Trivia: Reportedly a neighbor of Harry Houdini while growing up in the Bronx, American actor Edmond O'Brien decided to emulate Houdini by becoming a magician himself. The demonstrative skills gleaned from this experience enabled O'Brien to move into acting while attending high school. After majoring in drama at Columbia University, he made his first Broadway appearance at age 21 in Daughters of Atrus. O'Brien's mature features and deep, commanding voice allowed him to play characters far older than himself, and it looked as though he was going to become one of Broadway's premiere character actors. Yet when he was signed for film work by RKO in 1939, the studio somehow thought he was potential leading man material -- perhaps as a result of his powerful stage performance as young Marc Antony in Orson Welles' modern dress version of Julius Caesar. As Gringoire the poet in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), O'Brien was a bit callow and overemphatic, but he did manage to walk off with the heroine (Maureen O'Hara) at the end of the film. O'Brien's subsequent film roles weren't quite as substantial, though he was shown to excellent comic advantage in the Moss Hart all-serviceman play Winged Victory, in a role he repeated in the 1944 film version while simultaneously serving in World War II (he was billed as "Sergeant Edmond O'Brien"). Older and stockier when he returned to Hollywood after the war, O'Brien was able to secure meaty leading parts in such "films noir" as The Killers (1946), The Web (1947) and White Heat (1949). In the classic melodrama D.O.A. (1950), O'Brien enjoyed one of the great moments in "noir" history when, as a man dying of poison, he staggered into a police station at the start of the film and gasped "I want to report a murder...mine." As one of many top-rank stars of 1954's The Barefoot Contessa, O'Brien breathed so much credibility into the stock part of a Hollywood press agent that he won an Academy Award. On radio, the actor originated the title role in the long-running insurance-investigator series "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" in 1950. On TV, O'Brien played a Broadway star turned private eye in the 1959 syndicated weekly "Johnny Midnight," though the producers refused to cast him unless he went on a crash vegetarian diet. Plagued by sporadic illnesses throughout his life, O'Brien suffered a heart seizure in 1961 while on location in the Arabian desert to play the Lowell Thomas counterpart in Lawrence of Arabia, compelling the studio to replace him with Arthur Kennedy. O'Brien recovered sufficiently in 1962 to take the lead in a TV lawyer series, "Sam Benedict;" another TV stint took place three years later in "The Long Hot Summer." The actor's career prospered for the next decade, but by 1975 illness had begun to encroach upon his ability to perform; he didn't yet know it, but he was in the first stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Edmond O'Brien dropped out of sight completely during the next decade, suffering the ignominity of having his "death" reported by tabloids several times during this period. The real thing mercifully claimed the tragically enfeebled O'Brien in 1985.

Trivia: Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, Joan Fontaine began her acting career in her late teens with various West Coast stage companies under the name Joan Burfield. She also used that name when she made her 1935 feature film debut in No More Ladies, in which she had a minor role. The daughter of '40s actress Lilian Fontaine, she returned to the screen as Joan Fontaine after two more years of stage work, although appearing primarily in B-movies. Two exceptions were A Damsel in Distress (1937) opposite Fred Astaire and Gunga Din (1939) with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Her career took off in the early '40s due largely to leads in two Alfred Hitchcock films. Fontaine received Best Actress Oscar nominations for her work in the director's Rebecca (1940) and The Constant Nymph (1943), and won an Oscar for her performance in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). She starred in many subsequent films, at first playing innocent, well-bred types, but later maturing into roles as sophisticated, worldly, often hot-headed or maliciously calculating women. Appearing in few films after 1958, Fontaine was also a licensed pilot, champion balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, expert golfer, licensed interior decorator, and Cordon Bleu cook. The sister of actress Olivia de Havilland (with whom she supposedly had many feuds), the first three of Fontaine's four husbands were actor Brian Aherne, producer William Dozier, and producer/screenwriter Collier Young. She published an autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978 and made two rare TV movie and miniseries appearances in 1986. Joan Fontaine's final big-screen appearance was the intelligent British horror/drama The Devil's Own; her last TV work was in the 1994 production Good King Wenceslas. She died in 2013 at age 96.

Trivia: London-born actress/director/screenwriter Ida Lupino came from a family of performers. She played small parts in Hollywood films through the 1930s until she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941), which led to bigger roles in films of the '40s. Early on, she appeared in Peter Ibbetson (1935), Anything Goes (1936), Artists and Models (1937), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), and The Light That Failed (1939), among others. Later, she appeared in Ladies in Retirement (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942), and Forever and a Day (1943), and continued performing on into the 1960s, but not in major films. Starting with Not Wanted (1949), which she also co-wrote, she became the only female movie director of her time. She specialized in dramatic and suspense films, including Never Fear (1949), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), The Bigamist (1953), and the comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966). She also directed episodes of many television series, including The Untouchables and The Fugitive.

