Communist government fall.
Q 29Allied aircrews in World War II named their inflatable life jackets after which curvaceous star?
Mae West
Mae West was sentenced to ten days in jail in 1927 over her Broadway play 'Sex', served eight, and came out a national figure.
Q 30Besides Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, which was James Dean's third major film?
Giant
Giant was his final film: he died in a car crash at 24 shortly after finishing it, and it reached cinemas the following year.