Trivia: Sidney Poitier was to Hollywood what Jackie Robinson was to major league baseball: simply put, the man who broke the color barrier. An actor, director, and producer, he forever altered the racial perceptions long held by both motion picture audiences and executives, rising to superstar status in an industry forever dominated on both sides of the camera by whites while becoming the first African-American ever to take home an Oscar for Best Actor. Born February 20, 1927, in Miami, FL, Poitier grew up in poverty in the British West Indies. After quitting school at the age of 13, he later joined the U.S. Army, serving in World War II as a medical assistant. Upon his release from duty he relocated to New York City, where he auditioned for the American Negro Theater. When his heavy Bahamian accent prompted laughter from producers, Poitier spent the next six months honing his elocution skills, practicing his enunciation by repeating radio routines, and finally gaining admission to the theatrical troupe's ranks after his second audition.Handsome and athletic, Poitier made his Broadway debut in 1946 in an all-black production of Lysistrata, and moved into films four years later with No Way Out. His impressive turn in 1955's gritty The Blackboard Jungle brought him closer to stardom, and in 1958 he earned his first Academy Award nomination opposite Tony Curtis in Stanley Kramer's social drama The Defiant Ones. The film's focus on racial politics, as well as his increasing popularity with audiences of all racial backgrounds, solidified Poitier's standing as a key figure in the burgeoning civil rights movement, as roles in features including 1959's Porgy and Bess and 1961's Raisin in the Sun established him as the premier black actor of his generation. For 1963's The Lilies of the Field, he made history as the first African-American actor to win an Oscar in a leading role, and with the mainstream success of 1965's A Patch of Blue and 1967's To Sir, With Love, his ascent to superstardom was complete. Much to his credit, Poitier continued to make racially provocative films; in 1967 he appeared in Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as the black fiancé of a white woman, while in the same year's Best Picture-winning In the Heat of the Night, he starred as a Philadelphia police detective facing prejudice while investigating a murder in the Deep South. In 1969, Poitier founded the First Artists Production Company, and in 1972 -- at the peak of the blaxploitation era which his earlier success made commercially viable -- announced his directorial debut with Buck and the Preacher. He directed and starred in his next three films (1973's Warm December, 1974's Uptown Saturday Night, and 1975's Let's Do It Again) before starring in Ralph Nelson's 1975 South African political thriller The Wilby Conspiracy, after which he returned to the director's chair with 1977's A Piece of the Action.After directing the 1980 comedy Stir Crazy, Poitier began to decrease his workload; he helmed two more features, 1982's Hanky Panky and 1984's Fast Forward, but then disappeared from filmmaking for the next several years. In 1988, Poitier appeared onscreen for the first time in over a decade in Roger Spottiswoode's thriller Shoot to Kill, followed by a supporting turn in the espionage drama Little Nikita. Upon directing 1990's disastrous Bill Cosby comedy Ghost Dad, he starred as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the television feature Separate But Equal, and in 1992 appeared in the star-studded Sneakers. After another extended absence, Poitier returned in 1995 in the TV movie Children of the Dust, and in 1996 he starred in the long-awaited follow-up to his '67 success To Sir With Love, TV's To Sir With Love 2.A frequent author in addition to his acting, Poitier's book Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter was published in 2008, and the following year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Trivia: Perhaps better known to the general public as an actor, John Cassavetes' true artistic legacy derives from his work behind the camera; arguably, he was America's first truly independent filmmaker, an iconoclastic maverick whose movies challenged the assumptions of the cinematic form. Obsessed with bringing to the screen the "small feelings" he believed that American society at large attempted to suppress, Cassavetes' work emphasized his actors above all else, favoring character examination over traditional narrative storytelling to explore the realities of the human condition. A pioneer of self-financing and self-distribution, he led the way for filmmakers to break free of Hollywood control, perfecting an improvisational, cinéma vérité aesthetic all his own.The son of Greek immigrants, Cassavetes was born December 9, 1929, in New York City. After attending public school on Long Island, he later studied English at both Mohawk College and Colgate University prior to enrolling at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon graduating in 1950, he signed on with a Rhode Island stock company while attempting to land roles on Broadway and made his film debut in Gregory Ratoff's Taxi in 1953. A series of television roles followed, with Cassavetes frequently typecast as a troubled youth. By 1955, he was playing similar parts in the movies, appearing in pictures ranging from Night Holds Terror to Crime in the Streets. Cassavetes' career as a filmmaker began most unexpectedly. In 1957, he was appearing on Night People, a New York-based radio show, to promote his recent performance in the Martin Ritt film Edge of the City. While talking with host Jean Shepherd, Cassavetes abruptly announced that he felt the film was a disappointment and claimed he could make a better movie himself; at the close of the program, he challenged listeners interested in an alternative to Hollywood formulas to send in a dollar or two to fund his aspirations, promising he would make "a movie about people." No one was more surprised than Cassavetes himself when, over the course of the next several days, the radio station received over 2,000 dollars in dollar bills and loose change; true to his word, he began production within the week, despite having no idea exactly what kind of film he wanted to make.Assembling a group of students from his acting workshop, Cassavetes began work on what was later titled Shadows. The production had no script or professional crew, only rented lights and a 16 mm camera. Without any prior experience behind the camera, Cassavetes and his cast made mistake after mistake, resulting in a soundtrack which rendered the actors' dialogue completely inaudible (consequently creating a three-year delay in release while a new soundtrack was dubbed). A sprawling, wholly improvised piece about a family of black Greenwich Village jazz musicians -- the oldest brother dark-skinned, the younger brother and sister light enough to pass for white -- the film staked out the kind of fringe society to which Cassavetes' work would consistently return, posing difficult questions about love and identity.Unable to find an American distributor, the completed Shadows appeared in 1960, and was widely hailed as a groundbreaking accomplishment. After receiving the Critics Award at that year's Venice Film Festival, it finally was released in the U.S. with the backing of a British distributor. The film's success brought Cassavetes to the attention of Paramount, who hired him to direct the 1961 drama Too Late Blues with Bobby Darin. The movie was a financial and critical disaster, and he was quickly dropped from his contract. Landing at United Artists, he directed A Child Is Waiting for producer Stanley Kramer. After the two men had a falling out, Cassavetes was removed from the project, which Kramer then drastically re-cut, prompting a bitter Cassavetes to wash his hands of the finished product. Stung by his experiences as a Hollywood filmmaker, he vowed to thereafter finance and control his own work, turning away from directing for several years to earn the money necessary to fund his endeavors. A string of acting jobs in films ranging from Don Siegel's The Killers to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby to Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor) wrapped up Cassavetes for all of the mid-'60s, but in 1968 he returned to filmmaking with Faces, the first of his pictures to star his wife, the brilliant actress Gena Rowlands. Another edgy drama shot in Cassavetes' trademark cinéma vérité style, Faces was a tremendous financial and critical success, garnering a pair of Oscar nominations as well as winning five awards at the Venice Film Festival; its success again brought Hollywood calling, but this time the director entertained only those offers affording him absolute creative control and final cut.After coming to terms with Columbia, Cassavetes began work on 1970's Husbands, which co-starred Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. After helming 1971's Minnie and Moskowitz for Universal, he turned to self-financing, creating his masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence, which earned Rowlands an Academy Award nomination in the Best Actress category. With a story he developed with longtime fan Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes next turned to 1976's film noir The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; though also reissued two years later in a truncated version, the picture failed to find an audience, and was barely even circulated. When the same fate befell 1978's Opening Night, Cassavetes was forced to return to Columbia in 1980 to make Gloria.Four years passed before the director's next film, Love Streams. His subsequent effort was 1985's aptly titled Big Trouble, a comedy already in production when Cassavetes took over for writer/director Andrew Bergman, who had abruptly quit the project. The finished film was subsequently recut by its producers, and Cassavetes publicly declared it a disaster. Upon completing the picture, he became ill; regardless, he continued working, turning to the theatrical stage when he could no longer find funding for his films. A Woman of Mystery, a three-act play which was his final fully realized work, premiered in Los Angeles in 1987. On February 3, 1989, John Cassavetes died. Son Nick continued in his father's footsteps, working as an actor as well as the director of the films Unhook the Stars (1996) and She's So Lovely (1997), the latter an adaptation of one of his father's unfilmed screenplays.

