Trivia: Raised in Bronxville, N.Y., the granddaughter of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Anne Baxter took up acting at the age of 11 with Maria Ouspenskaya, debuting on Broadway two years later (in Seen but Not Heard); she continued working on Broadway until her screen debut at age 17 in Twenty-Mule Team (1940), a minor Western featuring Wallace Beery and Marjorie Rambeau. Charming if not beautiful, she tended to play shy and innocent types and gave a few outstanding performances, such as that with Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950); she and Davis were both nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, but it went to Judy Holliday. Her "breakthrough" film was Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), leading to many more roles in the next few years. At home in a variety of parts, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1946 for her work in The Razor's Edge. Although she has worked with many of Hollywood's most celebrated and accomplished directors (Welles, Hitchcock, Lang, Mankiewicz, Wilder Wellman), after the mid-'50s she tended to get poor roles in mediocre movies. Baxter left Hollywood in 1961 for an isolated cattle station in Australia, an experience she described in her critically-acclaimed book Intermission: A True Story. She made a few more films, but her major work was as Lauren Bacall's replacement as Margo Channing in Applause, the musical version of All About Eve; having played Eve in the film, she now assumed the role earlier held by Davis. Baxter also did some TV work, including a part in the early '80s series Hotel. She was married from 1946-53 to actor John Hodiak, whom she met while filming Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944).

Trivia: From his late teens to his late 20s, Ralph Bellamy worked with 15 different traveling stock companies, not just as an actor but also as a director, producer, set designer, and prop handler. In 1927 he started his own company, the Ralph Bellamy Players. He debuted on Broadway in 1929, then broke into films in 1931. He went on to play leads in dozens of B-movies; he also played the title role in the "Ellery Queen" series. For his work in The Awful Truth (1937) he received an Oscar nomination, playing the "other man" who loses the girl to the hero; he was soon typecast in this sort of role in sophisticated comedies. After 1945 his film work was highly sporadic as he changed his focus to the stage, going on to play leads in many Broadway productions; for his portrayal of FDR in Sunrise at Campobello (1958) he won a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award. From 1940-60 he served on the State of California Arts Commission. From 1952-64 he was the president of Actors' Equity. In 1986 he was awarded an honorary Oscar "for his unique artistry and his distinguished service to the profession of acting." He authored an autobiography, When the Smoke Hits the Fan (1979).

Trivia: A 1941 RKO radio press book claimed that actress Ruth Warrick first came to New York as the winner of something called the "Miss Jubelesta" contest, carrying a live turkey into Mayor LaGuardia's office. It's a safe bet Warrick, a former radio singer and model, would rather be remembered for her first Hollywood accomplishment, which was certainly no turkey: the role of Emily Monroe Norton, Mrs. Kane number one, in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Much too reserved and aristocratic for standard leading lady roles, Warrick was seen to better advantage in character parts. Since 1970, Ruth Warrick has starred as a snooty, status-conscious doctor's wife on the ABC daytime drama All My Children; Warrick alluded to this long-running character in the title of her 1980 autobiography, The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler.

Trivia: Shortly after graduating from Barnard College in 1920, Aline MacMahon made her New York debut in The Madras House. She was lavishly praised by the Manhattan critics for her starring turn in the 1926 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon. After appearing in the 1930 Kaufman-Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime, MacMahon was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role in the film version. Production delays allowed her to work elsewhere, thus her screen bow was in Warner Bros.' Five Star Final (1931). She was stuck in a "wisecracking dame" rut until her moving portrayal of philandering silver tycoon Edward G. Robinson's careworn wife in Silver Dollar (1932). In 1944, she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Katharine Hepburn's Chinese mother in Dragon Seed. More than a decade later, MacMahon appeared as James Agee's grandmother in both the stage and screen versions of All the Way Home. Retiring from films in 1963, Aline MacMahon continued performing on stage, joining New York's Lincoln Repertory troupe just after turning 65.

Trivia: Actor Scott McKay performed on stage, television, and occasionally in feature films.

