Trivia: Forceful leading actor Robert Loggia left plans for a journalistic career behind when he began his studies at New York's Actors Studio. His first important Broadway assignment was 1955's The Man with the Golden Arm; one year later, he made his first film, Somebody Up There Likes Me. In 1958 he enjoyed a brief flurry of TV popularity as the title character in "The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca," a multipart western originally telecast on Walt Disney Presents. His next weekly TV assignment was as a good-guy burglar in 1967's T.H.E. Cat. A fitfully successful movie leading man, Loggia truly came into his own when he cast off his toupee and became a character actor, often in roles requiring quiet menace. As Richard Gere's bullying father, Loggia dominated the precredits scenes of An Officer and a Gentleman (1981), and was equally effective as the villain in Curse of the Pink Panther (1982) and as mafia functionaries in Scarface (1983) and Prizzi's Honor (1985). He was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of a two-bit detective in The Jagged Edge (1985). The most likeable Robert Loggia screen character thus far is his toy manufacturer in Big (1988), the film in which Loggia and Tom Hanks exuberantly dance to the tune of "Heart and Soul" on a gigantic keyboard. Loggia would remain an active force on screen for decades to come, appearing in movies like Opportunity Knocks, Independence Day, and Return to Me, as well as TV shows like Mancuso, FBI, Wild Palms, and Queens Supreme. Loggia passed away in 2015, at age 85.

Trivia: Pilar Seurat was an exotic beauty of Filipino descent who enjoyed a decade-long acting career in films and on television in America during the 1960s. Born Rita Hernandez in Manila in 1938, she was trained as an actress and dancer, and after arriving in Hollywood at the end of the 1950s, she began getting roles on a wide variety of television shows, as well as in a handful of movies, usually playing Asian characters. Seurat's youth and her good looks were also exploited in films such as Seven Women From Hell and Battle at Bloody Beach, both released in 1961. That same year, she gave a gripping performance in the best role of her entire career, as Louisa Escalante, the sister of the blind murder victim, in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages. Most of Seurat's work was confined to television, however, where she played guest-starring roles in series such as Adventures in Paradise (which exploited her dancing ability in one episode, "Blueprint for Paradise"), Bonanza, Naked City, The Wild Wild West, The High Chaparral, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Daniel Boone, Hawaii Five-O, and Star Trek ("Wolf in the Fold"), as well as a handful of TV movies, among them Loss of Innocence. Seurat married writer/producer Don Devlin. Their son is Dean Devlin, the producer of such hit thrillers as Universal Soldier and Godzilla, and the blockbuster Independence Day. The two divorced in the mid-'60s, and Seurat gave up acting after marrying teacher/writer Don Cerveris, whom she divorced in the early '80s. She died of cancer in 2001.

Trivia: American actress Carmen Phillips played leads in many MGM films during the '50s and '60s.

Trivia: American actor Barry Atwater was tall enough but not handsome enough to be a leading man, so his film and TV career found him playing villains, authority figures and medical men. A stage and TV veteran, Atwater's first film appearance was in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) though you'd never know it from the opening credits. Longtime fans of the ABC daytime drama General Hospital will recall Atwater's performances as Dr. John Prentice, who married nurse Jessie Brewer (Emily McLaughlin) and later was unceremoniously murdered. Barry Atwater's most spectacular acting assignment was as Janos Skorzeny, the modern-day vampire terrorizing Las Vegas in the classic made-for-TV chiller The Night Stalker (1956).

Trivia: The inimitable American actress Kathleen Freeman has been convulsing film audiences with portrayals of dowdy, sharp-tongued matrons since she was in her 20s. After stage work, Freeman began taking bit roles in major-studio features in 1948, seldom getting screen credit but always making a positive impression. The best of her earliest roles was in Singin' in the Rain (1952); Freeman played long-suffering vocal coach Phoebe Dinsmore, whose Herculean efforts to get dumb movie star Jean Hagen to grasp the proper enunciation of the phrase "I can't staaaand him" proved uproariously futile. Often cast as domestics, Freeman had a year's run in 1953 as the "spooked" maid on the ghostly TV sitcom Topper. Freeman was a particular favorite of comedian Jerry Lewis, who cast the actress in showy (and billed!) roles in such farces as The Errand Boy (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963) and Who's Got the Action?. As Nurse Higgins in Lewis' Disorderly Orderly (1964), Freeman weeps quietly as Jerry meekly scrapes oatmeal off her face and babbles "Oh, Nurse Higgins...you're all full of...stuff." Lewis so trusted Freeman's acting instincts that he sent her to the set of director William Wyler's The Collector (1965) in order to help build up the confidence of Wyler's nervous young leading lady Samantha Eggar. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Freeman took occasional "sabbaticals" from her movie and TV assignments to do stage work, enjoying a lengthy run in a Chicago production of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Like many character actors of the '50s, Kathleen Freeman is frequently called upon to buoy the projects of baby-boomer directors: she was recently seen as an hysterical Julia Child clone in Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990).

Trivia: Character actor Hal Smith (born Harold John Smith) cut his acting teeth in various touring road companies. Before serving in the Air Force during World War II, he had amassed impressive credits as a band singer, radio disc jockey, and writer. In the postwar years, he decided to try his luck in Hollywood, although holding down a real-estate job so he'd have a financial cushion between acting jobs. His first recurring TV role was on the vintage sitcom I Married Joan (1952-53). (It was a different actor who appeared in the bit role of Anne Baxter's suitor in O. Henry's Full House [1952].) He spent most of the '50s playing guest stints and providing voice-overs for cartoon characters, and was briefly Hal the Bartender, a commercial spokesman for a popular brand of beer. In 1960, he was signed for the semi-regular role of town drunk Otis Campbell on The Andy Griffith Show, essaying this hilarious (if politically incorrect) characterization with expertise, although he often insisted, "I don't think I've ever really been drunk in my whole life." Since Otis did not appear in every Griffith episode, Smith had time aplenty to free-lance, playing such film roles as a drunken Santa in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and an effeminate Roman emperor in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962), and supplying voices for such cartoon programs as Davey and Goliath and The Flintstones. By 1962, he was making 50,000 dollars per year, a tidy sum in those days. During the 1970s and '80s, Smith was most closely associated with Disney, replacing the late Vance "Pinto" Colvig as the voice of Goofy and providing voices for series ranging from Winnie the Pooh and Friends to Ducktales. Smith died in 1994.

Trivia: In films from 1941, American character actor Norman Leavitt spent much of his career in uncredited bits and supporting roles. Leavitt can briefly be seen in such "A" pictures of the 1940s and 1950s as The Inspector General (1949) and Harvey (1950). His larger roles include Folsom in the 1960 budget western Young Jesse James. Three Stooges fans will immediately recognize Norman Leavitt from The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), in which he player scientist Emil Sitka's sinister butler--who turned out to be a spy from Mars!