Trivia: The epitome of the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" mentality and "Que Sera Sera" mantra, Doris Day has weathered the numerous storms of both career and personal life, using these carefree and easygoing sentiments as a testament to the endearing endurance and eternal optimism that defines her infectiously positive outlook on life.Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Evanston, OH, Day's optimistic philosophies would be tested from her earliest experiences. With childhood dreams of becoming a ballerina dashed after being involved in a near-fatal car crash, Day took to heart her mother's suggestion of refining her skills as a vocalist. Possessing a voice of distinct beauty at the youthful age of 14, Day was soon discovered by a vocal coach who arranged an appearance on a local radio station WLW. The rest, as they say, is history.Soon after her radio appearance, Day was approached by local bandleader Barney Rapp, leading the young songstress to adopt the moniker that would soon become a household name. Revealing her birth name to Rapp after auditioning with the song "Day By Day," Rapp jokingly suggested that her name was nice, though a little long for the theater's marquee. With her auditioning ballad becoming the inspiration for her stage persona, 14-year-old Day now had all the makings of a starlet ripe with potential. Discovered shortly after by big-band maestro Les Brown in 1940, Day toured briefly with his band, soon departing to accept the marriage proposal of sweetheart Al Jorden and pursue dreams of starting a family. Day's matrimonial happiness was short-lived, however, when Jorden's violent and jealous tendencies proved to be too much to take. Soon after the birth of their son in 1942, the couple divorced and Day rejoined Les Brown and his band, leading to the collaboration that would project the young singer into the heart of millions -- "Sentimental Journey."Day's contribution to film began with her appearance in Warner Bros.' romantic musical Romance on the High Seas (1948). The film, in which she co-starred with Jack Carson, was recognized with an Oscar nomination for the song "It's Magic," providing young Day with her first success as a pop singer. Throughout the 1950s, Day's wholesome image sustained her film career with successful turns in musicals (Calamity Jane [1953]) and romantic comedies (Teacher's Pet [1958]). Day's successful film career continued well into the 1960s with highlights including Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Pajama Game (1957), and Pillow Talk (1959). The latter is considered among the best of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies, with her image as the innocently alluring virgin breathing new life into her previously wholesome persona.In April of 1968, just as she was beginning five-year contract with CBS for The Doris Day Show, Day's film career came to an abrupt end with the death of her husband/manager/producer Marty Melcher. Left penniless and deep in debt through a series of Melcher's sordid investments, Day soon bounced back. Awarded a 22-million-dollar settlement, Day found success in television with The Doris Day Show. Her future television ventures, including Doris Day Today (1975) and Doris Day's Best Friends (1985) (which included one of the last appearances of a gravely ill Rock Hudson) were just a few examples of Day's enthusiastic and enduring nature. In 1975 Doris Day authored her biography, Doris Day: Her Own Story, which became a number one best-seller. Day went on to become an active and vocal supporter of animal rights, focusing the majority of her attentions on her Animal League and Animal Foundation organizations, as well as owning the pet-friendly Cypress Inn in Carmel, CA.

