Trivia: American actor Michael Forest starred in the title role in Roger Corman's sword-and-sandal opus Atlas (1961), after which he made the Hollywood adventure movie rounds of the mid to late '60s. He was among the handsome Hollywood hunks prevalent in such films as The Glory Guys (1966), The Sweet Ride (1967) and 100 Rifles (1969). Two decades later, Forest was still essaying beefcake supporting roles, notably in 1988's Deep Space. Soap-opera addicts are most familiar with Michael Forest for his interpretation of Nick Andropoulos on TV's As the World Turns. Devotees of Star Trek will remember Forest as the messianic Apollo in the 1967 episode "Who Mourns for Adonis?." And sitcom fans will recall Forest as Laura Petrie's former beau Joe Coogan, who shows up unexpectedly in clerical collar as Father Coogan on a 1963 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. In 2013, Forest turned in a very touching and powerful performance reprising his 1960s-era Star Trek role of the Greek god Apollo, in the fan-produced "Star Trek Continues" episode "Pilgrim Of Eternity," in which he was introduced working opposite his real-life wife Diana Hale (playing Athena).

Trivia: American lead and supporting actor who worked exclusively in foreign productions, particularly Italian.

Trivia: As the above question marks in the birthplace slot indicate, American actress Barboura Morris was the Mystery Woman of low-budget pictures. Little is known of her life before she graduated from UCLA and began her acting career as Barboura O'Neill, putting in her first professional time at Northern California's Stumptown stock company. After honing her skills under the tutelage of coach Jeff Corey, Barboura did some TV work in the '50s, mostly in dramatic anthologies. Roger Corman, who'd been in Barboura's class under Jeff Corey, convinced the actress to take the leading role in Corman's Sorority Girl (1957), in which she was still billed as Barboura O'Neill in a cast including such stalwart Corman players as Susan Cabot and Dick Miller. In American-International's Machine Gun Kelly (1958), Barboura acted opposite Charles Bronson, while in yet another A-I epic she was one of the beleaguered Nordic damsels in Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1959). The Wasp Woman (1959) contained perhaps Barbara's best performance during her long tenure at American-International, as the faithful secretary to the sting-happy title character. The actress continued taking TV roles inbetween her B-picture stints, and was seen in a flashy part as a glamorous amnesiac on a 1959 episode of The Thin Man. Evidently, Barboura Morris' final role was a bit in 1969's The Dunwich Horror; she died in 1975 at the age of 43.

Trivia: A former engineering student, Roger Corman entered the picture business as a messenger and ended up a producer/director after a stint as a story analyst and a brief detour to Oxford University. After returning to Hollywood, he saw an opportunity to make money and gain experience by making low-budget films to feed the drive-in and neighborhood theater circuits, which had been abandoned in large part by the major studios. Working from budgets of as little as 50,000 dollars, he quickly learned the art of creating bargain-basement entertainment and making money at it, producing and directing pictures for American International Pictures and Allied Artists. Five Guns West, Apache Woman, The Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, The Undead, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Teenage Doll, Machine Gun Kelly, The Wasp Woman, and Sorority Girl were only a few of the titles, and they were indicative of their subjects. These films were short (some as little as 62 minutes) and threadbare in production values. (Reportedly, distributor Samuel Z. Arkoff used to look at the film footage at the end of each day of shooting and call Corman, telling him, "Roger, for chrissake, hire a couple more extras and put a little more furniture on the set!") But his films were also extremely entertaining, and endeared Corman to at least two generations of young filmgoers.During the early '60s, Corman became more ambitious, and made the serious school desegregation drama The Intruder. Adapted for the screen by his brother Gene Corman from Charles Beaumont's novel, it was the only one of his movies to lose money -- because few theaters would book it -- although it was one of the finest B-movies ever made. Corman also began working in color, most notably on a series of adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories starring Vincent Price that won the respect of younger critics and aspiring filmmakers alike. Corman also employed many young film students and writers during this period, including Francis Ford Coppola, Curtis Harrington, and author Robert Towne. His output decreased as his budgets went up, and Corman moved away from directing and into producing. In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Corman was still producing exploitation films (such as Humanoids From the Deep), but his New World Pictures also distributed several important foreign movies, including Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers and the groundbreaking Jamaican crime drama The Harder They Come.