Trivia: Gloria Swanson may not have been the world's best actress, but she was certainly one of the screen's greatest personalities. The daughter of a peripatetic army officer, she was educated in public schools from Chicago to Puerto Rico. While visiting Chicago's Essanay studios in 1913, the 15-year-old Swanson was hired as an extra and it was in this capacity that she met her first husband, Wallace Beery, then starred in the studio's Sweedie comedies. Not long after making a brief appearance in Charlie Chaplin's first Essanay starrer His New Job (1915), she accompanied her husband to Hollywood, where he'd been signed by Mack Sennett's Keystone studios. Often teamed with diminutive leading man Bobby Vernon, Swanson earned a measure of fame as the deadpan heroine of such comedies as Teddy at the Throttle (1916) and The Pullman Bride (1916) (she later claimed that she had no sense of humor at the time and thus played her roles seriously, which made them all the funnier to the audience). Divorced from Beery in 1917, Swanson also left Keystone that same year to accept an offer to appear in dramatic roles for Triangle Pictures. She then went to work for Cecil B. DeMille, who admired her courage and tenacity and cast her as the glamorously (and provocatively) garbed heroines of such lavish productions as Don't Change Your Husband (1918), Male and Female (1919), and The Affairs of Anatol (1920). A full-fledged superstar by the early '20s, Swanson carefully controlled every aspect of her career, from choosing her leading men and directors to approving her publicity layouts. She also remained in the public eye via her succession of high-profile husbands, including the Marquis de la Falaise de Coudray. Though at her best in tear-stained romantic dramas, she could still deliver a top-notch comedy performance, as witness her portrayal of a dowdy, gum-chewing working girl in Allan Dwan's Manhandled (1924). In the late '20s she set up her own production company with the sponsorship of her then-lover, financier Joseph P. Kennedy. After a successful start with 1928's Miss Sadie Thompson, Swanson's company went bankrupt as a result of her benighted association with the Erich Von Stroheim-directed fiasco Queen Kelly (1929). Contrary to popular belief, she made a successful transition to sound, displaying her fine singing voice in films like Tonight or Never (1931) and Music in the Air (1934). But the public had adopted new favorites and no longer flocked to Swanson's films as they once had. She retired in the mid-'30s, briefly returning in 1941 to star with Adolphe Menjou in the undistinguished comedy Father Takes a Wife. Her next film appearance in 1949 turned out to be one of the finest achievements in anybody's career: Her Oscar-nominated virtuoso performance as faded, self-delusional silent screen star Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's vitriolic Hollywood melodrama Sunset Boulevard. So convincing was Swanson in this role that many of her fans believed that she was Norma Desmond, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Unfortunately, her attempts to follow up this triumph proved unsuccessful, prompting her to turn her back on filmmaking for the third time in her career. She did rather better on television in the 1950s, emceeing her own local New York TV talk show and hosting the syndicated anthology Crown Theatre Starring Gloria Swanson (1954). She also dabbled in scores of business enterprises, with mixed but generally satisfying results. Her most successful business venture was a line of organic cosmetics, "Essence of Nature;" she was also very active in the burgeoning health food movement of the 1960s, her ageless beauty and boundless energy serving as the best arguments in favor of proper nutrition. In the 1970s, she appeared on Broadway and on tour in Butterflies Are Free, and made her final screen appearance in Airport 74 (1974), more or less playing herself. Still active right up to her death, Gloria Swanson was survived by her sixth husband and several grandchildren.

