Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: Beefy, bulldog-visaged actor Robert Strauss was the son of a theatrical costume designer. Strauss tried his hand at a number of odd jobs before he, too, answered the call of the theater. His best-known Broadway role was the dimwitted, Betty Grable-loving Animal in Stalag 17, a role that he recreated for the 1953 film version, and was Oscar nominated for his efforts. Though he'd been seen onscreen as early as 1942, Strauss' film career didn't really take off until he garnered positive notices for Animal. He spent most of the 1950s at Paramount, working with everyone from William Holden to Jerry Lewis. In 1971, after several distinguished years in the business, Robert Strauss found himself the object of showbiz-column scrutiny when he agreed to co-star in the Danish "soft core" sex farce Dagmar's Hot Pants.

Trivia: American actress Lynn Bernay began her career as a dancer during the early 1950s. She later began acting on stage and in "B" movies. During the mid 1970s, Bernay began working as a wardrobe mistress.

Trivia: Australian actress Marjorie Bennett made her first film appearances in the pre-World War I years at the suggestion of her sister, silent film star Enid Bennett. Marjorie wasn't yet under the spell of the acting bug, so she abandoned performing for several years, re-emerging as a stage rather than screen actress. She returned to films in the late 1940s as a character player, notably in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). A prolific film and TV performer of the 1950s and 1960s, Marjorie Bennett was usually cast as huffy society matrons and haughty domestics; her massive bulk and easily outraged demeanor made her a perfect straight woman for such iconoclastic comedians as Red Skelton and the Three Stooges.

Trivia: The daughter of a Massachusetts lawyer, American actress Bette Davis matured with a desire to become an actress upon her graduation from Cushing Academy, but was turned away from Eva LeGallienne's Manhattan Civic Repertory in New York. Undaunted, Davis enrolled in John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School, where everyone (including classmate Lucille Ball) regarded her as the star pupil. After a 1928 summer season with director George Cukor's stock company in Rochester, NY (where she worked with future co-star -- and rival -- Miriam Hopkins), Davis went on to Broadway, starring in Broken Dishes and Solid South before Hollywood called. Dazzling on-stage, Davis was signed to a contract by Universal in 1930. After an unimpressive debut in Bad Sister in 1931, however, Davis was out of work, but picked up by Warner Bros. soon thereafter. Davis applied herself with white-hot intensity to becoming a star with that company, and after a major role in the 1932 George Arliss vehicle The Man Who Played God, a star she became. Still, the films at Warner Bros. were uneven, and it wasn't until the studio loaned out Davis to play the bravura role of Mildred in RKO's Of Human Bondage (1934) that the critics began to take notice. An Oscar nomination seemed inevitable for her performance in Bondage, but Davis was let down by Warner Bros., which didn't like the fact that her best appearance had been in a rival's movie, and it failed to get behind her Oscar campaign (although there was a significant write-in vote for the actress). But, in 1935, Davis excelled as a self-destructive actress in the otherwise turgid film Dangerous, and an Oscar was finally hers. And when Warner Bros. subsequently failed to give Davis the top roles she felt she then merited, the actress went on strike and headed for England. She lost a legal battle with the studio and came back, but it acknowledged her grit and talent by increasing her salary and giving her much better roles. In 1939 alone, Davis starred in Dark Victory, Juarez, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and The Old Maid. But she didn't get the plum role of the season -- Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind -- because Warner Bros. wouldn't loan her to David O. Selznick unless Errol Flynn was chosen to play Rhett Butler (a piece of casting both Selznick and Davis violently opposed). But Davis had already had her turn at playing a Southern belle in Jezebel (1938), which won her second a Oscar. As her star status increased in the 1940s, Davis found that it would have to be at the expense of her private life -- she would be married and divorced four times, admitting toward the end of her life that her career came first, last, and always. A fling at being her own producer in 1946 was disappointing, and her contract with Warner Bros. petered out in 1949 with a string of unsuccessful films. Davis made a spectacular comeback in 1950 when she replaced an ailing Claudette Colbert in the role of Margot Channing in the Oscar-winning All About Eve. Though suffering from a bone disease that required part of her jaw to be removed, Davis continued to work in films throughout the '50s; but, in 1961, things came to a standstill, forcing the actress to take out a famous job-wanted ad in the trade papers. In 1962, Davis began the next phase of her career when she accepted the role of a whacked-out former child star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? This led to a string of gothic horror films that did little to advance Davis' reputation, but kept her in the public eye. It was also in 1962 that Davis penned her thoughtful and honest autobiography The Lonely Life. Working in movies, TV, on-stage and on one-woman lecture tours into the '70s, Davis may have been older but no less feisty and combative; her outspokenness may have unnerved some of her co-stars, but made her an ideal interview subject for young film historians and fans. In 1977, Davis received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, an honor usually bestowed upon performers who were retired or inactive. Not Davis. She kept at her craft into the '80s, even after a stroke imposed serious limitations on her speech and movement. Amidst many TV movies and talk-show appearances, Davis gave one last memorable film appearance in The Whales of August (1987), in which she worked with another venerable screen legend, Lillian Gish. Though plagued with illness, Davis was formidable to the end -- so much so that when she died in France at the age of 82, a lot of her fans refused to believe it.

Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: Robert Fuller spent his first decade in show business trying his best to avoid performing. After his film debut in 1952's Above and Beyond, Fuller studied acting with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse but never exhibited any real dedication. He tried to become a dancer but gave that up as well, determining that dancing was "sissified." Fuller rose to nominal stardom fairly rapidly in the role of Jess Harper on the popular TV western Laramie (1959-63). Once he found his niche in cowboy attire, he stuck at it in another series, Wagon Train, turning down virtually all offers for "contemporary" roles. When westerns began dying out on television in the late 1960s, Fuller worked as a voiceover actor in commercials, earning some $65,000 per year (a tidy sum in 1969). On the strength of his performance in the Burt Topper-directed motorcycle flick The Hard Ride, Fuller was cast by producer Jack Webb as chief paramedic Kelly Brackett on the weekly TVer Emergency, which ran from 1972 through 1977. In 1994, Robert Fuller was one of several former TV western stars who showed up in cameo roles in the Mel Gibson movie vehicle Maverick.