Trivia: Born November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, CA, actress Sally Field was the daughter of another actress, Margaret Field, who is perhaps best known to film buffs as the leading lady of the sci-fi The Man From Planet X (1951). Field's stepfather was actor/stunt man Jock Mahoney, who, despite a certain degree of alienation between himself and his stepdaughter, was the principal influence in her pursuit of an acting career. Active in high-school dramatics, Field bypassed college to enroll in a summer acting workshop at Columbia studios. Her energy and determination enabled her to win, over hundreds of other aspiring actresses, the coveted starring role on the 1965 TV series Gidget. Gidget lasted only one season, but Field had become popular with teen fans and in 1967 was given a second crack at a sitcom with The Flying Nun; this one lasted three seasons and is still flying around in reruns.Somewhere along the way Field made her film debut in The Way West (1967) but was more or less ignored by moviegoers over the age of 21. Juggling sporadic work on stage and TV with a well-publicized first marriage (she was pregnant during Flying Nun's last season), Field set about shedding her "perky" image in order to get more substantial parts. Good as she was as a reformed junkie in the 1970 TV movie Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring, by 1972 Field was mired again in sitcom hell with the short-lived weekly The Girl With Something Extra. Freshly divorced and with a new agent, she tried to radically alter her persona with a nude scene in the 1975 film Stay Hungry, resulting in little more than embarrassment for all concerned. Finally, in 1976, Field proved her mettle as an actress in the TV movie Sybil, winning an Emmy for her virtuoso performance as a woman suffering from multiple personalities stemming from childhood abuse. Following this triumph, Field entered into a long romance with Burt Reynolds, working with the actor in numerous films that were short on prestige but long on box-office appeal.By 1979, Field found herself in another career crisis: now she had to jettison the "Burt Reynolds' girlfriend" image. She did so with her powerful portrayal of a small-town union organizer in Norma Rae (1979), for which she earned her first Academy Award. At last taken completely seriously by fans and industry figures, Field spent the next four years in films of fluctuating merit (she also ended her relationship with Reynolds and married again), rounding out 1984 with her second Oscar for Places in the Heart. It was at the 1985 Academy Awards ceremony that Field earned a permanent place in the lexicon of comedy writers, talk show hosts, and impressionists everywhere by reacting to her Oscar with a tearful "You LIKE me! You REALLY LIKE me!" Few liked her in such subsequent missteps as Surrender (1987) and Soapdish (1991), but Field was able to intersperse them with winners such as the 1989 weepie Steel Magnolias and the Robin Williams drag extravaganza Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Field found further triumph as the doggedly determined mother of Tom Hanks in the 1994 box-office bonanza Forrest Gump, which, in addition to mining box-office gold, also managed to pull in a host of Oscars and various other awards.Following Gump, Field turned her energies to ultimately less successful projects, such as 1995's Eye for an Eye with Kiefer Sutherland and Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (1996). She also did some TV work, most notably in Tom Hanks' acclaimed From the Earth to the Moon miniseries (1998) and the American Film Institute's 100 Years....100 Movies series. The turn of the century found Field contributing her talents to a pair of down-home comedy-dramas, first with a cameo matriarch role in 2000's Where the Heart Is and later that year as director of the Minnie Driver vehicle Beautiful. Both films met with near-universal derision from critics; only the Steel Magnolias-esque Heart found a modest box-office following.In 2003, Field took a role alongside Reese Witherspoon in the legal comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Bllonde, and in 2006 joined the cast of ABC's Brothers & Sisters in the role of matriach Nora Walker. The role earned her an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2007. The actress was cast in the role of Aunt May for The Amazing Spiderman (2012), and was so revered as Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln that she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Trivia: Amid the all-too-common stories of child performers who never made a happy transition to adult lives and careers, Beverly Washburn's career stands as one of the great success stories. Born in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day 1943, she made her uncredited screen debut in 1950, at age six, as the first victim of a plague-carrier in the thriller The Killer That Stalked New York. Even at that early age, she had a screen magnetism that shone through to audiences (and makes the death of her character, midway through the movie, a highly emotional moment for the viewer, despite taking place off-screen). The following year, she turned up (once more uncredited) playing the little girl who unknowingly entertains two visitors from the center of the earth in the feature film Superman and the Mole Men (1951), which introduced George Reeves in the role of Superman, and which was later re-edited into the two-part Adventures of Superman episode The Unknown People. She also