Trivia: Richard Basehart was too much of an actor (and almost too good an actor) to ever be a movie star -- his range was sufficient to allow him to play murderers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and would-be suicides in 20 years' worth of theatrical films in totally convincing fashion, but also to portray a hero in the longest-running science fiction/adventure series on network television. Without ever achieving stardom, he became one of the most respected performers of his generation in theater, film, and television. Born John Richard Basehart in Zanesville, OH, in 1914, he spent a part of his childhood in an orphanage after the death of his mother, when his father, Harry Basehart, found himself unable to look after the four children left in his care. The younger Basehart considered a career in journalism like his father, but when he was 13, he began acting in small roles in a local theater company and came to enjoy performing. In the mid-'30s, he joined Jasper Deeter's famed Hedgerow Theater company in Rose Valley, PA. By the end of the 1930s, he'd set his sights on a Broadway career and moved to New York. During the 1939 season, while working in stock, Basehart met an actress named Stephanie Klein, and the two were married in early 1940. He continued trying to establish a foothold in New York and in 1942, joined Margaret Webster's theater company. Basehart's breakthrough role came during 1945 in the play The Hasty Heart, in which director Bretaigne Windust cast him in the central role of the proud, dying young Scottish soldier. Basehart won the 1945 New York Drama Critics Award for his performance and was named the most promising newcomer of the season. Not only did Broadway producers take notice of Basehart but so did Hollywood, and he was soon signed to a movie contract. Thus began a screen career that lasted nearly 40 years, starting with Repeat Performance (1947), a thriller starring Joan Leslie. He followed this with Cry Wolf (1947), an adventure yarn also starring Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn, and Geraldine Brooks. Basehart was unusually careful as a new Hollywood performer to vary his roles and avoid getting typecast. His first of what proved a string of memorable portrayals was in He Walked By Night (1948), a fact-based thriller in which the actor played a brilliant but sociopathic electronics expert, responsible for a string of burglaries and for killing a police officer. Viewers who grew up knowing Basehart as the heroic figure on the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in the 1960s are often startled to see him 20 years earlier in He Walked By Night as an almost feral presence, quietly fierce, threatening and stealthy in his efforts to escape detection and capture. Over the next two years, Basehart essayed a multitude of roles, in contemporary dramatic subjects and period dramas, the most interesting of which was Anthony Mann's Reign of Terror (1949), in which he portrayed Maximilien Robespierre, one of the chief architects of the bloodbath that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. In 1950, Basehart played one of the most difficult film roles of his career when he was cast in the fact-based movie Fourteen Hours, playing a young man who spends 14 hours on the ledge of an office building, threatening to jump. It was during the shooting of this movie that Basehart's wife, Stephanie, was taken ill with what proved to be a brain tumor, and died very suddenly. He finished work on the film and then left the United States, going to Italy where he began putting his life back together. This began when he met the actress Valentina Cortese, whom he married in 1951. The two worked together in one movie, The House on Telegraph Hill, directed by Robert Wise at 20th Century Fox, in which Basehart played the villain trying to murder Cortese for her estate. Basehart returned to Hollywood only intermittently for the next nine years, and his next appearance in an American movie wasn't until 1953, when he worked in Titanic, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb. It was during the decade that Basehart made his home in Europe that the actor became multilingual, and developed a serious following over there as a leading man; while other, older American performers were entering the final legs of their careers making pictures in France, Italy, or England, he was making important pictures and playing great roles, as the doomed, gentle clown in Federico Fellini's La Strada; a basically honest man driven into crime in The Good Die Young; the movie director threatened by a blackmailer in Joseph Losey's Finger of Guilt, and even an action-adventure hero in an Italian-made version of Cartouche (1957). John Huston specifically chose Basehart for the central role of Ishmael in his superb 1956 film version of Moby Dick. In 1957, Basehart tried reestablishing his Hollywood acting credentials with his portrayal of a conscience-stricken American officer in the movie Time Limit, which got good notices but proved to be a one-off American screen credit. In 1960, the actor divorced his second wife and left Italy behind. He returned to live permanently in America and restart his career, and began a new life, marrying again in 1962. He found that film roles weren't easily forthcoming, however -- the only part that came his way was the title role in Stuart Heisler's 1962 drama Hitler, in which Basehart gave an unusually complex, cerebral portrayal of the Nazi leader. He made numerous appearances in dramatic series such as Combat and Naked City, and television anthology shows including Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame. In 1964, Basehart accepted the offer of a starring role on a television series, beginning a four-year run on the Irwin Allen-produced Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, portraying Admiral Harriman Nelson. Thus began the steadiest work of his career, more than 100 episodes made Basehart a television star. He appeared in one movie during this period, John Sturges' thriller The Satan Bug (1965), in which he played the villain. Following the cancellation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Basehart returned to acting on-stage, interspersed with work in made-for-television movies and occasional feature films, such as Rage (1972), directed by George C. Scott. He won critical acclaim for his work in the drama The Andersonville Trial, directed by George C. Scott, portraying Lt. Col. Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, and made the rounds of guest star roles in television shows, perhaps most memorably the "Dagger of the Mind" episode of Columbo. Basehart and his third wife, Diana, also became known for their dedication to the cause of animal rights, founding the organization Actors and Others for Animals. During the final years of his life, he did some acting on television series such as Knight Rider and appeared in movies such as the hit Being There, but he was also very much in demand as a narrator, working on Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (1980), among other projects. It was as a narrator that he made his final public appearance, at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Basehart suffered a series of strokes, and passed away soon after.

