Trivia: One of the all-time great rock & rollers and an unprecedented, phenomenal show-business success, Elvis Presley also starred in 31 consecutive big-screen hits. He was among the Top Ten box-office attractions in 1957 and from 1961-1966. When he was 13, he moved to Memphis with his family, going on to work as an usher in a movie theater and a truck driver. Presley toured locally as a singer (billed as "The Hillbilly Cat") and recorded several singles for a local label; he was signed by RCA in 1955 and became an instant star, racking up one hit single after another. On-stage, he gyrated his midsection seductively, leading him to acquire the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis." His concert appearances inspired hysteria among his young female fans, and he was considered by many to be a negative moral influence. However, Presley maintained his clean-cut, "mama's boy" image and soon had fans from every generation. He began appearing in films in 1956, debuting in Love Me Tender. Never successful among critics, his films were designed around his casual, good-ol'-boy characters, successful flirtations with his pretty female co-stars, and numerous songs. And each film made money, altogether grossing more than 150 million dollars. After Presley served a tour in the army, his singing career declined in the early '60s, when the Beatles and other new groups dominated the airwaves; he continued making successful films until 1969 (his last was Change of Habit with Mary Tyler Moore, who played a nun). He also appeared in two concert documentaries, That's the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972). In the early '70s, after a decade of few personal appearances, Presley began doing live entertainment again, and his drawing power was as strong as ever. However, he began neglecting his health and gained large amounts of weight. He died of a prescription-drug-induced heart attack in 1977, after which his cult of personality grew to enormous proportions. Presley is perhaps more popular in death than he was during his life.

Trivia: Leading lady Joan Blackman began her film activities in 1958. Joan's best-remembered film roles were Ellen, the earthbound girlfriend of extraterrestrial Jerry Lewis, in Visit to a Small Planet (1960), and Maile Duval, Elvis Presley's vis-à-vis in Blue Hawaii (1961). On television, she was seen as Marion Fowler during the 1965-1966 season of Peyton Place. Joan Blackman was married to actor/artist Joby Baker.

Trivia: Angela Lansbury received an Oscar nomination for her first film, Gaslight, in 1944, and has been winning acting awards and audience favor ever since. Born in London to a family that included both politicians and performers, Lansbury came to the U.S. during World War II. She made notable early film appearances as the snooty sister in National Velvet (1944); the pathetic singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which garnered her another Academy nomination; and the madam-with-a-heart-of-gold saloon singer in The Harvey Girls (1946). She turned evil as the manipulative publisher in State of the Union (1948), but was just as convincing as the good queen in The Three Musketeers (1948) and the petulant daughter in The Court Jester (1956). She received another Oscar nomination for her chilling performance as Laurence Harvey's scheming mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and appeared as the addled witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), among other later films. On Broadway, she won Tony awards for the musicals Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), the revival of Gypsy (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979) and, at age 82, for the play Blithe Spirit (2009). Despite a season in the '50s on the game show Pantomime Quiz, she came to series television late, starring in 1984-1996 as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote; she took over as producer of the show in the '90s. She returned to the Disney studios to record the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and to sing the title song and later reprised the role in the direct-to-video sequel, The Enchanted Christmas (1997). Lansbury is the sister of TV producer Bruce Lansbury.

Trivia: Chunky Boston-born actor Roland Winters was 19 when he played his first character role in the New York theatrical production The Firebrand. In the 1930s, he entered radio, serving as an announcer and foil for such performers as Kate Smith and Kay Kyser. In 1947, Winters became the fifth actor to essay the role of aphorism-spouting Oriental detective Charlie Chan. While Winters' six low-budget Chan entries are generally disliked by movie buffs, it can now be seen that the genially hammy actor brought a much needed breath of fresh air to the flagging film series with his self-mocking, semi-satirical interpretation of Charlie. A good friend of actor James Cagney, Winters showed up in several Cagney vehicles of the 1950s, notably A Lion Is in the Streets (1953) and Never Steal Anything Small (1959). Roland Winters continued to flourish in colorful supporting roles into the 1960s, and was also seen as a regular on the TV sitcoms Meet Millie (1952), The New Phil Silvers Show (1963), and The Smothers Brothers Show (1965).

