Trivia: The son of a Poughkeepsie garment manufacturer, Richard Denning majored in foreign trade and accounting at Woodbury College with the intent of taking over his father's business. Coming to Hollywood after winning a minor-league radio talent contest, Denning was signed to a Paramount stock-player contract in 1937. He made his debut in Hold Em Navy. Handsome and virile, Denning wasn't given much of an opportunity to display anything beyond his physical attributes in his first film appearances. He continued as a competent if colorless leading man into the postwar years where one of his best known roles was the human lead in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Denning was seen to better advantage on television as the star of the popular comedy/mystery series Mr. and Mrs. North (1952-54); he later played the title roles in the weekly The Flying Doctor (1959) and Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1960). He also co-starred on radio with Lucille Ball in My Favorite Husband, the late-1940s precursor to I Love Lucy While living in semi-retirement in Hawaii with his wife, actress Evelyn Ankers, Denning made sporadic appearances as the governor of that state on the long-running TV police drama Hawaii 5-0. Richard Denning has spent the last three decades serving as a lay minister in the Lutheran church.

Trivia: New Mexico-born Lori Nelson spent much of her childhood in radio stations and photo studios as a juvenile actress and model. Signed by Universal in 1952, Nelson played opposite Jimmy Stewart, and also starred in Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule, all within the space of one year. She freelanced in the mid-'50s, landing reasonably good roles in such films as Warners' I Died a Thousand Times (1955) and Paramount's Pardners (1956) before settling for Grade-Z drive-in fare like Hot Rod Girl. After a year of starring as Greta Lindquist in the syndicated TV sitcom How to Marry a Millionaire, Lori Nelson left the show in 1959 to seek out more challenging roles; when the calls stopped coming in, Nelson reinvented herself as a successful cosmetics manufacturer.

Trivia: Actor/writer Paul Dubov did his first film work as a Universal contract player in 1942. Never a leading man, Dubov was the quintessential utility player, able to convey characters of virtually any age or ethnic range. He played sizeable roles in such modestly budgeted sci-fiers as The She Creature (1956), Atomic Submarine (1959) and The Underwater City (1960). In the early 1960s, he was given his first screenwriting opportunities through the auspices of Four Star Productions, headed by Dick Powell. With his wife Gwen Bagni, Dubov created and developed the Four Star TV series Honey West (1965), starring Anne Francis as a gadget-happy private eye. Paul Dubov's final screenplay credit, again in collaboration with Gwen Bagni, was the 1979 TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House.

Trivia: Blonde, Brooklyn-born model and chorus girl Adele Jergens gained national fame when she was elected "Miss World's Fairest" at the 1939 World's Fair; if one chose to believe her "official" birth date, she was 13 years old at the time. Signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1944, Jergens showed up in that studio's "A" and "B" product in a succession of hard-boiled and "loose" roles. Her most curious assignment at Columbia was 1949's Ladies of The Chorus, wherein 27-year-old Jergens played the mother of 23-year-old Marilyn Monroe. Evidently, Jergens was possessed of a good nature, else she wouldn't have seemed so comfortable playing the foil to such comedians as Red Skelton, Abbott & Costello, Alan Young and even the Bowery Boys. Mostly consigned to programmers in the 1950s, Jergens enjoyed a rare "A" part in MGM's psychological melodrama The Cobweb. Adele Jergens was the widow of actor Glenn Langan, whom she married in 1949.

Trivia: Born Krekor Ohanian, American actor Mike Connors was born and raised in the heavily Armenian community of Fresno, California. He studied law at UCLA, but distinguished himself in sports (he'd gotten in on a basketball scholarship). While in the Air Force, Connors switched his career goals to acting on the advice of producer/director William Wellman, who'd remembered Connors' college athletic activities. Hollywood changed young Mr. Ohanian's last name to Connors, and since this was the era of "Rocks" and "Tabs" it was decided that the actor needed a suitably rugged first name. So Connors spent his first few acting years as Touch Connors, a nickname he'd gotten while playing college football. His first picture was the Joan Crawford vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) but handsome hunks were a glut on the market in the early '50s, so Connors found himself in "B" pictures, mostly at bargain-basement American International studios. Renaming himself "Mike," Connors was able to secure the lead role as an undercover agent on the 1959 detective series Tightrope. The series was a hit but was dropped from the network due to complaints about excessive violence, though it cleaned up in syndication for years afterward. After a few strong but non-starring roles in such films as Good Neighbor Sam (1963) and Where Love Has Gone (1964), Connors landed the title role in Mannix (1967), a weekly TV actioner about a trouble-prone private eye. For the next eight high-rated seasons, Connors' Joe Mannix was beaten up, shot at, cold-cocked and nearly run over in those ubiquitous underground parking lots each and every week. The series ran in over 70 foreign countries, allowing Connors a generous chunk of profits percentages in addition to his lofty weekly salary-- which became loftier each time that the actor announced plans to retire. Mike Connors has starred in the 1981 series Today's FBI and filmed a cop-show pilot titled Ohanian (playing a character with his own real name), but nothing has quite captured the public's fancy, or been as lucrative in reruns, as Connors' chef d'ouevre series Mannix.

