Trivia: At the peak of his career in the early '30s, actor Bela Lugosi was the screen's most notorious personification of evil; the most famous and enduring Dracula, he helped usher in an era of new popularity for the horror genre, only to see his own fame quickly evaporate. Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó was born in Lugos, Hungary, on October 20, 1882. After seeing a touring repertory company as they passed through town, he became fascinated by acting, and began spending all of his time mounting his own dramatic productions with the aid of other children. Upon the death of his father in 1894, Lugosi apprenticed as a miner, later working on the railroad. His first professional theatrical job was as a chorus boy in an operetta, followed by a stint at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts. By 1901, he was a leading actor with Hungary's Royal National Theatre, and around 1917 began appearing in films (sometimes under the name Arisztid Olt) beginning with A Régiséggyüjtö. Lugosi was also intensely active in politics, and he organized an actors' union following the 1918 collapse of the Hungarian monarchy; however, when the leftist forces were defeated a year later he fled to Germany, where he resumed his prolific film career with 1920's Der Wildtöter und Chingachgook. Lugosi remained in Germany through 1921, when he emigrated to the United States. He made his American film debut in 1923's The Silent Command, but struggled to find further work, cast primarily in exotic bit roles on stage and screen. His grasp of English was virtually non-existent, and he learned his lines phonetically, resulting in an accented, resonant baritone which made his readings among the most distinctive and imitated in performing history. In 1924, Lugosi signed on to direct a drama titled The Right to Dream, but unable to communicate with his cast and crew he was quickly fired; he sued the producers, but was found by the court to be unable to helm a theatrical production and was ordered to pay fines totalling close to 70 dollars. When he refused, the contents of his apartment were auctioned off to pay his court costs -- an inauspicious beginning to his life in America, indeed. Lugosi's future remained grim, but in 1927 he was miraculously cast to play the title character in the Broadway adaptation of the Bram Stoker vampire tale Dracula; reviews were poor, but the production was a hit, and he spent three years in the role. In 1929, Lugosi married a wealthy San Francisco widow named Beatrice Weeks, a union which lasted all of three days; their divorce, which named Clara Bow as the other woman, was a media sensation, and it launched him to national notoriety. After a series of subsequent films, however, Lugosi again faded from view until 1931, when he was tapped to reprise his Dracula portrayal on the big screen. He was Universal executives' last choice for the role -- they wanted Lon Chaney Sr., but he was suffering from cancer -- while director Tod Browning insisted upon casting an unknown. When no other suitable choice arose, however, only Lugosi met with mutual, if grudging, agreement. Much to the shock of all involved, Dracula was a massive hit. Despite considerable studio re-editing, it was moody and atmospheric, and remains among the most influential films in American cinema. Dracula also rocketed Lugosi to international fame, and he was immediately offered the role of the monster in James Whale's Frankenstein; he refused -- in order to attach himself to a picture titled Quasimodo -- and the part instead went to Boris Karloff. The project never went beyond the planning stages, however, and in a sense Lugosi's career never righted itself; he remained a prolific screen presence, but the enduring fame which appeared within his reach was lost forever. Moreover, he was eternally typecast: Throughout the remainder of the decade and well into the 1940s, he appeared in a prolific string of horror films, some good (1932's Island of Lost Souls and 1934's The Black Cat, the latter the first of many collaborations with Karloff), but most of them quite forgettable. Lugosi's choice of projects was indiscriminate at best, and his reputation went into rapid decline; most of his performances were variations on his Dracula role, and before long he slipped into outright parodies of the character in pictures like 1948's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was to be his last film for four years.As Lugosi's career withered, he became increasingly eccentric, often appearing in public clad in his Dracula costume. He was also the victim of numerous financial problems, and became addicted to drugs. In 1952, he returned from exile to star in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, followed later that year by the similarly low-brow My Son, the Vampire and Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. By 1953, Lugosi was firmly aligned with the notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, widely recognized as the worst director in movie history; together they made a pair of films -- Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster -- before Lugosi committed himself in 1955 in order to overcome his drug battles. Upon his release, he and Wood began work on the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, but after filming only a handful of scenes, Lugosi died of a heart attack on August 15, 1956; he was buried in his Dracula cape. In the decades to come, his stature as a cult figure grew, and in 1994 the noted filmmaker Tim Burton directed the screen biography Ed Wood, casting veteran actor Martin Landau as Lugosi; Landau was brilliant in the role, and won the Oscar which Lugosi himself never came remotely close to earning -- a final irony in a career littered with bittersweet moments.

