Trivia: American actor (and ex-teacher) Kerwin Mathews was but one of many handsome contract players at Columbia Pictures when, in 1957, he was thrust into the title role in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Mathews managed to assert his engaging personality into the proceedings even with the formidable competition of Ray Harryhausen's eye-popping special effects. Mathews went on to star in another Harryhausen opus, Three Worlds of Gulliver (1961), and also headlined the Harryhausen "wannabe" film Jack the Giant Killer (1962). After playing Johann Strauss Jr. in the Disney-produced The Waltz King (1962), Kerwin Mathews had trouble sustaining his stardom; his later films were along the lines of Battle Beneath the Earth (1968) and Nightmare in Blood (1978). He died in July 2007 at age 81.

Trivia: Judi Meredith was not much more than a tabloid celebrity in the late '50s and early '60s; her onscreen career was improbable enough to almost qualify as a minor miracle. Born Judith Clare Boutin in Portland, OR, she was an athletic child and became a figure skater. She turned professional and became a star performer with the Ice Follies in her teens. Her career was cut short, though, by an accident in which her back was broken. Her doctors told her that she would never skate again, but she resumed her career after a period of recovery until she broke her kneecap, which finally did end her professional skating. She turned to acting in her late teens and was performing in stock when she was spotted by George Burns, who liked her outgoing personality and healthy, athletic look. He cast her in a recurring role late in the run of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, playing Bonnie Sue McAfee in 1957. From there it was on to Studio One in "The Left-Handed Welcome" and a boisterous guest performance in the John Payne Western series The Restless Gun; she also played herself in the short-lived series The George Burns Show (1958). Meredith began appearing in movies that year, in pictures such as the Western drama Wild Heritage and teen romance Summer Love. She quickly began moving into actor and celebrity circles, and at one time was linked romantically to Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra. Meredith's biggest theatrical film role was as Princess Elaine in the fantasy-adventure film Jack the Giant Killer (1962). Her career arc was confined largely to television; however, Meredith's work included a string of appearances on the show Ben Casey, and she delivered a truly poignant performance in "Errant Knight," an episode of Bonanza featuring Dan Blocker and John Doucette. She was in her element as the whip-wielding Calamity Jane, working opposite Wild Bill Hickock (Robert Culp) in the made-for-TV film The Raiders (1963). She also had a role in William Castle's The Night Walker (1964), but two years later, she closed out the major part of her career in Curtis Harrington's Planet of Blood, made at American International Pictures. She was largely absent from the screen until 1971's Western comedy Something Big, and was last seen on television in an episode of Emergency two years later.

Trivia: Torin Thatcher came out of a military family in India to become a top stage actor in England and a well-known character actor in international films and television. Born Torin Herbert Erskine Thatcher in Bombay, India, in 1905, he was the great-grandson and grandson of generals -- one of whom had fought with Clive -- but he planned for a quieter life; educated at Bedford School, he originally intended to become a teacher before being bitten by the acting bug. Instead, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and later worked in every kind of theatrical production there was, from Greek tragedy to burlesque. Thatcher made his London debut in 1927 as Tranio in a production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Old Vic Company, and he subsequently portrayed both the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet with the same company. In the years that followed, Thatcher was in more than 50 Shakespearean productions and 20 plays by George Bernard Shaw. The outbreak of the Second World War took Thatcher into uniform, and he served for six years in the army, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel before he returned to civilian life in 1946. In 1944, Thatcher had made his first acquaintance of the theater world in New York when he found himself on leave in the city with only ten shillings in his pocket -- he spent it sparingly and discovered that Allied servicemen, even officers, were accorded a great many perks in those days; he was also amazed and delighted when he was recognized while on his way into a play in New York by a theatergoer who was able to name virtually every movie that he'd done in England over the preceding decade. He got a firsthand look at the city's generosity and also made sure to meet a number of people associated with the New York theater scene, contacts that served him in good stead when he returned to New York in 1946, as a civilian eager to pick up his career. He starred in two plays opposite Katharine Cornell, First Born and That Lady, and portrayed Claggart in a stage adaptation of Billy Budd, but his big success was in Noel Langley and Robert Morley's Edward My Son. Thatcher had been in movies in England since 1933, in small roles, occasionally in major and important films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) and Michael Powell's The Spy in Black (1939); his British career had peaked with a superb performance in a small but important role in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948). After moving to the United States, however, Thatcher quickly moved up to starring and major supporting roles in Hollywood movies, beginning with Affair in Trinidad (1952). He was busy at 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. over the next decade, moving between their American and British units, and stood out in such hit movies as The Crimson Pirate (1952) (as the pirate Humble Bellows) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). Although Thatcher could play benevolent characters, his intense expression and presence and imposing physique made him more natural as a villain, and he spent his later career in an array of screen malefactors, of whom the best known was the sorcerer Sokurah in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), directed by Nathan Juran. Thatcher and Juran were close friends and the director loved to use him -- the two became a kind of double act together for a time, turning up in "The Space Trader" episode of Lost in Space, guest-starring Thatcher and directed by Juran.

