Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from the '80s.

Trivia: The daughter of an aggressive (but comparatively benign) stage mother, Jane Withers was taught to sing and dance before she was three. At four, Withers was starring on her own radio program in Atlanta, doing imitations of such celebrities as Greta Garbo, ZaSu Pitts, and Maurice Chevalier. Relocating to Hollywood with her mother in 1932, Withers began her film career in bit parts, eventually winning the plum role of the obnoxious brat who bedevils sweet little Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes (1934) (throughout her career, Withers had nothing but nice things to say about Temple; for her part, Temple claimed that she was terrified of Withers, both on and off camera). This role won Withers a contract at Fox Studios (later 20th Century Fox), and for the next seven years she starred in a series of energetic, medium-budget comedies and musicals bearing such titles as Pepper (1936), The Holy Terror (1937), and Arizona Wildcat (1937). The script for her 1941 vehicle Small Town Deb was penned by Withers herself, using the nom de plume Jerrie Walters. After the end of her Fox contract in 1943, Withers attempted to establish herself as an ingenue in such films as Sam Goldwyn's The North Star, but her offbeat facial features and her inclination toward stoutness limited her choice of roles. In 1947, the newly married Withers decided to retire from films, something she was fully prepared to do thanks to her oil-rich husband and the generous trust fund set up by her parents. The collapse of her marriage and a severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis dealt potentially fatal blows to her optimistic nature, but by 1955 she was back on her feet, attending the U.S.C. film school in hopes of becoming a director. Hollywood producer/director George Stevens, a frequent U.S.C. lecturer, cast Withers in a sizeable supporting role in the 1956 epic Giant. Withers' second career as a character actress flourished into the 1970s; during this resurgence of activity she married again, only to be left a widow when her husband died in a 1968 plane crash. To TV viewers of the 1960s and 1970s, Jane Withers will be forever associated with her long-running (and extremely lucrative) stint as Josephine the Plumber in a popular series of commercials for Comet cleanser.

Trivia: As a teenager, American performer Betty Garrett won a scholarship to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, and in 1938 she debuted onstage in the Mercury Theater production of Danton's Death. Later she danced with the Martha Graham company, sang in nightclubs and resort hotels, and held down odd jobs between engagements. In 1942 Garrett debuted on Broadway in the revue Let Freedom Ring, leading to other Broadway appearances. For her work in Call Me Mister she won the Donaldson Award in 1946, after which MGM signed her to a movie contract. She went on to make five musicals in the late '40s, impressing critics with her singing, dancing, and bright comic acting; as an energetic and effervescent second lead, she typically played the heroine's best friend. Garrett took two years off to give birth to two children; meanwhile, her husband, actor Larry Parks, admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a Communist. This ruined Garrett's screen career for several years, during which she and Parks appeared in a nightclub act and toured the U.S. with a play. In the mid-'50s she appeared in two more films and had the chance to renew her career; however, her husband was still blacklisted, so she chose to retire from the screen. She and Parks went on to work in stock and occasionally on TV, but they derived their income primarily from real estate. In the mid-'70s Garrett had a recurring role as Archie Bunker's neighbor on the TV sitcom All In the Family, and played landlady Edna Babish on Laverne and Shirley.

Trivia: Thanks to the strenous efforts of her mother, a former dancer, American child actress Margaret O'Brien won her first film role at age four in the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical Babes on Broadway (1941). MGM was so impressed by the child's expressiveness and emotional range that she was given the title role in the wartime morale-booster Journey For Margaret (1942). She was so camera-savvy by the time she appeared in Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case (1943) that the film's star Lionel Barrymore declared that had this been the Middle Ages, O'Brien would have been burned at the stake! Some of her coworkers may secretly have wished that fate on O'Brien, since she reportedly flaunted her celebrity on the set, ostensibly at the encouragement of her parents. Famed for her crying scenes, O'Brien really let the faucets flow in her best film, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), in which her character also predated Wednesday Addams by two decades with a marked fascination for death and funerals. In 1944, O'Brien was given a special Academy Award, principally for work in Meet Me In St. Louis. As she grew, her charm faded; by 1951's Her First Romance, she was just one of a multitude of Hollywood teen ingenues. A comeback attempt in the 1956 film Glory was servicable, but the film was badly handled by its distributor RKO Radio and failed to re-establish the actress. A more fruitful role awaited her in a 1958 TV musical version of Little Women, in which O'Brien played Beth, the same role she'd essayed in the 1949 film version. In 1960, O'Brien had a strong supporting part in the period picture Heller in Pink Tights (1960), ironically playing a onetime child actress whose stage mother is trying to keep her in "kid" roles. In between summer theatre productions, O'Brien would resurface every so often in another TV show, reviewers would welcome her back, and then she'd be forgotten until the next part. The actress gained a great deal of weight in the late 1960s, turning this debility into an asset when she appeared in a "Marcus Welby MD" TV episode (starring her Journey for Margaret costar Robert Young) in which she played a woman susceptible to quack diet doctors. A bit thinner, and with eyes as wide and expressive as ever, O'Brien has recently appeared in a handful of episodes of "Murder She Wrote," that evergreen refuge for MGM luminaries of the past.

