Trivia: Yale graduate Bradford Dillman began his career in the sort of misunderstood-youth roles that had previously been the province of Montgomery Clift and James Dean. His first significant stage success was as the younger son in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Eugene O'Neill play Long Day's Journey Into Night. Signed by 20th Century-Fox in 1958, Dillman at first played standard leading men; his subtle shift to villainy occurred after he was cast as a wealthy psychopath in Compulsion, the 1959 drama based on the Leopold-Loeb case. Compulsion won Dillman an award at the Cannes Film Festival, and also threatened to typecast him for the rest of his film career, notwithstanding his leading role in Fox's Francis of Assisi (1961). It was during his Fox years that Dillman married popular cover girl Suzy Parker. Bradford Dillman has remained much in demand as a television guest star, and in 1965 was the lead on the filmed-in-Britain TV drama series Court-Martial.

Trivia: Heather Menzies made her film debut at 15, as Louisa von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965). Menzies followed this assignment with several well-scrubbed ingenue roles; she was prominently featured in one of the deathless anti-drug Dragnet episodes of the late 1960s. She underwent a startling image change in the 1970s, playing sexy roles with a minimum of clothing. In the 1977 TV-series version of Logan's Run, she was cast as Jessica 6, accruing a great deal of press attention for her extremely revealing costumes. She apparently retired after 1982's Endangered Species. Heather Menzies was married to actor Robert Urich.

Trivia: Kevin McCarthy and his older sister Mary Therese McCarthy both found careers in the entertainment industry, though in very different arenas -- Mary became a best-selling novelist, and Kevin became an actor after dabbling in student theatricals at the University of Minnesota. On Broadway from 1938 -- Kevin's first appearance was in Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois -- McCarthy was critically hosannaed for his portrayal of Biff in the original 1948 production of Death of a Salesmen (who could tell that he was but three years younger than the actor playing his father, Lee J. Cobb?) In 1951, McCarthy re-created his Salesman role in the film version, launching a movie career that would thrive for four decades. The film assignment that won McCarthy the hearts of adolescent boys of all ages was his portrayal of Dr. Miles Bennell in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Bennell's losing battle against the invading pod people, and his climactic in-your-face warning "You're next!, " made so indelible an impression that it's surprising to discover that McCarthy's other sci-fi credits are relatively few. Reportedly, he resented the fact that Body Snatchers was the only film for which many viewers remembered him; if so, he has since come to terms with his discomfiture, to the extent of briefly reviving his "You're next!" admonition (he now screamed "They're here!" to passing motorists) in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He has also shown up with regularity in the films of Body Snatchers aficionado Joe Dante, notably 1984's Twilight Zone: The Movie (McCarthy had earlier played the ageless title role in the 1959 Zone TV episode "Long Live Walter Jamieson") and 1993's Matinee, wherein an unbilled McCarthy appeared in the film-within-a-film Mant as General Ankrum (a tip of the cap to another Dante idol, horror-movie perennial Morris Ankrum). Kevin McCarthy would, of course, have had a healthy stage, screen and TV career without either Body Snatchers or Joe Dante; he continued showing up in films into the early 1990s, scored a personal theatrical triumph in the one-man show Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, and was starred in the TV series The Survivors (1969), Flamingo Road (1981), The Colbys (1983) and Bay City Blues (1984).

Trivia: Actor Keenan Wynn was the son of legendary comedian Ed Wynn and actress Hilda Keenan, and grandson of stage luminary Frank Keenan. After attending St. John's Military Academy, Wynn obtained his few professional theatrical jobs with the Maine Stock Company. After overcoming the "Ed Wynn's Son" onus (his father arranged his first job, with the understanding that Keenan would be on his own after that), Wynn developed into a fine comic and dramatic actor on his own in several Broadway plays and on radio. He was signed to an MGM contract in 1942, scoring a personal and professional success as the sarcastic sergeant in 1944's See Here Private Hargrove (1944). Wynn's newfound popularity as a supporting actor aroused a bit of jealousy from his father, who underwent professional doldrums in the 1940s; father and son grew closer in the 1950s when Ed, launching a second career as a dramatic actor, often turned to his son for moral support and professional advice. Wynn's film career flourished into the 1960s and 1970s, during which time he frequently appeared in such Disney films as The Absent-Minded Professor (1960) and The Love Bug (1968) as apoplectic villain Alonso Hawk. Wynn also starred in such TV series as Troubleshooters and Dallas. Encroaching deafness and a drinking problem plagued Wynn in his final years, but he always delivered the goods onscreen. Wynn was the father of writer/director Tracy Keenan Wynn and writer/actor Edmund Keenan (Ned) Wynn.