Trivia: A onetime lumberjack, Scott Brady distinguished himself as a Navy boxing champion during the war. After VJ Day, Brady took drama classes, appearing in his first film, Canon City, in 1948. Usually assigned rough-and-tumble roles (many villainous in nature), Brady exhibited a normally untapped comic prowess in the 1952 film The Model and the Marriage Broker. He continued taking lead roles in cheap westerns, horror films and science-fiction pictures into the 1960s, occasionally surfacing in "A" films like Marooned (1969) and Gremlins (1985, his last film). In 1959, Brady starred in a syndicated western series, Shotgun Slade, which allowed him the opportunity to act opposite several of his non-showbiz idols, including war hero Pappy Boyington and athlete Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch; he also had a recurring role in the 1970s anthology Police Story. Scott Brady is the younger brother of Lawrence Tierney, an actor best known for his gangster portrayals.

Trivia: Tall, silver-maned character actor Roy Roberts began his film career as a 20th Century-Fox contractee in 1943. Nearly always cast in roles of well-tailored authority, Roberts was most effective when conveying smug villainy. As a hotel desk clerk in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), he suavely but smarmily refused to allow Jews to check into his establishment; nineteen years later, Roberts was back behind the desk and up to his old tricks, patronizingly barring a black couple from signing the register in Hotel (1966). As the forties drew to a close, Roberts figured into two of the key film noirs of the era; he was the carnival owner who opined that down-at-heels Tyrone Power had sunk so low because "he reached too high" at the end of Nightmare Alley (1947), while in 1948's He Walked By Night, Roberts enjoyed one of his few sympathetic roles as a psycho-hunting plainclothesman. And in the 3-D classic House of Wax, Roberts played the crooked business partner of Vincent Price, whose impulsive decision to burn down Price's wax museum has horrible consequences. With the role of bombastic Captain Huxley on the popular Gale Storm TV series Oh, Susanna (1956-1960), Gordon inaugurated his dignified-foil period. He later played long-suffering executive types on The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and The Lucy Show. Roy Roberts last appeared on screen as the mayor in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).

