- British silent-era star Queenie Thomas (1898-1977) was a pupil at Canton High School, Cardiff - now the site of . She made more than 30 films, often as lead, then enjoyed a second career as Gloria Gaye, leader of a wartime all-female dance band.
- Welsh international football star Billy Meredith, formerly with Manchester United and Manchester City, had a lead role in a fiction feature Ball Of Fortune (1926). Only about a minute is known to survive, featuring Meredith in a mazy dribble.
- When a 1928 film about venereal disease, The Dangers Of Ignorance, was first screened in Cardiff, men and women spectators were segregated and had to attend separate screenings.
- Unemployed miners at Blaenavon, Gwent, made their own film - With The Aid Of A Rogue in 1928 - about an 18th century aristocratic highwayman!
- The first part-talkie shown in Wales was The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, at Cardiff's Queen's cinema in 1928. The first full talkie - again at the Queen's - was Jolson's The Singing Fool in 1929.
- The first talkie made in Hollywood but entirely set in Wales was James Whale's 1932 black comedy The Old Dark House, starring Melvyn Douglas and Boris Karloff.
- The first Welsh-language talkie fiction film was Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman) made in 1934 by Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, founder of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (The Welsh League of Youth) and father of S4C's first controller Owen Edwards.
- The Cardiff Board of Catholic Action declared war on immoral films in 1934, advising parishioners to boycott films they considered unwholesome.
- Rhys Williams, who played Dai Bando, was the only Welsh actor in a significant role in Hollywood's How Green Was My Valley (1941). It won five Oscars - including Best Film and Best Director (John Ford).
- Paul Robeson's favourite of all his British films was Proud Valley (1940), a mining drama set in south Wales and directed by Pen Tennyson, an old Etonian and great-grandson of the poet.
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