On this day in 1942, The Road to Morocco, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour, opens. The comedy was the third of seven Road pictures, which brought fame and fortune to its actors.

Hope, whose family immigrated to the United States from England when he was four, joined the vaudeville circuit in the early 1920s and later moved to radio and film. In most of the years between 1941 and 1953, Hope ranked among Hollywood’s Top 10 moneymaking stars, with Crosby not far behind. But while Hope may have raked in slightly more cash, it was Crosby who usually got the girl, at least in the seven Road movies.

Crosby was born Harry Lillis Crosby in Tacoma in 1903. During college in Spokane, he began singing and playing the drums with a band and abandoned an interest in law to pursue show business. He and a college friend, Al Rinker, moved to Los Angeles in 1925 and started a vaudeville act called “Two Boys and a Piano.” Crosby adopted the nickname Bing from a favorite comic strip.

Impressed by the act, bandleader Paul Whiteman hired Crosby and Rinker to tour with his band in 1927. Three years later, Crosby made his film debut as part of the band. Meanwhile, he married a starlet named Dixie Lee, with whom he had four sons.

Crosby became one of the most beloved entertainers in history. In 1931, he landed his own radio show, which ran in various forms until the mid 1940s. Radio boosted his popularity, and before long he was a hit at the box office as well as in the record store.

Crosby signed with Paramount in 1932 and appeared in The Big Broadcast the same year. His comic flair surfaced in the 1940s with the Road movies. During the same period, however, his dramatic work also gained attention: He won an Oscar for his performance as a priest in Going My Way (1944) and was nominated for his performances in The Bells of Saint Mary’s (1945) and The Country Girl (1954). Widowed in 1952, he later married actress Kathryn Grant, some 30 years his junior, and had three more children. He had a short-lived TV sitcom from 1964 to 1965 called The Bing Crosby Show, in which he played an aging singer trying to settle into domestic life. Years later, his daughter Mary Crosby played the girl who shot J.R. Ewing in the TV soap Dallas. Bing Crosby died on the golf course in 1977.