Trivia: London-born actress/director/screenwriter Ida Lupino came from a family of performers. She played small parts in Hollywood films through the 1930s until she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941), which led to bigger roles in films of the '40s. Early on, she appeared in Peter Ibbetson (1935), Anything Goes (1936), Artists and Models (1937), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), and The Light That Failed (1939), among others. Later, she appeared in Ladies in Retirement (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942), and Forever and a Day (1943), and continued performing on into the 1960s, but not in major films. Starting with Not Wanted (1949), which she also co-wrote, she became the only female movie director of her time. She specialized in dramatic and suspense films, including Never Fear (1949), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), The Bigamist (1953), and the comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966). She also directed episodes of many television series, including The Untouchables and The Fugitive.

Trivia: Bronx-raised actor Martin Balsam was the oldest of three children of a ladies' sportswear salesman. "Actors are bums" was dad's reaction when Balsam announced his intention of going into show business; still, young Martin took full advantage of lunch breaks from his "real" jobs to rehearse for amateur theatricals. After World War II, Balsam joined New York's Actors Studio, supporting himself by waiting on tables and ushering at Radio City Music Hall. During his formative years he was briefly married to actress Joyce Van Patten; their daughter Talia Balsam would later become a successful film and TV performer. Working steadily if not profitably in nightclubs and TV, Balsam made his first film, the Actors Studio-dominated On the Waterfront, in 1954. Averaging a movie and/or a play a year starting in 1957 (among his best-known film roles were Juror #1 in Twelve Angry Men [1957] and the unfortunate detective Arbogast in Psycho [1960]), Balsam went on to win a Tony for the Broadway play I Know You Can't Hear Me When the Water's Running, an Obie for the off-Broadway production Cold Storage, and an Academy Award for his performance as Jason Robards' older brother in the 1965 film version of A Thousand Clowns. Unfortunately for Balsam, the Oscar was as much a curse as a blessing on his career, and soon he was playing little more than variations on his Thousand Clowns role. In 1979, he was engaged by Norman Lear to play "lovable bigot" Archie Bunker's acerbic Jewish business partner Murray Klein on the CBS sitcom Archie Bunker's Place; he remained with the series until 1981. In 1991, Balsam appeared in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, the remake of a film in which Balsam had co-starred (in an entirely different role) in 1962.

Trivia: From vaudeville and stock companies, actor Jerome Cowan graduated to Broadway in the now-forgotten farce We've Gotta Have Money. While starring in the 1935 Broadway hit Boy Meets Girl, Cowan was spotted by movie producer Sam Goldwyn, who cast Cowan as a sensitive Irish rebel in 1936's Beloved Enemy. Most of Cowan's subsequent films found him playing glib lawyers, shifty business executives and jilted suitors. A longtime resident at Warner Bros., the pencil-mustached Cowan appeared in several substantial character parts from 1940 through 1949, notably the doomed private eye Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon. Warners gave Cowan the opportunity to be a romantic leading man in two "B" films, Crime By Night (42) and Find the Blackmailer (43). As the years rolled on, Cowan's air of slightly unscrupulous urbanity gave way to respectability, and in this vein he was ideally suited for the role of Dagwood Bumstead's new boss Mr. Radcliffe in several installments of Columbia's Blondie series; he also scored in such flustered roles as the hapless district attorney in Miracle on 34th Street. Cowan briefly left Hollywood in 1950 to pursue more worthwhile roles on stage and TV; he starred in the Broadway play My Three Angels and was top-billed on the 1951 TV series Not for Publication. In his fifties and sixties, Cowan continued essaying roles calling for easily deflated dignity (e.g. The Three Stooges' Have Rocket Will Travel [59] and Jerry Lewis' Visit to a Small Planet [60]) and made regular supporting appearances on several TV series, among them Valiant Lady, The Tab Hunter Show, Many Happy Returns and Tycoon.

Trivia: Before his motion picture career DeCorsia was a radio actor ("March of Time," "That Hammer Guy," "The Shadow"). He made his film debut in 1948 with The Lady from Shanghai. DeCorsia generally played lead villain roles (Enforcer, Naked City, Slightly Scarlet) or he occasionally parodied those villainous types (Kettles in the Ozarks, Dance With Me Henry).