Trivia: Born into a family of travelling show folk, Lyle Talbot toured the hinterlands as a teen-aged magician. Talbot went on to work as a regional stock-company actor, pausing long enough in Memphis to form his own troupe, the Talbot Players. Like many other barnstorming performers of the 1920s, Talbot headed to Hollywood during the early-talkie era. Blessed with slick, lounge-lizard good looks, he started out as a utility lead at Warner Bros. Talbot worked steadily throughout the 1930s, playing heroes in B pictures and supporting parts in A pictures. During a loanout to Monogram Pictures in 1932, he was afforded an opportunity to co-star with Ginger Rogers in a brace of entertaining mysteries, The 13th Guest and The Shriek and the Night, which were still making the double-feature rounds into the 1940s. In 1935, Talbot and 23 other film players organized the Screen Actors Guild; to the end of his days, he could be counted upon to proudly display his SAG Card #4 at the drop of a hat. As his hairline receded and his girth widened, Talbot became one of Hollywood's busiest villains. He worked extensively in serials, playing characters on both sides of the law; in 1949 alone, he could be seen as above-suspicion Commissioner Gordon in Batman and Robin and as duplicitous Lex Luthor in Atom Man Vs. Superman. He remained in harness in the 1950s, appearing on Broadway and television. Two of his better-known assignments from this period were Joe Randolph on TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and as Bob Cummings' lascivious Air Force buddy Paul Fonda on Love That Bob. Seemingly willing to work for anyone who met his price, Talbot had no qualms about appearing in the dregs of cheapo horror films of the fifties. He was prominently cast in two of the estimable Edward D. Wood's "classics," Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan Nine From Outer Space (1955). When asked what it was like to work for the gloriously untalented Wood, Talbot would recall with amusement that the director never failed to pay him up front for each day's work with a handful of stained, crinkly ten-dollar bills. Though he made his last film in 1960, Lyle Talbot continued touring in theatrical productions well into the late 1970s, regaling local talk-show hosts with his bottomless reserve of anecdotes from his three decades in Hollywood.

Trivia: A top-flight character actor and sometime leading man, Gregory Walcott managed to bridge the tail-end of the studio system, the heyday of series television, and the boom years of the post-studio 1970s, and carve a notable career in the process. He was born Bernard Mattox in 1928 (some sources say 1932) in Wendell, NC, a small town about 10 miles east of the state capitol of Raleigh. After serving in the Army following the end of the Second World War, he decided to try for an acting career and hitchhiked his way to California. He managed to get work in amateur and semi-professional theatrical productions and was lucky enough to be spotted in a small role in one of these by an agent. That resulted in his big-screen debut, in an uncredited role in the 20th Century-Fox drama Red Skies of Montana (1952). With his 6'-plus height, impressive build, and deep voice, Walcott would seem to have a major career in front of him, but the movie business of the 1950s was in a state of constant retrenchment, battling the intrusion of television and the eroding of its audience. For the next three years, he had little but bit parts in films, some of them major productions. His performance as the drill instructor in the opening section of Raoul Walsh's Battle Cry (1955) was good enough to get him a contract with Warner Bros. He subsequently played supporting roles in Mister Roberts (1955) and in independent productions such as Badman's Country (1958), and also started showing up on television with some regularity. And with each new role, he seemed to gather momentum in his career.As luck would have it, however, Walcott's most prominent role of the 1950s ended up being the one he received the lowest fee for doing, and that he also thought the least of, and also one that, for decades, he was loathe to discuss, on or off the record: as Jeff Trent, the hero of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Walcott's work on the magnum opus of writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. amounted to less than a week's work, and he was so busy in those days that one can easily imagine him forgetting about it as soon as his end of the shoot was over. And the movie was scarcely even seen on its initial release in the summer of 1959 and went to television in the early '60s in a package that usually had it relegated to "shock theater" showcases and the late-night graveyard (no pun intended). But the ultra-low-budget production, renowned for its eerily, interlocking values of ineptitude and entertainment, has become one of the most widely viewed (and deeply analyzed) low-budget movies of any era in the decades since.As this oddity in his career was starting to gather its fans (some would say fester), Walcott had long since moved on to co-starring in the series 87th Precinct and guest-starring roles in series television. Across the 1960s, he remained busy and had a chance to do especially good work on the series Bonanza, which gave him major guest-starring roles in seven episodes between 1960 and 1972. In one of these, "Song in the Dark" (1962), Walcott even had a chance to show off his singing voice, a talent of his that was otherwise scarcely recognized in a three-decade career. By the late '60s, he had also moved into production work, producing and starring in Bill Wallace of China (1967), the story of a Christian missionary. During the 1970s, Walcott finally started to get movie roles that were matched in prominence to his talent, most especially in the films of Clint Eastwood. He remained busy as a prominent character actor and supporting player -- part of that category of performers that includes the likes of Richard Herd and James Cromwell -- into the 1980s. He had retired by the start of the 1990s, but was called before the cameras once more for an appearance in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood. Walcott died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: Duke Moore was a would-be actor and friend of writer-director-producer Edward D. Wood, Jr., who spent his whole screen career in movies written or directed by Wood, starting with the 1948 western Crossroads of Laredo. Moore's biggest and most memorable role was as the police lieutenant investigating the mysterious deaths at the cemetery in Plan 9 From Outer Space, and almost more memorable than his inept line delivery are his moves with his service revolver. He played essentially the same role with a different name in Wood's next movie, Night of the Ghouls, which remained locked up in the laboratory thanks to Wood's inability to pay the fees for processing until the 1980s, almost a decade after Moore's death.

Trivia: Actor Dudley Manlove is best remembered for his association with "The World's Worst Director" Ed Wood, Jr. and for appearing as Eros in Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956). Manlove started his career as a child-actor in vaudeville. His other film credits include Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) and Creation of the Humanoids (1962). Later, he became a staff announcer NBC radio. He also occasionally appeared in such television shows as Dragnet and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Trivia: John Breckinridge, often referred to by his friends as "Bunny" Breckinridge, only ever appeared in a single film. But that movie, Edward D. Wood Jr.'s Plan 9 From Outer Space, has become one of the most heavily analyzed and discussed films this side of Citizen Kane, if only for its spellbinding ineptitude, and Breckinridge's particular role, as the ruler of the alien invaders, was an especially visible one. That portrayal, coupled with Breckinridge's status as part of the coterie of Hollywood and societal fringe figures assembled around director/producer/writer Wood during the early '50s, was sufficient to earn him an unexpected degree of screen immortality in Tim Burton's feature film Ed Wood (1994); in that movie, Breckinridge was portrayed by Bill Murray. John Breckinridge came from a family of American blue-bloods. One of his great-grandfathers was John Cabell Breckinridge (1821-1875), the Vice President of the United States (1857-1861) under James Buchanan, and later a senator from Kentucky, a Confederate general, and the Confederate Secretary of War; another great-grandfather was Lloyd Tevis (1824-1899), the lawyer and financial speculator who founded the Wells Fargo Bank. Born in Paris in 1902, Breckinridge grew up surrounded by luxury and moved freely in circles with the leading lights of theater, music, and art -- he later cited soprano and silent screen actress Mary Garden as one of the frequent guests at his family's home during his childhood. He was educated in England, at Eton College and at Oxford University, and in his twenties did some stage acting in England, specializing in Shakespearean roles. A marriage to the daughter of a French noblewoman lasted only two years, during the late '20s. Apart from his brief acting stint in the 1920s, Breckinridge never aspired to be a "public" figure, and he lived most of his life during the 1940s and 1950s in private; or, rather, with as much privacy as an almost openly gay, sometime millionaire could enjoy during this era. He was known in the underground gay community of the period for his outrageous statements, flamboyant dress (including lots of costume jewelry and perfume), and extravagant lifestyle. He crossed paths with Edward D. Wood Jr. prior to the time that Wood made Glen or Glenda (1953), a film whose production was inspired by the real-life story of the sex-change surgery of Christine Jorgensen (although the movie itself was actually about transvestism). In 1954, Breckinridge himself announced plans (never actually carried out) to go to Denmark for a sex-change operation. Breckinridge made his only screen appearance, portraying an alien ruler in Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, in 1956. His scene, which lasts barely five minutes, is one of the strangest in an already bizarre movie, the one-time stage actor giving a serious, sincere, polished, and dramatic portrayal, as though he were playing Hamlet, in what is otherwise a largely unpolished film in almost every other aspect of its production. His scene stands out from everything else in the picture, not that it's necessarily better -- he is too fey in his manner, reminiscent of Ernest Thesiger's Dr. Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein, and the effect is bizarre, in an already bizarre film. Although he often lived well and entertained lavishly, Breckinridge's life was marred by inconsistencies and troubles, even on this level. In 1954, he was ordered by a court to pay 8,500 dollars annually toward the support of his mother in England. And during the later 1950s, Breckinridge was arrested on several occasions, on charges ranging from vagrancy to sex perversion, and he spent a year in Atascadero, a California hospital for the criminally insane, from 1959 to 1960. He was confined to a nursing home in the closing years of his life. There is no known published account of his reaction to Bill Murray's portrayal of him in Ed Wood, which gave Breckinridge the highest public profile of his entire life.

Trivia: Charles Jared Criswell, known to the world simply as Criswell, occupies an odd niche in movie history. A syndicated columnist, radio, and television personality known for his outrageous predictions of the future, he managed to carve a tiny place for himself in screen history essentially playing himself, as a result of his friendship with filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr.He was born in 1907 in Princeton, IN, and got his first taste of journalism while working for a local newspaper as a teenager. He later enrolled as a music student at the University of Indiana. After college, Criswell went back into journalism, first in newspapers and then as a broadcaster -- he had a resonant voice and clear speaking style that made him especially appealing as an announcer and newscaster in the booming medium of radio. It was as a newscaster, when he found the need to pad the length of his broadcasts, that he began making his predictions. Initially it was a joke, as he would look over the next day's scheduled events and try to anticipate how they would come out, but then people started listening to what he said and responding. He also got a newspaper column in which he did the same thing, at first only locally. Eventually, he was syndicated in an ever larger number of papers. Over a period of decades, he built up a large following of readers and listeners, and by the mid-'50s, he was a low-level celebrity with a local television show in Los Angeles and his own entourage. It was around this time, from 1954 to 1956, that he crossed paths with Edward D. Wood Jr., a director/writer/producer who occupied an even lower rung of the moviemaking ladder than Criswell did on television. Wood was taken with Criswell's fame, confidence, and smooth delivery, and at first actually believed that the man knew something about the future. The first tangible result of their contact was Wood's casting of Paul Marco, an aspiring actor in Criswell's coterie of hangers-on, in a prominent supporting role in his feature film Bride of the Monster -- Marco went on to become a fixture (even the unifying cast member) in Wood's 1950's horror film trilogy of Bride of the Monster, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Night of the Ghouls. Wood was drawn to anyone whom he felt could get him an audience, and Criswell was a natural as a local television personality. With his intense manner and raised white pompadour hair style, Criswell was the Liberace of the para-psychology set (and ludicrous as that sounds, one should remember that Liberace was a huge star in 1956). What Criswell thought of Wood was anyone's guess -- the man passed on before the burgeoning interest in Wood's career grew big enough to yield any interviews -- but in the absence of any "real" producer knocking on his door, he agreed to work in Wood's films. Wood put him into the pre-credit and end sequences of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and he also narrated the movie to great (if unintended comical) effect. The self-proclaimed seer had a larger onscreen role in Night of the Ghouls, the intended sequel to Plan 9, but that movie went unreleased for 24 years because Wood couldn't afford to pay the laboratory bill to get it developed. Criswell's next and last appearance on film came with Orgy of the Dead, a kind of de-bowdlerized remake of Night of the Ghouls, with shots of topless dancers and photographed in garish color, in which he looked alarmingly jaundiced. His appearance in that film, which was intended for showing on the "strip circuit" -- road houses and cheap dives, in between live strip