Trivia: Diminutive Irish-American character actor Walter Burke kicked off his film career in 1948. Burke's weaselly, cigarette-dangling-from-lips characterization of political flunky Sugar Boy in the Oscar-winning All the King's Men (1949) set the tone for most of his later roles. Though often afforded meaty roles on television -- he was one of several actors who subbed for William Talman during the 1960-1961 season of Perry Mason -- Burke had no objection to accepting tiny but memorable bits, such as the cockney who warns Eliza Doolittle, "There's a bloke be'ind that pillar, takin' down every word that you're sayin'!" in the opening scene of My Fair Lady (1964). In another unbilled assignment, Burke convincingly voice-doubled for narrator Walter Winchell in a handful of early-'60s episodes of The Untouchables. Closing out his film career in the early '70s, Walter Burke moved to Pennsylvania, where he became an acting teacher.

Trivia: Trained at the Goodman Theatre in his hometown of Chicago, the 6'4", 230-pound Barry Kelley made his professional stage bow in 1930. Seventeen years later, he appeared in his first film, director Elia Kazan's Boomerang. Kelley was most often found in crime yarns and westerns, often cast as a corrupt law officer, e.g. Lieutenant Ditrich in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. Barry Kelley's hundreds of TV credits include the recurring roles of city editor Charlie Anderson in Big Town (1954) and Pete's boss Mr. Slocum in Pete and Gladys (1961).

Trivia: Dapper, rotund character actor Don Beddoe was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati, where his father headed the Conservatory of Music. Beddoe's professional career began in Cincinnati, first as a journalist and then an actor. He made his Broadway debut in the unfortunately titled Nigger Rich, which starred Spencer Tracy. Beddoe became a fixture of Columbia Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s, playing minor roles in "A"s like Golden Boy, supporting parts ranging from cops to conventioneers in the studio's "B" features, and flustered comedy foil to the antics of such Columbia short subject stars as The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde and Charley Chase. Beddoe kept busy until the mid-1980s with leading roles in 1961's The Boy Who Caught a Crook and Saintly Sinners, and (as a singing leprechaun) in 1962's Jack the Giant Killer.

Trivia: American actor Dayton Lummis was born in New York, but studied theatre in Los Angeles at the Martha Oatman School. His first professional engagement, at age 24, was with the Russell Stock Company, of Redlands, California; Lummis remained a regional actor until his Broadway bow in 1943. One of those actors whose face everyone remembers but whose name everyone forgets (one of his few billed roles was in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man [1956]), Lummis worked steadily if not prominently in films, most often in authoritative roles as aristocrats or politicians. The actor was better served by television, where he appeared in over 400 programs. Dayton Lummis was fairly anonymous when in modern dress, but came to life whenever decked out in a powdered wig or 19th century waistcoat; his adeptness at period roles made him indispensible during TV's western boom of the late '50s, and in fact Lummis had a regular costarring role as Marshal Andy Morrison on the 1959 oater Law of the Plainsman.

Trivia: Born Joanna Winnifrith, Anna Lee was a petite, charming, blond British actress. At age 14 she ran away from home to join a circus. After brief stage experience she began appearing in British films in 1932, playing leads and supporting roles; in 1940 she moved to Hollywood and began making films there. She is best remembered as Bronwyn Morgan, Roddy McDowall's sister-in-law, in How Green was My Valley (1941). Rarely onscreen after the late '60s, she had a regular role as Lila Quartermaine on the TV soap opera General Hospital. She married and divorced director Robert Stevenson. She was the widow of novelist/playwright/poet Robert Nathan and the mother of actors Jeffrey Byron and Venetia Stevenson.

Trivia: American actor Ken Mayer played character roles in feature films of the '50s and '60s (primarily Westerns). He also worked in summer stock and was a regular on the television series Space Patrol. Occasionally, Mayer also worked in TV commercials.