Trivia: Angela Lansbury received an Oscar nomination for her first film, Gaslight, in 1944, and has been winning acting awards and audience favor ever since. Born in London to a family that included both politicians and performers, Lansbury came to the U.S. during World War II. She made notable early film appearances as the snooty sister in National Velvet (1944); the pathetic singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which garnered her another Academy nomination; and the madam-with-a-heart-of-gold saloon singer in The Harvey Girls (1946). She turned evil as the manipulative publisher in State of the Union (1948), but was just as convincing as the good queen in The Three Musketeers (1948) and the petulant daughter in The Court Jester (1956). She received another Oscar nomination for her chilling performance as Laurence Harvey's scheming mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and appeared as the addled witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), among other later films. On Broadway, she won Tony awards for the musicals Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), the revival of Gypsy (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979) and, at age 82, for the play Blithe Spirit (2009). Despite a season in the '50s on the game show Pantomime Quiz, she came to series television late, starring in 1984-1996 as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote; she took over as producer of the show in the '90s. She returned to the Disney studios to record the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and to sing the title song and later reprised the role in the direct-to-video sequel, The Enchanted Christmas (1997). Lansbury is the sister of TV producer Bruce Lansbury.

Trivia: The sister of the notorious stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, with whom she was driven into performance by an ambitious stage mother, June Havoc began playing bits in silent film shorts at age two, eventually appearing in 24 Hal Roach comedies. She was earning $1500 a week as a vaudeville headliner by the time she was five. At age 13, she married the first of three husbands, and in her late teens, during the Depression and the demise of vaudeville, she modeled and participated in dance marathons (she still holds a record for marathon dancing in 1933), then went on to perform in Catskill Mountain resorts and in stock. In 1936 she made her Broadway debut. Four years later, she scored a big success in the 1940 production of Pal Joey, after which she was invited to Hollywood. She debuted onscreen as an adult in 1941, and over the next decade played leads and second leads in many films. However, Havoc never became a top star and found herself cast in routine films; she rarely appeared onscreen after 1952. Her stage work was more successful, and in 1944 she won a Donaldson Award for Mexican Hayride; she also did much work on TV. She wrote and directed the autobiographical Broadway play Marathon 33 (1963), and authored an autobiography, Early Havoc (1959). She was portrayed as a juvenile stage performer in the Broadway show Gypsy and its screen version. She married actor-director William Spier.

Trivia: A Brooklynite from head to toe, Dane Clark never completely forsook his streetwise pugnacity, not even while attending Cornell and John Hopkins, and earning a law degree from St. John's University. Clark held down several Depression-era jobs--road gang worker, boxer, ballplayer, magazine model--before making his first stage appearance in 1938. Four years later, he made his entree into films, at first using his given name of Bernard Zanville (sometimes spelled Zaneville). Signed by Warner Bros. in 1943, Clark was given a new professional name and purpose in life: as potential replacement for Warners' resident "tenement tough" John Garfield. Since there was plenty of life left in the original Garfield, however, Clark was largely confined to secondary roles, usually as the hero's best friend or the cocky troublemaker from Brooklyn. As the 1940s drew to a close, Clark was afforded a few leading roles by Warners, though it was while on loan-out to Republic that he delivered his finest performance, as emotionally overwrought accidental murderer Danny Hawkins in Moonrise (1948). His film appearances were fewer and farther between in the 1950s, as he sought out more rewarding roles on television and the Broadway stage. He did get to play Harlem Globetrotters maven Abe Saperstein in the 1954 feature Go, Man, Go, but he also had to produce the film himself. On TV, Clark starred as news correspondent Dan Miller on the weekly adventure series Wire Service (1956), and played hotel owner Slate Shannon on the 1959 TV version of the old Bogart-Bacall radio series Bold Venture. He also co-starred as Lt. Tragg on the ill-advised New Perry Mason (1973), and made innumerable guest appearances on such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables and Ellery Queen (1975 version).

Trivia: To hear him tell it, Robert Vaughn has spent most of his acting career getting very well paid for being artistically frustrated. Born in Manhattan and raised in Minnesota, Vaughn went straight from college drama classes to his first film, the juvenile delinquent opus No Time to Be Young (1957). Ever on the search for "meaningful" roles, Vaughn signed to play a survivor of a nuclear apocalypse in what he assumed would be a serious, politically potent drama: the film was released as Teenage Caveman (1957). Though Oscar-nominated for his performance as a crippled, alcoholic war veteran in The Young Philadelphians (1959), Vaughn didn't rise to full stardom until 1964, where he was signed to play ultra-cool secret agent Napoleon Solo in the TV espionage series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968). He swore at that time that he'd never, ever subject himself to the rigors of another television series, but in 1972 he was back to the weekly grind in the British series The Protectors. In films, Vaughn has been most effective as an icy, corporate heavy, notably in Bullitt (1968) and Superman III (1982). On-stage, Vaughn has exhibited a special fondness for Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular); he was given an excellent opportunity to recite the Bard's prose on film when he played Casca in Julius Caesar (1970). A dyed-in-the-wool liberal activist, Vaughn worked on his Masters and Ph.D. in political science at L.A. City College during his U.N.C.L.E. years; his doctoral thesis was later expanded into the 1972 history of the HUAC, Only Victims. Vaughn later had several recurring roles on TV shows like The Nanny and Law & Order and the British series Hustle and Coronation Street. He died in 2016, just shy of his 84th birthday.