Trivia: Flinty character actor Paul Birch was strictly a Broadway performer until switching to films in 1952. It didn't take long for Birch to be typecast in science fiction films after playing one of the three "vaporized" locals at the beginning of 1953's The War of the Worlds. Birch's more memorable cinema fantastique assignments included The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955), The Day the World Ended (1956), The 27th Day (1957), and Queen of Outer Space (1958). In 1957, he played the melancholy leading role in Roger Corman's Not of This Earth (1957). Not exclusively confined to flying-saucer epics, Paul Birch was also seen in such roles as the Police Chief in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the Mayor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Trivia: Looking for all the world like a beardless Rumpelstiltskin, actor Raymond Hatton utilized his offbeat facial features and gift for mimicry in vaudeville, where he appeared from the age of 12 onward. In films from 1914, Hatton was starred or co-starred in several of the early Cecil B. DeMille productions, notably The Whispering Chorus (1917), in which the actor delivered a bravura performance as a man arrested for murdering himself. Though he played a vast array of characters in the late teens and early 1920s, by 1926 Hatton had settled into rubeish character roles. He was teamed with Wallace Beery in several popular Paramount comedies of the late silent era, notably Behind the Front (1926) and Now We're in the Air (1927). Curiously, while Beery's career skyrocketed in the 1930s, Hatton's stardom diminished, though he was every bit as talented as his former partner. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hatton showed up as comic sidekick to such western stars as Johnny Mack Brown and Bob Livingston. He was usually cast as a grizzled old desert rat, even when (as in the case of the "Rough Riders" series with Buck Jones and Tim McCoy) he happened to be younger than the nominal leading man. Raymond Hatton continued to act into the 1960s, showing up on such TV series as The Abbott and Costello Show and Superman and in several American-International quickies. Raymond Hatton's last screen appearance was as the old man collecting bottles along the highway in Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967).

Trivia: Jonathan Haze was, for most of a decade, one of the most recognizable faces in the films of Roger Corman, as well as one of the most beloved members of Corman's stock company of players. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1929, he was living in California and working at a gas station when, in 1954, a friend and customer, Wyott Ordung -- who was directing a picture called Monster From the Ocean Floor, the first movie produced by Corman -- offered him a small role in the movie, as a Mexican laborer. Billed as "Jack Hayes," he was as good as any of the more experienced players in the hastily shot sci-fi thriller, and while Corman and Ordung parted company as soon as the film wrapped, the producer liked Haze's work sufficiently to offer him more; Haze, in turn, brought an aspiring writer friend of his, Dick Miller, into Corman's orbit. Haze's next screen appearance was as an outlaw sent on a dangerous mission in the closing days of the Civil War, in Five Guns West (1955), which Corman directed as well as produced. Haze went on to appear in most (if not all) of Corman's movies over the next ten years, often playing wild and eccentric characters. A radiation-scarred victim of atomic attack in The Day the World Ended, a hapless soldier in It Conquered the World (1956), and a suspicious and libidinous chauffeur in Not of This Earth (1957) were some of his more visible parts. But it was in 1960 that he achieved stardom in Corman's Little Shop of Horrors. Well-meaning, not-too-bright flower shop assistant Seymour Krelboin, who breeds a man-eating plant, was the role of a lifetime, and Haze ran with it -- he brought to bear his best comedic instincts and carried the movie in tandem with Mel Welles as Seymour's employer, Gravis Mushnik, and Jackie Joseph as Seymour's would-be girlfriend, Audrey. Following Little Shop, Haze started moving into other areas of filmmaking. In 1961, he wrote the screenplay for the American International Pictures sci-fi spoof Invasion of the Star Creatures, and he later worked Corman's The Born Losers (1967) -- the movie that introduced Tom Laughlin's character Billy Jack. The following year, however, Haze moved into a whole different stratum of filmmaking with work on Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), among other films. In 1982, Jonathan Haze was seen fleetingly as the "Dapper Man" in the slapdash action flick Vice Squad.

