Trivia: American actor Richard Crenna started out as a radio performer at age 11, demonstrating an astonishing range for one so young. The momentum of his career was unaffected by an army hitch and time spent earning an English degree at the University of Southern California. But even though he was by then in his twenties, Crenna found himself still playing adolescents, notably squeaky-voiced high schooler Walter Denton on the radio comedy Our Miss Brooks. That he was able to play characters of virtually any age was overlooked by movie and TV casting directors, who could see Crenna only in callow-juvenile roles. After making an excellent impression as ballplayer Daffy Dean in the 1953 film Pride of St. Louis, for example, Crenna wasn't cast in another film until the 1955 movie version of Our Miss Brooks--in which, at 29, he was Walter Denton once more. The following year, Crenna decided "to sorta let Walter Denton die," and took a decidedly mature role in the sleazy exploitation film Over-Exposed (1956). It was a fully grown Crenna who took on the role of Luke McCoy on the Walter Brennan TV series The Real McCoys, which ran from 1957 through 1963 and which gave Crenna his first opportunities as a director. After McCoys, Crenna found himself facing potential career standstill again, since it seemed that now he was typed as the rubeish Luke McCoy. This time, however, the actor had impressed enough producers with his dogged work ethic and the range displayed in guest-star appearances. In 1964, Crenna was cast in a prestigious TV drama For the People as assistant DA David Koster, and though the program lasted only one season, Crenna was firmly established as a compelling dramatic actor. Still, and despite solid Richard Crenna film performances in The Sand Pebbles (1966), Body Heat (1981) and The Flamingo Kid (1985), the actor has never completely escaped the spectre of Walter Denton. Crenna was able to conjure up the old adenoidal Denton voice on talk shows of the 1980s and 1990s, and in the action-film spoof Hot Shots: Part Deux, the actor, with an absolute straight face, portrayed Colonel Denton Walters!

Trivia: The daughter of a retired sea captain, British actress Norma Varden was a piano prodigy. After study in Paris, she played concerts into her teens, but at last decided that this was be an uncertain method of making a living--so she went to the "security" of acting. In her first stage appearance in Peter Pan, Varden, not yet twenty, portrayed the adult role of Mrs. Darling, setting the standard for her subsequent stage and film work; too tall and mature-looking for ingenues, she would enjoy a long career in character roles. Bored with dramatic assignments, Varden gave comedy a try at the famous Aldwych Theatre, where from 1929 through 1933 she was resident character comedienne in the theatre's well-received marital farces. After her talkie debut in the Aldwych comedy A Night Like This (1930), she remained busy on the British film scene for over a decade. Moving to Hollywood in 1941, she found that the typecasting system frequently precluded large roles: Though she was well served as Robert Benchley's wife in The Major and the Minor (1942), for example, her next assignment was the unbilled role of a pickpocket victim's wife in Casablanca (1942). Her work encompassed radio as well as films for the rest of the decade; in nearly all her assignments Norma played a haughty British or New York aristocrat who looked down with disdain at the "commoners." By the '50s, she was enjoying such sizeable parts as the society lady who is nearly strangled by Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train (1951), the bejeweled wife of "sugar daddy" Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and George Sanders' dragonlike mother in Jupiter's Darling (1955). Norma Varden's greatest film role might have been as the mother superior in The Sound of Music (1965), but the producers decided to go with Peggy Wood, consigning Varden to the small but showy part of Frau Schmidt, the Von Trapps' housekeeper. After countless television and film assignments, Norma Varden retired in 1972, spending most of her time thereafter as a spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild, battling for better medical benefits for older actors.

Trivia: With his crotchety persona, wrinkled visage, and nervous manner, Forrest Lewis is best remembered by most viewers for the neurotic and comical old man roles that he played in dozens of movies and television shows in the 1950s and '60s -- he was somewhere between Harry Carey Sr. and Strother Martin in his characterizations for over two decades. In reality, he'd been playing old men since the age of 20, in 1919. Born in Knightstown, IN, in 1899, Lewis was a linear descendant of Meriwether Lewis, the explorer immortalized by the Lewis and Clark expedition. Forrest Lewis was drawn to performing as a boy, and made his first appearance on a theatrical stage as a singer, at age 12. He made his professional acting debut at 20, with the Emerson Stock Company, portraying an 80-year-old man. Over the next decade, he toured the United States in vaudeville and stock companies, before landing on Broadway in Lulu Belle, starring Lenore Ulric. Radio began its boom years in the late '20s, and Lewis made his debut in the commercial broadcast medium in 1929. He had some small roles until fate took a hand; he inadvertently received a call for an audition that had been intended for another actor, and won the part. There was no looking back for Lewis, who was busy from then on, playing numerous key supporting roles, including Harry Freeman on the radio series Scattergood Baines and (with Van McCune) one half of the comedy team of Buck and Wheat, on the Aunt Jemima radio show. Lewis resisted offers to appear in movies until the mid-'40s, when he began playing character roles -- mostly far older (or acting far older) than his 44 years -- in movies such as Gildersleeve on Broadway (1943) and I'll Tell the World (1945). Lewis' career remained focused on radio, however, until that medium began retrenching in the early '50s. He jumped to television on Amos 'n' Andy and Dragnet, and also became downright ubiquitous on the big screen during the first half of the 1950s, playing a succession of doctors, judges, nit-picking public officials, police officers, and crotchety old men. Westerns predominated as a genre in his film career, but he also played in a few Disney movies (The Shaggy Dog, Son of Flubber) and even two minor B-horror classics, The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958) and The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959), the latter offering Lewis one of the biggest parts of his career, as the town constable faced with a series of grisly murders. And Howard Hawks used him in Man's Favorite Sport? (1964) and Red Line 7000 (1965). By the time of Riot on Sunset Strip (1967), in which he played a senior citizen seen in the movie's opening who expresses his anger over the behavior of the teenagers on the renowned stretch of Los Angeles real estate, Lewis had aged into the role. He died in 1977 of a heart attack at age 77, four years after his last television appearance.