Trivia: Character actor Howard McNear made a name for himself on network radio in a vast array of characterizations, from snivelling murderers to dapper French detectives. McNear's best-known radio role was as Doc on Gunsmoke, which ran from 1955 to 1962; his spin on the character was slightly more ghoulish than the interpretation offered by Milburn Stone on television. In films from 1954, the bespectacled, mustachioed McNear was usually cast as a querulous fussbudget. He was spotlighted as Dr. Dompierre in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and was prominently featured in three Billy Wilder comedies, Irma La Douce (1963), Kiss Me Stupid (1964) and The Fortune Cookie (1966). He appeared with frequency on TV in the 1950s and 1960s, often as a foil to such comedians as Jack Benny and Burns and Allen. Howard McNear's most beloved TV characterization was as Mayberry barber Floyd Lawson on The Andy Griffith Show; when McNear suffered a debilitating stroke in 1967, Griffith kept him on the payroll, re-writing the scripts to allow "Floyd" to be seated and non-ambulatory without drawing undue attention to McNear's affliction.

Trivia: Russian-born actor Gregory Gaye came to the U.S. after the 1917 revolution. Gaye flourished in films of the 1930s, playing a variety of ethnic types. He was Italian opera star Barelli in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), an exiled Russian nobleman in Tovarich (1937), an indignant German banker in Casablanca (1942), a Latin named Ravez in the 1945 "Sherlock Holmes" effort Pursuit to Algiers (1946) a minor-league crook of indeterminate origin in the Republic serial Tiger Woman (1945) and the villainous interplanetary leader in the weekly TV sci-fi series Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1945). Gregory Gaye was active in films until 1979, when he showed up briefly as a Russian Premier in the disaster epic Meteor.

Trivia: When casting about for a non de film, upon embarking on a movie career in 1944, Kansas-born stage actor John Stevenson chose the name of the fellow who allegedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s. As "Steve Brodie," Stevenson spent the 1940s working at MGM, RKO and Republic. He flourished in two-fisted "outdoors" roles throughout the 1950s, mostly in westerns. He holds the distinction of being beaten up twice by Elvis Presley, in Blue Hawaii (1961) and Roustabout (1964). Steve Brodie's screen career was pretty much limited to cheap exploitation flicks in the 1970s, though he did function as co-producer of the "B"-plus actioner Bobby Jo and the Outlaw (1976), a film distinguished by its steady stream of movie-buff "in" jokes.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer by Marge Champion's father Ernest Belcher, Iris Adrian began her performing career at age 13 by winning a "beautiful back" contest. Working as a New York chorus girl (she briefly billed herself as "Jimmie Joy"), Iris's big break came with the 1931 edition of The Ziegfeld Follies, which led to featured nightclub and comedy revue work in the U.S. and Europe. In the Kaufman/Hart Broadway play The Fabulous Invalid, Adrian raised the temperatures of the tired businessmen in the audiences by performing a strip-tease--this at a time (the late 1930s) when the standard burlesque houses had been banned from New York by Mayor LaGuardia. Brought to films by George Raft, Adrian made her first screen appearance in Raft's 1934 vehicle Rhumba. This led to dozens of supporting roles in subsequent feature films; Iris' standard characterization at this time was the brassy, gold-digging dame who never spoke below a shout. Often appearing in one-scene bits, Adrian received more sizeable roles in Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations (1936), Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948), Milton Berle's Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) and Jerry Lewis' The Errand Boy (1961). Through the auspices of director William Wellman, who had a fondness for elevating character actors to larger roles, Adrian gave a rollicking performance as Bonnie Parker wannabe Two Gun Gertie in 1942's Roxie Hart. She launched her TV career in 1949 on Buster Keaton's LA-based weekly comedy series. Some of her most memorable work for the small screen was on the various TV programs of Jack Benny, Adrian's favorite comedian and co-worker. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Iris Adrian kept very active in the comedy films of the Walt Disney studio, including That Darn Cat (1965) and The Love Bug (1968); and in 1978, she was superbly cast in the regular role of the sarcastic secretary for a New York escort service on The Ted Knight Show.

