Trivia: The son of professional ballplayer Walter Hart, William Sterling Hart attended the University of Pittsburgh, then worked as a clothing salesman before entering show business. He was signed by Columbia in 1939, where his name was changed to Robert Sterling so as to avoid confusion with silent western star William S. Hart. At Columbia, Sterling played bits in such features as Golden Boy and Blondie Brings Up Baby, and was also seen in the studio's short subjects product, notably as star of a 2-reel dramatization of the life of rubber magnate Charles Goodyear. In 1941, Sterling moved to MGM, where he was groomed as a potential Robert Taylor replacement. During his MGM tenure, he married actress Ann Sothern, with whom he appeared in Ringside Maisie. The union, which lasted until 1949, produced a daughter, future actress Tisha Sterling. Following war service, Sterling's career fell into a rut of colorless second leads. He finally achieved stardom on the delightful TV sitcom fantasy Topper, co-starring with his second wife Anne Jeffreys. After Topper completed its two-year run in 1955, the Sterlings took to the road in touring stage productions; they reteamed before the cameras in Love That Jill, a 1958 TV comedy which perished after 13 weeks. Sterling's additional TV work included the hosting chores on the 1956-57 season of The 20th Century-Fox Hour, and the starring role of small-town editor Robert Major on the 1961 sitcom Ichabod and Me. He was also one of several actors seriously considered for the role of Perry Mason before Raymond Burr won the part. Robert Sterling retired from acting in the 1970s to run a successful computer business; he has kept so low a public profile in the last two decades that many sources have referred to the still-active Anne Jeffreys as Sterling's widow!

Trivia: Actor MacDonald Carey started out as a Chicago-based radio actor and singer; among his early airwaves credits was a brief tenure as "Mr. First Nighter" in the anthology series of the same name, and a longer engagement as Dick Grosvenor on the daytime soap opera Stella Dallas. In 1941, Carey starred opposite Gertrude Lawrence in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, which led to a Hollywood contract. He appeared prominently in several Paramount features from 1942 to 1949, but is best remembered for his portrayal of the detective in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which he played on loan-out to Universal. When his film career began to wane in the early 1950s, Carey returned to radio as star of the tongue-in-cheek adventure series Jason and the Golden Fleece. He was also top-billed in two syndicated TV weeklies, Dr. Christian (1954) and Lock-Up (1959-61). In 1965, Carey was cast as Dr. Tom Horton on the NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives, a job he held until his death 19 years later; his voice is still heard at the opening of each episode, intoning the familiar intro "Like sands from the hourglass, so are the days of our lives." Not long before his death, MacDonald Carey published his autobiography, in which he was brutally candid about his lifelong battle with alcoholism.

Trivia: One of the best child actors of the 1950s and 1960s, freckled-faced Billy Mumy performed with a directness and sincerity that put many an adult performer to shame. Before he was even ten years old, Mumy had played two of the most unforgettable juveniles in TV history: malevolently telekinetic Anthony Fremont on the 1961 Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," and the pistol-toting protagonist of "Bang! You're Dead," an incredibly suspenseful 1962 installment of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directed by Hitchcock himself. In films from 1963, Mumy's finest cinematic hour-and-a-half was as Erasmus Leaf, an 8-year-old math genius with an all-consuming crush on Brigitte Bardot, in 1965's Dear Brigette. From 1965 to 1968, Mumy appeared as Will Robinson on the popular TV sci-fi fantasy series Lost in Space. As Mumy matured, he found roles harder to come by, though he was given generous screen time in the 1971 Stanley Kramer production Bless the Beasts and Children and was a regular on the 1975 TV weekly Sunshine. He kept busy in the 1980s on the sci-fi convention lecture circuit and as a scriptwriter; he also played cameo roles in remakes of "It's a Good Life" (the middle section of the 1983 Twilight Zone feature film) and "Bang! You're Dead" (one of the components of the 1985 TV revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents). The many fans of Bill Mumy's previous work in the realm of "fantastic television" were delighted in 1995 to find him playing the recurring role of Lennier on the syndicated TVer Babylon 5.

Trivia: Karl Swenson was one of the busiest performers in the so-called golden days of network radio. Swenson played the leading role in the seriocomic daily serial Lorenzo Jones, and was also heard on Our Gal Sunday as Lord Henry, the heroine's "wealthy and titled Englishman" husband. He carried over his daytime-drama activities into television, playing Walter Manning in the 1954 video version of radio's Portia Faces Life. From 1958 onward, Swenson was seen in many small roles in a number of big films: Judgment of Nuremberg (1961), How the West Was Won (1962), and The Birds (1963). One of his more sizeable movie assignments was the voice of Merlin in the 1963 Disney animated feature The Sword in the Stone. One of his last roles was the recurring part of Mr. Hansen on TV's Little House on the Prairie. Karl Swenson was married to actress Joan Tompkins.

Trivia: Though born in Michigan, Adele Mara exuded enough exotic Latin charm to be hired as a vocalist by bandleader Xavier Cugat. In 1941, she was signed to a Columbia Pictures contract, appearing in large roles and small in everything from 2-reel comedies to "B" features like Alias Boston Blackie (1941). She became a star at Republic Studios in the mid-1940s, appearing in many a Republic musical and melodrama and adorning lockers all over the world in cheesecake pin-ups; among her last assignments at Republic was the big-budget 1949 war epic Sands of Iwo Jima. In the late 1950s, Adele Mara curtailed her screen activities upon her marriage to TV producer Roy Huggins.

Trivia: Forever remembered by film buffs as the man who brought King Kong to New York, American actor Robert Armstrong was a law student at the University of Washington in Seattle when he dropped out in favor of a vaudeville tour. Learning by doing, Armstrong worked his way up to "leading man" roles in a New York stock company run by veteran character man Jimmy Gleason. Gleason's play Iz Zat So? led to a film contract for Armstrong, whose first picture was The Main Event (1927). The actor's stage training served him well during Hollywood's switchover to sound, and he appeared with frequency in the early talkie years, at one point costarring with Broadway legend Fanny Brice in My Man (1930). An expert at playing sports and showbiz promoters, Armstrong was a natural for the role of the enthusiastic but foolhardy Carl Denham in King Kong (1933). Armstrong enjoyed some of the best dialogue of his career as he coerced erstwhile actress Fay Wray to go with him to Skull Island to seek out "money, adventure, the thrill of a lifetime", and as he egged on his crew to explore the domain of 50-foot ape Kong. And of course, Armstrong was allowed to speak the final lines of this imperishable classic: "It wasn't the planes...It was beauty killed the beast." Armstrong played Carl Denham again in a sequel, Son of Kong (1933), and later played Denham in everything but name as a shoestring theatrical promoter in Mighty Joe Young (1949), wherein he brought a nice giant gorilla into civilization. Always in demand as a character actor, Armstrong continued to make films in the 1940s; he had the rare distinction of playing an American military officer in Around the World (1943), a Nazi agent in My Favorite Spy (1942), and a Japanese general in Blood on the Sun (1945)! In the 1950s and 1960s, Armstrong was a fixture on TV cop and adventure programs. Perhaps the most characteristic moment in Armstrong's TV career was during a sketch on The Red Skelton Show, in which Red took one look at Armstrong and ad-libbed "Say, did you ever get that monkey off that building?"