Trivia: The son of legendary Broadway actor DeWolfe Hopper and movie actress Hedda Hopper, William Hopper made his film debut as an infant in one of his father's films. The popular consensus is that the younger Hopper was given his first talking-picture break because of his mother's reputation as the most feared of the Hollywood gossips. Not so: Hopper was signed to his first Warner Bros. contract in 1937, a year or so before Hedda had established herself as the queen of the dirt-dishers. At first billing himself as DeWolfe Hopper Jr., Hopper languished in bit parts and walk-ons for several years. He wasn't able to graduate to better roles until the 1950s, by which time he was calling himself William Hopper. After a largely undistinguished film career (notable exceptions to his usual humdrum assignments were his roles in 20 Million Miles to Earth [1957] and The Bad Seed [1956]) Hopper finally gained fame -- and on his own merits -- as private detective Paul Drake on the enormously popular Perry Mason television series, which began its eight-season run in 1957. In a bizarre coincidence, Perry Mason left the air in 1966, the same year that William Hopper's mother Hedda passed away.

Trivia: Sicilian actor Frank Puglia started his career with a travelling operetta company at age 13. He and his family moved to the US in 1907, where he worked in a laundry until he hooked up with an Italian-language theatrical troupe based in New York. In 1921, Puglia was appearing as Pierre Frochard in a revival of the old theatrical warhorse The Two Orphans when he was spotted by film director D.W. Griffith. Puglia was hired to repeat his role for Griffith's film version of the play, retitled Orphans of the Storm; while Pierre Frochard was slated to die at the end of the film, preview-audience reaction to the death was so negative that Griffith called Puglia back to reshoot his final scenes, allowing him to survive for the fade-out. For the rest of his long film career, Puglia essayed a wide variety of ethnic supporting parts, portraying priests, musicians, diplomats and street peddlers. In 1942's Casablanca, Puglia has a memorable bit as a Morroccan rug merchant who automatically marks down his prices to any friends of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Frank Puglia played a larger and less likable role as a treacherous minion to sultan Kurt Katch in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944); when the film was remade as Sword of Ali Baba in 1965, so much stock footage from the 1944 film was utilized that Puglia was hired to replay his original part.

Trivia: Very few people remember Tito Vuolo's name, but in more than 40 movies and dozens of television shows -- ranging from comedy to film noir -- the Italian-born actor graced audiences with his presence. With his thick accent, short stature, and open, honest features, Vuolo was for many years the epitome of the ethnically identifiable, usually genial Italian, at a time when such portrayals were routine and encouraged in cinema. He could play excitable or nervous in a way that stole a scene, or move through a scene so smoothly that you scarcely noticed him. Vuolo's movie career began in 1946 with an uncredited appearance as a waiter in Shadow of the Thin Man, and he quickly chalked up roles in two further crime movies, the film noir classics Michael Gordon's The Web and Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death. He was also part of the cast of Dudley Nichols' Mourning Becomes Electra, RKO's disastrous attempt to bring serious theater to the screen, but much of Vuolo's work turned up in films of a grittier nature, such as Anthony Mann's T-Men and The Enforcer, directed by Bretaigne Windust and Raoul Walsh -- the latter film afforded Vuolo one of his most prominent roles in a plot, as the hapless cab driver whose witnessing (with his little girl) of a murder sets in motion a series of events that brings about a dozen murders and ultimately destroys an entire criminal organization. Vuolo's short, squat appearance could also be used to comical effect in a specifically non-ethnic context, as in King Vidor's The Fountainhead, when he turns up at the home of Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), in place of the expected arrival of tall, lean Howard Roarke (Gary Cooper), in response to her calculated request for repairs to the stone-work in her home. And sometimes he just stole a scene with his finely nuanced use of his accent and an agitated manner, as in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- his character goes into an excruciatingly funny explanation to Cary Grant about why he has to blast part of the proposed building site ("Thas-a no rock -- thas-a ledge"). Baby boomers may also remember Vuolo from his role in the 1953 Adventures of Superman episode "My Friend Superman," in which he portrayed a well-meaning luncheonette owner whose claim that Superman is a personal friend of his sets in motion a plot to kidnap Lois Lane. Vuolo's final film appearance was in the Ray Harryhausen science fiction thriller 20 Million Miles to Earth, playing the police commissioner. The beloved character actor died of cancer in 1962. Published dates of birth on Vuolo vary by as much as 19 years (1873 or 1892), so he was either 70 years old or 89 years old at the time of his death.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Arthur Space was active in films from 1940. Tall, tweedy, and usually sporting a mustache, Space played just about every kind of supporting role, from Western banker to big-city detective to jewel thief. One of his largest film roles was as the delightfully eccentric inventor Alva P. Hartley in the 1944 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Big Noise. As busy on television as in films, Arthur Space was seen on a weekly basis as Herbert Brown, the father of horse-loving teenager Velvet Brown, in the TV series National Velvet (1960-1961).