Trivia: A private school-educated everyman who could play outrageous comedy and wrenching tragedy, Jack Lemmon burst onto the movie scene as a 1950s Columbia contract player and remained a beloved star until his death in 2001. Whether through humor or pathos, he excelled at illuminating the struggles of average men against a callous world; as director Billy Wilder once noted, "There was a little bit of genius in everything he did." Born in 1925, the son of a Boston doughnut company executive, Lemmon was educated at Phillips Andover Academy and taught himself to play piano as a teen. A budding thespian by the time he entered Harvard, he was elected president of the famed Hasty Pudding Club. After his college career was briefly interrupted by a stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, Lemmon graduated from Harvard and headed to New York to pursue acting. By the early '50s, Lemmon had appeared in hundreds of live TV roles, including in the dramatic series Kraft Television Theater and Robert Montgomery Presents, as well as co-starring with first wife, Cynthia Stone, in two short-lived sitcoms. After Lemmon landed a major role in the 1953 Broadway revival of Room Service, a talent scout for Columbia Pictures convinced the actor to try Hollywood instead. Defying Columbia chief Harry Cohn's demand that he change his last name lest the critics take advantage of it in negative reviews, Lemmon quickly made a positive impression in his first film, the Judy Holliday comic hit It Should Happen to You (1954) and quickly became a reliably nimble comic presence at Columbia. A loan out to Warner Bros. for the smash Mister Roberts (1955), however, truly began to reveal his ability. Drawing on his Navy memories to play the wily Ensign Pulver, Lemmon held his own opposite heavyweights Henry Fonda and James Cagney and won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his fourth film. A free-agent star by the end of the 1950s, he began one of his two most auspicious creative collaborations when writer/director Billy Wilder tapped him to play one of the cross-dressing musicians in the gender-tweaking comic classic Some Like It Hot (1959). As enthusiastically female bull fiddler Daphne to Tony Curtis' preening Lothario sax player Josephine, Lemmon danced a sidesplitting tango with millionaire suitor Joe E. Brown and delivered a sublime speechless reaction to Brown's nonchalant acceptance of his manhood. Fresh off a Best Actor nomination for Hot, he then gave an image-defining performance in Wilder's multiple-Oscar winner The Apartment (1960). As ambitious New York office drone C.C. Baxter, who climbs the corporate ladder by loaning his small one-bedroom to his philandering bosses, Lemmon was both the likeable cynic and beleaguered romantic, perfectly embodying Wilder's sardonic view of a venal world. Lemmon's turn as the put-upon quotidian schnook pervaded the rest of his career. Determined to prove that he could play serious roles as well as comic, Lemmon campaigned to play Lee Remick's alcoholic husband in Blake Edwards' film adaptation of the teleplay Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Revealing the darker side of middle-class desperation, Lemmon earned still more critical kudos and another Oscar nomination. Despite this triumph, he returned to comedy, re-teaming with Wilder and The Apartment co-star Shirley MacLaine in Irma la Douce (1963). Though the love story between a Parisian prostitute and a cop-turned-lover in disguise was a lesser effort, Irma la Douce became a major hit for the trio. Continuing to display his skill at offsetting his characters' unseemly behavior with his innate, ordinary-guy affability, Lemmon's mid-'60s comic roles included a lascivious landlord in Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) and a homicidal husband in How to Murder Your Wife (1965). Lemmon began his second legendary creative partnership when Wilder cast Walter Matthau opposite him in The Fortune Cookie (1966). The duo's popularity was cemented when they re-teamed for the hit film version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple (1968). Despite his genuine pathos as suicidal, anal-retentive divorcé Felix Unger, Lemmon still managed to evoke great hilarity with Felix's technique for clearing his sinuses, becoming a superbly neurotic foil to Matthau's very casual Oscar Madison. Matthau subsequently starred in Kotch (1971), Lemmon's sole directorial effort, and Lemmon appeared in scion Charles Matthau's The Grass Harp (1995). Lemmon and Matthau also fittingly co-starred in Wilder's final film, Buddy Buddy (1981). After starring in The Out-of-Towners (1970) and Avanti! (1972), Lemmon took minimal salary in order to play a disillusioned middle-aged businessman in the drama Save the Tiger (1973). Though the film did little business, Lemmon finally won the Best Actor Oscar that had eluded him for over a decade and moved easily between comedy and drama from then on. As in The Odd Couple, he marshaled both humor and gloom for his portrayal of an unemployed, despondent gray flannel suit executive in Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1972). His reunion with Wilder and Matthau for another screen version of the fast-talking newspaperman comedy The Front Page (1974), however, was strictly for laughs. Working less frequently in films in the mid-'70s, Lemmon managed to retain his status as one of the best actors in the business with his passionate turn as a conscience-stricken nuclear power plant executive in the prescient drama The China Syndrome (1979). Along with the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lemmon also earned an Oscar nomination for Syndrome. He received another Oscar nod when he reprised his 1978 Tony-nominated performance as a dying press agent in the film version of Tribute (1980). Lemmon continued to push himself as an actor throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As an anguished father who seeks the truth about his son's disappearance in Constantin Costa-Gavras' politically charged Missing (1982), he repeated his Cannes win and Oscar nomination diptych. In 1986, Lemmon returned to Broadway in the challenging role of wretched patriarch James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Though critics began voicing their doubts after such films as Dad (1989), Lemmon offset his affection for sentiment in the early '90s with vivid performances as a slightly seedy character in JFK (1991), a fading, high-strung real estate agent in David Mamet's harsh Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and a truant father in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993). Lemmon proved that older actors could still draw crowds when he co-starred with Matthau as warring neighbors in the hit comedy Grumpy Old Men (1993) and the imaginatively titled sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995). The two concluded their decades-long, perennially appealing odd couple act with Out to Sea (1997) and The Odd Couple II (1998). Along with gathering such lifetime laurels as the Kennedy Center Honors and the Screen Actors' Guild trophy, Lemmon also continued to win nominations and awards for his work in such TV dramas as the 1997 version of 12 Angry Men (inspiring Golden Globe rival Ving Rhames to famously surrender his prize to Lemmon) and Inherit the Wind (1999). Lemmon's Emmy-worthy turn as a serenely wise dying professor in Tuesdays With Morrie proved to be his final major role and an appropriate end to his stellar career. One year after longtime friend Matthau passed away in July 2000, Lemmon succumbed to cancer on June 27, 2001. He was survived by his second wife, Felicia Farr (whom he married in 1962), and his two children.

