Trivia: Left fatherless at the age of four, American actress Lucille Ball developed a strong work ethic in childhood; among her more unusual jobs was as a "seeing eye kid" for a blind soap peddler. Ball's mother sent the girl to the Chautauqua Institution for piano lessons, but she was determined to pursue an acting career after watching the positive audience reaction given to vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen. Young Ball performed in amateur plays for the Elks club and at her high school, at one point starring, staging, and publicizing a production of Charley's Aunt. In 1926, Ball enrolled in the John Murray Anderson American Academy of Dramatic Art in Manhattan (where Bette Davis was the star pupil), but was discouraged by her teachers to continue due to her shyness. Her reticence notwithstanding, Ball kept trying until she got chorus-girl work and modeling jobs; but even then she received little encouragement from her peers, and the combination of a serious auto accident and recurring stomach ailments seemed to bode ill for her theatrical future. Still, Ball was no quitter, and, in 1933, she managed to become one of the singing/dancing Goldwyn Girls for movie producer Samuel Goldwyn; her first picture was Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933). Working her way up from bit roles at both Columbia Pictures (where one of her assignments was in a Three Stooges short) and RKO Radio, Ball finally attained featured billing in 1935, and stardom in 1938 -- albeit mostly in B-movies. Throughout the late 1930s and '40s, Ball's movie career moved steadily, if not spectacularly; even when she got a good role like the nasty-tempered nightclub star in The Big Street (1942), it was usually because the "bigger" RKO contract actresses had turned it down. By the time she finished a contract at MGM (she was dubbed "Technicolor Tessie" at the studio because of her photogenic red hair and bright smile) and returned to Columbia in 1947, she was considered washed up. Ball's home life was none too secure, either. She'd married Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz in 1940, but, despite an obvious strong affection for one another, they had separated and considered divorce numerous times during the war years. Hoping to keep her household together, Ball sought out professional work in which she could work with her husband. Offered her own TV series in 1950, she refused unless Arnaz would co-star. Television was a godsend for the couple; and Arnaz discovered he had a natural executive ability, and was soon calling all the shots for what would become I Love Lucy. From 1951 through 1957, it was the most popular sitcom on television, and Ball, after years of career stops and starts, was firmly established as a megastar in her role of zany, disaster-prone Lucy Ricardo. When her much-publicized baby was born in January 1953, the story received more press coverage than President Eisenhower's inauguration. With their new Hollywood prestige, Ball and Arnaz were able to set up the powerful Desilu Studios production complex, ultimately purchasing the facilities of RKO, where both performers had once been contract players. But professional pressures and personal problems began eroding the marriage, and Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, although both continued to operate Desilu. Ball gave Broadway a try in the 1960 musical Wildcat, which was successful but no hit, and, in 1962, returned to TV to solo as Lucy Carmichael on The Lucy Show. She'd already bought out Arnaz's interest in Desilu, and, before selling the studio to Gulf and Western in 1969, Ball had become a powerful executive in her own right, determinedly guiding the destinies of such fondly remembered TV series as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. The Lucy Show ended in the spring of 1968, but Ball was back that fall with Here's Lucy, in which she played "odd job" specialist Lucy Carter and co-starred with her real-life children, Desi Jr. and Lucie. Here's Lucy lasted until 1974, at which time her career took some odd directions. She poured a lot of her own money in a film version of the Broadway musical Mame (1974), which can charitably be labeled an embarrassment. Her later attempts to resume TV production, and her benighted TV comeback in the 1986 sitcom Life With Lucy, were unsuccessful, although Ball, herself, continued to be lionized as the First Lady of Television, accumulating numerous awards and honorariums. Despite her many latter-day attempts to change her image -- in addition to her blunt, commandeering off-stage personality -- Ball would forever remain the wacky "Lucy" that Americans had loved intensely in the '50s. She died in 1989.

Trivia: Described by TV producer Hy Averback as "a combination of Laurence Olivier andCharley Chase," bombastic comic actor Gale Gordon was the son of vaudeville performers. His father was "quick-change" artist Charles T. Aldrich, and his mother was actress Gloria Gordon (best known for her portrayal of Mrs. O'Reilly on radio's My Friend Irma). Born with a cleft palate, Gordon underwent two excruciating oral operations as a child. By the time he was 17, Gordon's diction was so precise and his "new" voice so richly developed that he was invited to study acting under the aegis of famed actor/manager Richard Bennett. After several years on stage, Gordon moved to California in 1929, where he worked in Los Angeles radio as a free-lance actor and announcer. He appeared in heroic and villainous "straight" parts on such syndicated radio series as The Adventures of Fu Manchu and English Coronets, but soon found that his true forte was comedy. Gordon played the flustered Mayor La Trivia on Fibber McGee and Molly, several prominent roles on The Burns and Allen Show, and, best of all, pompous principal Osgood Conklin on Our Miss Brooks. In films since 1933 (he played a bit at the end of Joe E. Brown's Elmer the Great), Gordon proved a formidable comic foil in such films as Here We Go Again (1942, again with Fibber McGee and Molly), and Jerry Lewis' Don't Give Up the Ship (1959) and Visit to a Small Planet (1960). It is impossible to have grown up watching television without at least once revelling in the comedy expertise of Gale Gordon. In addition to starring in the 1956 sitcom The Brothers, Gordon was also seen in the video versions of My Favorite Husband, Our Miss Brooks, The Danny Thomas Show, Dennis the Menace--and virtually every one of Lucille Ball's TV projects, including her last, 1986's Life with Lucy.