Trivia: Whit Bissell was a familiar face to younger baby boomers as an actor mostly associated with fussy official roles -- but those parts merely scratched the surface of a much larger and longer career. Born Whitner Nutting Bissell in New York City in 1909, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an alumnus of that institution's Carolina Playmakers company. He made his movie debut with an uncredited role in the 1940 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk and then wasn't seen on screen again for three years. Starting in 1943, Bissell appeared in small roles in a short string of mostly war-related Warner Bros. productions, including Destination Tokyo. It wasn't until after the war, however, that he began getting more visible in slightly bigger parts. He had a tiny role in the opening third of Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Cluny Brown (1946), but starting in 1947, Bissell became much more closely associated with film noir and related dark, psychologically-focused crime films. Directors picked up on his ability to portray neurotic instability and weaselly dishonesty -- anticipating the kinds of roles in which Ray Walston would specialize for a time -- and used him in pictures such as Brute Force, He Walked by Night, and The Killer That Stalked New York. His oddest and most visible portrayal during this period was in The Crime Doctor's Diary (1949), in which he had a scene-stealing turn as a mentally unhinged would-be composer at the center of a murder case. By the early 1950s, however, in addition to playing fidgety clerks, nervous henchmen, and neurotic suspects (and friends and relatives of suspects), he added significantly to his range of portrayals with his deeply resonant voice, which could convincingly convey authority. Bissell began turning up as doctors, scientists, and other figures whose outward demeanor commanded respect -- mainstream adult audiences probably remember him best for his portrayal of the navy psychiatrist in The Caine Mutiny, while teenagers in the mid-1950s may have known him best for the scientists and psychiatrists that he played in Target Earth and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it was in two low-budget films that all of Bissell's attributes were drawn together in a pair of decidedly villainous roles, as the mad scientists at the center of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. The latter, in particular, gave him a chance to read some very "ripe" lines with a straight face, most memorably, "Answer me! I know you have a civil tongue in your mouth -- I sewed it there myself!" But Bissell was never a one-note actor. During this same period, he was showing off far more range in as many as a dozen movies and television shows each year. Among the more notable were Shack Out on 101, in which he gave a sensitive portrayal of a shell-shocked veteran trying to deal with his problems in the midst of a nest of Soviet spies; "The Man With Many Faces" on the series Code 3, in which he was superb as a meek accountant who is pushed into the life of a felon by an ongoing family tragedy; and, finally, in "The Great Guy" on Father Knows Best, where he successfully played a gruff, taciturn employer who never broke his tough demeanor for a moment, yet still convincingly delivered a final line that could bring tears to the eyes of an audience. By the end of the 1950s, Bissell was working far more in television than in movies. During the early 1960s, he was kept busy in every genre, most notably Westerns -- he showed up on The Rifleman and other oaters with amazing frequency. During the mid-1960s, however, he was snatched up by producer Irwin Allen, who cast Bissell in his one costarring role: as General Kirk, the head of the government time-travel program Project Tic-Toc on the science-fiction/adventure series Time Tunnel. He also showed up on Star Trek and in other science-fiction series of the period and continued working in dozens of small roles well into the mid-1980s. Bissell died in 1996.

Trivia: Following World War II, California native Jack Webb planned to renew the art studies that he'd abandoned for the military. Instead, he turned to acting, appearing on various San Francisco-based radio programs. He briefly hosted his own satirical comedy series before finding his true metier in detective melodramas. In collaboration with future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard L. Breen (who remained a Webb associate until his death in 1967), Webb concocted a hard-boiled private eye show entitled Pat Novak for Hire. The popularity he gained from this effort enabled Webb to secure small film roles -- one of these was as a police lab technician in the 1948 film noir He Walked by Night (1948). Intrigued by the police procedure he'd learned while preparing for the role, Webb immersed himself in the subject until he felt ready to launch what many observers still consider the first realistic radio cop show: Dragnet, which premiered June 3, 1949. Webb carried over his terse characterization of L.A. police sergeant Joe Friday into the Dragnet TV series (which he also directed) beginning in 1952. Armed with a bottomless reserve of police terminology and a colorful repertoire of catchphrases, the laconic, ferret-faced Webb became one of the most successful -- and most widely imitated -- TV personalities of the 1950s; almost always in the Top Ten, Dragnet, produced by Webb's own Mark VII Productions, ran until 1959. Webb's newfound industry clout permitted him to direct for the big screen as well -- his 1950s movie credits (outside of such pre-star efforts as The Men, Sunset Boulevard, and Halls of Montezuma) include the 1954 feature version of Dragnet, 1955's Pete Kelly's Blues (based on another of Webb's radio series), 1957's The D.I., and 1959's 30. In addition, Webb's Mark VII produced such TV series as Noah's Ark, The D.A.'s Man, and the video version of Pete Kelly's Blues. Webb kicked off the 1960s with a rare attempt at directing comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). From 1962 through 1964, he was in charge of Warner Bros.' television division, an assignment which came to an end as a result of several failed TV ventures. A 1966 TV-movie version of Dragnet kicked off Webb's second career. He went on to star in a successful weekly Dragnet revival, which ran from 1967 through 1970, while his Mark VII outfit was responsible for a score of TV series, the most successful of which were Emergency and Adam 12. Regarded as something of a relic by the "hipper" viewers, Jack Webb nonetheless remained profitably active in television until the late '70s; he might have continued into the 1980s had not his drinking and smoking habits accelerated his death at the age of 62. Married three times, Jack Webb's first wife was singing star Julie London, whom he'd first met when he was 21 and she was 15.