Trivia: A certified comic genius, Ernie Kovacs' great accomplishments lay in his sublimely creative, way-ahead-of-its-time television work; he was seldom shown to best advantage in films. Born in New Jersey to Hungarian immigrants, Kovacs was an unremarkable student, though he excelled in high school theatricals. A serious bout with pleurisy ended his training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After working with a ragtag theatrical troupe, Kovacs attained his first radio work as an announcer for Trenton's WTTM. As the station's director of special events, the mustachioed, cigar-smoking Kovacs gained a fan following by staging such zany events as lying on a railroad track as a train approached, informing the listeners at home how it felt to be so close to death! He inaugurated his television career at Philadelphia's WPTZ in 1950, where he stretched the limits of the primitive medium with wild sketches, nonsequitur sight gags and trick photography. He carried this innovative spirit into his first network program, 1952's Kovacs Unlimited. Though none of his subsequent TV projects ever achieved the high ratings that they deserved, Kovacs was the object of an intense cult worship, comprised mostly of people who were sick to death of boob-tube banality and who thrived on Kovacs' willingness to experiment. In 1954, Kovacs married singer Edie Adams, who frequently starred in his TV endeavors; she also assisted him in his feverish efforts to reclaim his two children from a previous marriage who'd been kidnapped by wife number one. While generally master of his own domain on television, Kovacs was at the mercy of Hollywood typecasting when he began his film career with Operation Mad Ball (1957). He portrayed so many obnoxious Army officers that at one point he took out a trade paper ad, imploring "No More Captains--Please." His own favorite film was the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in professional widow Cyd Charisse. After completing his last film, Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), Kovacs concentrated his efforts on his ABC-TV monthly specials, wherein he transformed the running gag into an art form, brought inanimate objects to life, "visualized" the musical compositions of Beethoven, Stravinsky and Mahler, and hawked Dutch Masters cigars between the acts. The audacious brilliance of Ernie Kovacs came to an abrupt, tragic end when he was killed in an auto accident at the age of 42.

Trivia: The younger brother of actor Dana Andrews, Steve Forrest served in World War II while his brother (17 years Steve's senior) was starring in such films as The Purple Heart (1944) and Laura (1944). Upon his return to America, Steve went to Hollywood to pay a social call on Dana, decided he liked the movie colony, and opted to stick around for a while. Though he'd previously played bits in such films as Crash Dive (using his given name of William Andrews), Forrest never seriously considered acting as a profession until enrolling at UCLA. He tried regional theatre work and scriptwriting then received a brief but showy bit part in MGM's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). This led to further film work in second leads then several years' worth of villainous roles. When asked why he accepted so many bad-guy assignments, Forrest would cite the comment once made to him by Clark Gable: "The hero gets the girl but the heavy gets the attention". By 1969, however, Forrest felt as though he'd worn out his welcome as a heavy, and began regularly turning down roles, holding out for heroic parts. In 1975, he was cast as Lieutenant Dan "Hondo" Harrison on the popular TV action series S.W.A.T., which might have run for years had it not been axed under pressure from the anti-violence brigades. More recently, Steve Forrest lampooned his rugged, rough'n'ready image in the 1987 film comedy Amazon Women of the Moon.In the years to follow, Forrest would remain beloved for his man's man presence on screen, appearing occasionally on shows like Colombo and Murder, She Wrote. Forrest passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

