Trivia: Actor Keenan Wynn was the son of legendary comedian Ed Wynn and actress Hilda Keenan, and grandson of stage luminary Frank Keenan. After attending St. John's Military Academy, Wynn obtained his few professional theatrical jobs with the Maine Stock Company. After overcoming the "Ed Wynn's Son" onus (his father arranged his first job, with the understanding that Keenan would be on his own after that), Wynn developed into a fine comic and dramatic actor on his own in several Broadway plays and on radio. He was signed to an MGM contract in 1942, scoring a personal and professional success as the sarcastic sergeant in 1944's See Here Private Hargrove (1944). Wynn's newfound popularity as a supporting actor aroused a bit of jealousy from his father, who underwent professional doldrums in the 1940s; father and son grew closer in the 1950s when Ed, launching a second career as a dramatic actor, often turned to his son for moral support and professional advice. Wynn's film career flourished into the 1960s and 1970s, during which time he frequently appeared in such Disney films as The Absent-Minded Professor (1960) and The Love Bug (1968) as apoplectic villain Alonso Hawk. Wynn also starred in such TV series as Troubleshooters and Dallas. Encroaching deafness and a drinking problem plagued Wynn in his final years, but he always delivered the goods onscreen. Wynn was the father of writer/director Tracy Keenan Wynn and writer/actor Edmund Keenan (Ned) Wynn.

Trivia: An intelligent stage actress, Louise Platt's only memorable screen performance came as the pregnant army wife in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). She was 24 at the time, not exactly the blushing ingenue type, and she much preferred Broadway. She later appeared in such plays as A Room in Red and White, Spring Dance, The Promise, and, alternating with her sister Jean, as Johnny Belinda. In 1948 Platt created the role of Anne Boleyn opposite Rex Harrison in Anne of a Thousand Days and, the following year, starred with Lee Tracy in The Traitor, the latter produced by her former husband Jed Harris. She later appeared in several television shows, including two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Trivia: The daughter of a Canadian rancher, Fay Wray was raised in California. While attending Hollywood High School, Wray appeared in the annual Pilgrimage Play. Exhilarated by this brush with show business, she decided to try her luck as a film actress, and spent the next few months leaving her pictures and resumé with various studio casting agencies. She managed to land a few western ingenue roles and a handful of bit parts in Hal Roach's 2-reel comedies, but full stardom didn't come her way until 1928, when she was selected by Erich Von Stroheim to play the main female lead in The Wedding March. This led to a contract with Paramount Pictures, where she was briefly groomed as one-half of a romantic screen team with Gary Cooper. Surviving the talkie explosion, she continued working steadily into the early 1930s, appealingly conveying what one biographer would describe as "the contradictory qualities of virtue and sex appeal." Beginning in 1932, Wray developed into the talkie era's first "scream queen," playing the imperiled heroine in five back-to-back horror/fantasy classics. In Doctor X (1932), Vampire Bat (1933) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), she was cast opposite the satanic-featured Lionel Atwill, playing his daughter in the first-named film and his intended victim in the remaining two. In The Most Dangerous Game, Wray and Joel McCrea were hunted down like animals by demented sportsman Leslie Banks. And then came Fay's opportunity to play opposite "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood"--King Kong (1933). It was in this film that the auburn-haired Wray donned a blonde wig to portray Ann Darrow, the wide-eyed, writhing, screaming object of the Mighty Kong's affections. While King Kong is the film for which Wray will always be remembered (as late as 1996, she was still making annual pilgrimages to the Empire State Building to commemorate the anniversary of the film's premiere), it must be noted that she was certainly capable of playing roles with more depth and dimension than Ann Darrow. She was excellent as Gary Cooper's bitchy ex-flame in One Sunday Afternoon (1933) and as a dim-witted, voracious artist's model in The Affairs of Cellini (1934). Still, she felt typecast after King Kong, and in 1935 headed for England, hoping to find better film opportunities; instead, it was back to damsels in distress, most notably in the 1935 seriocomic thriller Bulldog Jack. During her Hollywood heyday, Wray was married to screenwriter John Monk Saunders, but their marriage ended in 1937. After a lengthy romance with playwright Clifford Odets, Wray married again, this time to another screenwriter, Robert Riskin. When Riskin became seriously ill in the late 1940s, Wray retired from acting to care for her invalid husband. She returned before the cameras in 1953, co-starring with Paul Hartman and Natalie Wood in the TV sitcom Pride of the Family. After Riskin's death in 1955, she made a film comeback in character roles, most memorably as philandering psychiatrist Charles Boyer's long-suffering wife in The Cobweb (1955). Throughout her acting career, she also kept busy as a writer and musician, and at one point co-wrote a play with no less than Sinclair Lewis. Curtailing her professional activities after her third marriage to a Los Angeles physician, Wray retired after portraying Henry Fonda's sister in the 1980 TV movie Gideon's Trumpet. In 1989, Fay Wray published her long-awaited autobiography, an endearingly overwritten tome titled On the Other Hand.

Trivia: American character actor Philip Bourneuf interrupted a lengthy stage career for his first film, 1944's Winged Victory. Like all other male members of the cast, Bourneuf was billed by his military rank; though he played a Colonel in Winged Victory, he was really just plain Corporal Philip Bourneuf. Few of his film roles allowed Bourneuf much room for expression; in the lavish historical drama Joan of Arc (1949), for example, the actor was listed way down the cast list for his role as Jean D'Estivet. Better roles came Bourneuf's way in The Big Night, where as a well-dressed nightclub denizen he shared several scenes with star John Barrymore, and in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), in which as a district attorney Bourneuf maneuvers the apparently innocent Dana Andrews into the electric chair. Philip Bourneuf's last film appearance was a typically minor role in 1970's The Molly Maguires.

Trivia: Formidable stage leading lady Doris Lloyd transferred her activities from British repertory to Hollywood in 1925. She was prominently cast as an alluring spy in George Arliss' first talkie Disraeli (1929); one year later, at the tender age of 30, she was seen as the matronly Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez in Charley's Aunt. Swinging back to younger roles in 1933, Lloyd was cast as the tragic Nancy Sykes in the Dickie Moore version of Oliver Twist. By the late 1930s, Lloyd had settled into middle-aged character roles, most often as a domestic or dowager. Doris Lloyd remained active until 1967, with substantial roles in such films as The Time Machine (1960) and The Sound of Music (1965).