acts -- was purely as a favor to Wood; by 1965, he'd been a fairly regular guest on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson) making his predictions. Most of these were outlandish -- such as his statement that Mae West would win election as president of the United States and land on the Moon with Criswell and George Liberace (the pianist's brother), or that the District of Columbia would disappear and the federal government would move to caverns under Wichita, KS. A tiny handful of the thousands of pronouncements that he released proved to be dead-on accurate, such as his statement in March of 1963 that something would happen to President Kennedy in November of that year that would prevent him from running for re-election, and declaring in late 1965 that Ronald Reagan (who was not yet taken seriously as an actor, much less as a politician) would become governor of California. Those were the predictions that he emphasized in his publicity. Other so-called psychics and predictors came along in his wake, including Jeanne Dixon, also parlaying a supposedly accurate prediction about Kennedy's assassination into a media career, who stole some of his thunder. Such was his fame, however, cultivated by reminding the public of his few accurate predictions, that Criswell was able to publish a book in 1969 that purported to lay out the history of the world for the next 30 years. It predicted the end of the world in the summer of 1999, something that Criswell didn't live long enough to be tripped up on, as he died in 1982. Among Criswell's other predictions over the years, his most often cited was one saying that the whole United States would turn gay by a certain date. Today, the man is almost completely forgotten except for his work in Wood's movies, principally Plan 9 From Outer Space, which has his shortest onscreen appearance but his funniest material. Thanks to that movie, Criswell's recordings have even been re-issued on CD, but nothing there is as memorable as his opening speech from Plan 9 From Outer Space, with the grave pronouncement, "We are all interested in the future, my friends, because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."

Trivia: Paul Marco was a longtime Hollywood prop man and crew member, who achieved his greatest and most lingering fame as an actor in the movies of writer/director/producer Edward D. Wood, Jr. Born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1927 to Italian immigrant parents, he apparently got bitten by the acting bug early in life. Being raised in the film capital allowed him greater access to that field than any number of would-be performers from elsewhere in the country, and this ultimately paid off, at least in terms of getting him work. In 1944, at the age of 17 -- probably helped by the shortage of male bit-players due to the war -- Marco turned up in a small, unbilled part in the B musical Sweet and Low-Down. His next known screen appearance came eight years later, in the Monogram Pictures costume drama Hiawatha, starring a young Vince Edwards in the title role and directed by B-movie master Kurt Neumann. It was during this period that Marco became part of the circle of friends surrounding Criswell, a syndicated columnist who published predictions of the future, and who had lately moved into local television with his own show. According to some accounts, Marco was responsible for introducing Criswell to Edward D. Wood, Jr., a writer/producer/director of ultra-low-budget films; whoever introduced who to whom -- Criswell was later to become part of Wood's stock company of players -- but Marco was soon a member of Wood's coterie of regulars. In 1955, the aspiring actor got his first credited role -- and, indeed, his first major role, and his most enduring part, as Officer Kelton in Wood's Bride of the Monster, a feature film starring one-time horror film great Bela Lugosi. Marco's performance as the good-natured if slightly inept Kelton made him one of the more endearing supporting players in the movie (the most appealing qualities of which, as with most of Wood's movies, were its mistakes). The director apparently liked Marco's work sufficiently to cast him in the same role in his next movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space, with more dialogue thrown his way and more scenes. And Marco was once more back as Kelton in a third film, Night of the Ghouls (1959), which didn't get released until the mid-'80s, owing to Wood's inability to pay the laboratory bill. By the early '60s, he'd also turned up in small supporting roles in episodes of series such as The Donna Reed Show and 77 Sunset Strip and was working regularly as a property man in numerous lower budgeted Hollywood films. Marco still showed up as an actor as well on occasion, and in 2005, the year before his death, reprised the role of Kelton in Wayne Berwick and Ted Newsom's The Naked Monster, a spoof of horror movies that also featured such fixtures of 1950s shock cinema as John Agar, Robert Clarke, Robert Cornthwaite, John Harmon, and Jeanne Carmen.

