Trivia: While still a teenager Farley Granger appeared in a Los Angeles little theater production, where he was spotted by a scout. Sam Goldwyn signed him to a film contract and he debuted onscreen as a Russian youth in The North Star (1943). Typecast as a troubled pretty boy or a vulnerable, sensitive, soulful young hero, Granger appeared in one more film and then served in World War II. After the war, he returned to the screen as an intellectual thrill-killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) Early predictions that Granger would become a major star failed to come true, however; his career was mismanaged and he never lived up to his potential. After making a series of minor Hollywood films, he moved to Italy in the mid '50s and made one film there, then returned to Hollywood for two more movies before giving up his screen career in favor of work on stage, doing repertory theatre and Broadway productions like The Seagull and The Glass Menagerie. In the late '60s Granger returned to Italy and began living there for much of the year, appearing onscreen in little-known Italian productions, and returning to America less frequently to participate in American projects. He eventually played a psychiatrist and head of a family on the TV soap opera One Life to Live, but mainly specialize in horror films and thrillers as the following decades unfolded, appearing in movies like 1974's Death Will Have Your Eyes and 1985's Deathmask. The actor enjoyed a state of semi-retirement as the years went on, however, stepping in front of the camera in the '90s and 2000s mostly as a participant in documentaries about Hollywood and Alfred Hitchcock, like 1995's The Celluloid Closet and 2001's Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies. Granger passed away in March of 2011 at the age of 85.

Trivia: A former accountant for the Gulf Oil Company, Dana Andrews made his stage debut with the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse in 1935. Signed to a joint film contract by Sam Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox in 1940, Andrews bided his time in supporting roles until the wartime shortage of leading men promoted him to stardom. His matter-of-fact, dead pan acting style was perfectly suited to such roles as the innocent lynching victim in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and laconic city detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944). For reasons unknown, Andrews often found himself cast as aviators: he was the downed bomber pilot in The Purple Heart (1944), the ex-flyboy who has trouble adjusting to civilian life in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and the foredoomed airliner skipper in Zero Hour (1957), The Crowded Sky (1960), and Airport 1975 (1974). His limited acting range proved a drawback in the 1950s, and by the next decade he was largely confined to character roles, albeit good ones. From 1963 to 1965, Andrews was president of the Screen Actors Guild, where among other things he bemoaned Hollywood's obsession with nudity and sordidness (little suspecting that the worst was yet to come!). An ongoing drinking problem seriously curtailed his capability to perform, and on a couple of occasions nearly cost him his life on the highway; in 1972, he went public with his alcoholism in a series of well-distributed public service announcements, designed to encourage other chronic drinkers to seek professional help. In addition to his film work, Andrews also starred or co-starred in several TV series (Bright Promise, American Girls, and Falcon Crest) and essayed such TV-movie roles as General George C. Marshall in Ike (1979). Dana Andrews made his final screen appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack.

Trivia: Actress Joan Evans' father was playwright Dale Eunson, and her mother was screenwriter/novelist Katherine Eunson. A stage performer from childhood, Evans was brought to Hollywood in 1949 with a fanfare of publicity as Sam Goldwyn's exciting new "discovery." She played the title role in Roseanna McCoy, a fanciful interpretation of the Hatfield/McCoy feud, then went on to co-star with Farley Granger in the uncharacteristically glum Goldwyn production Edge of Doom. When audience response to Evans failed to meet expectations, her option was quietly dropped by Goldwyn. Joan Evans spent her next nine years in Hollywood as a free-lancer, occasionally essaying worthwhile parts in such films as the cult-favorite western No Name on the Bullet (1959).

Trivia: He began acting in plays in his early teens, and was already a veteran by the time he joined Orson Welles's Mercury Theater in 1938; among his Mercury credits was a role in the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Like many Mercury performers, he followed Welles to Hollywood and debuted onscreen in Citizen Kane (1941). In a sporadically busy film career, he went on to play many character roles over the next four decades; he was often cast as insensitive, no-nonsense types, and sometimes played gangsters. He began a second career in the mid '50s as a TV director.

Trivia: A radio and stage actress since early childhood, Mala Powers made her first film appearance at age 11 in the 1942 Dead End Kids opus Tough As They Come. After attending U.C.L.A., she was discovered by filmmaker/actress Ida Lupino who starred Powers in her 1950 film Outrage. That same year, Stanley Kramer signed Powers to star opposite Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac. Though critical reviews for the film were mixed, Powers was praised for her beauty, sensitivity, and naturalness in portraying Cyrano's great love, Roxanne. It remains her best-known role. Her promising career was nipped in the bud the following year by a life-threatening illness. Following her recovery, Powers had difficulty obtaining production insurance and this in turn made it difficult for her to appear in A-features. As a result, she spent the majority of her subsequent career appearing in low-budget Westerns and adventure films. She died of complications from leukemia, at age 76, in early June 2007.