Trivia: From vaudeville and stock companies, actor Jerome Cowan graduated to Broadway in the now-forgotten farce We've Gotta Have Money. While starring in the 1935 Broadway hit Boy Meets Girl, Cowan was spotted by movie producer Sam Goldwyn, who cast Cowan as a sensitive Irish rebel in 1936's Beloved Enemy. Most of Cowan's subsequent films found him playing glib lawyers, shifty business executives and jilted suitors. A longtime resident at Warner Bros., the pencil-mustached Cowan appeared in several substantial character parts from 1940 through 1949, notably the doomed private eye Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. Warners gave Cowan the opportunity to be a romantic leading man in two "B" films, Crime By Night (42) and Find the Blackmailer (43). As the years rolled on, Cowan's air of slightly unscrupulous urbanity gave way to respectability, and in this vein he was ideally suited for the role of Dagwood Bumstead's new boss Mr. Radcliffe in several installments of Columbia's Blondie series; he also scored in such flustered roles as the hapless district attorney in Miracle on 34th Street. Cowan briefly left Hollywood in 1950 to pursue more worthwhile roles on stage and TV; he starred in the Broadway play My Three Angels and was top-billed on the 1951 TV series Not for Publication. In his fifties and sixties, Cowan continued essaying roles calling for easily deflated dignity (e.g. The Three Stooges' Have Rocket Will Travel [59] and Jerry Lewis' Visit to a Small Planet [60]) and made regular supporting appearances on several TV series, among them Valiant Lady, The Tab Hunter Show, Many Happy Returns and Tycoon.

Trivia: Curvaceous model Marie McDonald entered films in 1942, floundering in bit roles until a savvy press agent found an appropriate "tag" for her. Promoted as Marie "The Body" McDonald, she appeared in a number of decorative movie and TV roles that made few demands on her histrionic talents but emphasized her physical attributes to the Nth degree. Unlike such sex symbols as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, who managed to temper their overt eroticism with a touch of little-girl vulnerability, McDonald always seemed a bit hard and calculating on screen. Perhaps this is why we all laughed unashamedly when McDonald, cast as a Monroe-like starlet in The Geisha Boy (1958), was publicly humiliated by bumbling Jerry Lewis. When her film career dried up, McDonald began to indulge in some rather desperate publicity stunts; at one point, she ripped a page from the repertoire of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, claiming that she'd been kidnapped and bundled off to the desert. Even when her unorthodox behavior didn't make the headlines, McDonald could count upon her seven marriages to keep her name in print. Marie McDonald died of an apparent drug overdose at the age of 42.

Trivia: Familiar to million as the twangy, bucolic Pa Kettle, Percy Kilbride first stepped on the stage in the role of an 18th-century French fop in a San Francisco production of Tale of Two Cities. Interrupting his career to serve in World War I, Kilbride spent the postwar years in regional stock companies. He made a few scattered movie appearances in the 1930s, then returned to Hollywood to stay in 1942, when he re-created his Broadway role in the film version of George Washington Slept Here. Kilbride played a variety of rustic parts until 1947, when he created the Pa Kettle role in The Egg and I. From 1949 through 1955, he starred exclusively in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle series, retiring from the screen after Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955) (Kilbride's co-star Marjorie Main appeared in two more Kettle films opposite Arthur Hunnicutt and Parker Fennelly). In 1964, Percy Kilbride and his actor friend Ralf Belmont were crossing a Los Angeles street near Kilbride's home when a car struck both of them down; Belmont was killed instantly, but Kilbride survived long enough to undergo brain surgery. He died of his injuries after a long hospital stay.

Trivia: A kindergarten teacher in her native Cleveland, Margaret Hamilton began her acting career there in community theatre and with the prestigious Cleveland Playhouse. In 1933, Hamilton was invited to repeat her stage role of the sarcastic daughter-in-law in the Broadway play Another Language for the MGM film version. Though only in her early '30s, the gloriously unpretty Hamilton subsequently played dozens of busybodies, gossips, old maids, and housekeepers in films bearing such titles as Hat, Coat and Glove (1934), Way Down East (1935) and These Three (1936). She proved an excellent foil for such comedians as W.C. Fields (in 1940's My Little Chickadee) and Harold Lloyd (in 1946's The Sin of Harold Diddlebock). Her most famous film assignment was the dual role of Elvira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West in the imperishable 1939 gem The Wizard of Oz -- a role which nearly cost her her life when her green copper makeup caught fire during one of her "disappearance" scenes. She played several smaller but no less impressive roles at 20th Century-Fox, including the first-scene plot motivator in People Will Talk (1951) and Carrie Nation in Wabash Avenue (1950). She alternated her film work with stage assignments in the 1950s and 1960s, frequently returning to her home base at the Cleveland Playhouse. Achieving "icon" status in the 1970s by virtue of The Wizard of Oz, Hamilton sometimes found herself being cast for "camp" effect (e.g. Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud), but also enjoyed some of her best-ever parts, including the role of professorial occult expert in the 1972 TV movie The Night Strangler. Despite her menacing demeanor, Hamilton was a gentle, soft-spoken woman; she was especially fond of children, and showed up regularly on such PBS programs as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. In the 1970s, Margaret Hamilton added another sharply etched portrayal to her gallery of characters as general-store proprietor Cora on a popular series of Maxwell House coffee commercials -- one of which ran during a telecast of The Wizard of Oz!

