Trivia: Will Rogers Jr. is the son of legendary comic actor and folk philosopher Will Rogers. Rogers Jr. himself became an entertainer and impersonated his father in three films, among them The Story of Will Rogers (1952).

Trivia: The daughter of a Milwaukee physician, Nancy Olson attended UCLA, then briefly acted on stage before signing a Paramount Pictures contract in 1949. Her best screen assignment at Paramount was as self-effacing script clerk Betty Schaffer in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. She went on to be teamed with her Boulevard co-star William Holden in Union Station (1950), Force of Arms (1951) and Submarine Command (1951). Olson briefly retired in the mid-1950s when she married songwriter Alan Jay Lerner (they later divorced; her second husband was record executive Alan Livingston). In 1960, Olson went back before the cameras as Betty Carlisle, ever-patient fiance of would-be inventor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) in Disney's The Absent Minded Professor; she repeated this characterization in the 1963 sequel Son of Flubber. She went on to do a smattering of TV films, including the 1967 pilot of the Darren McGavin private eye series The Outsider. Nancy Olson also played continuing roles in the 1977 weekly Kingston: Confidential and the 1984 prime-time soaper Paper Dolls.

Trivia: Once there was a film historian who opined that Wallace Ford was in more movies than any other character actor of his prominence. This is unlikely, but Ford was certainly kept busy in roles of all shapes and sizes during his 35-year movie career. Orphaned in infancy, Ford grew up in various British orphanages and foster homes (his search in the mid-1930s for his natural parents drew worldwide headlines). He first set foot on stage at age 11, playing in vaudeville and music halls before working his way up to Broadway. His inauspicious feature-film debut was in Swellhead (1931), a baseball melodrama which lay on the shelf for nearly five years before its release. He went on to play wisecracking leading roles in such "B"s as Night of Terror (1933), The Nut Farm (1935) and The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1935); the critics paid no heed to these minor efforts, though they always showered Ford with praise for his supporting roles in films like John Ford's The Informer (1935) and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). He occasionally took a leave of absence from films to accept a stage role; in 1937, he created the part of George in the original Broadway production of Of Mice and Men (1937). As he grew balder and stockier, he remained in demand for middle-aged character roles, often portraying wistful drunks or philosophical ne'er-do-wells. Wallace Ford ended his film career with his powerful portrayal of Elizabeth Hartman's vacillating father in A Patch of Blue (1965).

Trivia: American-born Anthony Caruso decided early in his showbiz career to cash in on his last name by becoming a singer. Though he enjoyed some success in this field, Caruso had better luck securing acting roles. Typecast as a villain from his first film, Johnny Apollo (1940), onward, he remained a reliable screen menace until the 1980s. Usually cast as an Italian (he was Louis Chiavelli in 1950's The Asphalt Jungle), he has also played his share of Greeks, Spaniards, Slavs, and Indian chiefs. He was occasionally afforded an opportunity to essay sympathetic characters on the various TV religious anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s, notably This Is the Life. In 1976, Anthony Caruso enjoyed one of his biggest and most prominent screen roles in Zebra Force.On April 4, 2003 Anthony Caruso died following an extended illness in Brentwood, CA. He was 86.

Trivia: The screen's premiere "Old Codger," American actor Clem Bevans didn't make his movie debut until he was 55 years old. His acting career was launched in 1900 with a vaudeville boy-girl act costarring Grace Emmett. Bevans moved on to burlesque, stock shows, Broadway and light opera. In 1935, Bevans first stepped before the movie cameras as Doc Wiggins in Way Down East. It was the first of many toothless, stubble-chinned geezers that Bevans would portray for the next 27 years. On occasion, producers and directors would use Bevans' established screen persona to throw the audience off the track. In Happy Go Lucky (1942), he unexpectedly shows up as a voyeuristic millionaire with a fondness for female knees; in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), he is a likeable old desert rat who turns out to be a Nazi spy! Clem Bevans continued playing farmers, hillbillies, and "town's oldest citizen" roles into the early 1960s. The octogenarian actor could be seen in a 1962 episode of Twilight Zone ("Hocus Pocus and Frisby") looking and sounding just the same as he had way back in 1935.

