Trivia: Steve McQueen was the prototypical example of a new sort of movie star which emerged in the 1950s and would come to dominate the screen in the 1960s and '70s -- a cool, remote loner who knew how to use his fists without seeming like a run-of-the-mill tough guy, a thoughtful man in no way an effete intellectual, a rebel who played by his own rules and lived by his own moral code, while often succeeding on his own terms. While McQueen was one of the first notable examples of this new breed of antihero (along with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman), he was also among the most successful, and was able to succeed as an iconoclast and one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws at the same time.Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Indianapolis, IN, on March 24, 1930. In many ways, McQueen's childhood was not a happy one; his father and mother split up before his first birthday, and he was sent to live with his great uncle on a farm in Missouri. After he turned nine, McQueen's mother had married again, and he was sent to California to join her. By his teens, McQueen had developed a rebellious streak, and he began spending time with a group of juvenile delinquents; McQueen's misdeeds led his mother to send him to Boys' Republic, a California reform school. After ninth grade, McQueen left formal education behind, and after a spell wandering the country, he joined the Marine Corps in 1947. McQueen's hitch with the Leathernecks did little to change his anti-authoritarian attitude; he spent 41 days in the brig after going Absent With Out Leave for two weeks.After leaving the Marines in 1950, McQueen moved to New York City, where he held down a number of short-term jobs while trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At the suggestion of a friend, McQueen began to look into acting, and developed an enthusiasm for the theater. In 1952, he began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. After making an impression in a number of small off-Broadway productions, McQueen was accepted into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actor's Studio, where he further honed his skills. In 1956, McQueen made his Broadway debut and won rave reviews when he replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead of the acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain. The same year, McQueen made his film debut, playing a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me alongside Paul Newman, and he married dancer Neile Adams. In 1958, after two years of stage work and television appearances, McQueen scored his first leading role in a film as Steve, a noble and rather intense teenager in the sci-fi cult item The Blob, while later that same year he scored another lead, in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's moody performances as bounty hunter Josh Randall elevated him to stardom, and in 1960, he appeared in the big-budget Western The Magnificent Seven (an Americanized remake of The Seven Samurai), confirming that his new stardom shone just as brightly on the big screen. In 1961, McQueen completed his run on Wanted: Dead or Alive and concentrated on film roles, appearing in comedies (The Honeymoon Machine, Love With a Proper Stranger) as well as action roles (Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover). In 1963, McQueen starred in The Great Escape, an action-packed World War II drama whose blockbuster success confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men; McQueen also did his own daredevil motorcycle stunts in the film, reflecting his offscreen passion for motorcycle and auto racing. (McQueen would also display his enthusiasm for bikes as narrator of a documentary on dirt-bike racing, On Any Sunday).Through the end of the 1960s, McQueen starred in a long string of box-office successes, but in the early '70s, he appeared in two unexpected disappointments -- 1971's Le Mans, a racing film that failed to capture the excitement of the famed 24-hour race, and 1972's Junior Bonner, an atypically good-natured Sam Peckinpah movie that earned enthusiastic reviews but failed at the box office. Later that year, McQueen would team up again with Peckinpah for a more typical (and much more successful) action film, The Getaway, which co-starred Ali MacGraw. McQueen had divorced Neile Adams in 1971, and while shooting The Getaway, he and MacGraw (who was then married to producer Robert Evans) became romantically involved. In 1973, after MacGraw divorced Evans, she married McQueen; the marriage would last until 1977.After two more big-budget blockbusters, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, McQueen disappeared from screens for several years. In 1977, he served as both leading man and executive producer for a screen adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which fared poorly with both critics and audiences when it was finally released a year and a half after it was completed. In 1980, it seemed that McQueen was poised for a comeback when he appeared in two films -- an ambitious Western drama, Tom Horn, which McQueen co-directed without credit, and The Hunter, an action picture in which he played a modern-day bounty hunter -- and he wed for a third time, marrying model Barbara Minty in January of that year. However, McQueen's burst of activity hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a highly virulent form of lung cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. After conventional treatment failed to stem the spread of the disease, McQueen traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he underwent therapy at an experimental cancer clinic. Despite the efforts of McQueen and his doctors, the actor died on November 7, 1980. He left behind two children, Chad McQueen, who went on to his own career as an actor, and daughter Terry McQueen, who died of cancer in 1998.