Trivia: Paul Blaisdell's career was the stuff that nightmares were made of, especially for baby-boomer filmgoers. Blaisdell's career in movies lasted barely four years, and seldom involved pictures budgeted even in the six-figure range. If he isn't remotely as well known as, say, Dennis Muren or Jim Danforth, then that's because he never had more than a fraction of their budgets to work with. Blaisdell was born in Newport, RI, in 1927, and attended the New England School of Art and Design. Among his first steady work assignments after graduation was as an illustrator for various science fiction pulp magazines. It was during this period that Blaisdell entered the orbit of Forest J. Ackerman, a science fiction writer who would later become famous as the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman became Blaisdell's agent, and this led to his entry into movies. One day in 1955, Ackerman received a call from fledgling producer/director Roger Corman, who had completed a film called The Beast With a Million Eyes, which played nicely enough, but for one problem -- it had no monster. Corman made the movie knowing that he couldn't afford much of a monster, and had built the plot around the idea of an alien consciousness that occupied the bodies of existing animals; it was a clever idea, but the movie's distributors knew that audiences that had paid to see a monster movie would expect to see a monster in the movie. Corman needed an affordable creature, and Ackerman steered him to Blaisdell, who created a barely believable alien and a flying saucer for 200 dollars.All of a sudden, low-budget filmwork started coming Blaisdell's way and over the next three years, he worked on more than a dozen features, devising and animating a vast array of unearthly creatures, as well as sets, special effects, and props. Blaisdell was responsible for the design of the Tabonga, the walking killer tree stump of From Hell It Came, the three-eyed mutant in Roger Corman's doomsday drama The Day the World Ended, and the bulbous-headed Martians of Edward L. Cahn's Invasion of the Saucer Men. He also contributed to films such as Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man (he devised and built the giant hypodermic needle), Attack of the Puppet People, and Earth vs. the Spider. Blaisdell's most enduring creation was the title character for Edward L. Cahn's The She Creature -- the huge figure, sporting breasts and what amounted to natural prehistoric armor, immense strength, and rows of teeth in the most improbable places (anticipating the attributes of the title creature from Alien), was genuinely scary. Not all of Blaisdell's creations worked out quite so well, alas. The title-creature from It Conquered the World was intended as something unearthly; and -- given the supposedly steamy conditions on the planet Venus, whence it came -- perhaps it should have looked like something that would grow in a greenhouse; but it should not have looked like an angry turnip, which is exactly what it did look like. Despite lapses like this, Blaisdell's successes still outshone his failures. One of his most grisly creations was for the movie Not of this Earth, a small, hovering alien assassin-creature, which he devised around the framework of an umbrella -- equally impressive was the "embryo" state of the alien, which Blaisdell also created. Blaisdell made small onscreen appearances as an extra in some productions, such as Motorcycle Gang and Dragstrip Girl, and was very much a part of the business by 1958. His screen career ended that year, however, owing to a series of unfortunate incidents -- several of his creations were destroyed in a fire during the shooting of How to Make a Monster, and his proposed budget for the movie Beast From the Haunted Cave was rejected. He did one last job, for Edward L. Cahn, who was making a sci-fi/horror film at United Artists and needed a monster -- the resulting creature, for It! The Terror From Beyond Space, looked scary in silhouette or close-up, and the latter showed some of his inspiration on the fly when the headpiece proved too small for actor Ray "Crash" Corrigan, whose chin protruded from it, so Blaisdell painted the chin red and made it look like an alien tongue. He left the business in 1959 to return to carpentry and more conventional design work, and was forgotten by everyone except a few fellow professionals and millions of baby boomers who grew up with (and often had nightmares built around) his creations. Blaisdell would probably have gotten his due amid the boom of interest in 1950s sci-fi, during the 1980s and 1990s, and might even have found some financial reward on the convention circuit and designing model kits and masks, but it wasn't to be. Paul Blaisdell died of cancer in 1983 just a few days short of his 55th birthday, and a few years too soon for fame to finally find him.