Trivia: Large and muscular at an early age, American actor Dick Miller entered the Navy during World War II while still a teenager, distinguishing himself as a boxer. He attended CCNY, Columbia University and New York University, supporting himself with semi-pro football jobs, radio DJ gigs and as a psychological assistant at Bellevue. At age 22, he was host of a Manhattan-based TV chat show, Midnight Snack. Stage and movie work followed, and Miller joined the stock company/entourage of low-budget auteur Roger Corman. His first great Corman role was as the hyperthyroid salesman in Not of this Earth (1956); a handful of rock-and-roll quickies followed before Miller received his first sci-fi lead in War of the Satellites (1958). In Corman's Bucket of Blood (1959), Miller originated the role of Walter Paisley, the nebbishy sociopath who "creates" avant-garde sculpture by murdering his subjects and dipping them in plaster. He was then cast in the immortal Little Shop of Horrors (1960); Miller not only makes a terrific entrance by buying a bouquet of flowers and then eating them, but also narrates the picture. Miller stayed with Corman into the 1970s, at which time the director was in charge of New World Pictures. Seldom making a liveable income in films, Miller remained an unknown entity so far as the "big" studios were concerned -- but his teenaged fans were legion, and he was besieged on the streets and in public places for autographs. When the adolescent science-fiction fans of the 1950s became the directors of the 1980s, Miller began receiving some of the best roles of his career. In Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984), Miller was paired with his Little Shop costar Jackie Joseph, as a rural couple whose house is bulldozed by a group of hostile gremlins. Miller and Joseph returned in the sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1989), in which the actor heroically helped squash the gremlins' invasion of New York. Miller's most Pirandellian role was as the "decency league" activist in Matinee (1993) who is actually an actor in the employ of William Castle-like showman John Goodman. Directed again by longtime Miller fan Dante, Matinee contains a wonderful "in" joke wherein Miller is identified as a fraud via his photograph in a Famous Monsters of Filmland-type fanzine -- the very sort of publication which canonized Miller throughout the 1970s.

Trivia: Exotic, voluptuous, nostril-flaring British actress Barbara Steele originally aspired to be a painter. At 20, she was sidetracked into acting, and within a year she made her film bow in a one-line bit as a student in Bachelor of Hearts (1958). Most of her roles were nondescript until she moved to Italy and launched her horror-film cycle with her performance as a resuscitated witch in Black Sunday (1961). Throughout the next fifteen years, Steele thrived as an internationally popular "scream queen," undergoing the usual ordeals of being whipped, strangled, dismembered and set ablaze, but also dishing it out as well as taking it -- especially in the role of a demonic woman's prison warden in Caged Heat (1974). Steele attracted the attention of the movie cognoscenti when she answered an open call posted by director Federico Fellini, who promptly cast her in a flashy role in 8 1/2 (1963); fourteen years later, she appeared as Violet in director Louis Malle's controversial Pretty Baby (1977). For many years, Steele was the wife of screenwriter James Poe, who wrote a good part for her in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), only to see the role whittled into oblivion by director Sydney Pollack. Steele remained close to Poe even after their divorce, retiring from the screen when Poe died in 1980.

Trivia: Made her film debut at age 8 in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie. Studied ballet, tap, jazz and singing from an early age and majored in piano in college. Developed her own line of hair-care products. Longtime fan of I Love Lucy and founding board member of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Lucy's hometown of Jamestown, NY. Was a cofounder of the Save the Earth foundation, which creates awareness of environmental issues. Won the Soap Opera Digest award for Outstanding Lead Actress in 2001. Celebrated 30 years as Nikki Newman on The Young and the Restless in 2009.