Trivia: Although not as remembered as Yakima Canutt or even Cliff Lyons, brawny George DeNormand became one of the founding fathers of modern movie stunt work. In films from the early '30s, DeNormand performed stunts and played bit roles in scores of action thrillers, B-Westerns, and serials, working mostly for that memorable factory of thrills, Republic Pictures. His career lasted well into the television era and he was especially visible on such shows as The Cisco Kid, Range Rider, and Sky King. Married to writer/director Wanda Tuchock (1898-1985), DeNormand spent his last years at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Bobby Barber was in at least 160-odd movies and television shows that we know about; there's no telling the actual number of films that this bit player -- who was almost more recognizable for his round face (topped with a bald head) and large, round, bulging eyes than for his voice -- actually showed up in. And for all of those dozens upon dozens of appearances, his only regular, prominent screen credits derived from his work in connection with a pair of comedians for whom he played a much more important role offscreen. Barber was a character actor and bit player, born in New York in 1894, who had some experience on-stage before coming to movies in the 1920s. His earliest known screen credit dates from 1926, in the Lloyd Hamilton feature Nobody's Business, directed by Norman Taurog; Taurog was also the director of the next movie in which Barber is known to have appeared, The Medicine Men (1929), starring the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough (which also included a young Sylvia Field and Symona Boniface). By the 1930s, Barber had moved up to bit parts in major films, including the Marx Brothers features Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Virtually all of Barber's work was uncredited, as he bounced between feature-film roles that involved perhaps a single scene and shorts -- the latter starring such popular funnymen of the time as Andy Clyde and Harry Langdon -- that gave him somewhat more to do. Sometimes Barber was little more than a face, albeit a funny, highly expressive face, in a crowd, as in his jail-cell scene in Pot o' Gold (1941). He played innumerable waiters and shopkeepers, sometimes with accents such as his thick Italian dialect in his one scene (albeit an important one) in Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor. In 1941, Barber began working with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, a pair of burlesque comics who had just burst to stardom on the screen. He shows up as one of the sailors in the finale of their movie In the Navy, and the radio engineer who gets a comical electric shock from Costello's antics in Who Done It? In later movies with the duo, Barber would even get a line or two, as in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which he plays a waiter in a scene with Lon Chaney Jr. But his work for the pair involved far more than these bit parts -- Barber was basically kept on the Abbott and Costello payroll to be their resident "stooge," to hang around and help them work out gags, and also to work gags on them and on anyone else working with and for them, so that the performances on film would never seem stale. Barber is highly visible in a pair of outtakes from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, playing gags on Costello and also on Bela Lugosi. Barber and Costello (who was the more outgoing of the pair) had an especially close backstage friendship, whether playing cards or playing practical jokes on each other. This relationship eventually came to be reflected onscreen when The Abbott & Costello Show went into production in 1952. Barber was in most of the episodes, sometimes playing as many as three different roles in a single 25-minute show; he can also be spotted, from the back, no less -- his physique and walk being that distinctive -- in one episode ("Hillary's Birthday") in the establishing shot of the supermarket. Barber kept working in feature films during the later part of his career, again portraying countless waiters, bellhops, and even a cart driver in the high-profile MGM production Kim (1950). He could play sinister, as in The Adventures of Superman episode "Crime Wave," or just surly as in the underrated Western A Day of Fury. He moved on to working with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as well, in Pardners (1956) (directed by Norman Taurog), and also showed up in serious dramas such as Career (1959) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as Elvis Presley's pictures (Blue Hawaii). But it was Barber's interactions with Lou Costello, right up to the latter's final film (The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock), with which he is most immortalized, especially on the two seasons of The Abbott & Costello Show (where his real name was even once used, in a comedic variant -- "Booby Barber" -- in a sketch that didn't involve him).

Trivia: The faces of most movie extras are unmemorable blurs in the public's memory. Not so the elegant, statuesque Bess Flowers, who was crowned by appreciative film buffs as "Queen of the Hollywood Dress Extras." After studying drama (against her father's wishes) at the Carnegie Inst of Technology, Flowers intended to head to New York, but at the last moment opted for Hollywood. She made her first film in 1922, subsequently appearing prominently in such productions as Hollywood (1922) and Chaplin's Woman of Paris (1923). Too tall for most leading men, Flowers found her true niche as a supporting actress. By the time talkies came around, Flowers was mostly playing bits in features, though her roles were more sizeable in two-reel comedies; she was a special favorite of popular short-subject star Charley Chase. Major directors like Frank Lloyd always found work for Flowers because of her elegant bearing and her luminescent gift for making the people around her look good. While generally an extra, Flowers enjoyed substantial roles in such films as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's Private Worlds and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937). In 1947's Song of the Thin Man, the usually unheralded Flowers was afforded screen billing. Her fans particularly cherish Flowers' bit as a well-wisher in All About Eve (1950), in which she breaks her customary screen silence to utter "I'm so happy for you, Eve." Flowers was married twice, first to Cecil B. DeMille's legendary "right hand man" Cullen Tate, then to Columbia studio manager William S. Holman. After her retirement, Bess Flowers made one last on-camera appearance in 1974 when she was interviewed by NBC's Tom Snyder.