Trivia: In movies -- a career path that he didn't begin until he was 71 years old -- Edgar Stehli was known as a gifted character actor, capable of making small parts memorable and transforming larger supporting roles into parts rivaling the stars' prominence in whatever work he was in. He naturally played old-man parts, in everything from Westerns (No Name on the Bullet) to science fiction and fantasy (4D Man, the Twilight Zone episode "Long Live Walter Jameson"), and was in numerous major movies, including Robert Wise's Executive Suite and John Frankenheimer's Seconds. But for 40 years before that, he was a successful stage actor and, later, a busy radio actor as well. Born in Paris, France in 1884, Stehli came to America at age three and was raised in Montclair, NJ, where he resided his entire adult life. He attended Cornell University and earned a master's degree in Teutonic languages. He was planning on a career as a linguist when fate -- in the form of a touring company doing the play Raffles -- came through town and enlisted Stehli for a small role as a butler. From that point on, there was no looking back for Stehli, who abandoned linguistics in favor of the theater. Every few years after that, some critic or other, either in New York's Greenwich Village or some venue to the west, north, or south, would "discover" a great "new" talent in Edgar Stehli, as Bunthorne in a Village production of Patience or playing Osric on-stage with John Barrymore in Hamlet. He was never without work and ultimately cast in great roles in major plays, including portraying Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace to Boris Karloff's Jonathan Brewster. As a New York-based actor, film work eluded Stehli for the first 50 years of his career, and didn't seem to interest him. Instead, he turned to radio, most visibly as the voice of the sagely Dr. Huer in Buck Rogers, although by his own account he played hundreds of judges and other characters routinely defined as older authority figures. He turned to television -- which was also mostly produced in New York in those days -- in the late '40s, and it wasn't until 1954, when Stehli was 71, that he made his movie debut. With his wrinkled features, slightly raspy yet gentle voice, and wizened yet troubled eyes, he often was called upon to play crafty or tormented old men (who were sometimes both, witnessed by his work as Dr. Carson, the aging head of the research lab in Irvin S. Yeaworth's 4D Man, concerned about his advancing age and fading reputation, and not above stealing or being complicit in the theft of an idea or invention). One of his best screen roles, oddly enough, was in a Western, Jack Arnold's No Name on the Bullet (1958), as an ex-judge who is hiding a secret that may kill him before his terminal illness does. And in the Twilight Zone episode "Long Live Walter Jameson," he is fascinating to watch as an aging academic who learns, to his horror, what beating the aging process has done to a "younger" colleague of his. Stehli worked all through the '60s, in every genre from drama (Parrish) to sci-fi and fantasy (Seconds, Atlantis, the Lost Continent). He retired in 1970 and passed away three years later, at age 90.

Trivia: Even in her nineties, British actress Estelle Winwood retained the wide-eyed naïveté of her ingénue days. An actress from the age of five, Winwood was trained at the Liverpool Repertory company. As an adult, she specialized in the plays of such leading theatrical lights of the early 20th century as Shaw and Galworthy. In 1918, she starred in Broadway's very first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Why Marry?, and a few years later scored a personal triumph in The Circle. In films from 1933, Winwood was often cast as eccentric, birdlike old ladies, some few of which were capable of homicide. She is fondly remembered for such characterizations as Leslie Caron's fairy godmother in The Glass Slipper (1953) and the pass-the-hat lady in The Misfits (1961). Closing out her film career with the 1976 detective spoof Murder By Death, Estelle Winwood continued appearing on television until she passed the century mark; she died in her sleep at the age of 101.

Trivia: Kevin McCarthy and his older sister Mary Therese McCarthy both found careers in the entertainment industry, though in very different arenas -- Mary became a best-selling novelist, and Kevin became an actor after dabbling in student theatricals at the University of Minnesota. On Broadway from 1938 -- Kevin's first appearance was in Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois -- McCarthy was critically hosannaed for his portrayal of Biff in the original 1948 production of Death of a Salesmen (who could tell that he was but three years younger than the actor playing his father, Lee J. Cobb?) In 1951, McCarthy re-created his Salesman role in the film version, launching a movie career that would thrive for four decades. The film assignment that won McCarthy the hearts of adolescent boys of all ages was his portrayal of Dr. Miles Bennell in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Bennell's losing battle against the invading pod people, and his climactic in-your-face warning "You're next!, " made so indelible an impression that it's surprising to discover that McCarthy's other sci-fi credits are relatively few. Reportedly, he resented the fact that Body Snatchers was the only film for which many viewers remembered him; if so, he has since come to terms with his discomfiture, to the extent of briefly reviving his "You're next!" admonition (he now screamed "They're here!" to passing motorists) in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He has also shown up with regularity in the films of Body Snatchers aficionado Joe Dante, notably 1984's Twilight Zone: The Movie (McCarthy had earlier played the ageless title role in the 1959 Zone TV episode "Long Live Walter Jamieson") and 1993's Matinee, wherein an unbilled McCarthy appeared in the film-within-a-film Mant as General Ankrum (a tip of the cap to another Dante idol, horror-movie perennial Morris Ankrum). Kevin McCarthy would, of course, have had a healthy stage, screen and TV career without either Body Snatchers or Joe Dante; he continued showing up in films into the early 1990s, scored a personal theatrical triumph in the one-man show Give 'Em Hell, Harry!, and was starred in the TV series The Survivors (1969), Flamingo Road (1981), The Colbys (1983) and Bay City Blues (1984).