Trivia: American character actor Parker Fennelly usually played taciturn New Englanders on stage, screen, television and mostly on radio. His Yankee upbringing made him well-suited to the roles. In addition to acting, Fennelly was also a noted playwright.

Trivia: American stage and film actor Phillip Coolidge made his first film, Boomerang, in 1948. Since much of the film was shot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the New York-based actor didn't have to relocate to Hollywood for his brief assignment. Later film roles for Coolidge were on a par with his self-protective small-town mayor in Inherit the Wind (1960)--neither heroic nor villainous, but all too human. Seldom a leading character, Coolidge was always a reassuring presence in the supporting cast, be it as William Windom's brother on the 1960s TV series The Farmer's Daughter or in the teeny-tiny role of closet alcoholic Simon Stimson in the original 1938 Broadway production of Our Town. Phillip Coolidge's best and most recognizable film role was Ollie Higgins, the scheming silent-movie-theatre manager who literally scares his wife to death (and gets a suitable comeuppance) in William Castle's gimmicky thriller The Tingler (1959).

Trivia: "I'm not a comic," insisted Mary Wickes. "I'm an actress who plays comedy." True enough; still Wickes was often heaps funnier than the so-called comics she supported. The daughter of a well-to-do St. Louis banker, Wickes was an excellent student, completing a political science degree at the University of Washington at the age of 18. She intended to become a lawyer, but she was deflected into theatre. During her stock company apprenticeship, Wickes befriended Broadway star Ina Claire, who wrote the young actress a letter of introduction to powerful New York producer Sam Harris. She made her Broadway debut in 1934, spending the next five seasons in a variety of characterizations (never the ingenue). In 1939, she found time to make her film bow in the Red Skelton 2-reeler Seein' Red. After a string of Broadway flops, Wickes scored a hit as long-suffering Nurse Preen (aka "Nurse Bedpan") in the Kaufman-Hart comedy classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was brought to Hollywood to repeat her role in the 1941 film version of Dinner. After a brief flurry of movie activity, Wickes went back to the stage, returning to Hollywood in 1948 in a role specifically written for her in The Decision of Christopher Blake. Thereafter, she remained in great demand in films, playing an exhausting variety of nosy neighbors, acerbic housekeepers and imperious maiden aunts. Though her characters were often snide and sarcastic, Wickes was careful to inject what she called "heart" into her portrayals; indeed, it is very hard to find an out-and-out villainess in her manifest. Even when she served as the model for Cruella DeVil in the 1961 animated feature 101 Dalmations, Cruella's voice was dubbed by the far more malevolent-sounding Betty Lou Gerson. Far busier on TV than in films, Wickes was a regular on ten weekly series between 1953 and 1985, earning an Emmy nomination for her work on 1961's The Gertrude Berg Show. She also has the distinction of being the first actress to essay the role of Mary Poppins in a 1949 Studio One presentation. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Wickes did a great deal of guest-artist work in colleges and universities; during this period she herself went back to school, earning a master's degree from UCLA. Maintaining her professional pace into the 1990s, Wickes scored a hit with modern moviegoers as Sister Mary Lazarus in the two Sister Act comedies. Mary Wickes' final performance was a voiceover stint as one of the gargoyles in Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame; she died a few days before finishing this assignment, whereupon Jane Withers dubbed in the leftover dialogue.