Trivia: The son of a tennis pro, California-native Merv Griffin was evidently a born entertainer; as early as age seven, he was staging neighborhood carnivals and churning out his own one-page newspaper. Displaying a gift for music, Griffin was sent to study at a San Francisco conservatory, after which the 14-year-old led his local church choir and supported himself as a professional organist. After rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood glitterati at his uncle's tennis club, Griffin decided to make show business his life. He toured with his own USO troupe during the war, then became a Los Angeles radio pianist and singer. Because he tipped the scales at around 250 pounds, Griffin was billed as "the mystery voice" rather than have the illusion dispelled by publishing his photograph. When a fan visiting his studio laughed out loud at the sight of the porcine mystery voice, Griffin immediately went on a crash diet. It was a svelte and handsome Griffin who signed on in 1948 as a vocalist for Freddy Martin's orchestra; after scoring a hit with a recording of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts," the boyish baritone was given a contract at Warner Bros.Most of Griffin's movie appearances were in supporting roles, though he did play a substantial male lead opposite Kathryn Grayson in the 1953 Grace Moore biopic So This Is Love. (In 1982, he made a surprise return to movies as the "human punch line" to a running gag in Steve Martin's Man with Two Brains). Entering television in the mid-'50s, Griffin was a featured vocalist on the CBS Morning Show and the comedy/variety programs of Robert Q. Lewis and Kate Smith. He got his first taste of hosting his own TV program at a CBS outlet in Florida, after which he emceed such popular network game shows as Play Your Hunch (1958-1962) and Keep Talking (1960). Flourishing as his own producer in the early '60s, Griffin launched a daily, hour-long NBC talk show in 1962, which, though popular with the critics, died opposite CBS's soap opera lineup. Griffin's next foray into the chat-show world had more lasting results: in 1965, Westinghouse Broadcasting inaugurated the syndicated nighttimer The Merv Griffin Show, which after a hesitant first few months in which Merv tried to imitate rival Johnny Carson, hit its stride by peppering his showbiz palaver with controversial issues and such volatile guest stars as philosopher Bertrand Russell. The Merv Griffin Show also gave a shot in the arm to the career of irascible British character actor Arthur Treacher, who functioned as Merv's "Ed McMahon." In 1969, the CBS network, hoping to topple the mighty Carson in late night, offered Griffin his own CBS talk show. Not anxious to leave his comfortable niche, Griffin tried to throw CBS off his trail by demanding to be paid more than NBC paid Carson; to his amazement, CBS agreed. The network version of The Merv Griffin Show began in 1969 -- and ended a scant four years later, as much a victim of network censorship and indecision as lukewarm ratings. Griffin returned to syndication under the Metromedia imprimatur in 1972, remaining in the late-night race until voluntarily calling it quits in 1986. That same year, he sold his Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola for a whopping 250 million dollars. Thanks to this deal, to his nurturing of such game-show properties as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and to his management of numerous casinos, hotels, and resorts in both L.A. and Las Vegas, Merv Griffin closed out the 20th century as one of the wealthiest entertainer/entrepreneurs on earth, with a total net worth of well over one billion dollars. He died in August 2007 at 82 years old.

Trivia: It was once said of the versatile Louis Jean Heydt that he played everything except a woman. Born in New Jersey, the blonde, chiseled-featured Heydt attended Worcester Academy and Dartmouth College. He briefly served as a reporter on the New YorkWorld before opting for a stage career. Among his Broadway appearances was the lead in Preston Sturges' Strictly Dishonorable, establishing a long working relationship with Sturges that would extend to the latter's film productions The Great McGinty (1940) and The Great Moment (1942). Heydt's film characters often seemed destined to be killed off before the fourth reel, either because they were hiding something or because they'd just stumbled upon important information that could prove damaging to the villains. He was knocked off in the first three minutes of Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) and was shot full of holes just before revealing an important plot point to Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) (this after an unforgettable interrogation scene in which Heydt is unable to look Bogart straight in the eye). Heydt's many other assignments include the hungry soldier in Gone with the Wind (1939), Mentor Graham in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), a frustrated general practitioner in Tortilla Flat (1941), a squadron leader in Gung Ho (1943) and a loquacious rural family man in Come to the Stable (1949). Our Gang fans will recall Heydt as Bobby Blake's stepfather in the MGM "Gang" shorts Dad For a Day (1939) and All About Hash (1940). A ubiquitous TV actor, Louis Jean Heydt was seen on many anthology series, and as a semi-regular on the 1958 syndicated adventure weekly MacKenzie's Raiders.

