Trivia: Handsome leading man Rory Calhoun's successful film and television career spanned well over 50 years. In the mid-1940s,after a difficult childhood and adolescence, Calhoun found work as a lumberjack in Santa Cruz, California. It was while there employed that Calhoun was discovered by actor Alan Ladd, who suggested that the rugged young man give movies a try. Billed as "Frank McCown," Calhoun was signed to a brief contract at 20th Century-Fox, but most of his earliest movie scenes (including a sizeable supporting role in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Bullfighters) ended up on the cutting room floor. Free-lancing in the late 1940s, Calhoun first attracted a fan-following with his supporting role as a high-school lothario in 1948's The Red House. He returned to Fox in 1950, enjoying major roles in such films as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and River of No Return (1955). Established as a western player by the late 1950s, Calhoun starred on the popular TV western The Texan from 1958 through 1960. He spent his spare time writing, publishing at least one novel, The Man From Padeira. From 1949 through 1970, Calhoun was married to actress Lita Baron. Perpetuating his career into the 1980s and '90s, a more weather-beaten Rory Calhoun was seen in the lead of the satirical horror film Motel Hell (1980), was quite funny as a washed-up macho movie star in Avenging Angel (1985), and stole the show from ostensible leading-man George Strait in Pure Country (1992).

Trivia: Radiantly beautiful blonde actress Virginia Mayo was a chorus dancer when she began her film career as a bit player in 1942. She rose to face as Danny Kaye's leading lady in a series of splashy Technicolor musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Though never regarded as a great actress, she was disturbingly convincing as Dana Andrews' faithless wife in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and as James Cagney's sluttish gun moll in White Heat (1949). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mayo was one of the most popular female stars at Warner Bros., appearing in musicals, melodramas and westerns. Many of her characters were so outre that one wonders whether Mayo was having some sport with us: her turn as Jack Palance's paramour in The Silver Chalice (1955) and as Cleopatra in the guilty pleasure The Story of Mankind (1957) immediately come to mind. And it is Mayo who, in Warners' King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), utters the immortal high-camp line "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever do, Dick Plantagenet!" When her film career faltered in the 1960s, Mayo turned to stage work on the touring-company and dinner-theatre circuit; more recently, she has been a frequent interview subject on TV documentaries dealing with the old Hollywood studio system. Virginia Mayo is the widow of actor Michael O'Shea.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: American actor Richard Arlen was working as a messenger boy at Paramount studios in the early 1920s when he was injured in a slight accident; the story goes that Arlen went to the studio heads to thank them for their prompt medical care, whereupon the executives, impressed by Arlen's good looks, hired him as an actor. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Arlen soon became one of Paramount's most popular leading men, earning a measure of screen immortality by costarring with Buddy Rogers and Clara Bow in the first-ever Oscar winning picture, Wings (1927). Arlen was memorably cast as a World War I flying ace, a part in which he felt uniquely at home because he'd been a member of the Royal Canadian Flying Corps during the "real" war (though he never saw any combat!) The actor retained his popularity throughout the 1930s, and when roles became harder to come by in the 1940s, he wisely invested his savings in numerous successful businesses. Keeping in character, Arlen was also part-owner of a civilian flying service, and worked as an air safety expert for the government during World War II. Still acting in TV and commercials into the 1960s, Richard Arlen was reunited with his Wings costar Buddy Rogers in an amusing episode of the TV sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: John Agar was one of a promising group of leading men to emerge in the years after World War II. He never became the kind of star that he seemed destined to become in mainstream movies, but he did find a niche in genre films a decade later. Agar was the son of a Chicago meatpacker and never aspired to an acting career until fate took a hand in 1945, when he met Shirley Temple, the former child star and one of the most famous young actresses in Hollywood. In a whirlwind romance, the 17-year-old Temple married the 25-year-old Agar. His good looks made him seem a natural candidate for the screen and, in 1946, he was signed to a six-year contract by producer David O. Selznick. He never actually appeared in any of Selznick's movies, but his services were loaned out at a considerable profit to the producer, beginning in 1948 with his screen debut (opposite Temple) in John Ford's classic cavalry drama Fort Apache, starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda. His work in that movie led to a still larger role in Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, also starring Wayne. Those films were to mark the peak of Agar's mainstream film career, though John Wayne, who took a liking to the younger actor, saw to it that he had a major role in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which was one of the most popular war movies of its era. In 1949, however, Temple