Trivia: The son of a traveling British civil servant, Edmund Gwenn was ordered to leave his home at age 17 when he announced his intention to become an actor. Working throughout the British empire in a variety of theatrical troupes, Gwenn finally settled in London in 1902 when he was personally selected by playwright George Bernard Shaw for a role in Shaw's Man and Superman. Thanks to Shaw's sponsorship, Gwenn rapidly established himself as one of London's foremost character stars, his career interrupted only by military service during World War I. Gwenn's film career, officially launched in 1916, took a back seat to his theatrical work for most of his life; still, he was a favorite of both American and British audiences for his portrayals of blustery old men, both comic and villainous. At age 71, Gwenn was cast as Kris Kringle, a lovable old eccentric who imagined that he was Santa Claus, in the comedy classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947); his brilliant portrayal was honored with an Academy Award and transformed the veteran actor into an "overnight" movie star. Edmund Gwenn died shortly after making his final film, an oddball Mexican comedy titled The Rocket From Calabuch (1958); one of his surviving family members his cousin Cecil Kellaway, was a respected character actor in his own right.

Trivia: American actress Jane Darwell was the daughter of a Missouri railroad executive. Despite her father's disapproval, she spent most of her youth acting in circuses, opera troupes and stock companies, making her film debut in 1912. Even in her early thirties, Darwell specialized in formidable "grande dame" roles, usually society matrons or strict maiden aunts. Making an easy transition to talking pictures, Darwell worked primarily in small character parts (notably as governesses and housekeepers in the films of Shirley Temple) until 1939, when her role as the James Brothers' mother in Jesse James began a new career direction--now she was most often cast as indomitable frontierswomen, unbending in the face of hardship and adversity. It was this quality that led Darwell to be cast in her favorite role as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which she won an Oscar. Darwell continued to work until illness crept upon her in the late 1950s. Even so, Darwell managed to essay a handful of memorable parts on TV and in movies into the 1960s; her last film role was as the "Bird Woman" in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964).

Trivia: Though seemingly born with a battered bulldog countenance and a rattly voice best suited to such lines as "We don't like you kind around these parts, stranger," tough-guy character actor Kenneth Tobey was originally groomed for gormless leading man roles when he came to Hollywood in 1949. Possessing too much roughhewn authority to be wasted in romantic leads, Tobey was best served in military roles. One of these was the no-nonsense but likeable Capt. Patrick Hendrey in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, a role that typed him in films of a "fantastic" nature for several years thereafter. From 1956 through 1958, Tobey co-starred with Craig Hill on the popular syndicated TV adventure series Whirlybirds; up to that time, televiewers were most familiar with Tobey as Jim Bowie in the ratings-busting Davy Crockett miniseries. Though often consigned by Hollywood's typecasting system to workaday villain roles, Kenneth Tobey has not be forgotten by filmmakers who grew up watching his horror-flick endeavors of the 1950s; he has been afforded key cameo roles in such latter-day shockers as Strange Invaders (1983) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and in 1985 he reprised his Thing From Another World character in The Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: American director and actor James Young began his show business career as a stage actor before joining Vitagraph in 1910 where he co-directed the series Scenes of True Life. Later he became a full director and helmed some of the studio's biggest films. Sometimes he appeared in these films as an actor. He was the son of former Maryland Senator James Young Sr.

Trivia: A big band-era pianist, composer, and singer who also appeared onscreen in the late '40s and 1950s, Matt Dennis' association with Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers eventually lead to a fruitful association with such musical icons as Tommy Dorsey and later Frank Sinatra. A Seattle native, Dennis' collaborations with Dorsey and Sinatra resulted in such memorably hummable tunes as "Will You Still Be Mine" and "The Night We Clled It a Day." A consummate entertainer, Dennis entertained troops as a singer and arranger during World War II in addition to penning the often-used "Angel Eyes." Introduced to future wife Virginia Maxey while recording his debut album in 1953, the two would later work together while touring as a duet and performing Dennis' tunes. On June 21, 2002, Matt Dennis died of pneumonia in Riverside, CA. He was 88.

Trivia: Stockbroker-turned-big screen hero, Kem Dibbs is best-remembered for playing Buck Rogers in the 1950s serial. He also appeared in a few major feature films, including High Society (1955), The Ten Commandments (1956), and How the West Was Won (1962). Occasionally, Dibbs appeared on television in such dramatic series as Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Trivia: American actor Ken Drake appeared regularly on the television series Not for Hire, and made guest appearances on numerous other shows during the 1960s. He also appeared in a few films during the '50s and '60s. Drake got his start in the early 1950s after graduating from the Pasadena Playhouse and working with the Stage Society. His wife was Los Angeles Times drama critic Sylvie Drake.