Trivia: After some 15 years on the country & western circuit, singer/actor Sheb Wooley finally cracked popular music's Top Ten in 1958. It was Wooley who introduced the world to the "One Eyed, One Horned, Flying Purple People Eater," which remained the number one song for six straight weeks and stayed in the Top Ten for three weeks more. Thereafter, Wooley's recording career fluctuated between blue-ribbon country & western ballads and silly novelty songs. As an actor, Wooley was seen in such films as Little Big Horn (1951), High Noon (1952), Giant (1956), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and several other films with a sagebrush setting and equestrian supporting cast. From 1961 through 1965, Sheb Wooley played Pete Nolan, frontier scout for the never-ending cattle drive on the weekly TV Western Rawhide.

Trivia: Though he spoke most of his movie dialogue in a slow Western drawl, actor Slim Pickens was a pure-bred California boy. An expert rider from the age of four, Pickens was performing in rodeos at 12. Three years later, he quit school to become a full-time equestrian and bull wrangler, eventually becoming the highest-paid rodeo clown in show business. In films since 1950's Rocky Mountain, Pickens specialized in Westerns (what a surprise), appearing as the comic sidekick of Republic cowboy star Rex Allen. By the end of the 1950s, Pickens had gained so much extra poundage that he practically grew out of his nickname. Generally cast in boisterous comedy roles, Pickens was also an effectively odious villain in 1966's An Eye for an Eye, starting the film off with a jolt by shooting a baby in its crib. In 1963, director Stanley Kubrick handed Pickens his greatest role: honcho bomber pilot "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove. One of the most unforgettable of all cinematic images is the sight of Pickens straddling a nuclear bomb and "riding" it to its target, whooping and hollering all the way down. Almost as good was Pickens' performance as Harvey Korman's henchman in Mel Brooks' bawdy Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Slim Pickens was also kept busy on television, with numerous guest shots and regular roles in the TV series The Legend of Custer, B.J. and the Bear, and Filthy Rich.

Trivia: Sharp-featured character actor James Griffith set out in life to be a professional musician. He eased into acting instead, working the little-theatre route in his hometown of Los Angeles. In 1939, Griffith appeared in his first professional production, They Can't Get You Down. Following World War II service, he made his first film, Black Ice (1946). Steadily employed in westerns, James Griffith was generally cast as an outlaw, save for a few comparative good-guy assignments such as Sheriff Pat Garrett in The Law vs. Billy the Kid (1954).

Trivia: Rotund, moon-faced character actor Charles Watts made a mini-career out of portraying glad-handing politicians, voluble businessmen and salesmen, crafty bankers, and cheerful or cynical parents, uncles, family friends, and other supporting players. He never had a starring role, or even a co-starring role, in a motion picture, but his physical presence and voice made for some memorable moments. Born in Clarksville, TN, in 1912, Watts was a high-school teacher -- handling both business law and drama -- for a time during his mid-twenties, working in Chattanooga. He worked in local theater and tent shows early in his career, and after World War II was also in demand for industrial shows. Watts didn't start doing movie or television appearances until 1950, and in that first year he played small, uncredited roles in such serious dramas as The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), as a mailman, and Storm Warning (1951), as a lunch-counter proprietor -- and somewhat larger parts, as a sheriff, in three episodes of The Lone Ranger. Over the next 16 years, he was seen in nearly 100 movies and television shows. His most prominent big-screen role was that of Judge (and later United States Senator) Oliver Whiteside in George Stevens' Giant (1956), where his rich, melodious voice and cheerful demeanor were put to extensive use. Watts was also an uncredited man in the crowd in Stuart Heisler's I Died a Thousand Times, a police sergeant in Philip Dunne's The View From Pompey's Head (both 1955), and Mr. Schultz, the salesman from the suspender company, in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Watts even found his way into two big-scale musicals -- Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) and Jumbo (1962) -- a decade apart. When he had a role with dialogue of any length, he was often used -- or so it seemed -- for his tendency to speechify, and to make even ordinary words stand out in relief. As active on television as he was in movies, Watts was familiar to several generations of young viewers for his role as Bill Green, the skeptical anti-superstition league leader in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Lucky Cat" (1955). He also played a small but key role in the Father Knows Best episode "24 Hours in Tyrantland," done on behalf of the Treasury Department to sell U.S. Savings Bonds, as the Andersons' skeptical neighbor, whose brief, cynical talk to son Bud finally pushes Jim Anderson (Robert Young) to straighten his kids out about the importance of savings bonds. Watts remained busy into the mid-'60s, and died of cancer in 1966.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: A product of the Indiana orphanage system, the part-Cherokee-Indian Monte Blue held down jobs ranging from stevedore to reporter before offering his services as a movie-studio handyman in the early 1910s. Pressed into service as an extra and stunt man, Blue graduated to featured parts in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Thanks to his work with Griffith and (especially) Cecil B. DeMille, Blue became a dependable box-office attraction of the 1920s, playing everything from lawyers to baseball players. He was a mainstay of the fledgling Warner Bros. studios, where the profits from his films frequently compensated for the expensive failures starring John Barrymore. In 1928 he was cast in his finest silent role, as the drink-sodden doctor in White Shadows on the South Seas. After making a successful transition to talkies, Blue decided to retire from filmmaking, taking a tour around the world to celebrate his freedom. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1931, Blue found that he had lost his fortune through bad investments, and that the public at large had forgotten him. By now too heavy-set to play romantic leads, Blue rebuilt his career from the bottom up, playing bits in "A" pictures and supporting roles in "B"s. He was busiest in the bread-and-butter westerns produced by such minor studios as Republic, Monogram and PRC; he also showed up in several serials, notably as "Ming the Merciless" clone Unga Khan in 1936's Undersea Kingdom. Movie mogul Jack Warner, out of gratitude for Blue's moneymaking vehicles of the 1920s, saw to it that Monte was steadily employed at Warner Bros., and that his name would appear prominently in the studio's advertising copy. While many of his talkie roles at Warners were bits, Blue was given choice supporting roles in such films as Across the Pacific (1942), Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and especially Key Largo (1948). Extending his activities into TV, Blue continued accepting character roles until retiring from acting in 1954. During the last years of his life, Monte Blue was the advance man for the Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus; it was while making his annual appearance in this capacity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that Blue suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 73.

