Trivia: John Marley's craggy face, cement-mixer voice and shock of white hair were familiar to stagegoers from the 1930s onward. Marley started out as one-half of a comedy team, but soon found that his true metier was drama. In films on an infrequent basis since 1941, Marley stepped up his moviemaking activities in the mid-1960s, playing such sizeable roles as Jane Fonda's father in Cat Ballou (1965). He won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance as a miserable middle-aged husband in John Cassavetes' Faces (1968), and was Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Ali MacGraw's blue-collar dad in Love Story. Arguably Marley's most unforgettable assignment was The Godfather (1972), in which, as movie mogul Lou Woltz, he wakes up to find himself sharing his bed with a horse's head. John Marley's television work included a regular role on the obscure NBC daytime drama Three Steps to Heaven.

Trivia: Hank Patterson is best known to audiences for his portrayal of farmer Fred Ziffel on Green Acres -- for five seasons, his laconic character and the antics of his pig Arnold helped make life hopelessly confusing for series protagonist Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert). Patterson, along with his younger contemporary Arthur Hunnicutt, was one of a handful of character actors who cornered the market on portraying cantankerous old coots, usually in a rural setting, in movies and on television during the middle of the 20th century. With his deep, resonant voice, which could project even when he spoke in the softest tones, Patterson could also evoke menace and doom, an attribute that producers and directors sometimes utilized to great effect on programs like Twilight Zone. He was born Elmer Calvin Patterson in Springville, AL, in 1888, but by the 1890s his family had moved to Texas, and Patterson spent most of his boyhood in the town of Taylor. His main interest was music, and he studied in hope of a serious performing career, but was forced to enter showbusiness as a vaudeville pianist, playing with traveling shows. By the end of the 1920s, he'd made his way to California, and he entered the movie business as an actor -- despite his lack of formal training -- during the 1930s. Patterson's earliest identified screen work was an uncredited appearance in the Roy Rogers Western The Arizona Kid (1939). His first credited screen role was in the drama I Ring Doorbells, made at Producers Releasing Corporation. Patterson spent the next nine years working exclusively in Westerns, starting with Thomas Carr's The El Paso Kid, starring Sunset Carson. Among the best of the oaters that Patterson worked in were Edwin L. Marin's Abilene Town and Henry King's The Gunfighter, but most of the pictures that he did were on the low-budget side, and far less prestigious. He played a succession of blacksmiths, hotel clerks, farmers, shopkeepers, and other townsmen, usually bit roles and character parts. Beginning with Jack Arnold's Tarantula, Patterson moved into occasional modern character portrayals as well. Patterson also appeared on dozens of television series, ranging from The Abbott & Costello Show (where he played a very creepy mugger in "Lou Falls for Ruby") to Perry Mason. He was nearly as ubiquitous a figure on Twilight Zone as he was in any Western series, appearing in at least three installments, most notably as an old man in a modern setting in "Kick the Can," and as an ominous general store proprietor in "Come Wander With Me." It was the 19th century and rural settings, however, that provided his bread and butter -- he had appeared in several episodes of Gunsmoke, and in 1963 became a continuing character on the series in the role of Hank Miller, the Dodge City stableman. That same year, Patterson took on the semi-regular role of farmer Fred Ziffel in the rural comedy Petticoat Junction; and in 1965, that role was expanded into the series Green Acres -- eventually, he even portrayed Fred Ziffel in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies as well. The association of his character with the utterly surreal (and extremely popular) porcine character of Arnold the Pig (also known as Arnold Ziffel) ensured that Patterson was one of the most visible supporting players on the series. Ironically, by the time he was doing Green Acres, Patterson was almost completely deaf, but the producers loved his portrayal so much, that they worked around this by having the dialogue coach lying on the floor out-of-shot, tapping at his leg with a yardstick when it was his cue to speak a line. Patterson passed away in 1975 of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 86. He was the great-uncle of actress Tea Leoni.

Trivia: Australian actress Marjorie Bennett made her first film appearances in the pre-World War I years at the suggestion of her sister, silent film star Enid Bennett. Marjorie wasn't yet under the spell of the acting bug, so she abandoned performing for several years, re-emerging as a stage rather than screen actress. She returned to films in the late 1940s as a character player, notably in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). A prolific film and TV performer of the 1950s and 1960s, Marjorie Bennett was usually cast as huffy society matrons and haughty domestics; her massive bulk and easily outraged demeanor made her a perfect straight woman for such iconoclastic comedians as Red Skelton and the Three Stooges.