divorced Agar and his career slowed considerably; apart from the film he did with Wayne, the most notable aspect of his career that year was his appearance in the anti-Communist potboiler I Married a Communist (aka The Woman on Pier 13). During the early '50s, he appeared in a series of low-budget programmers such as The Magic Carpet, one of Lucille Ball's last feature films prior to the actress becoming a television star, and played leads in second features, including the offbeat comedy The Rocket Man. Agar seemed destined to follow in the same downward career path already blazed by such failed mid-'40s leading men as Sonny Tufts, when a film came along at Universal-International in 1955 that gave his career a second wind. The studio was preparing a sequel to its massively popular Creature From the Black Lagoon, directed by Jack Arnold, and needed a new leading man; Agar's performance in an independent film called The Golden Mistress had impressed the studio and he was signed to do the movie. Revenge of the Creature, directed by Arnold, was nearly as successful as its predecessor, and Agar had also come off well, playing a two-fisted scientist. He was cast as the lead in Arnold's next science fiction film, Tarantula, then in a Western, Star in the Dust, and then in The Mole People, another science fiction title. In between, he also slipped in a leading-man performance in Hugo Haas' crime drama Hold Back Tomorrow. He left Universal when the studio refused to give him roles in a wider range of movies, but his career move backfired, limiting him almost entirely to science fiction and Western movies for the next decade. In 1956, the same year that he did The Mole People, Agar made what was arguably the most interesting of all his 1950s films, Flesh and the Spur, directed by Edward L. Cahn for American International. The revenge Western, in which he played a dual role, wasn't seen much beyond the drive-in circuit, however, and was not widely shown on television; it is seldom mentioned in his biographies despite the high quality of the acting and writing. Agar was most visible over the next few years in horror and science fiction films, including Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, Attack of the Puppet People, The Brain From Planet Arous, Invisible Invaders, and Journey to the Seventh Planet. Every so often, he would also work in a mainstream feature such as Joe Butterfly or odd independent features like Lisette, but it was the science fiction films that he was most closely associated with and where he found an audience and a fandom. Coupled with his earlier movies for Universal, those films turned Agar into one of the most visible and popular leading men in science fiction cinema and a serious screen hero to millions of baby-boomer preteens and teenagers. The fact that his performances weren't bad -- and as in The Brain From Planet Arous, were so good they were scary -- also helped. It required a special level of talent to make these movies work and Agar was perfect in them, very convincing whether playing a man possessed by aliens invaders or a scientist trying to save the Earth. In 1962, he made Hand of Death, a film seemingly inspired in part by Robert Clarke's The Hideous Sun Demon, about a scientist transformed into a deadly monster, that has become well known in the field because of its sheer obscurity: The movie has dropped out of distribution and nobody seems to know who owns it or even who has materials on Hand of Death. By the time of its release, however, this kind of movie was rapidly losing its theatrical audience, as earlier examples from the genre (including Agar's own Universal titles) began showing up regularly on television. Hollywood stopped making them and roles dried up for the actor. He appeared in a series of movies for producer A.C. Lyles, including the Korean War drama The Young and the Brave and a pair of Westerns, Law of the Lawless and Johnny Reno, both notable for their casts of aging veteran actors, as well as in a few more science fiction films. In Arthur C. Pierce's Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Agar pulled a Dr. McCoy, playing the avuncular chief medical officer in the crew of a spaceship and also had starring roles in a pair of low-budget Larry Buchanan films for American International Pictures, Zontar, the Thing From Venus and Curse of the Swamp Creature. Amid all of these low-budget productions, however, Agar never ceased to try and keep his hand in mainstream entertainment -- there were television appearances that showed what he could do as a serious actor, perhaps most notably the 1959 Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Caretaker's Cat" (where he was billed as "John G. Agar," perhaps an effort to separate that work from his recent films) and tragic title role in the Branded episode "The Sheriff" (1967); and he always seemed to give 100% effort in those less classy oaters, horror outings, and space operas.His career after that moved into the realm of supporting and character parts, including a small but key role in Roger Corman's first big-budget, big-studio film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He returned to working with John Wayne in three Westerns, The Undefeated, Chisum, and Big Jake, and turned up every so often in bit parts and supporting roles, sometimes in big-budget, high-profile films such as the 1976 remake of King Kong, but mostly he supported himself by selling insurance. In the 1990s, however, Agar was rediscovered by directors such as John Carpenter, who began using him in their movies and television productions, and he worked onscreen in small roles into the 21st century until his death in 2002.