Trivia: Supporting actor Murray Alper's earliest screen credit was 1930's The Royal Family of Broadway. For the next 35 years, Alper was an inescapable movie presence, playing dozens of cab drivers, bookies, cops and GIs. One of his few credited appearances in an "A" picture was in The Maltese Falcon; he plays the friendly cabbie who drives Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) on a mid-film wild goose chase. Frequently seen in comedies, Alper showed up in eight Bowery Boys farces of the 1940s and 1950s, and was prominently featured in the Three Stooges' Trick Dicks (1953) and The Outlaws is Coming (1965, as Chief Crazy Horse!). One of Murray Alper's least characteristic roles was the judo instructor in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor (1963).

Trivia: Brought to Hollywood on the strength of a talent contest, Ralph Bowman didn't change his name to John Archer until after appearing in a handful of films produced between 1938 and 1940. While he was generally tucked amongst the supporting players in such big-budgeters as Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and White Heat (1949), Archer could count on star billing and plenty of screen time in such "B"s as King of the Zombies (1941) and Bowery at Midnight (1942). In the mid-1940s, Archer starred on the weekly radio melodrama The Shadow. At one time married to actress Marjorie Lord, John Archer is the father of 1990s leading lady Anne Archer.

Trivia: A popular radio performer who starred on the popular soap "Let George Do It," Bob Bailey was one of many rather anonymous actors to obtain starring roles during the leading man shortage in WWII Hollywood. Contracted by 20th Century Fox, Bailey's most prominent appearances came in two latter-day Laurel and Hardy comedies, Jitterbugs and The Dancing Masters (both 1943). Although dropped from the studio roster at the end of the war, he continued to play the occasional supporting roles well into the 1950s but stardom eluded him.

Trivia: A descendant of one of California's pioneer families, American actor Ray Collins' interest in the theatre came naturally. His father was drama critic of the Sacramento Bee. Taking to the stage at age 14, Collins moved to British Columbia, where he briefly headed his own stock company, then went on to Broadway. An established theatre and radio performer by the mid-1930s, Collins began a rewarding association with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He played the "world's last living radio announcer" in Welles' legendary War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938, then moved to Hollywood with the Mercury troupe in 1939. Collins made his film debut as Boss Jim Gettys in Welles' film classic Citizen Kane (1940). After the Mercury disbanded in the early 1940s, Collins kept busy as a film and stage character actor, usually playing gruff business executives. Collins is most fondly remembered by TV fans of the mid-1950s for his continuing role as the intrepid Lt. Tragg on the weekly series Perry Mason.

