Trivia: The son of a Baptist minister, actor DeForest Kelley was one of the lucky few chosen to be groomed for stardom by Paramount Pictures' "young talent" program in 1946. He served an apprenticeship in 2-reel musicals like Gypsy Holiday before starring as a tormented musician in Fear in the Night (47). Unfortunately, a sweeping cancellation of Paramount young talent contracts ended Kelley's stardom virtually before it began. By the mid-1950s, he was scrounging up work on episodic TV and playing bits in such films as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (56) (this film, by the way, is the first in which Kelley uttered his now-famous line, "He's dead, captain"). Producer/writer Gene Roddenberry took a liking to Kelley and cast the actor in the leading role of a flamboyant criminal attorney in the 1959 TV pilot film 333 Montgomery. The series didn't sell, but Roddenberry was still determined to help Kelley on the road back to stardom. One of their next collaborations was Star Trek (66-69), in which (as everybody in the galaxy knows) Kelley appeared as truculent ship's doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy. Virtually all of Kelley's subsequent film appearances have been as McCoy in the seemingly endless series of elaborate Star Trek feature films. And on the pilot for the 1987 syndie Star Trek: The Next Generation, DeForrest Kelley was once more seen as "Bones" -- albeit appropriately stooped and greyed.

Trivia: Paul Kelly was one of the few actors who not only played killers, but also had first-hand experience in this capacity! On stage from age 7, "Master" Paul Kelly entered films at 8, performing on the sunlight stages of Flatbush's Vitagraph Studios. His first important theatrical role was in Booth Tarkington's Seventeen; he later appeared in Tarkington's Penrod, opposite a young Helen Hayes. Star billing was Kelly's from 1922's Up the Ladder onwards. In films from 1926, Kelly alternated between stage and screen until his talkie debut in 1932's Broadway Through A Keyhole. The actor's career momentum was briefly halted with a two-year forced hiatus. On May 31, 1927, Kelly was found guilty of manslaughter, after killing actor Ray Raymond in a fistfight. The motivating factor of the fatal contretemps was Raymond's wife, Dorothy MacKaye, who married Kelly in 1931, after he'd served prison time for Raymond's death (MacKaye herself died in an automobile accident in 1940). This unfortunate incident had little adverse effect on Kelly's acting career, which continued up until his death in 1956. Returning to Broadway in 1947, Paul Kelly won the Donaldson and Tony awards for his performance in Command Decision; three years later, he starred in the original stage production of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl.

Trivia: A sadly neglected supporting actress, Ann Doran played everything from Charley Chase's foil in Columbia two-reelers of the late '30s to James Dean's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and also guest starred in such television shows as Superman, Petticoat Junction, Bewitched, and The A Team. A former child model and the daughter of silent screen actress Rose Allen (1885-1977), Doran made her screen bow in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922) but then spent the next 12 years or so getting herself an education. She returned to films in 1934 and joined the Columbia short subject department two years later. While with Columbia, Doran worked on all of Frank Capra's films save Lost Horizon (1937) and she later toiled for both Paramount and Warner Bros., often receiving fine reviews but always missing out on the one role that may have made her a star. Appearing in more than 500 films and television shows (her own count), Doran worked well into the 1980s, often unbilled but always a noticeable presence.

Trivia: The embodiment of businesslike dignity, actor Robert Emmett Keane was active in films from his 1929 debut in the talkie short Gossip through the 1956 second feature When Gangland Strikes. Because of his distinguished, above-reproach demeanor, Keane was often effectively cast as confidence men, shady attorneys and mystery murderers: after all, if he can convince the gullible folks people on-screen that he's honest, it's likely the audience will fall for the same line. Keane is warmly remembered by Laurel and Hardy fans for his roles in three of the team's 20th Century-Fox films of the '40s, playing con artists in two of them (A-Haunting We Will Go and Jitterbugs). In the early '50s, Keane played Captain Brackett in the national touring company of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical triumph South Pacific. In private life, Robert Emmett Keane was the husband of Claire Whitney.

Trivia: American actor Jeff York inaugurated his film career in the late '30s at Paramount, under the "nom de stage" of Granville Owen. York spent the postwar years as an MGM contractee, then freelanced into the 1950s. From 1954 to 1958, he was most often to be found in the film and TV projects of the Walt Disney Studios, playing major roles in Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956, as keelboatman Mike Fink), Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1956), and The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). His best-remembered assignment under the Disney banner was the role of shiftless Bud Searcy in Old Yeller (1957), a character he reprised in the 1963 sequel Savage Sam. In 1959, Jeff York co-starred with Ray Danton, Roger Moore, and Dorothy Provine in the Warner Bros. TVer The Alaskans.

Trivia: Bald, hook-nosed character actor John Harmon launched his film career in 1939. Harmon's screen assignments ranged from shifty-eyed gangsters, rural law enforcement officials and hen-pecked husbands. He was seen in films as diverse as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and the "B" horror flick Monster of Piedra Blancas. Star Trek fans will remember John Harmon for his supporting role in the 1967 episode "City on the Edge of Forever."

Trivia: Supporting actress Gladys Blake first appeared onscreen in the late 1930s. In Warren Meyers' Who is That?, a picture book devoted to Hollywood's favorite character actors, Blake is lumped together with such cinematic tarts as Veda Ann Borg and Olga San Juan in a chapter titled "My, Isn't She Cheap?" In truth, Blake's appearances as "naughty ladies" were limited. During her 12-year (1938-1950) screen career, she was most often seen as a garrulous telephone operator, most memorably in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It? (1942). Gladys Blake's final screen role was, appropriately enough, "The Talkative Woman" in Paid in Full (1950).

Trivia: American silent-film actress Julia Faye made her film bow in The Lamb (1915), which also represented the first film appearance of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Though she photographed beautifully, Faye's acting skills were limited. It's possible she would have quickly faded from the scene without the sponsorship of producer/director Cecil B. DeMille. Faye appeared in sizeable roles in most of DeMille's extravaganzas of the '20s; her assignments ranged from the supporting part of an Aztec handmaiden in The Woman God Forgot (1918) to the wife of Pharoah in The Ten Commandments (1923). Offscreen, Faye became DeMille's mistress. The actress continued to work in DeMille's films into the sound era, at least until the personal relationship dissolved. By the '40s, Faye was washed up in films and hard up financially. DeMille responded generously by putting Faye on his permanent payroll, casting her in minor roles in his films of the '40s and '50s, and seeing to it that she was regularly hired for bit parts at the director's home studio of Paramount. Julia Faye's final appearance was in 1958's The Buccaneer, which also happened to be the last film ever produced by Cecil B. DeMille (it was directed by DeMille's son-in-law, Anthony Quinn).

Trivia: Born in Kingston, Jamaica, distinguished-looking Leander de Cordova began his screen career as an assistant director on such early dramas as the 1916 Francis X. Bushman version of Romeo and Juliet. He later co-directed, with producer G.B. Samuelson, the famous silent version of She (1925) starring Betty Blythe, and was solo director on silent screen actress Mary Philbin's final foray into sound films, the technically crude After the Fog (1929). Although he was credited as dialogue director on the 1930 Tiffany sound production Borrowed Wives and later helmed a cheap Buffalo Bill Jr. oater (Trail of the Golden West [1931]) for the small-scale studio Cosmos, talkies effectively put an end to de Cordova's directorial career. He spent the next two decades as an actor mostly playing bit parts, but remains very visible in two popular serials: Dick Tracy (1937) in which he played Stevens the dock superintendent and to an even higher degree Zorro's Fighting Legion as Felipe one of several imposing council members suspected of being the nefarious megalomaniac Don del Oro.