Trivia: Ray Harryhausen carved out an all-but-unique niche for himself in movies, from the 1950s through the 1980s. In an era in which actors commanded the lion's share of public attention, with directors taking most of what was left, Harryhausen acquired a worldwide fandom as the creator and designer of some of the most beloved fantasy films of all time. He was usually identified as a special-effects designer and, more specifically, a master of stop-motion animation, but Harryhausen's role went much deeper than that. He was the originator of most of the movies with which he is associated, and his special effects determined the shape, content, and nuances of his movies down to the script level, much more so than the directors of the movies, who often had little more to do than move actors around and run the crew. Harryhausen began devising his own models and puppets, eventually putting his skills to use working in an army-training film unit during World War II. After the war, he went to work for producer George Pal on a series of stop-motion animated short films called Puppetoons, and eventually went to work for Willis O'Brien. At the time, O'Brien was working on a joint production with Merian C. Cooper (the co-producer of King Kong), making a fantasy film about a giant ape entitled Mighty Joe Young (1949). As it worked out, O'Brien was so heavily involved on the production side that 80 percent of the animation in the movie was Harryhausen's work.At the start of the 1950s, Harryhausen devised a relatively low-cost method of stop-motion work that permitted the creation of special effects on a smaller budget than had theretofore been the case. The first movie to make use of his new technique was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Inspired by the short story The Foghorn (written by Harryhausen's longtime friend Ray Bradbury), the movie told the story of a dinosaur awakened from suspended animation by an Arctic nuclear test; the dinosaur escapes official notice at first, wrecking isolated ships and a lighthouse as it follows its ancient spawning instinct down the Atlantic coast until it comes ashore in New York City. That last third of the film remains one of the most spectacular ever seen in movies, Harryhausen's model work and Willis Cooper's miniature sets resulting in stunningly realistic, spellbinding depictions of the gigantic beast and the destruction of the city.The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was soon remade as Gojira, which was later recut for the U.S. and retitled Godzilla, King of the Monsters; and later as The Giant Behemoth; with a man in a rubber suit, as Gorgo. He followed this up with It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).Harryhausen eventually wearied of doing monster-on-the-loose stories, so he turned back to an idea that he'd first conceived after The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms of doing an Arabian Nights fantasy along the lines of the 1940 Alexander Korda-produced Thief of Bagdad. The difference would be that his would show all of the wonders of the ancient-world fantasy onscreen using stop-motion photography. The result was The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The opening of Harryhausen's great cycle of fantasy films, the movie was a huge box-office hit and a critical favorite.The next 23 years were something of a golden age for Harryhausen and Schneer, as they generated seven extraordinary fantasy and sci-fi fantasy films: The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The First Men in the Moon (1964), The Valley of Gwangi (1969), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and Clash of the Titans (1981). He also took a break from his own productions with Schneer to work on Hammer Films' One Million Years B.C. (1966), starring Raquel Welch and John Richardson. The latter featured the best dinosaur animation seen onscreen since King Kong, and The Valley of Gwangi gave Harryhausen a chance to pay tribute to his mentor, adapted as it was from a proposal of O'Brien's. The jewel among his own productions with Schneer, however, was Jason and the Argonauts, which brought the Greek gods, goddesses, demigods, and other mythical creations to life as they had never before been seen onscreen. Harryhausen's movies of the 1970s were no less dazzling, and it is to his credit that he continued making his fantasy movies. By 1981, Harryhausen and Schneer had reached the top of their game in terms of casting -- Burgess Meredith, Dame Maggie Smith, and Sir Laurence Olivier were all in Clash of the Titans. But Columbia had gone through several management shifts over the years and declined to produce that movie, which ended up in the hands of MGM. It was also the first movie in which Harryhausen had to rely on the work of assistants to help him. He was unable to get further films produced, however, as the generational change in the movie industry, combined with his good taste, his advancing age (as well as his corresponding desire not to be divided from his family for months at a time), and his unwillingness to utilize CGI technology, left Harryhausen seeming out of step with the business.From the 1980s onward, Harryhausen maintained (and his fans seem to all agree) that his stop-motion technique, though time-consuming, permitted the introduction of a personality into his creations. Those creatures, from Mighty Joe Young to Clash of the Titans, display the illusion of full life, including feeling and, within the limits of what their nature is supposed to be, an inner life. Indeed, one of the highest tributes to Harryhausen's art is the sense of real life behind his Rhedosaurus from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, his Ymir (and the elephant) from 20 Million Miles to Earth, the Cyclops (and most of the rest) from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and all of the creatures from Jason and the Argonauts and The Valley of Gwangi -- they feel so real that it hurts when they hurt . Despite Harryhausen's absence from movies for 11 years, he received an Academy Award in 1992 for his career-length work as a creator and designer of stop-motion animation. A frequent guest at festivals of his films, he has also seen his models and miniatures exhibited in museums. In May of 2004, he published Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, a deluxe oversize hardcover book (co-written with Tony Dalton), featuring a forward by Ray Bradbury. Harryhausen died in 2013 of natural causes at the age of 92.

Trivia: A University of Florida football star, Dale Van Sickel entered films in the very early '30s as an extra. Playing hundreds of bit parts at almost every studio in Hollywood, Van Sickel earned his true fame as one of Republic Pictures' famous stuntmen, specializing in fisticuffs and car stunts. He appeared in nearly all the studio's serials in the 1940s, including The Tiger Woman (1944), The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), and The Black Widow (1947), almost always playing several bit roles as well. Often the studio cast their leading men because of their resemblance to Van Sickel and the other members of the serial stunt fraternity that included Tom Steele, Dave Sharpe, and Ted Mapes. A founding member and the first president of the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures, Van Sickel later performed in innumerable television shows as well as such diverse feature films as Spartacus (1960), It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), and The Love Bug (1969).