Trivia: Trained at Northwestern University's drama department, onetime salesman Claude Akins was a Broadway actor when he was selected by a Columbia talent scout for a small role in the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity (1953). With a craggy face and blunt voice that evoked memories of Lon Chaney Jr., Akins was a "natural" for villainous or roughneck roles, but was versatile enough to play parts requiring compassion and humor. A television actor since the "live" days, Akins achieved stardom relatively late in life via such genial adventure series as Movin' On (1974), B.J. and the Bear (1979), The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979) and Legmen (1984). In his last decade, Claude Akins was a busy-and most genial-commercial spokesperson.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer by Marge Champion's father Ernest Belcher, Iris Adrian began her performing career at age 13 by winning a "beautiful back" contest. Working as a New York chorus girl (she briefly billed herself as "Jimmie Joy"), Iris's big break came with the 1931 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, which led to featured nightclub and comedy revue work in the U.S. and Europe. In the Kaufman/Hart Broadway play The Fabulous Invalid, Adrian raised the temperatures of the tired businessmen in the audiences by performing a strip-tease--this at a time (the late 1930s) when the standard burlesque houses had been banned from New York by Mayor LaGuardia. Brought to films by George Raft, Adrian made her first screen appearance in Raft's 1934 vehicle Rhumba. This led to dozens of supporting roles in subsequent feature films; Iris' standard characterization at this time was the brassy, gold-digging dame who never spoke below a shout. Often appearing in one-scene bits, Adrian received more sizeable roles in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936), Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948), Milton Berle's Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) and Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1961). Through the auspices of director William Wellman, who had a fondness for elevating character actors to larger roles, Adrian gave a rollicking performance as Bonnie Parker wannabe Two Gun Gertie in 1942's Roxie Hart. She launched her TV career in 1949 on Buster Keaton's LA-based weekly comedy series. Some of her most memorable work for the small screen was on the various TV programs of Jack Benny, Adrian's favorite comedian and co-worker. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Iris Adrian kept very active in the comedy films of the Walt Disney studio, including That Darn Cat (1965) and The Love Bug (1968); and in 1978, she was superbly cast in the regular role of the sarcastic secretary for a New York escort service on The Ted Knight Show.

Trivia: In the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance," Gig Young comments that he thinks he's seen drugstore counterman Byron Foulger before. "I've got that kind of face" was the counterman's reply. Indeed, Foulger's mustachioed, bespectacled, tremble-chinned, moon-shaped countenance was one of the most familiar faces ever to grace the screen. A graduate of the University of Utah, Foulger developed a taste for performing in community theatre, making his Broadway debut in the '20s. Foulger then toured with Moroni Olsen's stock company, which led him to the famed Pasadena Playhouse as both actor and director. In films from 1936, Foulger usually played whining milksops, weak-willed sycophants, sanctimonious sales clerks, shifty political appointees, and the occasional unsuspected murderer. In real life, the seemingly timorous actor was not very easily cowed; according to his friend Victor Jory, Foulger once threatened to punch out Errol Flynn at a party because he thought that Flynn was flirting with his wife (Mrs. Foulger was Dorothy Adams, a prolific movie and stage character actress). Usually unbilled in "A" productions, Foulger could count on meatier roles in such "B" pictures as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Panther's Claw (1943). In the Bowery Boys' Up in Smoke (1957), Foulger is superb as a gleeful, twinkly-eyed Satan. In addition to his film work, Byron Foulger built up quite a gallery of portrayals on television; one of his final stints was the recurring role of engineer Wendell Gibbs on the popular sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: Cruelly but accurately described by one film historian as "that female mountain of flesh," actress/singer Jody Gilbert was one of moviedom's busiest "large" ladies. The major difference between Gilbert and other "sizeable" character actresses is that she could give back as good as she got in the insult department. As the surly waitress in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Gilbert was more than a match for her troublesome customer W. C. Fields. She went on to trade quips with Shemp Howard in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941) and to aggressively pursue the hapless Lou Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942). On television, Gilbert was seen as J. Carroll Naish's plump would-be sweetheart Rosa in Life with Luigi (1952), a role she'd previously essayed on radio. One of Gilbert's last screen appearances was the belligerent railroad passenger whom holdup man Paul Newman imitates in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Jody Gilbert died at the age of 63 as the result of injuries sustained in an auto accident.