Trivia: A former prizefighter, nightclub bouncer and lifeguard, Jack Warden took to the stage after serving as a paratrooper in World War II. Warden's first professional engagement was with the Margo Jones repertory troupe in 1947. He made both his Broadway and film debuts in 1951, spending the next few years specializing in blunt military types and short-tempered bullies. Among his most notable screen roles of the 1950s was the homicidally bigoted factory foreman in Edge of the City and the impatient Juror #7 in Twelve Angry Men (both 1957). He was Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of the cuckolded Lester in Warren Beatty's Shampoo (1975) and for his work as eternally flustered sports promoter Max Corkle in another Beatty vehicle, Heaven Can Wait (1978). He has also played the brusque, bluff President in Being There (1978); senile, gun-wielding judge Ray Ford in ...And Justice For All (1979); the twin auto dealers--one good, one bad--in Used Cars (1980); Paul Newman's combination leg-man and conscience in The Verdict (1982); shifty convenience store owner Big Ben in the two Problem Child films of the early 1990s; the not-so-dearly departed in Passed Away (1992); and Broadway high-roller Julian Marx in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994). Extensive though his stage and screen credits may be, Warden has been just as busy on television, winning an Emmy for his portrayal of George Halas in Brian's Song (1969) and playing such other historical personages as Cornelius Ryan (1981's A Private Battle) and Mark Twain (1984's Helen Keller: The Miracle Continues). Barely stopping for air, Jack Warden has also starred or co-starred on the weekly TV series Mister Peepers (1953-55), The Asphalt Jungle (1961), Wackiest Ship in the Army (1965), NYPD (1967-68), Jigsaw John (1975), The Bad News Bears (1979) and Crazy Like a Fox (1984-85); and, had the pilot episode sold, Jack Warden was to have been the star in a 1979 revival of Topper. Though this was not to be for Warden, the gruff actor's age and affectionately sour demeanor found him essaying frequent albiet minor feature roles through the new millennium. Remaining in the public eye withn appearances in While You Were Sleeping (1995), Ed (1996), Bullworth (1998) and The Replacements (2000), the former welterweight fighter remained as dependable as ever when it came to stepping in front of the lens.

