Trivia: The son of an Irish whiskey distiller, Brian Donlevy was 10 months old when his family moved to Wisconsin. At 15, Donlevy ran away from home, hoping to join General Pershing's purge against Mexico's Pancho Villa. His tenure below the border was brief, and within a few months he was enrolled in military school. While training to be a pilot at the U.S. Naval Academy, Donlevy developed an interest in amateur theatricals. He spent much of the early 1920s living by his wits in New York, scouting about for acting jobs and attempting to sell his poetry and other writings. He posed for at least one Arrow Collar ad and did bit and extra work in several New York-based films, then received his first break with a good supporting role in the 1924 Broadway hit What Price Glory?. Several more Broadway plays followed, then in 1935 Donlevy decided to try his luck in Hollywood. A frustrated Donlevy was prepared to head back to Manhattan when, at the last minute, he was cast as a villain in Sam Goldwyn's Barbary Coast. In 1936 he was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract, alternating between "B"-picture heroes and "A"-picture heavies for the next few years. The most notable of his bad-guy roles from this period was the cruel but courageous Sgt. Markoff in Beau Geste (1939); reportedly, Donlevy deliberately behaved atrociously off-camera as well as on, so that his co-workers would come to genuinely despise his character. From 1940 through 1946, Donlevy was most closely associated with Paramount Pictures, delivering first-rate performances in such films as The Great McGinty (1940), Wake Island (1942), The Glass Key (1942) and The Virginian (1946). His own favorite role was that of the good-hearted, raffish con-artist in Universal's Nightmare (1942). In 1950, Donlevy took time off from films to star and co-produce the syndicated radio (and later TV) series Dangerous Assignment. He went on to introduce the character of Dr. Quatermass in two well-received British science fiction films, The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Enemy From Space (1957). Brian Donlevy left behind an impressive enough filmic legacy to put the lie to his own assessment of his talents: "I think I stink."

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: New York-born actor Ted Hecht (also sometimes billed as Theodore Hecht) got his start in theater, and eventually moved up to the Broadway stage, where he worked in such plays as Congai (1928), The Great Man (1931), and Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935). Hecht made the move into motion pictures at the start of the 1940s in small uncredited roles -- with his dark, intense features and rough voice, he was quickly typed into playing "foreign" roles, often with a sinister edge, in movies at every stratum of Hollywood. In So Proudly We Hail! (1943), he played Dr. Jose Bardia, while in the Katharine Hepburn/Walter Huston vehicle Dragon Seed (1944), he portrayed Major Yohagi; he was Prince Ozira in Tarzan and the Huntress (1947), and Lieutenant Sarac in Istanbul (1957). Hecht was also heavily employed on television, again in exotic and sometimes nefarious parts. In three episodes of The Adventures of Superman he portrayed (East) Indians and Arabs, while he played Chinese characters in episodes of Terry and the Pirates. Hecht normally did one-shot appearances that didn't allow him much in the opportunities to develop his characters or his portrayals. The big exception in his career came during his work on the series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, where he appeared in seven episodes, portraying the notorious interplanetary outlaw and pirate Pinto Vortando. His work was, by turns, broad, sinister, and charming, a mix of stereotyped Mexican bandito with a little bit of Long John Silver thrown in, but it did evolve across the series. He starts out as a one-dimensional bad guy but convincingly softens from his contact with the youngest of the heroes, the boy space traveler Bobby (Robert Lyden), and, by his seventh episode, becomes one of the series' most likable villains, a rogue with a twinkle of goodness in his eye that he can't stamp out but must live with. Even 40 years later, watching the series, one couldn't help but be impressed with what he did with the one- (okay, maybe one-and-a-half-) dimensional role. Hecht retired at the end of the 1950s, and passed away in 1969.

Trivia: Nestor Paiva had the indeterminate ethnic features and gift for dialects that enabled him to play virtually every nationality. Though frequently pegged as a Spaniard, a Greek, a Portuguese, an Italian, an Arab, an even (on radio, at least) an African-American, Paiva was actually born in Fresno, California. A holder of an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, Paiva developed an interest in acting while performing in college theatricals. Proficient in several languages, Paiva made his stage bow at Berkeley's Greek Theatre in a production of Antigone. His subsequent professional stage career was confined to California; he caught the eye of the studios by appearing in a long-running Los Angeles production of The Drunkard, which costarred another future film player of note, Henry Brandon. He remained with The Drunkard from 1934 to 1945, finally dropping out when his workload in films became too heavy. Paiva appeared in roles both large and small in so many films that it's hard to find a representative appearance. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby can take in a good cross-section of Paiva's work via his appearances in Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1945) and Road to Rio (1947); he has a bit as a street peddler in Morocco, is desperado McGurk in Utopia, and plays the Brazilian theatre manager who isn't fooled by the Wiere Brothers' attempt to pass themselves off as Americans ("You're een the groove, Jackson") in Rio. During his busiest period, 1945 through 1948, Paiva appeared in no fewer than 117 films. The familiar canteloupe-shaped mug and hyperactive eyebrows of Nestor Paiva graced many a film and TV program until his death in 1966; his final film, the William Castle comedy The Spirit is Willing (1967), was released posthumously.

Trivia: Supporting actor in Australian comedies of the '30.