Trivia: Reed was elected beauty queen of her high school and Campus Queen of her college. The latter honor resulted in her photo making the L.A. papers, and as a result she was invited to take a screen test with MGM, which signed her in 1941. She played supporting roles in a number of minor films (at first being billed as "Donna Adams"), then in the mid '40s she began getting leads; with rare exceptions, she portrayed sincere, wholesome types and loving wives and girlfriends. She went against type playing a prostitute in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Rarely getting rewarding roles, she retired from the screen in 1958 to star in the TV series "The Donna Reed Show," which was a great success and remained on the air through 1966. After 1960 she appeared in only one more film. In the mid '80s she emerged from retirement to star in "Dallas;" Barbara Bel Geddes returned to the show in 1985, and Reed won a $1 million settlement for a breach of contract suit against the show's producers. She died of cancer several months later.

Trivia: American actor Paul Petersen was a child actor who appeared on television and in a couple of feature films during the '50s; he is best remembered for playing teenager Jeff Stone on The Donna Reed Show where he literally grew up. While there, Petersen had a brief side-career as a popular singer, making his recording debut in early 1962 with the novelty song "She Can't Find Her Keys," which originally aired as a dream sequence on the show. Other hits followed, including his Top Ten single "My Dad," which he also sang on the television show. Eventually Petersen left the show and began playing leads in a few '60s feature films. Since then, Petersen has become a writer of spy novels and has made only infrequent forays into film.

Trivia: With his unusual gaunt features and intense expression, William Lanteau made a career out of playing eccentrics and character roles. His role as town leader Chester Wanamaker on the Newhart show was the most visible part in a career of more than 30 years on stage, screen, and television. Lanteau's theatrical credits included productions of The Matchmaker, What Every Woman Knows, Mrs. McThing, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, Detective Story, and Catch My Soul -- he was also in the original stage production of On Golden Pond, playing Charlie Martin, a part he re-created in the film version with Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Jane Fonda. His film credits date from 1959 and his portrayal of Available Jones in the screen version of the musical Li'l Abner. He began working in television around the same time, and one of his most memorable and poignant early appearances was in the Andy Griffith Show episode "Stranger in Town," portraying a mysterious new arrival in Mayberry who seems to know all there is to know about everyone in the town, gradually eliciting suspicion and panic on the part of all concerned -- in the end, the explanation for his character's behavior is not only harmless but very touching, and Lanteau pulled it off perfectly, moving from quirkily mysterious to vulnerable in the course of less than 20 minutes of screen time without any seams showing. Lanteau also played small parts in The Honeymoon Machine and That Touch of Mink, and slightly larger roles in Sex and the Single Girl and Hotel, but it was mostly on television that Lanteau kept busy when he wasn't working on the stage. On television, his work included one-shot roles on Naked City, Dr. Kildare, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Green Acres, The Mothers-In-Law, All in the Family, Here's Lucy, Perry Mason, Sanford and Son, Diff'rent Strokes, Coach, and Murder She Wrote during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, before the role on Newhart opened up. He became part of one of the most successful "double acts" on television, working alongside rotund actor Thomas Hill, who portrayed Chester, the other political leader of the town. Lanteau passed away in 1993, three years after the cancellation of the series, from complications arising out of heart surgery.

Trivia: James Stacy had passed the quarter-century mark before deciding upon an acting career. In 1956, Stacy's James Dean-ish handsomeness landed him a part in a Pepsi-Cola commercial. Afterward, Stacy put together a portfolio and started making the casting rounds. Unfortunately, his difficult attitude managed to get him fired from his first film role in South Pacific (1958), and had his lines taken away from him in Sayonara (1957). His recurring appearances as Fred on TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet started the ball rolling again, and by 1965 Stacy was Columbia Pictures' answer to Frankie Avalon, starring in such Beach Party rip-offs as A Swingin' Summer and Winter a Go Go. He also found time to marry actress Connie Stevens, only to lose her to singer Eddie Fisher. Stacy's second wife was Kim Darby. From 1968 through 1971, Stacy starred on the TV western Lancer. Two years after the series' cancellation, he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, which cost him his left arm and leg. Courageously refusing to retire, he began appearing in roles specially written to accommodate his handicap. His comeback film was the 1975 Kirk Douglas western Posse, in which he was cast in the nonambulatory role of newspaper editor Hellman. In 1977, he starred in the TV-movie Just a Little Inconvenience, playing a double-amputee Vietnam veteran. And in Disney's 1982 fantasy film Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stacy plays a crippled, embittered bartender, who makes the mistake of his life when he wishes to be "whole" again. His last regular TV role was Rogosheske in the weekly cop series Wiseguy. In 1996, once he was retired from acting, he served a six-year prison sentence after pleading no contest to the molestation of a minor (Stacy's erratic behavior around his arrest negated the hope of only getting probation for the incident). He was released in 2001 and resumed his life as a private citizen. Stacy died in 2016.