Trivia: Open-faced, prominently chinned character actor Lyle Latell began surfacing in films in the late 1930s. Only occasionally did Latell rise above the status of bit player; he was most often seen as a wisecracking reporter, griping military man or cheerful cabbie. From 1945 through 1947, Latell was a regular in RKO's Dick Tracy "B"-picture series, playing Tracy's assistant Pat Patton. Lyle Latell was married to Mary Foy, one of the "Seven Little Foys" of vaudeville fame.

Trivia: The younger brother of comic actor Nat Pendleton, Gaylord "Steve" Pendleton entered films in 1923. He was usually cast as collegiate types (undergrads, military school cadets), with a few weaklings and villains thrown in. Fans of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby will remember Pendleton as tuxedoed "other man" Gordon Wycott in Road to Singapore (1940). Active in films until 1960, Gaylord Pendleton was generally confined to minor roles, with a handful of leads and second leads in serials and comedy two-reelers.

Trivia: Though seemingly born with a battered bulldog countenance and a rattly voice best suited to such lines as "We don't like you kind around these parts, stranger," tough-guy character actor Kenneth Tobey was originally groomed for gormless leading man roles when he came to Hollywood in 1949. Possessing too much roughhewn authority to be wasted in romantic leads, Tobey was best served in military roles. One of these was the no-nonsense but likeable Capt. Patrick Hendrey in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, a role that typed him in films of a "fantastic" nature for several years thereafter. From 1956 through 1958, Tobey co-starred with Craig Hill on the popular syndicated TV adventure series Whirlybirds; up to that time, televiewers were most familiar with Tobey as Jim Bowie in the ratings-busting Davy Crockett miniseries. Though often consigned by Hollywood's typecasting system to workaday villain roles, Kenneth Tobey has not be forgotten by filmmakers who grew up watching his horror-flick endeavors of the 1950s; he has been afforded key cameo roles in such latter-day shockers as Strange Invaders (1983) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and in 1985 he reprised his Thing From Another World character in The Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1937.

Trivia: Six-foot-tall American actor Rory Mallinson launched his screen career at the end of WW II. Mallinson was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1945, making his first appearance in Price of the Marines. In 1947, he began free-lancing at Republic, Columbia and other "B"-picture mills. One of his larger roles was Hodge in the 1952 Columbia serial Blackhawk. Rory Mallinson made his last film in 1963.

Trivia: Carlotta Monti, born Charlotte Monte, appeared in a few feature films from 1929 through 1950, but her career never took flight. She is best remembered as being the longtime companion in a tumultuous relationship with comedian W.C. Fields. Following his death, Monti struggled at odd jobs to stay afloat. During the '70s, she acted in a few films and in 1971 published the autobiographical W.C. Fields and Me. In 1976, Valerie Perrine played Monti in the film version of the book.

Trivia: Actor Harry Harvey Sr. started out in minstrel shows and burlesque. His prolific work in Midwestern stock companies led to film assignments, beginning at RKO in 1934. Harvey's avuncular appearance (he looked like every stage doorman named Pop who ever existed) won him featured roles in mainstream films and comic-relief and sheriff parts in B-westerns. His best known "prestige" film assignment was the role of New York Yankees manager Joe McCarthy in the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic Pride of the Yankees. Remaining active into the TV era, Harry Harvey Sr. had continuing roles on two series, The Roy Rogers Show and It's a Man's World, and showed up with regularity on such video sagebrushers as Cheyenne and Bonanza.

Trivia: American actress Ruth Robinson made a solitary screen appearance in 1911 before returning to the stage. She resumed her film activities in 1936, playing a minor part in the Boris Karloff melodrama The Walking Dead. For the next two decades, she showed up in such stern-faced roles as missionaries, housekeepers, prison matrons, and society spouses. In 1956, Ruth Robinson appeared fleetingly as the title character in the speculative The Search for Bridey Murphy.