Trivia: Ben Frommer was the epitome of the successful character actor. Across a screen career totaling more than 40 years, he worked in over 100 film roles and possibly twice as many parts on television, ranging from just a few seconds of screen time in feature films to regular work on one of the more popular western series of the mid-1960s. And in virtually all of it, as with so many of the best people in his profession, he melted so well into the parts he played that audiences were seldom possessed to even ask his name. Ironically, it was in one of the cheapest -- and perhaps THE cheapest -- production on which he ever worked, in a part scarcely larger, or of longer duration than his typical background and supporting role, that Frommer earned his lingering name recognition. Born in Poland in 1913, Frommer arrived in Hollywood as an actor in the early 1940s, making his screen bow with an uncredited appearance in the 1943 Olsen & Johnson vehicle Crazy House. He next showed up in a bit part in the Laurence Tierney-starring film noir Born To Kill (1947). Frommer's short stature and fireplug-like physique, coupled with his rough-hewn features, made him ideal for playing working-class background parts such as deliverymen and taxi drivers. Most of his work was in lower-budgeted films, including exploitation fare such as Sid Melton's Bad Girls Do Cry (shot in the mid-1950s but not issued till much later). And it was in low-budget films -- some of the lowest budgeted ever made, in fact -- that Frommer would achieve a form of immortality as an actor.It was writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. who gave Frommer the opportunity to play a slightly wider range of parts. In Bride Of the Monster, Frommer was cast as a surly drunk, while in Wood's magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, he is the mourner who is charged by the script with providing the explanation as to why the old man (played by Bela Lugosi in footage shot for a movie that was never made) is buried in a crypt, while his wife (Maila "Vampira" Nurmi) is buried in the ground. The dialogue is as awkward as anything else in the notoriously poorly made (but thoroughly entertaining) movie, but Frommer does his best to deliver it convincingly, in what was almost certainly one very rushed take. Around this time, Frommer also showed up in the horror film Cult of the Cobra and the outsized production of Around The World In 80 Days, and a lot more television as well -- he also began providing voices for animated productions, a professional activity that would occupy ever more of his time later in his career. He worked in pictures by John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain), and Mervyn LeRoy (Gypsy), but it was during this same period, from 1965 through 1967, that Frommer achieved his widest weekly exposure on television, when he was cast in the comedic western series F-Troop in the role of Smokey Bear, the squat, chunky (and uncredited) member of the Hekawi Indian tribe. He usually did little more than hold the reigns of the horses ridden by Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch's characters, but he was impossible to miss in a shot.Frommer remained a very busy character actor and voice-actor over the next two decades, and only slowed down during his final years in the profession. During that time, he took on the new profession of publicist for his fellow actors. He died in 1992 at the age of 78.