Trivia: American filmmaker Blake Edwards was the grandson of J. Gordon Edwards, director of such silent film epics as The Queen of Sheba (1922). Blake started his own film career as an actor in 1943; he played bits in A-movies and leads in B-movies, paying his dues in such trivialities as Gangs of the Waterfront and Strangler of the Swamp (both 1945). He turned to writing radio scripts, distinguishing himself on the above-average Dick Powell detective series Richard Diamond. As a screenwriter and staff producer at Columbia, Edwards was frequently teamed with director Richard Quine for such lightweight entertainment as Sound Off (1952), Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1953), and Cruisin' Down the River (1953). He also served as associate producer on the popular syndicated Rod Cameron TV vehicle City Detective the same year. Given his first chance to direct a movie in 1955, Edwards turned out a Richard Quine-like musical, Bring Your Smile Along; ironically, as Edwards' prestige grew, his style would be imitated by Quine. A felicitous contract at Universal led Edwards to his first big box-office successes, including the Tony Curtis film Mister Cory (1957) and Cary Grant's Operation Petticoat (1959).In 1958, Edwards produced, directed, and occasionally wrote for a hip TV detective series, Peter Gunn, which was distinguished by its film noir camerawork and driving jazz score by Henry Mancini. A second series, Mr. Lucky (1959), contained many of the elements that made Peter Gunn popular, but suffered from a bad time slot and network interference. (Lucky was a gambler, a profession frowned upon by the more sanctimonious CBS executives.) The show did, however, introduce Edwards to actor Ross Martin, who later appeared as an asthmatic criminal in Edwards' film Experiment in Terror (1962). Continuing to turn out box-office bonanzas like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Edwards briefly jumped on the comedy bandwagon of the mid-'60s with the slapstick epic The Great Race (1965), which the director dedicated to his idols, "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy." (Edwards' next homage to the duo was the far less successful 1986 comedy A Fine Mess). In 1964, Edwards introduced the bumbling Inspector Clouseau to an unsuspecting world in The Pink Panther, leading to a string of money-spinning Clouseau films starring Peter Sellers; actually, The Pink Panther was Edwards' second Clouseau movie, since A Shot in the Dark, although released after Panther, was filmed first. Despite the carefree spirit and great success of his comedies, Edwards hit a snag with Darling Lili (1969), a World War I musical starring Edwards' wife Julie Andrews. The film was a questionable piece to begin with (audiences were asked to sympathize with a German spy who cheerfully sent young British pilots to their deaths), but was made incomprehensible by Paramount's ruthless editing. Darling Lili sent Edwards career into decline, although he came back with the 1979 comedy hit 10 and the scabrous satirical film S.O.B. (1981). Edwards' track record in the 1980s and '90s was uneven, with such films as Blind Date (1987), Sunset (1988), and Switch (1991). The director was also unsuccessful in his attempts to revive the Pink Panther comedies minus the services of Sellers (who had died in 1980) as Clouseau. Still, Edwards always seemed able to find someone to bankroll his projects. And he left something of a legacy to Hollywood through his actress daughter Jennifer Edwards and screenwriter son Geoffrey Edwards.In 2004, just when the world began to think it might never again hear from Edwards, the filmmaker gave a slapsticky acceptance speech in response to an honorary Academy Award. He died six years later, of complications from pneumonia, at the age of 88.

Trivia: During World War II, "victory casting" referred to the practice of placing draft-proof male actors in the plum roles that would normally have gone to Hollywood's top leading men, most of whom were in uniform. Though some of the "4-F" male stars were inadequate substitutes for the old favorites, a few were better-than-average performers. One of the best of the "victory" bunch was handsome, outgoing William Eythe, who signed with 20th Century-Fox in 1943. Eythe was excellent in his first film, The Ox-Bow Incident, as the conscience-stricken son of martinet lynch-mob leader Frank Conroy, and was no less impressive in such subsequent films as Song of Bernadette (1944), Wilson (1944), Wing and a Prayer (1944) and House on 92nd Street (1946). But once the war ended, Eythe seemed to lack the staying power that would have permitted him to compete on equal footing with such returning stars as Tyrone Power and James Stewart; he gradually left films to concentrate on theatre work. William Eythe died of hepatitis at the age of 38.

Trivia: At age one he debuted onscreen (playing John Barrymore as a baby) in The Beloved Rogue (1927), then appeared in a number of films as a toddler. He stayed onscreen through his childhood and adolescence, becoming one of Hollywood's favorite child stars. He appeared in many Our Gang comedy shorts and more than 100 feature films. He was less successful as a teenage actor and young adult, and he retired from the screen in the early '50s. He went on to teach and write books about acting, edit Equity magazine, perform on Broadway, in stock, and on TV, write and direct for TV, produce an Oscar-nominated short film (The Boy and the Eagle), and produce industrial shows; he wrote the book Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (But Don't Have Sex or Take the Car) (1984), an insider's account of the hazards of being a child star. He was married to actress Jane Powell from 1988 until his death, at age 89, in 2015.

Trivia: Essentially a stage actress, Michigan-born Ruth Nelson appeared sporadically in films from her first movie appearance in Of Human Bondage (1934) to her last in Awakenings (1990). Few of Ms. Nelson's roles were large enough to afford attention from critics -- notable exceptions were the 1943 wartime drama North Star and the 1947 Tracy /Hepburn vehicle Sea of Grass -- and unfortunately she made few TV appearances, so it's hard to provide anyone unfamiliar with her work a frame of reference. She did, however, pop up frequently as a peripheral interview subject during the late-'70s heyday of director Robert Altman. Ms. Nelson had married another director, John Cromwell, in 1946, and both Mr. and Mrs. Cromwell acted together in Altman's 1978 film A Wedding. Fans who tried to grill Cromwell on his own film accomplishments (Anna and the King of Siam, Dead Reckoning, et al.) were obliged to filter their request through Ruth Nelson, who was able to "interpret" her husband's nods, shrugs and snorts of disapproval.

