Trivia: Trained at Juilliard and the American Academy of Dramatic Art, actress Constance Towers made her first impression on the public as a film actress. Towers was seen as the resourceful Southern-belle leading lady of John Ford's The Horse Soldiers (1959), then essayed a similar characterization in Ford's Sergeant Rutledge (1960). For a brief period in the early 1960s, she was the pet actress of director Samuel Fuller, who effectively cast her in extremely demanding roles in Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1965). With several film and TV appearances to her credit, Towers finally made her professional stage debut in a 1960 production of Guys and Dolls; one year later, she made her Broadway bow as star of Anya, a musicalization of Anastasia. Most closely associated with musicals, she has made hundreds of appearances in revivals of such Rodgers and Hammerstein classics as South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. During the 1960s and 1970s, Constance hosted a daily discussion show on New York radio station WOR. On TV, Towers has been seen as Clarissa McCandliss, daughter of JR-type patriarch Rory Calhoun, on the daytime drama Capitol (1982-87), and as Camilla, the mother of ex-call girl Jade O'Keefe (Lisa Hartman), on the heavy-breathing nighttimer 2000 Malibu Road (1992). Constance Towers is married to former actor and U.S. diplomat John Gavin.

Trivia: Six-foot granite-jawed Anthony Eisley came into his own as a leading man on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before switching to more demanding and complex character and supporting roles. The son of a corporate executive, he was born Frederick Glendinning Eisley in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He spent most of his childhood moving with his family as his father's various positions took them from city to city, every few years. He was bitten by the acting bug early in life, but had no serious was of pursuing a career in the field until he joined a stock company in Pennsylvania. He began getting theater roles after that and by the early 1950s had begun working in television and feature films, the latter usually uncredited, under the name Fred Eisley -- this also included his first series work, in Bonino (1953), starring Ezio Pinza and a young Van Dyke Parks. While his theater work included such prime fare as Mister Roberts and Picnic, when it came to movies and television he was in every kind of production there was, from independent, syndicated TV series such as Racket Squad to high-profile movies like The Young Philadelphians, and Eisley broke through to star billing in the Roger Corman-directed horror film The Wasp Woman (1960) (working opposite Susan Cabot in the title role). Around that same time he took the role of John Cassiano in Pete Kelly's Blues (1959), a short-lived TV series directed and produced by Jack Webb. It was after being seen in a stage production of Who Was That Lady that Eisley was cast as Tracy Steele, the tough ex-cop turned private detective in the series Hawaiian Eye. It was also with that series that he became Anthony Eisley. Following the three-year run of that series, Eisley resumed work as a journeyman actor, but the array of roles that he took on improved exponentially -- in one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, entitled "The Lady And The Tiger And The Lawyer", he guested as a seemingly affable, attractive new neighbor of the Petries who admits, in the end, that he has a problem with spousal abuse that prevents him from choosing either of the women they've aimed at him at a possible match; and in Samuel Fuller's groundbreaking film drama The Naked Kiss, he plays a hard-nosed cop who uncovers a sinister, deeply troubling side to his city's much-publicized children's hospital and the people behind it. Eisley appeared in dozens of television series and movies over the ensuing three decades, always giving 100% of himself even when the budget and the production were lacking (see The Navy Vs. The Night Monsters . . . .. But on the sets of television shows, especially, where the quality was there, his work was without peer -- that was one reason that Jack Webb, who had used him in Pete Kelly's Blues, made Eisley a part of his stock company, using him in six episodes of Dragnet in the 1960s. Those shows are especially fascinating to watch for the quiet intensity of his performances -- he mostly played morally-compromised character, including a man plotting the murder-for-hire of his wife, an affable but corrupt police lieutenant, and career criminal who thinks (incorrectly) that he has outsmarted the detectives who are questioning him. Eisley's credits, in keeping with his image from Hawaiian Eye, were heavily concentrated in series devoted to law enforcement. He continued working through the 1990s, and died of heart failure in 2003, at the age of 78.