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: Trained for an industrial career but sidetracked into showbiz by a few seasons at Pasadena Playhouse, "Mr. Average Man" utility player John Ridgely spent most of his Hollywood years at Warner Bros. From his first film Submarine D-1 (1937), Ridgely was one of the studio's most reliable and ubiquitous supporting players, portraying first-reel murder victims, last-reel "surprise" killers, best friends, policemen, day laborers, and military officers. One of his largest film roles was the commanding officer in Howard Hawks' Air Force (1943), in which he was billed over the more famous John Garfield. His indeterminate features could also convey menace, as witness his portrayal of blackmailing gangsters Eddie Mars in Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946). Freelancing after 1948, John Ridgely continued to essay general-purpose parts until he left films in 1953; thereafter he worked in summer-theater productions and television until his death from a heart attack at the age of 58.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: Mabel Paige was virtually "born in a trunk"; both her parents were busy stock company actors. Paige made her own stage bow at age four, in a production of Van the Virginian. When Paige was 11, she was headlining her own Southern stock company; upon reaching adulthood, she established the Paige Theater in Jacksonville, FL. During her stay in Jacksonville, Paige appeared in a quartet of silent comedies, co-starring with her husband, Charles Ritchie, and up-and-coming Oliver Hardy. Retiring from show business in the 1920s to raise her family, Paige returned to acting on radio and on Broadway in the late '30s. In 1941, she was brought to Hollywood to re-create her role as an eccentric theatrical boarding house landlady in Out of the Frying Pan, which wouldn't be released until 1943, under the title Young and Willing. Because of the delayed release of this film, Paige's "official" talkie debut was as the Runyon-esque street peddler in Paramount's Lucky Jordan (1942). Usually heading the supporting cast, and generally cast as a tart-tongued "swinging senior," Paige was given one top-billed starring role in Republic's Someone to Remember (1943), playing a feisty old lady who resides in a college dormitory in hopes of being reunited with her long lost son. After completing her final film, Houdini (1953), Mabel Paige accepted brief roles in such TV series as Racket Squad and I Love Lucy, but illness and age had eroded her comic gifts.

Trivia: The father of actors Houseley Stevenson Jr. and Onslow Stevens, Houseley Stevenson Sr. was one of the founders and principal directors of the famed Pasadena Playhouse. After a four-decade-plus stage career, Stevenson came to films in 1936. At first, he played bits, but as he moved into his sixties the size of his roles increased. The hollow-cheeked, stubble-chinned actor was especially adept at playing elderly derelicts whose dialogue usually ran along the lines of "Whatsa matter, son? Hidin' from the law?" Houseley Stevenson was at his very best in two Humphrey Bogart films: In Dark Passage (1947), he played the seedy plastic surgeon Dr. Coley, while in Knock on Any Door he was seen as the philosophical rummy "Junior."

Trivia: By the time she first appeared as Grandma Walton in 1971, American actress Ellen Corby had been playing elderly characters for nearly thirty years--and she herself was still only in her fifties. The daughter of Danish immigrants, Ellen Hansen was born in Wisconsin and raised in Philadelphia; she moved to Hollywood in 1933 after winning several amateur talent shows. Her starring career consisted of tiny parts in low-budget Poverty Row quickies; to make a living, Ellen became a script girl (the production person responsible for maintaining a film's continuity for the benefit of the film editor), working first at RKO and then at Hal Roach studios, where she met and married cameraman Francis Corby. The marriage didn't last, though Ellen retained the last name of Corby professionally. While still a script girl, Ellen began studying at the Actors Lab, then in 1944 decided to return to acting full time. She played several movie bit roles, mostly as servants, neurotics, and busybodies, before earning an Oscar nomination for the role of Trina the maid in I Remember Mama (1948). Her career fluctuated between bits and supporting parts until 1971, when she was cast as Grandma Walton in the CBS movie special The Homecoming. This one-shot evolved into the dramatic series The Waltons in 1972, with Ms. Corby continuing as Grandma. The role earned Ellen a "Best Supporting Actress" Emmy award in 1973, and she remained with the series until suffering a debilitating stroke in 1976. After a year's recuperation, Ellen returned to The Waltons, valiantly carrying on until the series' 1980 cancellation, despite the severe speech and movement restrictions imposed by her illness. Happily, Ellen Corby endured, and was back as Grandma in the Waltons reunion special of the early '90s.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: Actress Mary Field kept her private life such a well-guarded secret that not even her most devoted fans (including several film historians who've attempted to write biographies of the actress) have ever been able to find out anything about her background. So far as anyone can ascertain, she entered films around 1937; her first important assignment was the dual role of the mothers of the title characters in The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Viewers may not know the name but they have seen the face: too thin and sharp-featured to be beautiful, too soft and kindly to be regarded as homely. Mary Field is the actress who played Huntz Hall's sister in the 1941 Universal serial Sea Raiders; the spinsterish sponsor of Danny Kaye's doctoral thesis in A Song of Born (1947); the nice lady standing in Macy's "Santa Claus" line with the little Dutch girl in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); the long-suffering music teacher in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950); and Harold Peary's bespectacled vis-a-vis in The Great Gildersleeve (1942)--to name just four films among hundreds.