Trivia: Wasp-waisted, exotic Maila Nurmi was perhaps best known under the name of Vampira, the character that she created. She was one of the more startling (albeit marginal) pop culture figures of the 1950s and made an indelible mark in movies -- principally in a role that didn't have a word of dialogue. The Finnish-born beauty contest winner and niece of Olympic athlete Paavo Nurmi, Maila Nurmi arrived in Hollywood at the end of the 1940s, crossing paths with Marilyn Monroe (during her pre-stardom days as Norma Jean Baker) in the course of working as a dancer, model, and actress. The turning point in her career came in 1953 when Nurmi attended a masquerade ball in Hollywood in the guise of the ghoul woman from the Charles Addams cartoons (later christened Morticia in the television adaptation). Binding her breasts and painting her body a stark white, she looked like a preserved corpse. Nurmi ended up winning the party's top prize and in the course of the attendant publicity, caught the eye of television producer Hunt Stromberg Jr., the son of the movie producer Hunt Stromberg. His station, KABC-TV, had a late-night horror movie showcase and he offered Nurmi the chance to host it in her ghoul woman guise. The Vampira Show, as it became known, was a campy phenomenon in Los Angeles in 1954-1955 and Nurmi earned a place in pop culture history as the first television horror movie host, a fraternity which later included such figures as John Zacherle and even kid-show host Claude Kirschner. Surrounded by spooky settings, plastic bugs, and other horror film accoutrements, Nurmi delighted audiences with her offbeat humor and sexually provocative persona, which was her own creation. Indeed, with her more sexually suggestive appearance as Vampira, Nurmi became the model for Carolyn Jones' Morticia Addams on The Addams Family, as much as was Addams' own ghoul woman creation, if not more so. She later took the act to television station KHJ in Los Angeles and built up a serious cult following, which included the actor James Dean. A dabbler in the offbeat, Dean initially approached Nurmi because he thought she was seriously involved in mysticism and the occult and only then discovered that it was all an act, although the two remained close friends. Nurmi's Vampira was the subject of coverage in Life magazine and Newsweek, and fan clubs sprang up around her persona. Her break into motion pictures -- though it hardly seemed like anything important at the time -- came about when director Edward D. Wood Jr. approached Nurmi about appearing in a movie he was making called Grave Robbers From Outer Space (later renamed Plan 9 From Outer Space). From an afternoon's work and 200 dollars, Wood got footage of the wasp-waisted Vampira wandering (or perhaps vamping) around a cheesy graveyard set with ex-wrestler Tor Johnson. She didn't have any dialogue and the movie was greeted with indifference and derision when it was finally released, but Nurmi's footage in Plan 9 From Outer Space became her most lasting pop-culture image, reprinted and recreated for decades. The mute portrayal was also her idea, since Nurmi reportedly couldn't abide the dialogue that had been written for her character. None of the Vampira shows from television were preserved and the program disappeared after the mid-'50s in a dispute between Nurmi and her producers (she describes herself as being "blacklisted"). As an actress, Nurmi has appeared on Broadway in Catherine Was Great and in movies as lab technicians, beat poetesses, and other off-beat roles, but Vampira remains he trademark and signature. Nurmi disappeared from popular culture in the 1960s, although the Morticia Addams character kept the Vampira influence alive well into the middle of the decade and beyond in reruns. In the early '80s, she gained attention in regards to her friendship with James Dean (in the film James Dean: The First American Teenager). She also attempted (unsuccessfully) to sue the actress Cassandra Peterson over the latter's screen persona of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Well into her eighties, Nurmi was occasionally rediscovered whenever the work of Edward D. Wood Jr. was reshown and re-evaluated -- particularly after director Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood was released. Nurmi was even the subject of a Finnish documentary, 1995's About Death, Sex and Taxes. She also turned up in 1998's little-seen Billy Zane vehicle I Woke Up Early the Day I Died adapted from an unproduced Wood script.