Trivia: Whit Bissell was a familiar face to younger baby boomers as an actor mostly associated with fussy official roles -- but those parts merely scratched the surface of a much larger and longer career. Born Whitner Nutting Bissell in New York City in 1909, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an alumnus of that institution's Carolina Playmakers company. He made his movie debut with an uncredited role in the 1940 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk and then wasn't seen on screen again for three years. Starting in 1943, Bissell appeared in small roles in a short string of mostly war-related Warner Bros. productions, including Destination Tokyo. It wasn't until after the war, however, that he began getting more visible in slightly bigger parts. He had a tiny role in the opening third of Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Cluny Brown (1946), but starting in 1947, Bissell became much more closely associated with film noir and related dark, psychologically-focused crime films. Directors picked up on his ability to portray neurotic instability and weaselly dishonesty -- anticipating the kinds of roles in which Ray Walston would specialize for a time -- and used him in pictures such as Brute Force, He Walked by Night, and The Killer That Stalked New York. His oddest and most visible portrayal during this period was in The Crime Doctor's Diary (1949), in which he had a scene-stealing turn as a mentally unhinged would-be composer at the center of a murder case. By the early 1950s, however, in addition to playing fidgety clerks, nervous henchmen, and neurotic suspects (and friends and relatives of suspects), he added significantly to his range of portrayals with his deeply resonant voice, which could convincingly convey authority. Bissell began turning up as doctors, scientists, and other figures whose outward demeanor commanded respect -- mainstream adult audiences probably remember him best for his portrayal of the navy psychiatrist in The Caine Mutiny, while teenagers in the mid-1950s may have known him best for the scientists and psychiatrists that he played in Target Earth and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it was in two low-budget films that all of Bissell's attributes were drawn together in a pair of decidedly villainous roles, as the mad scientists at the center of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. The latter, in particular, gave him a chance to read some very "ripe" lines with a straight face, most memorably, "Answer me! I know you have a civil tongue in your mouth -- I sewed it there myself!" But Bissell was never a one-note actor. During this same period, he was showing off far more range in as many as a dozen movies and television shows each year. Among the more notable were Shack Out on 101, in which he gave a sensitive portrayal of a shell-shocked veteran trying to deal with his problems in the midst of a nest of Soviet spies; "The Man With Many Faces" on the series Code 3, in which he was superb as a meek accountant who is pushed into the life of a felon by an ongoing family tragedy; and, finally, in "The Great Guy" on Father Knows Best, where he successfully played a gruff, taciturn employer who never broke his tough demeanor for a moment, yet still convincingly delivered a final line that could bring tears to the eyes of an audience. By the end of the 1950s, Bissell was working far more in television than in movies. During the early 1960s, he was kept busy in every genre, most notably Westerns -- he showed up on The Rifleman and other oaters with amazing frequency. During the mid-1960s, however, he was snatched up by producer Irwin Allen, who cast Bissell in his one costarring role: as General Kirk, the head of the government time-travel program Project Tic-Toc on the science-fiction/adventure series Time Tunnel. He also showed up on Star Trek and in other science-fiction series of the period and continued working in dozens of small roles well into the mid-1980s. Bissell died in 1996.

Trivia: American actor James MacArthur was the adopted son of stage legend Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur. Despite his mother's insistence that James have a normal childhood, it was difficult not to be intoxicated by the theatre when growing up around the greatest acting and literary talent in the '40s. At age 8, young MacArthur appeared in a stock-company production of The Corn is Green. Fresh out of Harvard, MacArthur became a movie juvenile, specializing in tortured-teen roles in such films as The Young Stranger (1957) and Disney's Light in the Forest (1958). Outgrowing his somewhat charming awkwardness, MacArthur was less satisfying as a standard leading man, and by 1967 he was wasting away in pictures like The Love Ins. That same year, the pilot film for a new Jack Lord cop series, Hawaii Five-O, was screened for a test audience. The group liked the film but not the young man (Tim O'Kelly) who played Lord's assistant, deeming him too young for the part. Hawaii producer Leonard Freeman then called upon 30-year-old MacArthur, with whom Freeman had worked on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang 'Em High. From 1968 through 1979, MacArthur played Hawaii Five-0's detective Danny Williams, always handy whenever Jack Lord felt the need to snap "Book 'em, Danno." Though the series enriched MacArthur and made him a vital member of the Honolulu society and business world, the actor finally packed it in after 11 seasons, when it seemed as though he'd be Danno forever (the show continued for one more season). Too wealthy to care about a career at this point, James MacArthur still took an occasional role into the '80s; his most prominent post-Hawaii assignment was the 1980 TV movie Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story, in which he played a rare non-sympathetic character. MacArthur died in October 2010 of natural causes at age 72.