Trivia: Born Gretchen Young, her family moved to Hollywood and she began appearing (at age four) as a child extra in movies, as did her sisters (one of whom later became known as actress Sally Blane). At 14, she got a small supporting role in Naughty but Nice (1927), which led to a screen contract. She moved quickly from teenager to ingénue to leading lady roles, appearing in many films and successfully making the transition to the sound era. By the mid-'30s, she was an established star, usually cast in decorative roles in routine programmers. For her work in The Farmer's Daughter (1947) she won the Best Actress Oscar, and was nominated again for Come to the Stable (1949). After a consistently busy screen career of 25 years, she retired from films in 1953 to host the TV series The Loretta Young Show, a weekly half-hour teleplay; she appeared in about half of the show's episodes, winning three Emmy Awards. Since the early '60s, she has devoted most of her energies to Catholic charities. She has been married twice. In 1930, she made headlines when, at age 17, she eloped with actor Grant Withers. However, the marriage was annulled after a year. She later married producer and writer Thomas Lewis, from whom she eventually separated. She authored the memoir The Things I Had to Learn (1961). After NBC unlawfully broadcast her TV shows abroad, she sued the network in 1972 and won 600,000 dollars.

Trivia: Actor Barry Sullivan was a theater usher and department store employee at the time he made his first Broadway appearance in 1936. His "official" film debut was in the 1943 Western Woman of the Town, though in fact Sullivan had previously appeared in a handful of two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios in the late '30s. A bit too raffish to be a standard leading man, Sullivan was better served in tough, aggressive roles, notably the title character in 1947's The Gangster and the boorish Tom Buchanan in the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. One of his better film assignments of the 1950s was as the Howard Hawks-style movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Sullivan continued appearing in movie roles of varying importance until 1978. A frequent visitor to television, Barry Sullivan starred as Sheriff Pat Garrett in the 1960s Western series The Tall Man, and was seen as the hateful patriarch Marcus Hubbard in a 1972 PBS production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.

Trivia: Actress Marglo Gillmore appeared in numerous plays between 1917 and the early 1960s. The daughter of Actors Equity founder Frank Gillmore, she made her film debut in 1932 in Wayward. After that she didn't work in films again until the 1950s.

Trivia: American actor Bruce Cowling appeared in numerous films during the '40s and '50s. Many of those films were actioners or westerns.

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

Trivia: A top athlete at Brown University, Don Haggerty performed military service and did stage work before his movie-acting debut in 1947. Free-lancing, Haggerty put in time at virtually every studio from Republic to MGM, playing roles of varying sizes in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) The Asphalt Jungle (1951), Angels in the Outfield (1951) and The Narrow Margin (1952). Most often, he was cast as a big-city detective or rugged westerner. During the first (1955-56) season of TV's The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Haggerty showed up semi-regularly as Marsh Murdock. Don Haggerty was the father of Grizzly Adams star Dan Haggerty.

Trivia: Snowy-haired Art Baker played avuncular character roles on both stage and screen. Among his movie credits were Once Upon a Time (1944), Spellbound (1946), Daisy Kenyon (1947) and State of the Union (1948). Though never wanting for acting jobs, Baker is best remembered for his radio career (which began in 1936) and his subsequent TV work. Among his many other airwaves credits, Art Baker was the first emcee of the audience-participation program People are Funny and was the host of the long-running human-interest series You Asked for It.

Trivia: Following his screen debut in 1949's Twelve O'Clock High, Richard Anderson was groomed for stardom at MGM. His stature in Hollywood seemed assured when he married the daughter of former MGM luminary Norma Shearer. But Anderson was -- by his own admission -- a less-than-noble figure in his younger days, losing both prestige and several plum film roles through his arrogance, his explosive temper, and his after-hours carousing. A kinder, mellower Richard Anderson resurfaced on television in the 1970s, gaining a modest but loyal fan following thanks to his weekly appearances as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man. Anderson also played Goldman on the spin-off series The Bionic Woman -- the result being that, for several years in the mid-1970s, he was simultaneously co-starring on two different TV series in the same role. Richard Anderson's additional TV-series stints included Mama Rosa (1950), Bus Stop (1961), Dan August (1970), Cover-Up (1984) and Dynasty (1986-87 season).

Trivia: Born Irene Granstedt, this Swedish starlet changed her first name for obvious reasons when entering films in 1928. No one, however, mistook Granstedt for Garbo and she went on to play a series of hardboiled roles seemingly deemed too small for the likes of Veda Ann Borg. Growing up in Mountain View, CA, Granstedt first made headlines when at 14 she shot and critically wounded a boyfriend who had committed the sin of accompanying another girl to a church social. According to newspaper reports, Greta Granstedt was sentenced "to leave Mountain View and never return." By the mid-'20s, she had recovered enough from the ordeal to appear opposite Joseph Schildkraut in a Los Angeles production of From Hell Came a Lady and had taken the second of her seven husbands. She made her screen debut in a small role in Buck Privates (1928), with European idol Lya de Putti, and her talkie debut in The Last Performance (1929). Again the role was miniscule and Granstedt would make her biggest impact in low-budget action films, including two serials. Her unfortunate past was dredged up again when she married musician Ramon Ramos but her reputation as the "Tragedy Girl" failed to open any new doors in Hollywood and she continued to play mainly bit parts. Some of these, however, were quite good and she is memorable as Beulah Bondi's daughter in the crime drama Street Scene (1931) and as Margo's hardboiled friend in the New York-lensed Crime Without Passion (1934). While in New York, Granstedt appeared in a couple of Broadway plays before returning to Hollywood for perhaps her best remembered role, that of Anna, one of the resistance workers in Beasts of Berlin (1939), the exploitation drama that put ramshackle PRC on the map. Her other 1940s roles were minor and she had to wait until 1958 and The Return of Dracula to make any kind of impact. In this not-as-bad-as-it-sounds horror pastiche she played a stout California housewife welcoming Francis Lederer's count to her suburban home -- with the expected results. Retiring permanently from the screen in 1970, Granstedt relocated to Canada and raised Appaloosa horses.