Trivia: Stern-visaged American actress Virginia Brissac was a well-established stage actress in the early part of the 20th century. For several seasons in the 1920s, she headed a travelling stock company bearing her name. Once Brissac settled down in Hollywood in 1935, she carved a niche in authoritative parts, spending the next twenty years playing a steady stream of schoolteachers, college deans, duennas and society matrons. Once in a while, Virginia Brissac was allowed to "cut loose" with a raving melodramatic part: in Bob Hope's The Ghost Breakers, she dons a coat of blackface makeup and screams with spine-tingling conviction as the bewitched mother of zombie Noble Johnson.

Trivia: American actress Frances Morris was seen in small utility roles from 1934 to 1961. At first, Morris was cast as gun molls, stewardesses, secretaries, receptionists, and maids. She was exceptionally busy in the 1940s, essaying a variety of WAVES and WACs. The following decade, she was seen in maternal roles (some of them actually given character names) in both films and TV. One of Frances Morris' better assignments was the sympathetic prison warden in the 1952 Loretta Young starrer Because of You.

Trivia: Howland Chamberlain was the quintessential character actor who turned his expertise at playing nervous, fidgety roles into an array of memorable portrayals in some of the most important movies of the late '40s and early '50s. At that time, just as he'd appeared in one of the most acclaimed movies of the decade, High Noon, his screen career came to a halt after he was called as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify. Chamberlain, whose name was sometimes spelled Chamberlin in film credits (and in his Variety obituary), was born in New York City and moved to California in the 1930s, where he went to work with the WPA's Federal Theater Project in Los Angeles and met his future wife Leona. According to a 1976 SoHo Weekly News article by Jennifer Merlin, they delayed their wedding as a matter of economic survival, as a married couple couldn't both have jobs with the WPA. In the late '30s, Chamberlain became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse, which was something of a minor league "farm team" for aspiring Hollywood actors. In the mid-'40s, Chamberlain began appearing onscreen in character roles, starting with The Best Years of Our Lives as Mr. Thorpe. His career over the next six years carried him into the casts of a surprising number of crime dramas and film noirs, among them Michael Gordon's The Web, Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, Fritz Lang's House by the River, and Hugo Haas' Pickup; these were broken up by work in the occasional comedy, such as A Song Is Born (in which he played a nervous lawyer). Chamberlain also did television work. One example which has endured as his best work was as a pair of identical twins involved in a radium smuggling scheme in the episode "Double Trouble" from The Adventures of Superman. His two most notable screen appearances were in Force of Evil and High Noon, as the vengeful hotel clerk who wishes harm to Marshal Kane. In 1956, after the House Un-American Activities Committee incident, Chamberlain and his family moved to New York, where he resumed his acting career on the stage. Chamberlain appeared in dozens of plays on tour (including A Raisin in the Sun), on Broadway and off-Broadway (in Children of Darkness and The Courageous One), and the Festival in the Park (including Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra). The Chamberlains later acted together in off-Broadway theater as well, including a production of Morton Lichter's Old Timer's Sexual Symphony (and other notes). He had appeared in small roles again on television as early as 1960, on programs like Bonanza, and by the mid-'70s he was acting regularly in Los Angeles, including productions at the Mark Taper Forum. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s, with Kramer vs. Kramer (in which he played Judge Atkins), 27 years after his last film appearance, that Chamberlain did any more movie work. He kept working in movies such as Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa and Steve Barron's Electric Dreams, until his death from heart and related problems in the late summer of 1984.