had one great scene with James Stewart in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), and appeared in small, uncredited roles in George Stevens' Shane (1953) and Edward Dmytryk's The Juggler (1953), starring Kirk Douglas, which was notable as the first Hollywood film shot in Israel. The mid-'50s saw a sharp downturn in film production and mass layoffs at most of the studios, and for the next five years, Washburn primarily worked in television, on series as different as Dragnet and The Loretta Young Show -- where the young actress was part of the stock company for both series -- and The Jack Benny Show. Apart from being a very quick study and an appealing child, Washburn was also popular with producers and directors for her ability to cry on cue, which eliminated the need for many a retake. Her range and ability to memorize lines -- and not just her own, but those of the performers around her -- allowed her to take roles on numerous anthology shows and guest spots on series such as Father Knows Best, Fury, and Leave It to Beaver, and she was also one of the regular cast members on an earlier Barbara Billingsley series called Professional Father. In 1957, she returned to feature films by way of Walt Disney in the movie Old Yeller, playing Lisbeth Searcy, but a lot of her work remained confined to television, across a whole range of series, including anthology series, comedies, westerns, dramas, and crime thrillers, plus appearing as a sketch player in The Hollywood Palace, one of the live variety shows of the early/middle '60s.Washburn was unable to professionally break stride as she reached her early twenties, owing to her family's financial situation. Her father contracted a serious illness in the early '60s, and in addition to being unable to work, he required expensive medical treatments. Washburn actually went to court -- successfully -- to get the trust fund money her parents had started to put aside for her from age six released, in order to pay for her father's treatments. She remained busy throughout the 1960s, and among the many series in which she turned up was the original Star Trek. Fans will likely remember Washburn as Lieutenant Galway, the luckless crewmember who succumbs to the old-age-like radiation sickness encountered on planet Gamma Hydra 2 in the episode "The Deadly Years" -- though it must be conceded that the 20-second century hairdo she was forced to wear in that episode did not become her (making her look like a young Alice Ghostley) She also appeared in episodes of The Streets of San Francisco and Scarecrow and Mrs. King and was in the 2003 pilot to Las Vegas. Washburn was still working in 2009, and, indeed, in that decade had found herself participating in cult celebrations of one of the stranger feature films in which she ever appeared, Jack Hill's Spider Baby (1964).

Trivia: Biting, sarcastic comic actor Paul Lynde made his Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952, which was transferred to film virtually intact in 1953. Far heavier than most of his fans remember him (he tipped the scales at 260 pounds), Lynde scored with a "sick" monologue in which he described the various injuries that had befallen him. The undercurrent of pain inherent in his comedy has been attributed by some observers to Lynde's lifelong insecurities, many of these stemming from the time when his father, mother, and favorite brother all died within a three-month period. By the time Lynde was cast as the long-suffering father in the 1961 Broadway play Bye Bye Birdie, he had slimmed down considerably and his comic gifts had sharpened to a fine point. Beginning with the 1963 Disney film Son of Flubber, Lynde played a series of movie character parts in which he made snide, cynical comments about everyone and everything. Funny in small doses, Lynde's screen character was a bit too much to take on an extended basis, though he was very funny in the recurring character of Uncle Arthur on the '60s TV sitcom Bewitched, and, after several busted pilots, managed to survive a full season with The Paul Lynde Show in 1972. He also provided a number of cartoon voices, notably the villainous Sylvester Sneakley on Hanna-Barbera's Saturday morning opus The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969). During the late '70s, Lynde cultivated a fan following for his wisecracking appearances as the "center square" on the TV celebrity game show The Hollywood Squares. He died in 1982 at the age of 55.

Trivia: Miss Jeff Donnell, as she was often billed, was signed by Columbia Pictures almost immediately after her graduation from Yale Drama School. Though likeable and talented enough for leading roles, the toothy, frizzy-haired Ms. Donnell was most often seen as the heroine's best friend or as kooky comedy relief. Columbia certainly kept her busy during her ten-year stay at that studio, casting her in such "A" pictures as My Sister Eileen (1942) and In a Lonely Place (1952) and "B"s like The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942) and Thief of Damascus (1952); she is particularly amusing in the latter film as Scheherezade, garrulously insisting upon telling her Arabian Nights stories to a villainous caliph whether he likes it or not. From 1954 through 1956, Jeff was married to another longtime Columbia contractee, Aldo Ray. On television, Jeff spent four years on The George Gobel Show as Gobel's wife, "Spooky Old Alice." Jeff Donnell's last regular TV work was the recurring role of Sheila Fields on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.