Trivia: Lee Philips studied playwriting at Adelphi College, and later with Harold Clurman. Originally a stage actor, Phillips made his stage debut in the early '50s and appeared on Broadway in dramas such as Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night, with Edward G. Robinson, Gena Rowlands, Anne Jackson, and Martin Balsam, and The Mandragola, directed by Sanford Meisner and starring Albert Paulsen, John Fiedler, and Mark Rydell. He followed this with television work on Armstrong Circle Theatre, and other dramatic anthology shows, and feature film appearances in movies such as Peyton Place (1958), in which he distinguished himself with an impassioned performance as the earnest school principal. Additionally, he appeared in the television productions of Marty and 12 Angry Men. Phillips turned to directing in the early '60s on sitcoms such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, and followed this with numerous TV movies and occasional feature films, most notably The Girl Most Likely To (1973), a black comedy about a formerly homely girl (Stockard Channing), transformed by plastic surgery, who decides to revenge herself on the high school classmates who tormented her.

Trivia: Blonde, loquacious American actress Joyce Van Patten was being sent out for modelling assignments at the age of eight months. Her stagestruck mother advertised Van Patten and older brother Dick as "the Van Patten Kids," ready and willing to step into any juvenile roles available. At age 5, Joyce made her Broadway debut in Love's Old Sweet Song, which also featured Dick. Joyce was nine years old when she won the Donaldson award for her performance in the stage drama Tomorrow the World. She interrupted her stage career for a brief marriage at age 16 (her equally brief second marriage was to actor Martin Balsam), then at 20 played her first adult role in the Broadway comedy Desk Set. Her first film assignment was an unbilled bit in the Manhattan-lensed Fourteen Hours (1951), and her first regular TV stint was on the CBS soap opera As the World Turns in the late '50s. Joyce has since been seen on a weekly basis in such TV series as The Danny Kaye Show (1963-66), The Good Guys (1968) (as Herb Edelman's good-natured wife), The Don Rickles Show (1972) (as Don's goodnatured wife) and The Mary Tyler Moore Hour (1979) (as Mary's personal secretary, yet again good-natured). Joyce Van Patten's films have included The Goddess (1958), I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), St. Elmo's Fire (1984), and a rare "bitchy" appearance as the antagonistic athletic coach in The Bad News Bears (1976).

Trivia: British actor Wilfred Hyde-White entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art upon graduation from Marlborough College. After some stage work, he made his first film in 1934 and became a stalwart in British movies like Rembrandt (1936) and The Demi-Paradise (1943), often billed as merely "Hyde White" and specializing in benign but stuffy upper-class types. Hyde-White received a somewhat larger role than usual in The Third Man (1949), principally because his character was an amalgam of two characters who were originally written for the erstwhile British comedy team Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. Working both sides of the continent, Hyde-White appeared in such American productions as In Search of the Castaways (1962) and Gaily, Gaily (1969). His best-loved role was as Colonel Pickering in the 1964 Oscar-winner My Fair Lady, wherein he participated in two musical numbers, "The Rain in Spain" and "You Did It." Remaining in films until 1983, Hyde-White was still inducing audience chuckles in such films as The Cat and the Canary (1979), in which he appeared "posthumously" in a pre-filmed last will and testament.

Trivia: Widely acclaimed as one of the great beauties of the stage, British actress Gladys Cooper had the added advantage of great talent. Daughter of a London magazine editor, she made her stage bow at age 17 in a Colchester production of Bluebell in Fairyland; at 19, she was a member of the "Gaiety Girls," a famous and famously attractive chorus-girl line. Graduating to leading roles, Cooper was particularly popular with young stage door johnnies; during World War I, she was the British troops' most popular "pin-up." Switching from light comedy to deep drama in the 1920s, Cooper retained her following, even when leaving England for extended American appearances after her 1934 Broadway debut in The Shining Hour. She made subsequent New York appearances in Shakespearean roles, thereafter achieving nationwide fame with her many Hollywood film appearances (she'd first acted before the cameras way back in 1911 in a British one-reeler, Eleventh Commandment). Now past fifty but still strikingly attractive, Cooper was often cast as aristocratic ladies whose sharp-tongued cattiness was couched in feigned politeness; her film parts ranged from Bette Davis' overbearing mother in Now Voyager (1941) to the hidden murderess in a Universal "B" horror, The Black Cat (1941). Returning to the London stage in 1947, Cooper remained there for several years before returning to Broadway in The Chalk Garden(1955). New York was again regaled by her in 1962 when she played Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India (the role which won Peggy Ashcroft an Oscar when Passage was filmed over 20 years later). The years 1960-1964 were particularly busy for Cooper on TV and in films; she won her third Oscar nomination for her role as Prof. Henry Higgins' mother in My Fair Lady (1964), starred as the matriarch of a family of genteel swindlers on the TV series The Rogues (1964), and even found time to co-star with a very young Robert Redford on a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone. Made a Dame Commander of the O.B.E. in 1967, Cooper had no plans for slowing down in her eighties, even though she was appalled by the "let it all hang out" theatre offerings of the era. Cooper was planning to tour in a Canadian revival of Chalk Garden in 1971 when she contracted pneumonia and died in November of that year.

