Trivia: Hissable movie heavy Dan Duryea was handsome enough as a young man to secure leading roles in the student productions at White Plains High School. He majored in English at Cornell University, but kept active in theatre, succeeding Franchot Tone as president of Cornell's Dramatic Society. Bowing to his parents' wishes, Duryea sought out a more "practical" profession upon graduation, working for the N. W. Ayer advertising agency. After suffering a mild heart attack, Duryea was advised by his doctor to leave advertising and seek out employment in something he enjoyed doing. Thus, Duryea returned to acting in summer stock, then was cast in the 1935 Broadway hit Dead End. The first of his many bad-guy roles was Bob Ford, the "dirty little coward" who shot Jesse James, in the short-lived 1938 stage play Missouri Legend. Impressed by Duryea's slimy but somehow likeable perfidy in this play, Herman Shumlin cast the young actor as the snivelling Leo Hubbard in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. This 1939 Broadway production was converted into a film by Sam Goldwyn in 1941, with many members of the original cast -- including Duryea -- making their Hollywood debuts. Duryea continued playing supporting roles in films until 1945's The Woman in the Window, in which he scored as Joan Bennett's sneering "bodyguard" (that's Hollywoodese for "pimp"). Thereafter, Duryea was given star billing, occasionally in sympathetic roles (White Tie and Tails [1946], Black Angel [1946]), but most often as a heavy. From 1952 through 1955, he starred as a roguish soldier of fortune in the syndicated TV series China Smith, and also topped the cast of a theatrical-movie spin-off of sorts, World for Ransom (1954), directed by Duryea's friend Robert Aldrich. One of the actor's last worthwhile roles in a big-budget picture was as a stuffy accountant who discovers within himself inner reserves of courage in Aldrich's Flight of the Phoenix (1965). In 1968, shortly before his death from a recurring heart ailment, Duryea was cast as Eddie Jacks in 67 episodes of TV's Peyton Place. Dan Duryea was the father of actor Peter Duryea, likewise a specialist in slimy villainy.

Trivia: Supporting actress Jean Hale first appeared onscreen in 1964.

Trivia: Linda Lawson was a singer/actress who enjoyed a busy career from the end of the 1950s until the start of the 1970s. Born in Ann Arbor, MI, in 1936, she was three when her family moved to Fontana, CA, and she began singing while still a child. By the end of her teen years, she'd turned professional and had even managed to land an engagement at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Her singing and her memorably dark, voluptuous good looks, coupled with some natural acting ability, led to Lawson getting roles on such series as 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, M Squad, The Rifleman, and Sea Hunt in her early twenties, and she made the jump to feature films in 1960 with a role in the thriller The Threat. She also found time to record an excellent jazz-pop album during this period, but eventually acting supplanted singing as the focus of her career. Lawson's best screen role was in her second film, as the doomed, tormented Mora in Curtis Harrington's hauntingly beautiful Night Tide (1961). She remained busy throughout the 1960s, including a regular role on Adventures in Paradise for one season, and on series such as The Virginian, interspersed with occasional feature-film work, and she married producer John Foreman (1925-1992), who subsequently became business partners with actor Paul Newman. Lawson's last major screen role was in Newman's Sometimes a Great Notion (1971). She wasn't seen on the screen for several decades after that, but her daughters, Julie Foreman and Amanda Foreman, entered the movie business during the start of the 21st century; Lawson was seen again onscreen in the made-for-television feature Another Woman's Husband (2000) and in a 2005 episode of ER.

Trivia: After apprenticing at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, MA, she debuted on Broadway in 1938 as the lead's understudy in Our Town; the following year her performance in the ingénue part in Life With Father caught film mogul Samuel Goldwyn's attention, and he signed her to a screen contract. Wright debuted onscreen in The Little Foxes (1941), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The following year she was nominated in both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories for her third and fourth films, The Pride of the Yankees and Mrs. Miniver, respectively; she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She remained busy onscreen through 1959, after which she appeared in only a handful of films during the next three decades. From 1942 to 1952, she was married to novelist and screenwriter Niven Busch; later she married, divorced, and remarried playwright Robert Anderson. In the '70s, she appeared in TV dramas. Her later stage work included Mary, Mary (1962) and the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman (1975).

Trivia: Already a character player in his 30s, American actor Robert Cornwaithe was frequently called upon to play scientific and learned types in such films as War of the Worlds (1953) and The Forbin Project (1971). He was also busy on TV, portraying lawyers, officials and the like on such series as The Andy Griffith Show, Batman (in the "Archer" episode with Art Carney), Gidget, Laverne and Shirley and The Munsters. Cornwaithe earned his niche in the Science Fiction Film Hall of Fame for his performance in The Thing (1951); grayed up, bearded, and looking suspiciously Russian, the actor played the foolhardy Professor Carrington, whose insipidly idealistic efforts to communicate with the extraterrestrial "Thing" nearly gets him killed. In honor of this performance, Robert Cornwaithe was cast as a similar well-meaning scientist in "Mant," the giant-insect film within a film in Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), wherein Cornwaithe shared screen time with two equally uncredited horror-film icons, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy.

Trivia: American character actor Lew Brown has been appearing on stage, screen and television for over 50 years.