Trivia: Reed was elected beauty queen of her high school and Campus Queen of her college. The latter honor resulted in her photo making the L.A. papers, and as a result she was invited to take a screen test with MGM, which signed her in 1941. She played supporting roles in a number of minor films (at first being billed as "Donna Adams"), then in the mid '40s she began getting leads; with rare exceptions, she portrayed sincere, wholesome types and loving wives and girlfriends. She went against type playing a prostitute in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Rarely getting rewarding roles, she retired from the screen in 1958 to star in the TV series "The Donna Reed Show," which was a great success and remained on the air through 1966. After 1960 she appeared in only one more film. In the mid '80s she emerged from retirement to star in "Dallas;" Barbara Bel Geddes returned to the show in 1985, and Reed won a $1 million settlement for a breach of contract suit against the show's producers. She died of cancer several months later.

Trivia: American actor Paul Petersen was a child actor who appeared on television and in a couple of feature films during the '50s; he is best remembered for playing teenager Jeff Stone on The Donna Reed Show where he literally grew up. While there, Petersen had a brief side-career as a popular singer, making his recording debut in early 1962 with the novelty song "She Can't Find Her Keys," which originally aired as a dream sequence on the show. Other hits followed, including his Top Ten single "My Dad," which he also sang on the television show. Eventually Petersen left the show and began playing leads in a few '60s feature films. Since then, Petersen has become a writer of spy novels and has made only infrequent forays into film.

Trivia: The son of a Norwegian pastor, John Qualen was born in British Columbia. After his family moved to Illinois, Qualen won a high school forensic contest, which led to a scholarship at Northwestern University. A veteran of the tent-show and vaudeville circuits by the late '20s, Qualen won the important role of the Swedish janitor in the Broadway play Street Scene by marching into the producer's office and demonstrating his letter-perfect Scandinavian accent. His first film assignment was the 1931 movie version of Street Scene. Slight of stature, and possessed of woebegone, near-tragic facial features, Qualen was most often cast in "victim" roles, notably the union-activist miner who is beaten to death by hired hooligans in Black Fury (1935) and the pathetic, half-mad Muley in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Qualen was able to harness his trodden-upon demeanor for comedy as well, as witness his performance as the bewildered father of the Dionne quintuplets in The Country Doctor (1936). He was also effectively cast as small men with large reserves of courage, vide his portrayal of Norwegian underground operative Berger in Casablanca (1942). From Grapes of Wrath onward, Qualen was a member in good standing of the John Ford "stock company," appearing in such Ford-directed classics as The Long Voyage Home (1940), The Searchers (1955), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). John Qualen was acting into the 1970s, often appearing in TV dramatic series as pugnacious senior citizens.