Trivia: Comedienne Joan Davis was the daughter of a Minnesota-based train dispatcher. A performer in local amateur productions since the age of 3, Joan sang, danced and clowned at summer camps, amusement parks, and small-time vaudeville houses, marrying her "straight man" Si Willis in 1931. While performing in Los Angeles, Joan strenuously campaigned for an opportunity to appear before the cameras; her first film was the 1935 educational two-reeler Way Up Thar, directed by Mack Sennett and co-starring several members of Buster Keaton's family. This led to her first feature film, Millions in the Air (1935). After a desultory RKO contract, Joan and her husband returned to vaudeville; she was rediscovered for pictures by 20th Century-Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast Joan in raucous Martha Raye-like slapstick roles in such films as Sonja Henie's Thin Ice (1937), the Ritz Bros.' Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and Alice Faye's Tail Spin (1939). In 1941, she became a regular on Rudy Vallee's radio program, and was memorably co-starred with Abbott and Costello in Hold That Ghost (1941). During the 1940s, Joan was top billed in several energetic "B" efforts like Kansas City Kitty (1944) and He Gets Her Man (1945), and was promoted to star of her own top-rated radio series for Sealtest dairy products. After her film career ended with the bottom-barrel Columbia farce Harem Girl, Joan formed her own production company to produce the popular TV sitcom I Married Joan, which ran from 1952 through 1955 on the networks, then seemingly forever in reruns. Co-starring on I Married Joan as Joan's sister was the actress' daughter, Beverly Wills. Joan Davis died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 53, shortly after completing the pilot film for a new TV series.

Trivia: Ohio-born actor Jim Backus's stage career began in summer stock, where, according to his then-roommate Keenan Wynn, he was as well known for his prowess with the ladies as he was for his on-stage versatility. Backus continued acting in New York, vaudeville, and especially radio in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a regular on radio's The Alan Young Show, portraying Eastern Seaboard snob Hubert Updike III, the prototype for his "Thurston Howell III" characterization on the 1960s TV sitcom Gilligan's Island. In 1949, Backus provided the voice of the nearsighted Mr. Magoo for the first time in the UPA cartoon Ragtime Bear; the actor later claimed that he based this character on his own businessman father. Also in 1949, Backus made his first film appearance in Easy Living, which starred his childhood friend Victor Mature. Backus' most famous screen role was as James Dean's weak-willed, vacillating father in Rebel without a Cause. On television, Backus co-starred with Joan Davis on the I Love Lucy-like 1950s sitcom I Married Joan, and played the leading role of fast-talking news service editor Mike O'Toole on the 1960 syndicated series Hot Off the Wire (aka The Jim Backus Show). In the 1960s, Backus continued to provide the voice of Mr. Magoo in several TV projects, and was seen on-camera in the aforementioned Gilligan's Island, as well as the 1968 TV version of Blondie, wherein Backus played Mr. Dithers. Co-starring as Mrs. Dithers was Backus' wife Henny, who also collaborated with her husband on several amusing volumes of memoirs. Jim and Henny Backus' last two books, Backus Strikes Back and Forgive Us Our Digressions, commented humorously on a deadly serious subject: Parkinson's Disease, the ailment which would eventually cost Backus his life at the age of 76.

Trivia: When the call went out for an actress to play a circus strongwoman capable of lifting both a chair and Spencer Tracy in 1949's Adam's Rib, there was but one performer who could logically fit the bill: character actress Hope Emerson, who scraped the ceiling at 6' 2" and weighed in at 230 pounds. Emerson made her Broadway debut as the leader of the Amazons in Lysistrata. Her performance in the Fred Stone musical Smiling Faces led to her screen bow in the 1932 filmization of that property. During the 1940s, Emerson gained fame as the radio voice of Borden's Elsie the Cow. After years in vaudeville and the legitimate stage, Emerson returned to films as a homicidal masseuse in the New York-filmed Cry of the City (1948). She went on to play the feuding Mrs. Hatfield in Goldwyn's Roseanna McCoy (1948), and the implicitly lesbian prison matron in Caged (1950), an assignment which earned her an Oscar nomination. In 1958, Emerson was cast as Mother, owner of the nightclub where the beauteous Lola Albright was featured songstress, on the popular TV private eye series Peter Gunn. She left this series in 1959 to take a larger role as a housekeeper named "Sarge" on the weekly sitcom The Dennis O'Keefe Show. Shortly after filming the last O'Keefe episode, Hope Emerson died of a liver ailment at the reported age of 51.

Trivia: A one-time Miss California, American actress Sheila Bromley came to films relatively late; she was 26 when she appeared in her first movie, Idol of the Crowds (1937). While she had several short-term starlet contracts over the years, principally at Columbia, Fox and Warner Bros., Bromley's credits are hard to trace, simply because she spent so much time not being Sheila Bromley. At various points in her career she billed herself as Sheila Manners, Sheila Mannors and Sheila Fulton, seldom rising above B-picture status under any of those names. On TV, she was a regular on the popular sitcom I Married Joan (1952-55), billed again as Sheila Bromley. After nearly twenty years in such disposable second features as Torture Ship (1939), Calling Philo Vance (1940), Time to Kill (1942) and Young Jesse James (1950), "Sheila Bromley/Manners/Mannors/Fulton" retired, returning several years later for small roles in major 1960s productions like Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Hotel (1966). In 1965, Sheila Bromley had a continuing featured role on the NBC TV daytime drama Morning Star.

Trivia: Throughout Hollywood's golden age and TV's "typecasting" era of the '50s and '60s, there would always be a demand for American actor Dan Tobin. After all, somebody had to play all those stuffed-shirt executives, snotty desk clerks, officious male secretaries, tight-fisted bankers and tuxedoed, mustachioed stiffs to whom the heroine was unhappily engaged before the hero came along. Tobin was a welcome if slightly pompous presence in such films as Woman of the Year (1941), Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947) The Big Clock (1948) and The Love Bug Rides Again (1973). On television, Tobin had semiregular stints on I Married Joan, My Favorite Husband and Perry Mason, as well as innumerable guest bits on sitcoms and anthologies. Dan Tobin was also a frustrated screenwriter, at least according to scenarist George Clayton Johnson; while working together on a 1960 episode of Twilight Zone, Tobin cornered Johnson and described his concept for a fantasy script about a gambler who could read his opponent's minds -- a talent which failed when he came up against an opponent who couldn't speak English!