Trivia: A rugged, craggy-faced, bushy-browed lead actor and character player, he began his stage career in 1937, which was interrupted by service in World War Two. He debuted onscreen in Winged Victory (1944), but did not begin regularly appearing in films until 1949; he was usually cast as grim, determined, humorless men in action features. From 1950-60 he was married to actress Bette Davis, with whom he appeared in three films. His many TV credits include a role in the series Young Dr. Kildare. He was politically active in liberal causes, and played a part in rejuvenating Maine's Democratic party; he also helped elect Edmund Muskie to governor of that state in 1953. In 1965 he took part in the Selma-Montgomery civil rights march. At odds with President Johnson's Vietnam policy, he switched parties and in 1968 tried unsuccessfully to win a Republican nomination to the Maine legislature as an anti-war, pro-environmentalist primary candidate. He authored an autobiography, Bette, Rita and the Rest of My Life (1989); "Rita" refers to actress Rita Hayworth, with whom he'd had a romantic affair.

Trivia: Straight out of Dartmouth College, Alan Hewitt made his Broadway bow in the 1935 Lunt/Fontanne production of Taming of the Shrew (which featured another newcomer, Cameron Mitchell). The wiry, sneering-voiced Hewitt appeared in several Theatre Guild productions of the 1930s and 1940s and later supported Ethel Merman in the 1950 musical Call Me Madam. He also served for many years as an official of the Actor's Union Council. During the 1960s, Hewitt became one of the Disney Studios' favorite actors, playing stereotypical self-important officials in such comedies as The Absent-Minded Professor (1960), Son of Flubber (1963) and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1967). Fans of 1960s sitcoms will remember Alan Hewitt as the ever-suspicious detective Bill Brennan on My Favorite Martian.

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.