Trivia: After studying at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio and Sandy Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse, Kathleen Maguire made her professional stage debut in the early '50s. Her most celebrated performance was in the 1958 off-Broadway revival of Time of the Cuckoo, for which she won an Obie award. In 1957, she made her first film appearance as Ellen Wilson in the New York-filmed Edge of the City. On television, Kathleen Maguire was a familiar soap opera performer, co-starring in such daytime dramas as Three Steps to Heaven, A World Apart, A Time for Us, and One Life to Live.

Trivia: African-American stage, film, and TV luminary Ruby Dee was born in Cleveland, the daughter of a Pullman-porter father and schoolteacher mother. While growing up in Harlem, Dee developed an interest in the theater. In 1941, she began studying under Morris Carnovsky at the American Negro Theatre. While attending Hunter College, she made her first professional stage appearance in South Pacific (not the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but a short-lived 1943 drama). On Broadway from 1946, Dee's first major success was as the title character in Anna Lucasta. In 1948, she married actor Ossie Davis, with whom she appeared in everything from Shakespeare to TV margarine commercials. Though she and Davis were both uncredited in their joint film debut, 1950's No Way Out, Dee achieved second billing in her next feature, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Among her favorite stage roles were Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and Luttiebelle in her husband Ossie Davis' play Purlie Victorious, roles that she would commit to film in 1961 and 1963 respectively. On TV, Dee was a regular on The Guiding Light, Roots: The Next Generations, and The Middle Ages; Dee worked steadily throughout the 1970s, '80s, dividing her time more or less equally between television [with turns in such small-screen movies as The Atlanta Child Murders (1981), The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990) and the 1990 Decoration Day, for which she won an Emmy] and the big screen, where her credits included the features Cat People (1982), Cop and a Half (1993) and A Simple Wish (1997). Dee received a career resurgence thanks to her prominent enlistment in the features of Spike Lee (alongside Davis), notably Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991). As time rolled on, she also began to participate in documentaries, such as the 1998 Christianity: The First Thousand Years and the 1999 Smithsonian World: Nigerian Art - Kindred Spirits); made guest appearances in such prime-time series as Touched by an Angel; and essayed a prominent role opposite Halle Berry in the telemovie Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). She continued to work steadily after Davis's death in early 2005, and in fact received her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nomination for her role in Ridley Scott's period crime saga American Gangster (2007). In 2011 she participated in Sing Your Song, a well-received biography of Harry Belafonte from HBO. In addition to her acting credits, Ruby Dee was an accomplished writer; she contributed a weekly column to New York's Amsterdam News, co-authored the script for the 1967 film Up Tight!, penned the 1975 TV play Twin-Bit Gardens, and published a book of poetry, Glowchild (1972).Dee died of natural causes in June 2014 at age 91.