Trivia: Mara Corday's principal career in movies only lasted seven years, from 1951 until 1958, but as a result of a handful of those films -- coupled with her status as one of the most photographed models of her era -- she has maintained a fandom for 50 years. This is especially true among science fiction buffs, among whom Corday's three movies in the genre -- Tarantula, The Giant Claw, and The Black Scorpion -- remain beloved films of their era. She was born Marilyn Watts in Santa Monica, CA, and displayed an outgoing personality at an early age. Her modeling career began while she was still in her teens, and by the end of the 1940s, when she was 17, Corday was also working as a chorus girl at the Earl Carroll Theatre. Following Carroll's death, she joined the George White Scandals of 1950, and was part of the cast of a stage production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Corday was lucky enough in 1951 to appear in a small Los Angeles production of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, where she was seen by Paul Kohner, one of Hollywood's top agents. Kohner offered to represent her, and there followed a string of appearances for Corday in supporting roles on shows like Kit Carson, starring Bill Williams, as well as bit parts in movies such as Two Tickets to Broadway (1951) at RKO, Sea Tiger (1952) at Monogram, and Problem Girls at Columbia. Corday was also briefly signed up with legendary producer Hal Wallis -- this coincided with her appearance in the Wallis-produced Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis 3-D comedy Money From Home (1953) at Paramount. Unfortunately, her brief contractual link-up with Wallis yielded no further work in films of that prominence, and her next two films were with Republic Pictures. Her contact with Wallis, however, yielded a screen test that got Corday a spot as a contract player at Universal in 1954. This not only secured her a steady income and a series of small (but gradually larger) roles in various Universal features, among them the musical So This Is Paris (1954), but also training in the finer points of acting. The studio also featured young players like Corday, Grant Williams, and Clint Eastwood any place they could, such as their appearances as contract players in the 1955 network television special Allen in Movieland, hooked around the studio's upcoming release of The Benny Goodman Story. Corday was still pursuing her modeling career, and by 1955 was one of the most photographed women on the West Coast, a fact that wasn't lost on the studio -- Universal's management, in turn, began putting her into better movies, including the Kirk Douglas feature Man Without a Star (1955), directed by King Vidor. Ironically, even as she was getting bigger and better roles in movies aimed at mainstream audiences -- including Harmon Jones' A Day of Fury (1956), which arguably contains Corday's best work -- it was her work in a trio of genre films that would ensure Corday a devoted fandom for decades to come. Jack Arnold's Tarantula (1955) showed off the actress in a demure, intelligent role as a scientist's assistant, quite unlike the hardboiled girls from the wrong side of the tracks that she often played; and while the 200-foot-tall spider of the title attracted a lot of attention, Corday's good looks were impossible to ignore as well. In The Giant Claw (1957), which suffered from ludicrous special effects, she was the best thing to look at in the movie, even for filmgoers under age 13; and in The Black Scorpion (1957), she even supplied her wardrobe, and looked nothing less than stunning in virtually all of her scenes, and got to act the role of a full-blooded heroine, complete with acts of bravery of her own. Corday's modeling career had continued uninterrupted, culminating in October 1958 when she was the Playmate of the Month in Playboy magazine -- she would probably have been able to build on the momentum of the Playboy issue, but for the fact that she married actor Richard Long, who insisted that she stay at home to raise their family. Following Long's death in 1974, Corday resumed her career with help from the most successful of her fellow Universal contract players, Clint Eastwood, who got her roles in The Gauntlet (1977), Sudden Impact (1983), Pink Cadillac (1989), and The Rookie (1990). Corday has been working on various film-related writing projects, and has also been delighted to discover that she has a fandom.

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."