Trivia: The inimitable American actress Kathleen Freeman has been convulsing film audiences with portrayals of dowdy, sharp-tongued matrons since she was in her 20s. After stage work, Freeman began taking bit roles in major-studio features in 1948, seldom getting screen credit but always making a positive impression. The best of her earliest roles was in Singin' in the Rain (1952); Freeman played long-suffering vocal coach Phoebe Dinsmore, whose Herculean efforts to get dumb movie star Jean Hagen to grasp the proper enunciation of the phrase "I can't staaaand him" proved uproariously futile. Often cast as domestics, Freeman had a year's run in 1953 as the "spooked" maid on the ghostly TV sitcom Topper. Freeman was a particular favorite of comedian Jerry Lewis, who cast the actress in showy (and billed!) roles in such farces as The Errand Boy (1961), The Nutty Professor (1963) and Who's Got the Action?. As Nurse Higgins in Lewis' Disorderly Orderly (1964), Freeman weeps quietly as Jerry meekly scrapes oatmeal off her face and babbles "Oh, Nurse Higgins...you're all full of...stuff." Lewis so trusted Freeman's acting instincts that he sent her to the set of director William Wyler's The Collector (1965) in order to help build up the confidence of Wyler's nervous young leading lady Samantha Eggar. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Freeman took occasional "sabbaticals" from her movie and TV assignments to do stage work, enjoying a lengthy run in a Chicago production of Ira Levin's Deathtrap. Like many character actors of the '50s, Kathleen Freeman is frequently called upon to buoy the projects of baby-boomer directors: she was recently seen as an hysterical Julia Child clone in Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990).

Trivia: A man often referred to as "the Henry Higgins of Hollywood," Robert Easton was one of the most sought-after dialect coaches in the movie industry for decades. In that capacity, he worked with A-list clients including Sir Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, Anne Hathaway, Ben Kingsley and Robert Duvall. Easton devoted the rest of his time to supporting character roles, that took advantage of his uncanny ability to slip from one regional or ethnic accent into another.In the beginning, Milwaukee native Easton earned much of his cinematic bread and butter playing Southerners. He first gained national attention as one of the "Quiz Kids" on the radio series of the same name. In films from 1949, the gangling Easton was often seen as a blank-faced, slow-talking hayseed. He appeared in guest spots on series including The Beverly Hillbillies, Get Smart, The Mod Squad and The Bionic Woman, voiced a regular character on the animated program Stingray from 1964 through 1965, and turned up in features such as Pete's Dragon, Working Girl, Pet Sematary II, Needful Things and Primary Colors. Easton died at age 81 in December 2011.

Trivia: Child actor Teddy Infuhr made his first screen appearance as one of Charles Laughton's kids in 1942's The Tuttles of Tahiti. Long associated with Universal Pictures, Infuhr garnered a great deal of critical attention for his brief appearance as a mute, semi-autistic pygmy in Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman (1944). Later on, he showed up as one of the anonymous children of Ma and Pa Kettle (Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride) in Universal's The Egg and I; when the Kettles were spun off into their own long-running movie series, Infuhr remained with the backwoods brood, usually cast as either George or Benjamin Kettle. One of his many free-lance assignments was Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), in which the poor boy suffered one of the most horrible deaths ever inflicted upon a movie juvenile. Teddy Infuhr's film career came to a quiet close in the early 1950s. He died in June 2007 at age 70.

Trivia: Juvenile performer Carl Switzer and his brother, Harold, began singing at local functions in their Illinois hometown. While visiting an aunt in California, the Switzer boys accompanied their mother to Hal Roach Studios, then proceeded to warble a hillbilly ditty in the Roach cafeteria. This performance won them both contracts at Roach, though only Carl achieved any sort of stardom. Nicknamed "Alfalfa," Carl became a popular member of the Our Gang kids, his performances distinguished by his cowlicked hair, vacuous grin, and off-key singing. Few who have seen The Our Gang Follies of 1938 can ever forget the sight of Alfalfa being pelted with tomatoes as he bravely vocalizes the immortal aria "I'm the Bar-ber of Sevilllllle!" The boy remained with Our Gang when Roach sold the property to MGM in 1938; his last Gang short was 1940's Kiddie Kure. Switzer found it hard to get film roles after his Our Gang tenure, especially when he began to mature. By the early '50s, his movie appearances had dwindled to bits. Switzer's handful of worthwhile adult film roles include a 100-year-old Indian in director William Wellman's Track of the Cat (1954); he was also a semi-regular on Roy Rogers' TV series. Throughout most of the 1950s, he supported himself as a hunting guide and bartender. Miles removed from the lovable Alfalfa, 32-year-old Carl Switzer was killed in a boozy brawl over a 50-dollar debt.

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: Known to fans of the Three Stooges and television's I Love Lucy show, plain-speaking Margie Liszt hailed from radio where she had briefly starred as Miss Duffy on the popular variety show Duffy's Tavern. When the program was turned into a musical by Paramount in 1945, the role was played by Broadway actress, Ann Thomas and Lizst instead began her association with the Stooges. She later also appeared on such diverse television programs as Rawhide and The Donna Reed Show.