Trivia: Actor Robert Alda studied architecture at NYU, briefly working in this field until choosing show business. He started performing in vaudeville, and in burlesque as a tenor and straight man; by 1934, he was well established on radio. He made a spectacular film debut in Warner Bros.' 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945), essaying the role of George Gershwin over the objections of director Irving Rapper, who'd wanted to hold off production until Tyrone Power was available. Alda did as good a job as possible, given the banalities of the scripts, though his piano-playing sequences are obviously faked and tricked up. Alda's starring career faded out rather quickly; he was more successful with second leads and villainous roles, and in the early 1960s became a fixture of Italian sword-and-sandal and spy films. Returning to Broadway in 1950, Alda created the role of Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, winning a Tony Award in the process. In 1954, he starred in the syndicated TV series Secret File USA. Robert Alda was the father of Alan Alda, with whom he appeared in a poignant MASH TV episode of the late 1970s.

Trivia: California-born Jeanette Nolan racked up an impressive list of radio and stage credits in the 1930s, including a stint with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe. She made her film debut in 1948 in Welles' MacBeth; her stylized, Scottish-burred interpretation of Lady MacBeth was almost universally panned by contemporary critics, but her performance holds up superbly when seen today. Afterwards, Ms. Nolan flourished as a character actress, her range extending from society doyennes to waterfront hags. She appeared in countless TV programs, and played the rambunctious title role on the short-lived Western Dirty Sally (1974). Nolan made her final film appearance playing Robert Redford's mother in The Horse Whisperer (1998). From 1937, Jeanette Nolan was married to actor John McIntire, with whom she frequently co-starred; she was also the mother of actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: Blonde, bouncy Dorothy Provine was born in South Dakota to a Seattle-based businessman and his interior decorator wife. While attending the University of Washington, Provine appeared in some 35 amateur and professional stage productions, and was cohost of a Seattle TV quiz program. She headed to Broadway at age 20, but had better luck in Hollywood, where she was given star billing in such low-budgeters as The Bonnie Parker Story (1958) and The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock (1959), the latter film representing Lou Costello's last screen work. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1959, Provine starred on two hour-long TV series, The Alaskans and The Roaring 20s. Both programs gave the actress ample opportunity to display her considerable singing and dancing skills, as did her extended cameo in the 1965 Blake Edwards superproduction The Great Race. She also proved an apt comedienne in such films as It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Good Neighbor Sam (1964), and Who's Minding the Mint? (1967); she was less effective as a British secret agent in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966). Dorothy Provine retired from the screen in 1968 upon marrying cinematographer-director Robert Day, though she continued to show up in commercials and "straw hat" summer theater productions. She died in late april 2010 of emphysema.

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.