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: 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: When redheaded band vocalist Martha Jean Lafferty was casting about for a professional name, she chose Janet Blair, claiming that she named herself after her county of birth, Blair County, Pennsylvania. Janet was signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1941, appearing in such programmers as Blondie Goes to College (1941) before graduating to the "dish" title role in My Sister Eileen (1942). Her last assignments at Columbia were nondescript leading-lady stints in Red Skelton's The Fuller Brush Man (1948) and the swashbuckling The Black Arrow (1948). She left Hollywood for Broadway in 1950, then toured for many years in the road company of South Pacific, eventually playing the leading role of Nellie Forbush more often than any other actress. She returned to moviemaking in 1957; the best of her later film roles was the suspected sorceress in the British Burn, Witch, Burn (1962). Janet Blair's TV activities included several musical specials of the 1950s and 1960s, one of them based on the exploits of globetrotting journalist Nellie Bly; she also played Sid Caesar's wife in many of the comedian's TV appearances of the 1956-57 season, co-hosted 1959's The Chevy Show with singer John Raitt, and portrayed the wife of detective Henry Fonda on the 1971 "drammedy" The Smith Family.

Trivia: While many of Earl Holliman's bucolic screen characters tended to shy away from "book learnin," Holliman himself is a graduate of UCLA. Making his film debut with a one-line bit as a bellboy in Martin and Lewis' Scared Stiff (1953), Holliman went on to featured and co-starring roles in westerns and military dramas, usually cast as a hot-headed rustic with a streak of manic unpredictability. His larger film roles include the comic-relief cook in Forbidden Planet (1956), Katharine Hepburn's girl-happy brother in The Rainmaker (1956)--a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination--and Matt Elder in the John Wayne starrer Sons of Katie Elder (1965). A nearly inescapable presence on television, Holliman turned in some impressive work on the many live TV anthologies of the 1950s. His portrayal of a shipwrecked marine in the 1958 Kraft Theatre production "The Sea is Boiling Hot," in which he carried on a one-sided debate with monolingual Japanese officer Sessue Hayakawa, led to his being cast in a similar solo turn in the 1959 Twilight Zone pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" His series-TV credits include the roles of gunslinger-turned-hotelier Sundance in Hotel de Paree (1959), bronco buster Mitch Guthrie in Wide Country (1962), Palm Springs private eye Matthew Durning in PS I Luv U (1991) and barkeep Darden Towe in Delta (1992). Undoubtedly his most famous TV assignment was as Angie Dickinson's superior officer Lt. Bill Crowley in the weekly Police Woman (1974-78). Most recently Earl Holliman made a most welcome guest appearance as Lea Thompson's Wisconsinite dad in the TV sitcom Caroline in the City.

Trivia: A Utah girl born and bred, actress Marie Windsor attended Brigham Young University and represented her state as Miss Utah in the Miss America pageant. She studied acting under Russian stage and screen luminary Maria Ouspenskaya, supporting herself as a telephone operator between performing assignments. After several years of radio appearances and movie bits, Windsor was moved up to feature-film roles in 1947's Song of the Thin Man. She was groomed to be a leading lady, but her height precluded her co-starring with many of Hollywood's sensitive, slightly built leading men. (She later noted with amusement that at least one major male star had a mark on his dressing room door at the 5'6" level; if an actress was any taller than that, she was out.) Persevering, Windsor found steady work in second-lead roles as dance hall queens, gun molls, floozies, and exotic villainesses. She is affectionately remembered by disciples of director Stanley Kubrick for her portrayal of Elisha Cook's cold-blooded, castrating wife in The Killing (1956). Curtailing her screen work in the late '80s, Windsor, who is far more agreeable in person than onscreen, began devoting the greater portion of her time to her sizeable family. Because of her many appearances in Westerns (she was an expert horsewoman), Windsor has become a welcome and highly sought-after presence on the nostalgia convention circuit.

Trivia: Terry Moore was born Helen Koford; during her screen career she was billed as Helen Koford, Judy Ford, Jan Ford, and (from 1949) Terry Moore. She debuted onscreen at age 11 in 1940 and went on to play adolescent roles in a number of films. As an adult actress, the well-endowed Moore fell into the late-'40s/early-'50s "sexpot" mold, and was fairly busy onscreen until 1960; after that her screen work was infrequent, though she ultimately appeared in more than a half-dozen additional films. She claimed she was secretly wed to billionaire Howard Hughes in 1949, and that they were never divorced; for years she sued Hughes's estate for part of his will, and finally was given an undisclosed sum in an out-of-court settlement. She wrote a book detailing her secret life with Hughes from 1947-56, The Beauty and the Billionaire, in 1984. For her work in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) she received a "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar nomination. She co-produced the film Beverly Hills Brat (1989), in which she also appeared.