Trivia: Pressured by his father to become a policemen like all five of his brothers, American actor Michael O'Shea defied his dad by dropping out of school at age 12, then entered vaudeville in an act with his idol, boxer Jack Johnson. Working the Prohibition years as a comic and emcee in speakeasies, O'Shea organized his own dance band, Michael O'Shea and His Stationary Gypsies. Adopting the professional name Eddie O'Shea, the actor spent the '30s in stock companies and in radio, until accruing good reviews for his 1942 Broadway appearance in The Eve of St. Mark. Somewhat reluctantly, O'Shea entered movies on the strength of his stage work; the one Michael O'Shea film that seems to get the most circulation today is Lady Of Burlesque (1943) in which he played a red-nosed burleyque comic who was the erstwhile boyfriend of stripper Barbara Stanwyck. Bouncing back and forth between Broadway and movies, O'Shea never quite became a star, though he did manage to marry one: Virginia Mayo, with whom he'd appeared in the 1943 film Jack London. O'Shea's film work in the '50s was acceptable, but he was shown to better advantage in the 1955 TV sitcom, It's A Great Life, which though no hit had a great second life in reruns. According to an interview given in 1972 Michael O'Shea fulfilled his father's "policeman" wishes after a fashion by working as an operative for the FBI in the mid '60s, helping to break up a gambling ring plaguing O'Shea's home turf of Ventura County, California.

Trivia: Lean, effete, and sinister, Vincent Price was among the movies' greatest villains as well as one of the horror genre's most beloved and enduring stars. Born May 27, 1911, in St. Louis, MO, Price graduated from Yale University, and later studied fine arts at the University of London. He made his theatrical debut in the Gate Theatre's 1935 production of Chicago, followed by work on Broadway, in stock and with Orson Welles' famed Mercury Theater. Under contract to Universal, Price traveled to Hollywood, making his screen debut in 1938's Service de Luxe, before returning to Broadway for a revival of Outward Bound. His tenure at Universal was largely unsuccessful, and the studio kept him confined to supporting roles. Upon completing his contract, Price jumped to 20th Century Fox, starring in a pair of 1940 historical tales, Brigham Young -- Frontiersman and Hudson Bay. Still, fame eluded him, and in 1941 he began a long Broadway run (in Angel Street) that kept him out of films for three years. Price returned to the West Coast to co-star in 1943's The Song of Bernadette and became a prominent supporting player in a series of acclaimed films, including 1944's Wilson and Laura, and 1946's Leave Her to Heaven. His first starring role was in the low-budget Shock!, portraying a murderous psychiatrist. He next played a sadistic husband opposite Gene Tierney in Dragonwyck. Clearly, Price's niche was as a villain -- everything about him suggested malice, with each line reading dripping with condescension and loathing; he relished these roles, and excelled in them. Still, he was not the star Fox wanted; after 1947's The Web, his contract expired and was not renewed. Price spent the next several years freelancing with a variety of studios and by 1952 had grown so disenchanted with Hollywood that he returned to the stage, performing in a San Francisco production of The Cocktail Party before replacing Charles Laughton in the touring company of Don Juan in Hell.Price then signed on to star in 1953's House of Wax, Warners' 3-D update of their Mystery of the Wax Museum. The picture was one of the year's biggest hits, and one of the most successful horror films ever produced. Price's crazed performance as a vengeful sculptor brought him offers for any number of similar projects, and he next appeared in another 3-D feature, Dangerous Mission. He also made a triumphant return to the stage to appear in Richard III, followed by Black-Eyed Susan. The latter was Price's last theatrical performance for 14 years, however, as he began a very busy and eclectic motion picture schedule. Though he essayed many different types of characters, his forays into horror remained by far his most popular, and in 1958 he co-starred in the hit The Fly as well as William Castle's House on Haunted Hill. By the 1960s, Price was working almost exclusively in the horror genre. For producer Roger Corman, he starred in a series of cult classic adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories including 1960's The Fall of the House of Usher, 1963's The Raven, 1964's The Masque of the Red Death, and 1968's The Conqueror Worm. He also appeared in a number of teen movies like 1963's Beach Party, 1965's Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, and the 1969 Elvis Presley vehicle The Trouble With Girls. Price began to cut back on his film activities during the 1970s despite hits like 1971's The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its follow-up Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Instead he frequently lectured on art, and even published several books. For disciple Tim Burton, Price co-starred in the 1990 fantasy Edward Scissorhands; apart from voice-over work, it was his last screen appearance. He died in Los Angeles on October 25, 1993.