Trivia: Born in an upstate New York rural community, George Duryea was raised by relatives when both his parents died young. Educated at Columbia University and Carnegie Tech, Duryea embarked upon an acting career, first with a Maine stock company, then on Broadway. He played Abie in the hit comedy Abie's Irish Rose in New York, then toured with the production for several seasons. In 1928, he was brought to films as a young leading man, appearing in such "A"-list productions as Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929). By 1930, however, he was having trouble securing work that is, until he changed his name to Tom Keene and signed on as RKO-Pathe's resident cowboy star. Throughout the early 1930s, Keene's western vehicles played profitably if not spectacularly in neighborhood houses throughout the country. He made a brief return to dramatic roles as the leading character in King Vidor's populist classic Our Daily Bread (1934), but returned to westerns when his performance was drubbed by the critics. When George O'Brien succeed Keene at RKO, the latter moved on to smaller studios, retaining his popularity into the early 1940s. In 1944, he adopted a new nom de film, Richard Powers, and flourished as a character actor into the 1950s. He briefly returned to his "Tom Keene" persona in the all-star western "special" Trail of Robin Hood (1950) and the 1958 Rowan & Martin cowboy spoof Once Upon a Horse (1958). One of George Duryea/Tom Keene/Richard Powers' final appearances was in the deathless Ed Wood Jr. opus Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Trivia: J. Edward Reynolds never planned to be either a movie producer or an actor -- but he ended up doing both, in Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Plan 9 From Outer Space. By calling, Reynolds was a Baptist preacher from the deep south, but he brought his ministry to Los Angeles after World War II, and ended up playing a key role in the making of that movie, as well as a small role in the actual film. Reynolds was born in Kansas in 1886 (some sources put his year of birth closer to 1909 or 1910). He had a ministry in Alabama in the early/middle twentieth century, but some point he felt compelled to move to California and make religious films. He became the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills. During the mid-1950s, he made the acquaintance of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the actor-turned-filmmaker, who was eking out a living as a producer/director -- at the time, Wood had three movies to his credit as a director, Glen Or Glenda, Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster. And Wood persuaded Reynolds that he could take a step toward realizing his dream of making big-scale religious movies if he were to invest in the director's proposed new project, which had the working title of "Grave Robbers From Outer Space." This was not the kind of picture that Reynolds had ever seen himself making, but as a means to an end -- so Wood convinced him -- it seemed potentially promising, as science-fiction movies were making money at that time. There were stumbling blocks -- the key members of the cast had to agree to be baptized, and the title needed to be changed -- but Reynolds and his church put up the money to get the movie made. Additionally, Reynolds was also able to secure the services of a young, up-and-coming actor named Gregory Walcott, who was a parishioner and a friend. Walcott had his doubts about the movie, and especially the screenplay, and recognized that his agent would never approve, but his friendship with Reynolds and his desire to help him overcame those impediments. And Reynolds himself, along with his associate pastor Hugh Thomas, Jr., appeared in the opening section of the movie playing the two gravediggers who make small-talk before they are killed (off-screen) by Vampira (Reynolds is the more heavy-set of the two men). As it turned out, Plan 9 From Outer Space proved virtually unmarketable at the time, as Reynolds soon discovered, to his dismay -- while maintaining his ministry, he tried to recover the church's investment by getting Plan 9 out to the public. But the best he could do was place it with Distributors Corporation of America (DCA), which was little more than a vanity operation, the client (i.e. the movie owner) paying for all prints, stills, lobby cards, and other distribution and publicity fees up front -- DCA took no risks themselves, though they still managed to go bankrupt at the end of the decade. With its odd mix of silent Lugosi footage, flying saucers on strings, idiosyncratic (to say the least) acting and dialogue, Plan 9 From Outer Space was just a little too strange to find an audience in theaters, into which it usually went on the wrong end of double-bills with other DCA properties. In June of 1963, J. Edward Reynolds passed away -- according to Walcott, his struggle to make a success of the movie, or even get it seen in theaters, helped hasten the man's death. By then, Plan 9 From Outer Space had made its way to television, where it was given a slightly more dignified berth than it had received in theaters, on various horror movie showcases of the era, such as "Chiller Theater" on New York City's WPIX-Channel 11 (which used clips from Plan 9 in its opening and closing credits for at least seven years). The rest of the story is well known to Ed Wood fans -- how the film's reputation built in "underground" circles, along with Wood's recognition as a kind of "counter-auteur" (or "anti-genius"), culminating with the production and release of Tim Burton's lovingly goofy tribute movie Ed Wood. By that time, even Gregory Walcott, who had spent decades downplaying his participation in the movie that he had done as an act of friendship, had come aboard and played a role in Burton's picture.What Reynolds might have thought of all of this, is anyone's guess. But taken from his point of view, it could be evidence that the Lord does, indeed, work in mysterious ways -- after all, we are reading about Ed Reynolds and his ministry in the twenty-first century, something that was unlikely to have happened in any other circumstance. And, perhaps, along with all of His other glorious attributes -- and Reynolds would, no doubt, consider them all glorious -- the history of Ed Reynolds and Plan 9 provides evidence that God also has a sense of humor.