Trivia: The brother of actress Marilyn Brown, Barry Brown was 17 when he made his screen bow in Andy Warhol's Flesh. Brown's breakthrough role was Civil War draft dodger Drew Dixon in the 1972 sleeper Bad Company. His co-star was Jeff Bridges, a close friend whom Brown lionized in an essay written for Danny Peary's 1978 compendium Close-Ups; it was but one of many published works for Brown, who in addition to his acting accomplishments was also a noted film historian. After co-starring as Fred Winterbourne in Peter Bogdanovich's uneven 1974 cinemadaptation of Daisy Miller, Brown slowly drifted away from show business. Barry Brown was 27 when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Trivia: American actor, screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Bartel is perhaps best known as the director and star of the quirky sleeper Eating Raoul (1982). Born in New York City, Bartel was a film aficionado since childhood and entered the industry at age 13 working as an assistant animator for UPA. He later studied film at UCLA and while there, made several short animated films and documentaries; for his work as a student actor and playwright, Bartel won several awards. Later he studied at Rome's prestigious Centro Sperimental di Cinematografica on a Fulbright Scholarship; there his graduation film, Progetti, was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Soon after coming back to the U.S., Bartel began working as an assistant director for military films; he then went on to make films for the U.S. government. As a feature filmmaker, Bartel is consistently drawn to the darkly funny, more perverse aspects of life. His provocative directorial debut was Private Parts (1972) which centered on a runaway teenage girl who encounters several residents involved with bizarre sexual practices in her aunt's ramshackle San Francisco hotel. Though it was a box office flop, the film earned Bartel decent notice from critics. He next involved himself with B-movie king Roger Corman and worked for him as both an actor and a second unit photographer. In 1974, he again tried directing with Big Bad Mama. He directed one more film before coming up with the screenplay for Eating Raoul. Directed by and starring Bartel, it is the ghastly but hilarious tale of an average couple who comes up with an unusual scam for making money involving sex for sale and a very large frying pan. Bartel was unable to find a distributor for the film until he entered it in the Los Angeles Film Festival where it generated such acclaim that 20th Century-Fox obtained the distribution rights. The film has since become a cult favorite. After the success of Raoul, Bartel continued directing a variety of films through the 1980s. Notable efforts from this time period include his wild satire of westerns Lust in the Dust (1985) and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989). In the early '90s, he directed Shelf Life and then began focusing on his acting career and appearing in such films as The Jerky Boys (1994) and Basquiat (1996). He died of a heart attack, following surgery for liver cancer, on May 13, 2000.

Trivia: Very early in his stage career, Richard Deacon was advised by Helen Hayes to abandon all hopes of becoming a leading man: instead, she encouraged him to aggressively pursue a career as a character actor. Tall, bald, bespectacled and bass-voiced since high school, Deacon heeded Ms. Hayes' advice, and managed to survive in show business far longer than many of the "perfect" leading men who were his contemporaries. Usually cast as a glaring sourpuss or humorless bureaucrat, Deacon was a valuable and highly regarded supporting-cast commodity in such films as Desiree (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Kiss Them For Me (1957), The Young Philadelphians (1959) and The King's Pirate (1967), among many others. Virtually every major star who worked with Deacon took time out to compliment him on his skills: among his biggest admirers were Lou Costello, Jack Benny and Cary Grant. Even busier on television than in films, Richard Deacon had the distinction of appearing regularly on two concurrently produced sitcoms of the early 1960s: he was pompous suburbanite Fred Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the long-suffering Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Deacon also co-starred as Kaye Ballard's husband on the weekly TV comedy The Mothers-in-Law (1968), and enjoyed a rare leading role on the 1964 Twilight Zone installment "The Brain Center at Whipples." In his last decade, Richard Deacon hosted a TV program on microwave cookery, and published a companion book on the subject.

Trivia: Guich Koock was one of seven children born to a Texas farmer and his wife. Koock attended Texas A&M University, where he earned a BA in history and an MA in Texas folklore. Newly married, he spent his immediate post-college years as a bartender, shooting his own food (squirrels, rabbits etc.) to save money. He went on to work as a schoolteacher, woodcarver, blacksmith, rodeo clown, and organizer of the annual Luckenbach, Texas "World's Fair," regaling the crowds with all manner of eccentric displays and contests. The story goes that Koock was downing a brew at a local bar when a casting director for Steven Spielberg offered him the supporting role of a Louisiana deputy in Spielberg's The Sugarland Express. Thus was launched his on-and-off acting career, with Koock generally cast as a bucolic good ol' boy who wasn't as dumb as he looked. After several busted TV pilots, he landed the part of Deputy Harley Puckett in the 1977-79 sitcom Carter Country. Guich Koock has since played variations of that role in such weekly TVers as The Chisholms (1980, as Frank O'Neill), Lewis and Clark (1981-82, co-starring with Gabe Kaplan as the manager of a C&W club) and She's the Sheriff (1987-88, as still another deputy, this one named Hugh Mulcahy).

