Trivia: American actress Patty Duke (born December 14, 1946) was groomed almost from infancy for a starring career by her manager/guardian John Ross. She studied at the Quintano School for Young Professionals and earned her Equity card at age seven, appearing in numerous TV productions and in such Hollywood films as I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Goddess (1958) (playing young Kim Stanley, the "Marilyn Monroe" character in that film), and Happy Anniversary (1959). Duke also appeared as a quiz-show contestant, and was later compelled to testify as to her honesty during the cheating scandals of 1958 and 1959. Just before her 13th birthday, Duke made her stage debut in the role of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker; the production won the girl instant stardom and later an Academy Award for the film version of Miracle Worker (1962). Manager John Ross very carefully monitored Duke's public appearances, making certain the world saw her as a sweet, uncomplicated young lady. The truth was that Duke was terribly unhappy, feeling pressured into performing and into suppressing her own emotions. That's not what the world saw in the three seasons of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966), a sitcom wherein the young actress literally talked to herself in the dual role of cousins Patty and Cathy Lane. She became cynical with stardom in a hurry, and in a bold act of defiance, 18-year-old Duke married a man twice her age, director Harry Falk Jr. Her first grown-up role as a Judy Garland type in Valley of the Dolls (1967) was panned, and it was suggested that she'd lost her talent. The next few years she was cast in a series of unsuccessful films but made a strong comeback with the 1969 TV movie My Sweet Charlie, which won her the first of three Emmys; the others being for the miniseries Captains and the Kings(1976) and a remake of The Miracle Worker (1979) in which she played the role of Annie Sullivan, co-starring with Melissa Gilbert as Helen Keller. In 1972 she married actor John Astin. He raised her son, Sean Astin (actually the biological son of music promoter Michael Tell), as his own; they had Mackenzie Astin together. Duke also briefly changed her professional name to Patty Duke Astin. The Astins worked together prolifically for the duration of their marriage (which eventually ended in divorce). Building up her self-confidence and completely rebuilding her reputation in the '80s, Patty Duke served from 1985 through 1988 as president of the Screen Actor's Guild (the second woman to do so), starred in three separate network sitcoms, and wrote her harrowing best-selling memoirs, Call Me Anna, which in 1990 was adapted into a TV movie that she co-produced and starred in.In 2002, Duke returned to the stage to play Aunt Eller in a production of Oklahoma!, and appeared as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 to discuss living with bipolar disorder. The actress replaced Carol Cane as Madame Morrible in the San Francisco production of Wicked in 2009, and joined the cast of The Protector (a short-lived drama from Lifetime) in 2011. Her final role was in a 2015 episode of the Disney channel show Liv and Maddie, fittingly playing a set of identical twins. Duke died in 2016, at age 69.

Trivia: The son of the Los Angeles Times' drama editor, William Schallert was, along with Sydney Chaplin, one of the co-founders of Hollywood's highly regarded Circle Theatre troupe. Sent to Great Britain on a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theatre, Schallert guest-lectured at Oxford on several occasion before heading home. A character actor of almost intimidating versatility, Schallert began his long film and TV career in 1951. While he appeared in films of every variety, Schallert was most closely associated with the many doctors (mad or otherwise), lab technicians and scientific experts that he played in such science fiction endeavors as The Man From Planet X (1951), Gog (1954), Them! (1954) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Monolith Monsters (1959). Director Joe Dante paid homage to Schallert's prolific horror-flick work by casting the actor in his Matinee, where he played yet another dabbler in Things Man Is Not Meant to Know in the film-within-a-film "Mant." Schallert's hundreds television credits could fill a book in themselves; the Nickelodeon cable network once tried to put together a montage of the actor's guest star appearances, touching only the tip of the iceberg. He was a regular on such series as Dobie Gillis (as literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit, who always dismissed his class as though announcing the beginning of the Indy 500), Get Smart (as a senile 97-year-old Navy admiral), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (as Nancy's attorney father) The New Gidget (as Gidget's professor father) The Nancy Walker Show, Little Women and Santa Barbara. His most famous TV role was as Patty Lane's ever-patient newspaper-editor dad on The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963 through 1966; over twenty years later, Mr. Schallert and Ms. Duke were touchingly reunited--again as father and daughter--on an episode of The Torkelsons (1991-92). William Schallert once served as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a position later held...by Patty Duke. Shallert continued acting until the early 2010s; he died in 2016, at age 93.

Trivia: Kentucky native Jean Byron was still attending high school when she began accepting jobs as a radio and band singer. In 1952, she made her first film, Columbia's Voodoo Tiger, "co-starring with Johnny Weissmuller and a chimpanzee," as she later ruefully observed. Better roles followed for Jean on the many TV anthology series of the 1950s. In 1959, she was cast in a recurring role on the weekly sitcom Dobie Gillis, playing high school teacher Imogene Burkhart (which happened to be Jean's real name). From 1963 through 1966, Jean Byron was seen on The Patty Duke Show, as Patty's mother; Jean's husband was played by another Dobie Gillis alumnus, William Schallert.

Trivia: American actor Paul O'Keefe began his career appearing on-stage and in television ads while still a child. He later became a supporting actor.

Trivia: Portly, tight-jawed John McGiver had intended to become a professional actor upon graduating from Catholic University in Washington D.C., but he became an English teacher at New York's Christopher Columbus High School instead. One day in the mid-1950s, McGiver bumped into one of his old Catholic University classmates, who'd become an off-Broadway producer; the star of the producer's newest play had just walked out, and would McGiver be interested in taking his place? This little favor led to a 20-year career in TV and films for the balding, bookish McGiver. He was featured in such films as Love in the Afternoon (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Mame (1974). McGiver's funniest screen portrayal was the thick-eared landscaper in The Gazebo (1959), who insisted upon referring to the title object as a "GAZE-bow". In 1964, John McGiver starred as Walter Burnley, supervisor of a department store complaint department, on the weekly TV sitcom Many Happy Returns.