Trivia: Stage actress Anne O'Neal first showed up onscreen as a street singer in John Ford's The Informer. Well suited for such roles as spinsterish gossips and baleful landladies, O'Neal kept busy in the mid-'30s with the Columbia Pictures short-subject unit, serving as the foil for such comics as Andy Clyde and the Three Stooges. During the 1940s, she was a semi-regular in the one- and two-reel productions of MGM, showing up in the Passing Parade, Our Gang, and Crime Does Not Pay series. Her feature-film credits include such small but memorable roles as psychiatrist Porter Hall's neurotic secretary in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Miss Sifert in the cult classic Gun Crazy (1949). Anne O'Neal spent her last active years in television, most poignantly as one of the "rejuvenated" senior citizens in the 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Kick the Can."

Trivia: American actor Ernest Truex fulfilled the dream of many a performer by playing Hamlet--at age six, in a kiddie talent show. A professional from adolescence onward, Truex appeared in several plays produced by the legendary David Belasco, including a "character juvenile" in The Good Little Devil, in which he supported Mary Pickford. Good Little Devil served as Truex's film debut in 1914, though it would be at least fifteen years and numerous plays later before he'd tackle the movies on a fulltime basis. During the '20s, Truex gained so much popularity in light domestic comedies that several writers concocted vehicles especially for him. Usually cast in wistful, milquetoast roles, Truex in real life was fiercely competitive, much to the chagrin of directors and writers who had to fight tooth and nail to keep Truex from hogging every scene he was in. Talking pictures allowed Truex a few leading roles, as in the first version of the comedy melodrama Whistling in the Dark (1933) (a role played in the remake by Red Skelton), but soon found his weight was more effectively felt in supporting parts. Many of these recycled his "downtrodden little man" routine, with such spectacular exceptions as The Warrior's Husband (1933), in which he played an outrageously campy "nance," and Roadblock (1939), where the actor went against the mild-mannered grain to play a scheming, demonic gang boss. Truex continued his stage work in the '30s and '40s, notably as the "back to the farm" homeowner in Kaufman and Hart'sGeorge Washington Slept Here (Jack Benny did the movie version). Becoming slightly more precious as he got older, Truex portrayed any number of "sly grandpop" roles in the '50s, with television providing fresh new outlets for the actor's talent. He had recurring roles in such sitcoms as Mr. Peepers, Jamie, Pete and Gladys; a potential long-lasting 1958 stint as a hotel manager on The Ann Sothern Show came to an abrupt end because Ms. Sothern, some say, was a tad intolerant of inveterate scene stealers. Like many veteran performers, Ernest Truex was given ample opportunity to shine on Rod Serling's anthology Twilight Zone, first as a prescient peddler in the 1959 episode "What You Need," then more memorably as a nursing home resident desperate to recapture his youth in 1962's "Kick the Can." Ernest Truex was married to actress Sylvia Field, herself an early-'60s TV favorite as Mrs. Wilson on Dennis the Menace.

Trivia: Actor Earle Hodgins has been characterized by more than one western-film historian as a grizzled, bucolic Bob Hope type. Usually cast as snake-oil salesmen, Hodgins would brighten up his "B"-western scenes with a snappy stream of patter, leavened by magnificently unfunny wisecracks ("This remedy will give ya a complexion like a peach, fuzz 'n' all..."). When the low-budget western market died in the 1950s, Hodgins continued unabated on such TV series as The Roy Rogers Show and Annie Oakley. He also made appearances in such "A" films as East of Eden (55), typically cast as carnival hucksters and rural sharpsters. In 1961, Earle Hodgins was cast in the recurring role of wizened handyman Lonesome on the TV sitcom Guestward Ho!

Trivia: Life literally began at 60 for American actor Burt Mustin, who didn't enter show business until that age and didn't make his film debut until Detective Story (1951), at which time he was 68. After a decade of uncredited movie roles as hillbilly patriarchs and Town's Oldest Citizens, Mustin began getting name recognition for numerous TV appearances in the late '50s and early '60s. The actor was a particular favorite of producer/actor Jack Webb, who cast Mustin several times on Dragnet; in one episode Burt was an octogenarian burglar, and in another was a retired detective who solved a murder case - and chewed out a young cop for not knowing the proper way to take fingerprints! Situation comedy producers made good use of Burt Mustin as well, and he was featured in innumerable cameos on such programs as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Get Smart and The Jack Benny Program, usually stealing most of the laughs from the stars. Mustin had regular TV roles as eccentric neighbor Finley on Date with the Angels, Gus the Fireman on Leave It to Beaver, barber shop patron Jud Crowley on The Andy Griffith Show, the amorous senior-citizen husband of Queenie Smith on The Funny Side, and nursing-home refugee Justin Quigley on All in the Family. Mustin got the biggest press coverage of his career when, in character as Arthur Lanson, he married Mother Dexter - played by 82-year-old Judith Lowry - on the December 13, 1976 episode of Phyllis. It was a hilarious and, in retrospect, poignant moment in TV history: Judith Lowry had died a few days before the program was aired, and Burt Mustin, who was too ill to watch the show, passed away six weeks later.