Trivia: The younger brother of actor Dana Andrews, Steve Forrest served in World War II while his brother (17 years Steve's senior) was starring in such films as The Purple Heart (1944) and Laura (1944). Upon his return to America, Steve went to Hollywood to pay a social call on Dana, decided he liked the movie colony, and opted to stick around for a while. Though he'd previously played bits in such films as Crash Dive (using his given name of William Andrews), Forrest never seriously considered acting as a profession until enrolling at UCLA. He tried regional theatre work and scriptwriting then received a brief but showy bit part in MGM's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). This led to further film work in second leads then several years' worth of villainous roles. When asked why he accepted so many bad-guy assignments, Forrest would cite the comment once made to him by Clark Gable: "The hero gets the girl but the heavy gets the attention". By 1969, however, Forrest felt as though he'd worn out his welcome as a heavy, and began regularly turning down roles, holding out for heroic parts. In 1975, he was cast as Lieutenant Dan "Hondo" Harrison on the popular TV action series S.W.A.T., which might have run for years had it not been axed under pressure from the anti-violence brigades. More recently, Steve Forrest lampooned his rugged, rough'n'ready image in the 1987 film comedy Amazon Women of the Moon.In the years to follow, Forrest would remain beloved for his man's man presence on screen, appearing occasionally on shows like Colombo and Murder, She Wrote. Forrest passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

Trivia: "As familiar as a favorite leather easy chair" is how one magazine writer described the craggy, weather-beaten face of ineluctable character actor James Gregory. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any time in the past six decades that Gregory hasn't been seen on stage, on TV or on the big screen. There were those occasional periods during the 1930s and 1940s when he was working on Wall Street rather than acting, and there were those uniformed stints in the Marines and the Naval Reserve. Otherwise, Gregory remained a persistent showbiz presence from the time he first performed with a Pennsylvania-based travelling troupe in 1936. Three years later, he was on Broadway in Key Largo; he went on to appear in such stage hits as Dream Girl, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and The Desperate Hours. In films from 1948, Gregory was repeatedly cast as crusty no-nonsense types: detectives, military officers, prosecuting attorneys and outlaw leaders. With his bravura performance as demagogic, dead-headed senator Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Gregory launched a second career of sorts, cornering the market in portraying braggadocio blowhards. One of his best characterizations in this vein was as the hard-shelled Inspector Luger in the TV sitcom Barney Miller. He played Luger for six seasons (1975-78, 1979-81), with time out for his own short-lived starring series, Detective School (1978). He also played Prohibition-era detective Barney Ruditsky on The Lawless Years (1959-61) and T. R. Scott in The Paul Lynde Show (1972), not to mention nearly 1000 guest appearances on other series. James Gregory has sometimes exhibited his sentimental streak by singing in his spare time: he has for many years been a member of the SPEBQSA, which as any fan of The Music Man can tell you is the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.

Trivia: Georgia-born Joanna Moore spent two decades of her life in acting, a profession that she claimed never to have really wished to pursue. And across that time she got to play a couple of highly visible parts in important movies: she was the daughter of the murder victim whose killing starts the action in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and was the learning-disabled prostitute in Edward Dmytryk's A Walk on the Wild Side (1962). But despite those two stand-out credits and movie-star looks, she had the misfortune to have come along too late to make a lasting impression. Born Dorothy Cook in Americus, GA, in 1934, she didn't begin her screen acting career until the mid-'50s, a point where television had started to overwhelm the movie business, leaving no more room for studios to develop young talent. As a result, as beautiful as she was, Moore spent most of her career on the small screen, on anthology shows such as Lux Video Theater, or doing one-shot appearances on The Rifleman, Riverboat, Adventures in Paradise, and the countless other dramatic series that filled the home screen. She took what there was in feature film work, the dubious (Monster on the Campus) and the good (The Last Angry Man), but following Walk on the Wild Side, her best opportunities came from Elvis Presley (Follow That Dream), and the Disney organization, which memorably cast her as femme fatale Desiree de la Roche in Son of Flubber (1963). She did work in some better quality dramatic series, such as Route 66 and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but her best career opportunity seems to have come along in 1963, when Moore was cast as Peggy MacMillan, the new love interest for Sheriff Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) on The Andy Griffith Show, but that proved to be only a four-episode gig. It did allow her to show off her range in comedy as well as drama, however, and even to sing the folk song "Down in the Valley" in one show, and it became the screen role for which she may be best remembered.Moore married actor Ryan O'Neal that same year, and became much better known in the press from that personal union than for any of her screen work; O'Neal's sudden rise to fame with the advent of the series Peyton Place in 1964 made them one of the most visible (and attractive) young couples in Hollywood during the mid-'60s. Moore kept very busy during this period, working in episodes of everything from My Three Sons to Gunsmoke, and she even turned up on Peyton Place in 1966. By 1967, however, the marriage -- which produced two children, Tatum O'Neal and Griffin O'Neal -- had ended in divorce. By the end of the 1960s, Moore's personal life had begun falling apart, and she lost custody of both children owing to substance abuse problems. She was still extremely busy, however, appearing in Robert Altman's 1968 space-exploration feature film drama Countdown, as well as sitcoms (The Governor and J.J.) and television dramas (Judd for the Defense) right into 1970. After that, her appearances became much more sporadic, and it was said that Moore was living a post-hippie lifestyle on various communes when she wasn't working in episodes of Kung Fu or making a rare feature film appearance in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg (1975), where she was almost lost amid the all-star cast of the gargantuan disaster movie. She made two on-screen appearances in the 1980s, but otherwise had been unseen in the 20 years before her death in 1997.

Trivia: Assistant producer and production assistant Edgar Peterson attended Harvard before getting involved with New York theater and radio. During the late '30s, Peterson wrote and directed a few documentaries for the federal government. When the war broke out, he helped with the production of Capra's Why We Fight propaganda docudramas. After that, he worked for RKO in Hollywood as an associate producer. He later began working on television.

Trivia: Mississippi-born Roscoe Ates spent a good portion of his childhood overcoming a severe stammer. Entering show business as a concert violinist, the shriveled, pop-eyed Ates found the money was better as a vaudeville comedian, reviving his long-gone stutter for humorous effect. In films from 1929, Ates appeared in sizeable roles in such films as The Champ (1931), Freaks (1932) and Alice in Wonderland (1933), and also starred in his own short subject series with RKO and Vitaphone. Though his trademarked stammer is something of an endurance test when seen today, it paid off in big laughs in the 1930s, when speech impediments were considered the ne plus ultra of hilarity. By the late 1930s Ates's popularity waned, and he was reduced to unbilled bits in such films as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Dixie (1942). His best showing during the 1940s was as comic sidekick to singing cowboy Eddie Dean in a series of 15 low-budget westerns. Remaining busy in films and on TV into the 1960s, Roscoe Ates made his last appearance in the 1961 Jerry Lewis comedy The Errand Boy.