Trivia: Ex-telephone lineman Guy Madison was serving his country in the Navy at the time he made his screen debut as an extra in David Selznick's Since You Went Away (1944). After the war, Madison was signed by RKO, where he was given the star buildup in such films as Till the End of Time (1946) and Honeymoon (1947). Unpleasant publicity surrounding his stormy marriage to actress Gail Russell very nearly put an end to Madison's burgeoning career. Salvation came in the form of a syndicated TV series, Wild Bill Hickok, which starred Madison in the title role and which ran from 1951 through 1958. Thanks to his Hickok popularity, Madison was able to secure major roles in such "A" pictures as The Charge at Feather River (1953) and On the Threshold of Space (1956). After the cancellation of Wild Bill Hickok in 1958, Guy Madison's star faded somewhat, though he went on to make a good living as a leading man in German and Italian westerns and swashbucklers of the 1960s.

Trivia: Joan Weldon was lucky enough as an actress to get in briefly at the end of the Hollywood studio system, make some good movies (and one great one), and then land on her feet in musical theater, which is where she wanted to be in the first place. Born Joan Louise Welton in San Francisco, she was the daughter of a prominent attorney. As a child, she showed a keen interest in music and studied piano and voice. She joined the chorus of the San Francisco Grand Opera Company and later sang with the Civic Light Opera Company. It was during a performance with the latter that she was spotted by screenwriter-turned-producer Stanley Rubin (Macao, The Narrow Margin, River of No Return), who arranged for her to have a screen test at 20th Century Fox. The studio passed on her, however, because it wasn't in the market for vocalists. Meanwhile, she appeared on television as a singer on the series This Is Your Music and later crossed paths with William T. Orr, the son-in-law of Warner Bros. co-founder Jack L. Warner (and later the executive in charge of the company's television division), which led to a contract with Warners. Her last name was changed to Weldon and she narrowly missed out being cast as a victim of Vincent Price's malevolence in André De Toth's 3-D horror classic House of Wax. Instead, her contribution to the 3-D movie craze was as the second female lead in De Toth's The Stranger Wore a Gun amid a cast that included veterans Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, and George Macready and future stars Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Weldon was also loaned out to MGM in the Sigmund Romberg bio-musical Deep in My Heart (1954), and ended up cut from the picture for her trouble. Weldon was cast in a series of Westerns, including The Command and Riding Shotgun, but her greatest contribution to the screen was as the female lead in Gordon Douglas' Them! The first and best of Hollywood's radioactive/giant monster movies, the film relied more on characters than most others in the genre and featured an extraordinary cast, including one Oscar-winner (Edmund Gwenn), one Oscar-nominee (James Whitmore), one future TV star (James Arness) in the lead, and another two (Fess Parker and Leonard Nimoy) in small roles. Weldon broke some cinematic ground, playing a notably intelligent and assertive female character who also happened to be beautiful. "We took the movie very seriously," she recalled in a 2004 interview, "exactly like any other drama." Of her co-star Edmund Gwenn, she said, "He was the sweetest man, and he was quite elderly by then and riven with arthritis, but he worked as hard as any of us; when the director called 'Action,' he did everything asked of him, all of the climbing and the walking through the desert. It was just that, when they called 'Cut!,' he had a manservant that would rush over to him and get him to a chair." Weldon's career in movies ended with the expiration of her Warner Bros. contract in 1954. She resumed her singing career with Jimmy McHugh and was later in the road company production of The Music Man, playing Marian Paroo. Weldon made her way to Broadway in Kean, starring opposite Alfred Drake, and opened the State Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York playing opposite John Raitt in a scene from Carousel. She later toured with Fess Parker in Oklahoma and, in 1967, played the lead in a production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow at Lincoln Center. Weldon retired from the stage in 1980, but was still well remembered by opera and musical fans in the early 2000s. She also attracted a crowd when she turned up as a member of the audience in March 2004 at a rare 3-D screening of The Stranger Wore a Gun in New York.

Trivia: Whitmore attended Yale, where he joined the Yale Drama School Players and co-founded the Yale radio station. After serving in World War II with the Marines, he did some work in stock and then debuted on Broadway in 1947's Command Decision. He entered films in 1949, going on to play key supporting roles; occasionally, he also played leads. For his work in Battleground (1949), his second film, he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He starred in the early '60s TV series "The Law and Mr. Jones." He won much acclaim for his work in the one-man stage show Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, in which he played Harry Truman; he reprised the role in the 1975 screen version, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. After 1980 his screen appearances were infrequent. He is the father of actor James Whitmore Jr.

Trivia: Brooklyn-born Harvey Lembeck was a nightclub and Broadway comedian at the time of his 1951 film bow in You're in the Navy Now. The roly-poly, nasal-voiced Lembeck was most often cast as the wise-guy comedy relief in war films, most notably Stalag 17 (1953), in which Lembeck and bearlike Robert Strauss repeated their stage roles as "court jesters" in a dismal POW camp (the two actors would later be reteamed in the 1961 Jack Webb picture The Last Time I Saw Archie, not to mention a series of TV commercials in the mid-1960s). Harvey remained in uniform for a four-year hitch as Corporal Barbella on the popular 1950s Phil Silvers sitcom You'll Never Get Rich. In 1963's Beach Party, Lembeck made the first of several sidesplitting appearances as leather-jacketed Brando wannabe Eric von Zipper, whose attempts to prove his toughness to his fellow bikers always came a-cropper; in Beach Blanket Bingo, for example, he was cut in twain by a buzzsaw, moaning "Why Me?" even as his two halves fell bloodlessly to the floor. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Harvey Lembeck directed several TV sitcom episodes, and also operated a training school for aspiring comedians; carrying on the "family business" after Harvey's death was his son, actor/director Michael Lembeck.

Trivia: Carl Benton Reid determined he wanted to be an actor and nothing else while still in high school. Graduating from the drama department at Carnegie Tech, Reid worked for several seasons with the Cleveland Playhouse in the 1920s. He appeared in abbreviated Shakespearean productions at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, then went on to a fruitful Broadway career. Reid was brought to Hollywood in 1941 to re-create his stage role of Oscar Hubbard in the film version of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes. Trafficking in "heavy" roles for most of his film career, Reid's favorite film assignment was also his least villainous: Clem Rogers, father of the title character in 1953's The Story of Will Rogers. As busy on television as he'd previously been on-stage and in films, Carl Benton Reid was seen regularly as "the Man," a shadowy espionage chief, in the 1965 TV series Amos Burke, Secret Agent.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: Expert horseman Boyd "Red" Morgan entered films as a stunt man in 1937. Morgan was justifiably proud of his specialty: falling from a horse in the most convincingly bone-crushing manner possible. He doubled for several top western stars, including John Wayne and Wayne's protégé James Arness. He could also be seen in speaking roles in such films as The Amazing Transparent Man (1959), The Alamo (1960), True Grit (1968), The Wild Rovers (1969) and Rio Lobo (1970). According to one report, Boyd "Red" Morgan served as the model for the TV-commercial icon Mister Clean.

Trivia: American character actor Robert Nichols appeared in numerous Hollywood and British films during the 1950s. He was particularly prolific during the 1950s. Nichols has also worked on stage and in television.