Trivia: A graduate of Juilliard and a former member of the famed Pasadena Playhouse, diminutive American screen actress Jane Adams (born Betty Jane Bierce) is mainly remembered as the most beautiful of all Universal's monster creations, the hunchbacked Nina of House of Dracula (1945). It was really a pity that the studio should promote Adams as merely one of the ghoulish attractions in this monster-rally, especially since the deformed and self-sacrificing nurse offered the sensationalistic horror opus its one genuine character. She was rather more conventionally cast in yet another horror film, The Brute Man (1946), starring real life acromegalia victim Rondo Hatton, but this low-budget effort proved so poor that Universal ended up unloading it to Poverty Row company PRC. Sporting a new moniker, Poni Adams, she also appeared opposite the studio's resident B-Western star, Kirby Grant but was back to Jane for Lost City of the Jungle (1946), a rough-and-tumble serial noted as the swan song of veteran villain Lionel Atwill. She was Vicky Vale in yet another serial, 1949's Batman and Robin, but did mostly television thereafter. Except for appearances at various classic film fairs, Adams retired completely from show business in 1953 in order to travel with her husband, Major General Thomas Turnage, later an advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Trivia: Starting out as an assistant animator at the Walt Disney studios, John Dehner went on to work as a professional pianist, Army publicist, and radio journalist. From 1944 until the end of big-time radio in the early '60s, Dehner was one of the busiest and best performers on the airwaves. He guested on such series as Gunsmoke, Suspense, Escape, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and starred as British news correspondent J.B. Kendall on Frontier Gentleman (1958) and as Paladin in the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel (1958-1960). On Broadway, he appeared in Bridal Crown and served as director of Alien Summer. In films from 1944, Dehner played character roles ranging from a mad scientist in The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954) to Sheriff Pat Garrett in The Left-Handed Gun (1958) to publisher Henry Luce in The Right Stuff (1983). Though he played the occasional lead, Dehner's cocked-eyebrow imperiousness generally precluded any romantic entanglements; he once commented with pride that, in all his years as an actor, he never won nor kissed the heroine. As busy on TV as elsewhere, Dehner was seen regularly on such series as The Betty White Show (1954), The Westerner (1960), The Roaring '20s (1961), The Baileys of Balboa (1964), The Doris Day Show (1968), The Don Knotts Show (1969), Temperatures Rising (1973-1974), Big Hawaii (1977), Young Maverick (1979-1980), and Enos (1980-1981). He also essayed such TV-movie roles as Dean Acheson in The Missiles of October (1974). Working almost up to the end, John Dehner died of emphysema and diabetes at the age of 76.

Trivia: In the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance," Gig Young comments that he thinks he's seen drugstore counterman Byron Foulger before. "I've got that kind of face" was the counterman's reply. Indeed, Foulger's mustachioed, bespectacled, tremble-chinned, moon-shaped countenance was one of the most familiar faces ever to grace the screen. A graduate of the University of Utah, Foulger developed a taste for performing in community theatre, making his Broadway debut in the '20s. Foulger then toured with Moroni Olsen's stock company, which led him to the famed Pasadena Playhouse as both actor and director. In films from 1936, Foulger usually played whining milksops, weak-willed sycophants, sanctimonious sales clerks, shifty political appointees, and the occasional unsuspected murderer. In real life, the seemingly timorous actor was not very easily cowed; according to his friend Victor Jory, Foulger once threatened to punch out Errol Flynn at a party because he thought that Flynn was flirting with his wife (Mrs. Foulger was Dorothy Adams, a prolific movie and stage character actress). Usually unbilled in "A" productions, Foulger could count on meatier roles in such "B" pictures as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Panther's Claw (1943). In the Bowery Boys' Up in Smoke (1957), Foulger is superb as a gleeful, twinkly-eyed Satan. In addition to his film work, Byron Foulger built up quite a gallery of portrayals on television; one of his final stints was the recurring role of engineer Wendell Gibbs on the popular sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: Pop-eyed comic actor Wally Vernon started in showbiz at the age of three. With extensive experience in minstrel shows, burlesque, vaudeville, and the legitimate stage under his belt, Vernon began appearing in films in the early '30s, showing up in two-reelers produced at Sennett, RKO, MGM, and Universal. A contract player at 20th Century Fox in the mid-'30s, Vernon displayed his salty, Runyon-esque dialogue delivery in such films as Sharpshooters (1938) and The Gorilla (1939). During the late '40s and early '50s, Vernon was the ubiquitous comedy relief in many a Republic Western. From 1948 through 1956, Vernon co-starred with Eddie Quillan in a lively series of 16 two-reel comedies, produced by Columbia Pictures. Back at Fox in the 1960s, Vernon was one of many Hollywood old-timers given good supporting roles in the 1964 Shirley MacLaine comedy What a Way to Go. Wally Vernon was killed by a hit-and-run driver near his Van Nuys home in 1970.