Trivia: One of America's preeminent and best-respected independent filmmakers, John Sayles has established a reputation for refusing to abandon his values in favor of becoming a studio filmmaker. As a result, his films tend to be rich, nuanced explorations of personal and political relationships, a style that reflects Sayles' beginnings as a novelist; he once admitted, "My main interest is making films about people...I'm not interested in cinematic art." Sayles' interest in storytelling began at an early age: before the age of nine, he was an avid novel reader. A native of Schenectady, NY, where he was born on September 28, 1950, he went on to study at Williams College. In addition to pursuing a degree in psychology, Sayles also appeared in school plays and summer stock. It was through such activities that he met many of the people who would be his future collaborators, including actor David Strathairn and Maggie Renzi, who would serve as his producer and offscreen companion.Following his graduation from Williams, Sayles decided to embark on a career as a fiction writer. Supporting himself with jobs as an orderly, a day laborer, and a meat packer, he began to write, submitting stories to magazines and eventually publishing two novels. Both Pride of the Bimbos (1975) and Union Dues (1977) met with positive critical notices but little financial success. Sayles' 1979 short story anthology, The Anarchist's Convention, met a similar fate. Meanwhile, Sayles found additional employment, joining Roger Corman's stable of B-movie writers in the mid-'70s. Under Corman's auspices, he wrote Piranha (1978), The Lady in Red (1979), and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Armed with this rudimentary filmmaking experience, Sayles directed his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, in four weeks in 1978. Shot for a reported 40,000 dollars, it was a poignant look at a reunion of 1960s activists on the cusp of adulthood. Featuring future Sayles regulars like Strathairn, Renzi, and Gordon Clapp, the film garnered critical praise, winning awards for Best Screenplay from both Los Angeles and New York film critic groups when it was released in 1980, and predating by several years Lawrence Kasdan's similar but more commercially successful The Big Chill.In 1983, Sayles made Lianna and Baby, It's You. The former was an examination of the changes facing a married woman who realizes that she's a lesbian, while the latter was the first and last film the director made under the control of a studio. Sayles' negative experiences while making the film caused him to vow that he would never again trade the rights to a final cut for funding; fortunately, he didn't have to. The same year that Baby, It's You was released, the director was awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, which provided him with at least 32,000 dollars per year, tax-free, for five years. One of the results was The Brother From Another Planet (1984), the story of a mute, black alien (Joe Morton) who wanders the streets of Harlem. A look at a variety of issues, including racial prejudice and drug addiction, the film won further acclaim for its director, who also wrote, edited, scored, and acted in it. Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988) followed, providing complex studies of union politics in a 1920s West Virginia coal-mining town and the 1919 Black Sox scandal in baseball, respectively. Both films provided unconventional looks at pivotal aspects of American history, further marking Sayles as a director who traveled down his own road. After beginning the 1990s with a similar exploration of (contemporary) American society in City of Hope (1991), Sayles earned further praise and a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for Passion Fish (1992), a film that examined the often-fractious relationship between a paralyzed former soap opera star (Mary McDonnell) and her live-in nurse (Alfre Woodard). Sayles then changed pace with The Secret of Roan Inish in 1994. A mystical story about a small girl living in Ireland, the film was aimed at both children and adults. A return to grittier subjects followed in 1996 with Lone Star, which examined the personal and public politics at work in a small Texas border town through the lens of a murder investigation. The film, which featured superb performances by such actors as Chris Cooper, Matthew McConaughey, and Kris Kristofferson, earned Sayles another Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. It also provided him with one of his biggest (relative) commercial successes, unlike the subsequent Men With Guns (1997), which returned Sayles to arthouse territory. That film's political allegory, taking place in an unnamed Latin American country and spoken entirely in Spanish, delivered a powerful message; unfortunately, that message reached relatively few people. In 1999, Sayles again stepped behind the camera, this time to make Limbo. Starring Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Lone Star's Vanessa Martinez, the film was the unsettling, open-ended story of three people trapped between an unappealing past and a potentially deadly future. A complex character study in the tradition of the director/screenwriter's best films, it premiered that year at the Cannes Festival. The following years found the critically hailed director busier than ever; if his pace had been lagging in the eyes of some, his output in 2002 and 2003 would find Sayles remaining in top form as both a writer and director. Ever original in his writing and acutely retaining his ability to craft well-defined, three-dimensional characters, Sayles' 2002 drama, Sunshine State, dealt with the effect of real-estate development on a small Florida community in a delicate, humorous, and non-damning manner that earned the effort near-universal acclaim. The performances turned in by stars Angela Bassett and Edie Falco proved both memorable and endearing. It wasn't long before Sayles was back behind the camera, and the result was an equally compelling study of six women who travel to South America in hopes of becoming adoptive mothers. Graced with a talented cast that included Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, and Marcia Gay Harden, the intimate independent film pleased longtime fans of the director and perhaps even won over a few new converts. In 2004, Sayles wrote and directed the political satire Silver City, starring Chris Cooper as an aspiring, not-so-bright politician (shades of George W. Bush) and sporting an impressing ensemble cast that included Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Roth, Kris Kristofferson, Thora Birch, and Daryl Hannah, and Maria Bello. Sayles also co-wrote the screenplay for the dinosaur horror sequel Jurassic Park IV (2005).On top of writing and directing, Sayles has edited most of his films, acted in his own movies and many others, and served as executive producer for Santitos (1999) and Girlfight (2000). In addition to his feature-film work, Sayles has made many contributions to other media. He has done extensive television work, such as creating the 1989 TV series Shannon's Deal, and has helmed several of Bruce Springsteen's best music videos, including "Born in the USA." Sayles has also continued to write, penning the plays New Hope for the Dead and Turnbuckle.