Trivia: Actor Michael Dante was first seen in a secondary role in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). A bit too "threatening" for romantic leads, Dante was more effectively cast in antagonistic roles, notably Chief Crazy Horse in the 1967 TV series Custer and the 1990 theatrical feature Crazy Horse and Custer: The Untold Story. Even when ostensibly cast as a good guy in Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1965), he turned out to be a heel in the film's final scenes. Star Trek devotees will recall Michael Dante as Maab in the 1967 episode "Friday's Child."

Trivia: The daughter of silent comedy film director Ray Grey, who died when she was eight, Virginia Grey debuted onscreen at age 10 as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927). She did a few more juvenile roles in silents, then as a teenager she appeared in small roles in talkies before working her way up to leading lady in a number of second features; she also played second leads in a few major productions. Grey went on to a prolific, long-lived screen career over the next three-plus decades; she also worked occasionally on TV and for a time was a regular on the soap opera General Hospital. Though she never married, at one time she was romantically involved with actor Clark Gable, whom she reportedly came close to marrying.

Trivia: Patsy Kelly was a dumpy, big-eyed comedic actress with Brooklyn manners and accent. Having studied dance since childhood and also developed into a skilled comedienne, she was very popular in Broadway musicals of the early '30s such as Earl Carroll's Sketches and Wonder Bar, opposite Al Jolson in the latter. In 1933 Hal Roach brought her to Hollywood to replace ZaSu Pitts as Thelma Todd's costar in a popular series of two-reel comedies. Over the next decade she sustained a busy screen career, often playing the deadpan, wisecracking friend of the heroine in comedies and musicals; occasionally she played leads, as well. She retired after 1943, reportedly because of a drinking problem. Later she worked on radio and TV and performed with close friend Tallulah Bankhead in the play Dear Charles, at Bankhead's kind invitation. In the '60s she returned occasionally to films in supporting roles. In 1971 she scored a major success as the costar (a tap-dancing maid) of the Broadway revival of No No Nanette, for which she won a Tony Award; she went on to perform in the Broadway revival of Irene.

Trivia: A sprightly, merry, tiny leading lady of the silent era, Bronson played bits in films starting at age 16; two years later, she was selected by author Sir James Barrie to play the title role in the first film version of his Peter Pan (1924). With her petiteness and lively persona, she was placed into a series of elfin roles by Paramount; the studio hoped to build her up as the successor to Mary Pickford as "America's Sweetheart." Public tastes changed rapidly, however, and she was soon obliged to accept more mature roles which caused her popularity to quickly wane. Nevertheless, she went on to star in many silents and some talkies before retiring from the screen (to get married) in the early '30s. She made one more appearance in the '30s (in a western starring Gene Autry) then disappeared from the screen until the 1960s, when she resumed her career as a character actress.

Trivia: Actress Barbara Perry began her career in the early 1930s, debuting in the 1933 movie Counselor-at-Law when she was just 10 years old. Her career would really kick into gear some years later, when the blonde beauty reached adulthood, appearing in several films and TV shows throughout the '40s and '50s, like The Thin Man, The Hathaways, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Perry's filmography would continue to grow as the decades went on, and many would remember her for roles like Doris Williams on The Andy Griffith Show, Mrs. Thompson on My Three Sons, and Mrs. Bentley on Bewitched. She later appeared on shows like Newhart, Married...with Children, and How I Met Your Mother, and in movies like 1991's Father of the Bride, 1997's Just Write, and 2010's The Back-up Plan.

Trivia: African-American juvenile actor, onscreen from the '60s, though inactive now.

Trivia: Voluptuous "B"-movie actress Edy Williams started out with small, decorative roles in such films as The Naked Kiss (1964) and A House is Not a Home (1964), and such TV series as Batman and The Beverly Hillbillies. Her career really took off in the mid-1960s, when she became the protégé and briefly the wife, of nudie-movie king Russ Meyer. When Meyer briefly became the darling of the intelligentsia, he took Williams along for the ride, giving her starring roles in his major-studio releases Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and The Seven Minutes (1971). Williams didn't seem to have any pretensions about her thespic abilities; she flaunted and revelled in her sexpot status, going so far as to pose for publicity photos in the freezer of a butcher shop. She was only sporadically active in films in the 1980s and 1990s, but as she enters her sixth decade, Edy Williams is assured yearly newspaper space for her flamboyant, outrageously outfitted appearances at the annual Cannes Film Festival and Academy Awards ceremonies.