Trivia: Jovial, twinkly-eyed character actor Cecil Kellaway resembled a full-grown leprechaun, so it's not surprising that he'd play such a role in the 1948 film Luck of the Irish -- and win an Oscar nomination in the bargain. Before coming to Hollywood to play Mr. Earnshaw in the 1939 filmization of Wuthering Heights, the South African-born Kellaway spent nearly two decades as an actor, writer and director of British and Australian films and stage plays. Even when he played a villainous part like the eternally drunken warlock in I Married a Witch (1942) or an unsympathetic role like the cold-blooded psychiatrist Mr. Chumley in Harvey (1950), it was impossible for Kellaway to be completely dislikable. In 1967, Kellaway won a second Oscar nomination for his performance as the tippling priest in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Cecil Kellaway was the cousin of veteran British actor Edmund Gwenn.

Trivia: Though no one in his family had ever pursued a theatrical career (one of his more illustrious relatives was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), Alan Napier was stagestruck from childhood. After graduating from Clifton College, the tall, booming-voiced Napier studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then was engaged by the Oxford Players, where he worked with such raw young talent as John Gielgud and Robert Morley. He continued working with the cream of Britain's acting crop during his ten years (1929-1939) on the West End stages. Napier came to New York in 1940 to co-star with Gladys George in Lady in Waiting. Though his film career had begun in England in the 1930s, Napier had very little success before the cameras until he arrived in Hollywood in 1941. He essayed dignified, sometimes waspish roles of all sizes in such films as Cat People (1942), The Uninvited (1943), and House of Horror (1946); among his off-the-beaten-track assignments were the bizarre High Priest in Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948) and a most elegant Captain Kidd in the 1950 Donald O'Connor vehicle Double Crossbones. In 1966, Alan Napier was cast as Bruce Wayne's faithful butler, Alfred, on the smash-hit TV series Batman, a role he played until the series' cancellation in 1968. Alan Napier's career extended into the 1980s, with TV roles in such miniseries as QB VII and such weeklies as The Paper Chase.

Trivia: Pennsylvania-born actor Don Keefer enjoyed a 60-year-plus career on stage and screen that saw him range freely across character parts and leading roles in both fields. An actor from his youth, he started early playing leads, portraying the title role in The Adventures of Marco Polo for a production of the Child Study Association. He won the Clarence Derwent Award for his early work on Broadway, and spent his early career working alongside the likes of Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, and José Ferrer, and under such directors as Moss Hart, Elia Kazan, and Margaret Webster (including the famed production of Othello starring Paul Robeson). Keefer was a charter member of the Actors' Studio, and originated the role of Bernard, the studious neighbor son-turned-lawyer in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was the only actor to remain with the production for its entire Broadway run, and subsequently made his screen debut in 1951 in the movie adaptation of the play produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Laslo Benedek. From that beginning, he went on to appear in more than 130 movie and television productions, in between theatrical work on both coasts (including a stint at the Theatre Group at UCLA under John Houseman). Highlights of his stage career include a highly acclaimed touring production of Anton Chekhov: The Human Comedy, focusing on the lighter side of Chekhov's work. On screen as on stage, Keefer played a wide variety of parts -- he made a fine villain-turned-neutral in "Winchester Quarantine," an early (and very powerful) episode of Have Gun Will Travel, but was equally good as Ensign Twitchell, the comically (yet tragically) over-eager and officious junior officer in Joseph Pevney's Away All Boats, during this same period. Don Keefer was still working in the late '90s, in movies such as Liar Liar and an episode of Profiler. But amid hundreds of portrayals, Keefer's single most memorable role for most viewers -- other than Bernard in Death of a Salesman -- is almost certainly that of Dan Hollis, the doomed neighbor whose birthday celebration comes to a hideous end (his head popping out of a giant jack-in-the-box) in the 1961 Twilight Zone show "It's a Good Life."