Trivia: American actress Merry Anders was a professional model when she signed her first studio contract in 1951. After two years of uncredited bits in such 20th Century-Fox features as Belles on Their Toes (1952) and Titanic (1953), Merry found more rewarding work on TV. From 1953 through 1955, she appeared in The Stu Erwin Show, replacing Ann Todd in the role of Joyce, Erwin's oldest daughter. While most of her film assignments were along the bargain-basement lines of The Dalton Girls (1957) and The Hypnotic Eye (1960), Merry built up a reputation as "queen" of the TV pilot films. If she appeared as guest star in the pilot episode of a potential series, that series would most likely be sold. Merry would be the last person to insist that she was a great actress; her "versatility" in her many TV roles consisted of changing her hair color as often as possible. It was as a redhead that Merry was cast in the lead of the syndicated sitcom How to Marry a Millionaire, which ran from 1958 through 1960. After this assignment, Merry continued to show up as a blonde, brunette and redhead in such deathless movie offerings as Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) and Legacy of Blood (1973). In the late 1960s, she had a semi-recurring role on Dragnet as a super-efficient policewoman; the character was meant to develop into a love interest for Joe Friday (Jack Webb), but the series never went in that direction. It can be argued that Merry Anders' most memorable performance (and the one most often seen these days) was as a woman who is drowned in a phone booth (!) on a 1966 episode of Get Smart.

Trivia: The son of actors Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, Jody McCrea didn't seem to have much direction in life until his father insisted that they be co-starred in the 1959 TV western Wichita Town. The younger McCrea attempted to follow in his father's rugged, "strong silent-type" footsteps in his subsequent film appearances. By the time he became a regular in the Beach Party flicks at American-International in the mid-1960s, however, McCrea had found his true cinematic niche as goofy, vacant-eyed comedy relief. Jody McCrea gave up show business in 1970 to become a rancher in New Mexico.

Trivia: As the son of legendary Hollywood director William Wellman, Sr. -- the man responsible for the first Best Picture winner, Wings (1927) -- and actress Dorothy Coonan, actor William Wellman Jr. followed in the footsteps of his show-business family and maintained a nearly constant presence in films and television over the decades. He began his career by focusing largely on action-oriented genre fare, such as the Western Darby's Rangers (1958) and the war drama Lafayette Escadrille (1958, both directed by his father), the Lewis Milestone-helmed combat film Pork Chop Hill (1959), and the premier Billy Jack installment, Born Losers (1967). The Trial of Billy Jack marked his reunion with director-star Tom Laughlin. In the late '70s and early '80s, Wellman became involved with Mark IV Pictures, an evangelical Christian production outfit best known for its Thief in the Night film series (on the book of Revelation); he acted in the 1981 series installment Image of the Beast, and appeared in and scripted the 1983 installment Prodigal Planet. Wellman also became active in television; his small-screen assignments include work in the miniseries The Blue and the Gray (1982) and James A. Michener's Space (1985) as well as the 1994 telemovie Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg.

Trivia: Regis "Reg" Parton started out as a Hollywood stuntman in the 1940s and went on to play roles ranging from cowpokes to space aliens. His early credits include the Abbott and Costello fantasy Keep 'Em Flying (1941) and Backlash (1956). During the '50s, he specialized in westerns and in the '60s, Parton was a stunt coordinator for A.C. Lyles Paramount westerns. In addition to feature-film work, Parton has performed in numerous television series including Rawhide, Branded and The Green Hornet.

Trivia: Although he went on to play a variety of street-wise working-class louts, William Bendix was the son of the conductor of the New York Metropolitan Orchestra. He appeared in one film as a child, then went on to a variety of jobs (including time spent as a minor league baseball player) before joining the New York Theater Guild. His first Broadway appearance was as a cop in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939); he then began a healthy film career in 1942 with Woman of the Year; the same year, he appeared in Wake Island, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. With his thick features, broken nose and affected Brooklyn accent, Bendix often played the time-weathered meanie with a heart of gold; eventually he was typecast as dumb and brutish characters. He is best known for his role on the radio show The Life of Riley, which he reprised in the film of the same name (1949) and into a television series in 1953. He played Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story (1948), and generally worked for Paramount.

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.