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: The niece of musical comedy luminary Nanette Fabray, American actress Shelley Fabares was in show business almost as soon as she could walk. She was a model for children's fashions at age 3, a bit actress in the film The Bandit Queen at age 7, a peripheral character on the Annie Oakley TV series at 8, and Frank Sinatra's dance partner on a 1953 TV special. After doing the TV-anthology route from ages 10 through 13, Fabares was cast at age 14 as Donna Reed's daughter on The Donna Reed Show, a part she would virtually grow up in. Before the series' cancellation in 1966, Fabares had become a top recording artist, selling a million copies of "Johnny Angel" before quitting singing cold because she felt she had no talent in that endeavor. Except for co-starring stints in three Elvis Presley musicals, Fabares' employment outside Donna Reed was virtually nil, and from 1968 through 1970 she barely worked at all. She filmed six TV pilots before 1971, but none sold. Things began picking up in 1972 when she was signed for a Brian Keith series set in Hawaii, The Little People. This led to guest TV spots until the next sitcom hitch in 1977's The Practice, in which Fabares played Danny Thomas' daughter-in-law. Highcliffe Manor, a muddled TV satire of Gothic melodramas, followed in 1979, but lasted a scant four weeks. By this time, Fabares' characterizations were of the "snooty shrew" category, and in this capacity she was shown to good advantage as Bonnie Franklin's business partner on One Day at a Time in 1981. Off-camera, Fabares was very active in the prosocial and ecological activities of her new husband, former MASH star Mike Farrell--a far cry from her on-camera haughtiness and self-involvement. More recently, Shelley Fabares' acting career is alive and prospering via her continuing role as Craig T. Nelson's lady love, sportscaster Christine Armstrong, on the Emmy-winning sitcom Coach.

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: Actress Binnie Barnes enjoyed a 30-year career on both sides of the Atlantic, and despite appearances in several notable films in her native England, she found her most lasting success in Hollywood, where she was best remembered for her tart-tongued portrayals. She was born Gittel Enoyce Barnes in London to a British father who was Jewish and an Italian mother. She was raised Jewish, although she converted to Catholicism upon her second marriage; later in life, she also took the formal name Gertrude Maude Barnes. It took until her teens before she actually entered performing, as a trick-rope artist in vaudeville (billed as "Texas Binnie Barnes"). Around that career start at 15, she also worked as a nurse, chorus girl, dance hostess, and milkmaid over the next few years. Barnes didn't start formal acting until age 26, working with Charles Laughton on stage. And apart from one appearance in a 1923 silent, she made her proper screen debut in 1931 in a series of short films, cast opposite comedian Stanley Lupino. Barnes was later signed to Alexander Korda's fledgling London Films, through which she was cast in movies such as Counsel's Opinion (1932) and other minor productions, earning the princely sum of 35 pounds (roughly $180) a week, which was actually very good money by ordinary standards, but hardly as star's compensation. She had something of a breakthrough in Korda's 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII portraying Catherine Howard, which gave her valuable exposure in England and America (where the movie was extraordinarily popular). Barnes was in the stage version of Cavalcade which, in turn, led to Hollywood to do the movie version and marked the beginning of her American career. Although she was initially uncomfortable in Hollywood, it was there that she spent most of the rest of her screen career. It helped that during the next few years she suppressed her English accent and developed a new, sassier persona as a wise-cracking female character lead, with her tall, imposing beauty and good looks, she was still attractive, but was usually cast as the heroine's best friend or older sister, and frequently with the best lines in those roles. At her best in those years, Barnes was a sort of trans-Atlantic rival to Eve Arden, cast in the same kind of sarcastic, knowing, yet attractive female roles. She still occasionally worked in films in England, including Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan and The Divorce of Lady X (a remake of Counsel's Opinion, in which Merle Oberon played her former role, while Barnes played the wife in the comedy of mistaken identity).Barnes had a sense of humor about herself that allowed her to work comfortably opposite performers such as the Ritz Brothers (The Three Musketeers), in which she was turned upside down and shaken by the comic trio; Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in The Time of Their Lives, in which she had one of the funniest "in" joke lines in the history of Hollywood (when meeting the intense, taciturn housekeeper played by Gale Sondergaard, Barnes' character remarks, "Didn't I see you in 'Rebecca'?"). She also got to portray a lusty side to her screen persona as the lady pirate Anne Bonney in The Spanish Main (a role originally slated for June Duprez), which afforded her a great death scene as well as some fierce and entertaining interactions with Maureen O'Hara, as the two contended for the affections of Paul Henried.In 1940, she married her second husband, actor/announcer-turned-film executive Mike Frankovich, and the two eventually moved to Italy following the end of the Second World War. There she produced movies, as well as acting in them, including Decameron Nights (1953) (in which -- shades of Alec Guinness -- she played eight different roles). Barnes retired in 1955 to devote herself to her home life, but in the mid-'60s, at her husband's insistence, she started to work again, on television and in feature films. She resumed acting on The Donna Reed Show, in two episodes three seasons apart, and played Sister Celestine in The Trouble With Angels (1967) and its sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968). Barnes' last screen appearance was in 40 Carats (1973), and during that same year she was a guest on The Tonight Show. She enjoyed a long and happy retirement, and passed away in 1998 at the age of 95, six years after her husband passed away.

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from 1963.