Trivia: Whenever Ellen Corby or Mary Field weren't available to play a timid, spinsterish film role, chances are the part would go to Dorothy Adams. Though far from a shrinking violet in real life, Ms. Adams was an expert at portraying repressed, secretive women, usually faithful servants or maiden aunts. Her best-remembered role was the overly protective maid of Gene Tierney in Laura (1944). Dorothy Adams was the wife of veteran character actor Byron Foulger; both were guiding forces of the Pasadena Playhouse, as both actors and directors. Dorothy and Byron's daughter is actress Rachel Ames, who played Audrey March on TV's General Hospital.

Trivia: Character actor Donald Kerr showed up whenever a gumchewing Runyonesque type (often a reporter or process server) was called for. A bit actor even in two-reelers and "B" pictures, Kerr was one of those vaguely familiar faces whom audiences would immediately recognize, ask each other "Who is that?", then return to the film, by which time Kerr had scooted the scene. The actor's first recorded film appearance was in 1933's Carnival Lady. Twenty-two years later, Donald Kerr concluded his career in the same anonymity with which he began it in 1956's Yaqui Drums.

Trivia: A sadly neglected supporting actress, Ann Doran played everything from Charley Chase's foil in Columbia two-reelers of the late '30s to James Dean's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and also guest starred in such television shows as Superman, Petticoat Junction, Bewitched, and The A Team. A former child model and the daughter of silent screen actress Rose Allen (1885-1977), Doran made her screen bow in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922) but then spent the next 12 years or so getting herself an education. She returned to films in 1934 and joined the Columbia short subject department two years later. While with Columbia, Doran worked on all of Frank Capra's films save Lost Horizon (1937) and she later toiled for both Paramount and Warner Bros., often receiving fine reviews but always missing out on the one role that may have made her a star. Appearing in more than 500 films and television shows (her own count), Doran worked well into the 1980s, often unbilled but always a noticeable presence.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Harlan Warde came to films in 1941 and remained before the cameras until the mid-'60s. During WWII, Warde played many a young man in uniform. Afterwards, he showed up in supporting roles as detectives, doctors, and ministers. One of Harlan Warde's last assignments was the recurring part of Sheriff Brannon on the TV Western series The Virginian (1962-1971).

Trivia: Balding, long-necked character actor Frank Cady was a stage actor of long standing when he moved into films in 1947. He was usually cast as a quiet, unassuming small town professional man, most memorably as the long-suffering husband of the grief-stricken alcoholic Mrs. Daigle (Eileen Heckart) in The Bad Seed (1957). A busy television actor, he spent much of the 1950s on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as Ozzie Nelson's neighbor Doc Willard. The "TV Generation" of the 1960s knows Cady best as philosophical storekeeper Sam Drucker on the bucolic sitcoms Petticoat Junction (1963-1970) and Green Acres (1965-1971). Whenever he wanted to briefly escape series television and recharge his theatrical batteries, Frank Cady appeared with the repertory company at the prestigious Mark Taper's Forum.

Trivia: As the 19th century became the 20th, Paul Scardon enjoyed a thriving career as an actor, producer, and director on both the Australian and New York stage. Scardon entered films with the Majestic company in 1911; he went on to play such authoritative roles as General Grant in The Battle Cry of Peace. From 1912 until the end of the silent era, he was a prolific director of romantic dramas, some of which starred his wife, actress Betty Blythe. Retiring when talkies came in, Paul Scardon returned to films as an actor in 1940, essaying bit roles until he left show business permanently in 1948.

Trivia: A handsome, dark-haired silent-screen leading man with a widow's peak, Charles Meredith appeared opposite some of the era's great leading ladies, including Marguerite Clark, Blanche Sweet, Mary Miles Minter, Katherine MacDonald, and Florence Vidor. Between 1924 and 1947, Meredith concentrated on the legitimate stage, then returned to film as a distinguished character actor, playing the judge in Joan Crawford's Daisy Kenyon (1947), the High Priest in DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), and an admiral in Submarine Command (1952). Continuing well into the television era, the veteran actor had continuing roles in two short-lived series: Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954) and Erle Stanley Garner's Court of Last Resort.

Trivia: Billy Mauch and his identical twin brother, Bobby Mauch, appeared in films of the '30s and '40s. They debuted in The Prince and the Pauper (1937) and went on to staff a number of the Penrod series. In the early '50s, Billy Mauch appeared in a couple of films without his brother.

Trivia: American actor Tommy Kelly had a very brief career during the late '30s through the mid '40s as a child actor. He is best remembered for playing the title role in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is said that David O. Selznick handpicked Kelly for the role. Kelly died in 2016, at age 90.