Trivia: While growing up in Chicago, Tom Bosley dreamed of becoming the star left-fielder for the Cubs. As it turned out, the closest Bosley got to organized athletics was a sportscasting class at DePauw University. After additional training at the Radio Institute of Chicago and two years' practical experience in various dramatic radio programs and stock companies, he left for New York in 1950. Five years of odd jobs and summer-theater stints later, he landed his first off-Broadway role, playing Dupont-Dufort in Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival. Steadier work followed at the Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C.; then in 1959, Bosley landed the starring role in the Broadway musical Fiorello!, picking up a Tony Award, an ANTA Award, and the New York Drama Critics Award in the bargain. In 1963, he made his film bow as Natalie Wood's "safe and secure" suitor Anthony Colombo in Love With the Proper Stranger. Occasionally cast as two-bit criminals or pathetic losers (he sold his eyes to blind millionairess Joan Crawford in the Spielberg-directed Night Gallery TV movie), Bosley was most often seen as a harried suburban father. After recurring roles on such TV series as That Was the Week That Was, The Debbie Reynolds Show, and The Sandy Duncan Show, Bosley was hired by Hanna-Barbera to provide the voice of flustered patriarch Howard Boyle on the animated sitcom Wait Til Your Father Gets Home (1972-1973). This served as a dry run of sorts for his most famous series-TV assignment: Howard Cunningham, aka "Mr. C," on the immensely popular Happy Days (1974-1983). The warm, familial ambience of the Happy Days set enabled Bosley to weather the tragic death of his first wife, former dancer Jean Elliot, in 1978. In addition to his Happy Days duties, Bosley was narrator of the syndicated documentary That's Hollywood (1977-1981). From 1989 to 1991, he starred on the weekly series The Father Dowling Mysteries, and thereafter was seen on an occasional basis as down-to-earth Cabot Cove sheriff Amos Tupper on Murder, She Wrote. Reportedly as kind, generous, and giving as his Happy Days character, Tom Bosley has over the last 20 years received numerous honors for his many civic and charitable activities.

Trivia: Stocky, blondish character actor John Karlen gained a mid-1966s following as Willie Loomis (and several other roles) on the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows. Thereafter, Karlen became a fixture in other Dan Curtis productions, appearing in such feature-length Curtis endeavors as House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Trilogy of Terror (1973). In 1987, Karlen won an Emmy for his portrayal of Harvey Lacey, the contractor husband of Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly), on the TV series Cagney and Lacey (1982-88); two years later he co-starred on the less successful video weekly Snoops. John Karlen's TV movie credits include the role of Jerry Barr in the execrable Roseanne: An Unauthorized Biography (1994).

Trivia: British actor Aubrey Morris had quirky little character roles in numerous films of the '70s and '80s. He was seen as P. R. Deltoid in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1970), Dr. Putnam in Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1972) and The Old Gardener/Gravedigger in the cult horror item The Wicker Man (1973). Additional credits include Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975), Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975), and Gene Wilder's The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1977) Followers of TV's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) will remember Aubrey Morris in the recurring role of The Captain. Morris' final role was in a 2015 episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia; he passed away later that year, at age 89.

Trivia: Trained at London's Webber-Douglas academy, Paxton Whitehead made his professional debut in 1956, and within two years was signed by the RSC. Crossing the Atlantic to appear in Canadian stage and TV productions, Whitehead made his Broadway bow in 1962's The Affair. He went on to appear with the American Shakespeare Company, to direct in regional repertory, and to function as artistic director of the Shaw Festival, a job he held down for ten years. His later Broadway credits include Crucifer of Blood (as Sherlock Holmes) and the 1980 revival of Camelot (as Pellinore). Whitehead's first film appearance was in the 1986 Whoopi Goldberg comedy Jumpin' Jack Flash. The following year, he starred as Dudley the Butler in the syndicated sitcom Marblehead Manor; one of his co-stars was Linda Thorson, with whom he'd appeared on Broadway in Noises Off. In 1995, Paxton Whitehead was starred as cable-TV exec Duke Stone in the WB Network situation comedy Simon, one of that fledgling network's few bonafide successes.

Trivia: Moved to Hollywood with only one show business contact, a friend who wrote movie-trailer scripts. Was the TV spokesperson for fast-food chain Del Taco from 2000 to 2006. Met his wife in an acting class. Gives speeches to high-school students for Media Fellowship International, a Christian media and entertainment organization.