Trivia: Steve McQueen was the prototypical example of a new sort of movie star which emerged in the 1950s and would come to dominate the screen in the 1960s and '70s -- a cool, remote loner who knew how to use his fists without seeming like a run-of-the-mill tough guy, a thoughtful man in no way an effete intellectual, a rebel who played by his own rules and lived by his own moral code, while often succeeding on his own terms. While McQueen was one of the first notable examples of this new breed of antihero (along with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman), he was also among the most successful, and was able to succeed as an iconoclast and one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws at the same time.Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Indianapolis, IN, on March 24, 1930. In many ways, McQueen's childhood was not a happy one; his father and mother split up before his first birthday, and he was sent to live with his great uncle on a farm in Missouri. After he turned nine, McQueen's mother had married again, and he was sent to California to join her. By his teens, McQueen had developed a rebellious streak, and he began spending time with a group of juvenile delinquents; McQueen's misdeeds led his mother to send him to Boys' Republic, a California reform school. After ninth grade, McQueen left formal education behind, and after a spell wandering the country, he joined the Marine Corps in 1947. McQueen's hitch with the Leathernecks did little to change his anti-authoritarian attitude; he spent 41 days in the brig after going Absent With Out Leave for two weeks.After leaving the Marines in 1950, McQueen moved to New York City, where he held down a number of short-term jobs while trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At the suggestion of a friend, McQueen began to look into acting, and developed an enthusiasm for the theater. In 1952, he began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. After making an impression in a number of small off-Broadway productions, McQueen was accepted into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actor's Studio, where he further honed his skills. In 1956, McQueen made his Broadway debut and won rave reviews when he replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead of the acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain. The same year, McQueen made his film debut, playing a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me alongside Paul Newman, and he married dancer Neile Adams. In 1958, after two years of stage work and television appearances, McQueen scored his first leading role in a film as Steve, a noble and rather intense teenager in the sci-fi cult item The Blob, while later that same year he scored another lead, in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's moody performances as bounty hunter Josh Randall elevated him to stardom, and in 1960, he appeared in the big-budget Western The Magnificent Seven (an Americanized remake of The Seven Samurai), confirming that his new stardom shone just as brightly on the big screen. In 1961, McQueen completed his run on Wanted: Dead or Alive and concentrated on film roles, appearing in comedies (The Honeymoon Machine, Love With a Proper Stranger) as well as action roles (Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover). In 1963, McQueen starred in The Great Escape, an action-packed World War II drama whose blockbuster success confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men; McQueen also did his own daredevil motorcycle stunts in the film, reflecting his offscreen passion for motorcycle and auto racing. (McQueen would also display his enthusiasm for bikes as narrator of a documentary on dirt-bike racing, On Any Sunday).Through the end of the 1960s, McQueen starred in a long string of box-office successes, but in the early '70s, he appeared in two unexpected disappointments -- 1971's Le Mans, a racing film that failed to capture the excitement of the famed 24-hour race, and 1972's Junior Bonner, an atypically good-natured Sam Peckinpah movie that earned enthusiastic reviews but failed at the box office. Later that year, McQueen would team up again with Peckinpah for a more typical (and much more successful) action film, The Getaway, which co-starred Ali MacGraw. McQueen had divorced Neile Adams in 1971, and while shooting The Getaway, he and MacGraw (who was then married to producer Robert Evans) became romantically involved. In 1973, after MacGraw divorced Evans, she married McQueen; the marriage would last until 1977.After two more big-budget blockbusters, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, McQueen disappeared from screens for several years. In 1977, he served as both leading man and executive producer for a screen adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which fared poorly with both critics and audiences when it was finally released a year and a half after it was completed. In 1980, it seemed that McQueen was poised for a comeback when he appeared in two films -- an ambitious Western drama, Tom Horn, which McQueen co-directed without credit, and The Hunter, an action picture in which he played a modern-day bounty hunter -- and he wed for a third time, marrying model Barbara Minty in January of that year. However, McQueen's burst of activity hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a highly virulent form of lung cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. After conventional treatment failed to stem the spread of the disease, McQueen traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he underwent therapy at an experimental cancer clinic. Despite the efforts of McQueen and his doctors, the actor died on November 7, 1980. He left behind two children, Chad McQueen, who went on to his own career as an actor, and daughter Terry McQueen, who died of cancer in 1998.

Trivia: Born in New York City while his father Noah Beery Sr. was appearing on-stage, Noah Beery Jr. was given his lifelong nickname, "Pidge," by Josie Cohan, sister of George M. Cohan "I was born in the business," Pidge Beery observed some 63 years later. "I couldn't have gotten out of it if I wanted to." In 1920, the younger Beery made his first screen appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro (1920), which co-starred dad Noah as Sergeant Garcia. Thanks to a zoning mistake, Pidge attended the Hollywood School for Girls (his fellow "girls" included Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Jesse Lasky Jr.), then relocated with his family to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, miles from Tinseltown. While some kids might have chafed at such isolation, Pidge loved the wide open spaces, and upon attaining manhood emulated his father by living as far away from Hollywood as possible. After attending military school, Pidge pursued film acting in earnest, appearing mostly in serials and Westerns, sometimes as the hero, but usually as the hero's bucolic sidekick. His more notable screen credits of the 1930s and '40s include Of Mice and Men (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (again 1939, this time as the obligatory doomed-from-the-start airplane pilot), Sergeant York (1941), We've Never Been Licked (1943), and Red River (1948). He also starred in a group of rustic 45-minute comedies produced by Hal Roach in the early '40s, and was featured in several popular B-Western series; one of these starred Buck Jones, whose daughter Maxine became Pidge's first wife. Perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, Beery appeared with his camera-hogging uncle Wallace Beery only once, in 1940's 20 Mule Team. Children of the 1950s will remember Pidge as Joey the Clown on the weekly TV series Circus Boy (1956), while the more TV-addicted may recall Beery's obscure syndicated travelogue series, co-starring himself and his sons. The 1960s found Pidge featured in such A-list films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and as a regular on the series Riverboat and Hondo. He kicked off the 1970s in the role of Michael J. Pollard's dad (there was a resemblance) in Little Fauss and Big Halsey. Though Beery was first choice for the part of James Garner's father on the TV detective series The Rockford Files, Pidge was committed to the 1973 James Franciscus starrer Doc Elliot, so the Rockford producers went with actor Robert Donley in the pilot episode. By the time The Rockford Files was picked up on a weekly basis, Doc Elliot had tanked, thus Donley was dropped in favor of Beery, who stayed with the role until the series' cancellation in 1978. Pidge's weekly-TV manifest in the 1980s included Quest (1981) and The Yellow Rose (1983). After a brief illness, Noah Beery Jr. died at his Tehachapi, CA, ranch at the age of 81.