Trivia: Actor Max Showalter learned his craft at the Pasadena Playhouse. An adroit, quick-witted comic performer, Showalter was one of the earliest participants in the infant medium known as television. He was an ensemble player on 1949's The Swift Show, and that same year was a panelist on the "charades" quiz show Hold It Please. 20th Century-Fox chieftan Darryl F. Zanuck was a fan of Showalter's work; the producer hired Showalter as a Fox featured player, but not before changing his name to the more "box-office" Casey Adams. While there were a few leading roles, notably as Jean Peter's obtuse husband in Niagara (1953), for the most part Showalter/Adams' film career was confined to brief character parts (e.g. Return to Peyton Place [1958] and The Music Man [1962]). While still travelling under the alias of Casey Adams, Showalter appeared in a half-hour pilot film titled It's a Small World (1956); on this one-shot, the actor originated the role of Ward Cleaver, a role that would ultimately be assumed by Hugh Beaumont when Small World matriculated into Leave It to Beaver. Shedding the Casey Adams alias in the mid '60s, Max Showalter remained a busy character player into the '80s, appearing as a regular on the 1980 sitcom The Stockard Channing Show.

Trivia: The daughter of Episcopal missionaries, Jayne Meadows was born in China; she spoke nothing but Chinese until her parents returned to America in the early 1930s. The sister of Honeymooners co-star Audrey Meadows, Jayne Meadows began her film career in the mid-1940s as a contract player at MGM. Her velvety voice and self-confident bearing ruled out her being cast as simpering ingénues: Meadows excelled as cold-blooded "other women," vitriolic divorcees, and neurotic murderesses. Her best screen role was the double- and triple-crossing Mildred Haveland in Lady in the Lake (1946). For nearly five decades, Jayne was harmoniously married to her second husband, TV personality Steve Allen, with whom she has co-starred on dozens of variety programs and game shows, as well as Steve Allen's memorable PBS miniseries Meeting of Minds. Both she and her husband were nominated for Emmy Awards for their joint guest appearance on the TV series LA Law. Her more regular TV work included the third-billed role of Nurse Chambers on Medical Center (1969-73) and the part of Ken Howard's mother on the 1983 "dramedy" It's Not Easy. Meadows made an indelible impression through the power of her voice alone as Billy Crystal's gushing, unseen mom in the two City Slickers film comedies of the 1990s. She continued acting and appearing on-screen until the late 2000s; she died in 2015, at age 95.

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: Direct from Chicago's DePaul University, Betsy Palmer underwent intensive training at New York's Actors Studio, supporting herself as a secretary. She made her professional bow in stock in Wisconsin and Illinois in 1950; one year later, she made the first of hundreds of TV appearances. In 1955, Palmer first appeared on Broadway in The Grand Prize, and that same year launched her sporadic film career. Later stage credits included Forty Carats, in which she successfully replaced Lauren Bacall, and extensive touring in the role of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. To millions of baby-boomers, Palmer will forever be associated with her work as a panelist on such TV game shows as I've Got a Secret; a later generation of televiewers will most readily recall her as Virginia Bullock on the 1989-90 season of Knot's Landing. To those whose teen years coincided with the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, Betsy Palmer is known only as the vicious, vengeful, axe-wielding Mrs. Voorhees (Jason's mom) in the first Friday the 13th (1980); reportedly, Palmer won that role because she was willing to drive her own car to and from location shoots. Palmer continued to act through her later years; she died in 2015, at age 88.

Trivia: Was the son of Croatian immigrants. Was senior class president in high school. Served in the U.S. Air Force as a pilot and bombardier in WWII. Originally wanted to enter the entertainment industry in hopes of becoming an opera singer. Was given his first job in the entertainment field as a page for NBC. Prior to acting, co-hosted a morning radio show called Rayburn & Finch in NYC in the 1940s. Contended that his career came to a halt when he was 68 and Entertainment Tonight revealed his age as being older than many thought. Given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in October 1999, only a month before his death.

Trivia: Born John Paige, this versatile leading man of many '40s B-movies and musicals attended West Point before dropping out to work as a radio singer and announcer. In 1931 he began appearing in film shorts, billed as David Carlyle. In the mid '30s he began appearing in features, changing his name to Robert Paige in 1938; by the early '40s he was a busy leading man, appearing in every genre of film. He was onscreen infrequently after 1949, but did much work on TV; besides acting in TV productions (he was a regular on the series Run Buddy Run), he also worked as a quiz-show host and Los Angeles newscaster. He finished his career as a public relations executive in Hollywood.