Trivia: American character actress Ruth White specialized in offbeat roles on-stage and in feature films. She started out in stock theater in the early '40s after studying acting under Maria Ouspenskaya. She made her Broadway debut in 1949 and went on to become a popular and oft-distinguished performer. White made her film debut in Edge of the City (1957). White died in 1969.

Trivia: Avery was a versatile American character actor onscreen from 1956, beginning with The Harder They Fall.

Trivia: After stock experience in New England and a starring role in a Broadway flop, American actor John Kellogg was selected to play the lead in the road company of the long-running service comedy Brother Rat. He continued working steadily on stage until interrupted by World War II service. After a smattering of movie exposure at other studios, Kellogg signed a Columbia contract in 1946. Good-looking and dependable enough for secondary roles but not quite star material, Kellogg was seen in such films as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1945), Johnny O'Clock (1947) and 12 O'Clock High (1949).

Trivia: A Broadway actor who also found marked success in celluloid with roles in such film noir classics as The Set-Up and The Narrow Margin, David Clarke embarked on an enduring screen career following his debut in the 1941 boxing drama Knockout. The Chicago native found a powerful ally in the business when he made fast friends with star Will Geer while pounding the boards in his hometown early on, and after being abandoned in Seattle following a failed touring play, the talented duo set their sights on Broadway. Both actors were hired to appear in the 1936 Broadway play 200 Were Chosen, and in the years that followed, both Geer and Clarke went on to achieve notable success on both stage and screen. Clarke also found frequent work on television on such popular series as Kojak and Wonder Woman as well as a recurring role in the small-screen drama Ryan's Hope. Clarke and Geer remained lifelong friends, appearing together in both the 1949 film Intruder in the Dust and the enduring television drama The Waltons -- in which Clarke made several guest appearances. David Clarke married actress Nora Dunfee in 1946; the couple would frequently appear together on-stage and remained wed until Dunfee's death in 1994. On April 18, 2004, David Clarke died of natural causes in Arlington, VA. He was 95.

Trivia: In Hollywood from 1931 to 1950, American actor Charles Jordan kept busy in a vast array of minor roles and walk-ons. Jordan's characters were frequently named "Shorty;" they ranged from gangsters to reporters to bartenders to jury foremen. In producer Val Lewton's Cat People (1942), Jordan plays the bus driver who figures into one of the film's most memorable "sudden shock" vignettes. Charles Jordan spent most of the 1940s at Warner Bros., Columbia, and Monogram, appearing in substantial roles in two of Monogram's "Charlie Chan" entries.

Trivia: Inaugurating his career at the Cleveland Playhouse, American character actor Robert F. Simon made his first Broadway appearance in Clifford Odets' Clash By Night. In 1949, Simon succeeded Lee J. Cobb in the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He made his film debut in 1954, spending the next two decades playing a steady stream of generals, doctors, executives and journalists. One of Simon's most prominent film roles was the father of the title character in 1956's The Benny Goodman Story. On television, Simon played bombastic newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in the weekly adventure series The Amazing Spider-Man (1977-78), and could also be seen in recurring roles on Saints and Sinners (1961), Bewitched (1964), Custer (1967), Nancy (1970) and MASH (1972-73 season, as General Mitchell).