Trivia: Mean-looking John Lacy Cason was one of those unsung Hollywood heroes: a stuntman. A former professional prizefighter (hence his battered-looking nose), Cason was, according to his fellow stunt people, Pierce Lyden, "one of the toughest men in the business." He had arrived in Hollywood in the late '30s and began receiving billing in 1941, always playing henchmen. Nicknamed "Lefty" due to a fierce left-handed hook, Cason appeared in scores of B-Westerns in the '40s and guest starred on nearly all the television oaters of the following decade. He died in a road accident near Santa Barbara, CA, shortly after finishing an episode of Wagon Train.

Trivia: General purpose actor Harry Lauter began showing up in films around 1948. Long associated with Columbia Pictures, Lauter appeared in featured roles in such major releases as The Big Heat (1953), Hellcats of the Navy (1957) and The Last Hurrah (1958). He also acted in the studio's "B"-western and horror product. Making occasional visits to Republic, Lauter starred in three serials: Canadian Mounties vs. the Atomic Invaders (1953), Trader Tom of the China Seas (1954) and King of the Carnival (1956), Republic's final chapter play. On TV, he co-starred with Preston Foster in Waterfront (1954) and was second-billed as Ranger Clay Morgan in Tales of the Texas Rangers (1955-59). After appearing in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Harry Lauter retired from acting to concentrate on painting and managing his art and antique gallery.

Trivia: Australian-born actor George Lloyd spoke without a trace of accent of any kind in his hundreds of movie appearances. Lloyd's mashed-in mug and caterpillar eyebrows were put to best use in roles calling for roughneck sarcasm. He was often seen as second-string gangsters, escape-prone convicts, acerbic garage mechanics and (especially) temperamental moving men. George Lloyd's film career began in the mid-1930s and petered out by the beginning of the TV era.

Trivia: Ted Mapes grew up on his father's wheat ranch in Nebraska. Upon attaining adulthood, Mapes took on a variety of manual-labor jobs, ending up as a furniture hauler in Los Angeles. Through a movie-studio connection, he landed a job as a grip on the 1929 Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford talkie Taming of the Shrew. By the mid-1930s, he'd moved away from the technical side of the business and was working as a stunt man and supporting actor. Mapes performed stunts for such major action stars as John Wayne, Charles Starrett, Joel McCrea and James Stewart. He also doubled for Gary Cooper (whom he closely resembled) in 17 different films, and essayed speaking roles in 13 Republic serials. After retiring from the stunt game, he kept active in Hollywood as an advisor for the American Humane Association, seeing to it that movie animals were properly trained and cared for on the set. In 1978, Ted Mapes was elected to the Stuntman Hall of Fame.

Trivia: American character actor Frank Marlowe left the stage for the screen in 1934. For the next 25 years, Marlowe showed up in countless bits and minor roles, often in the films of 20th Century-Fox. He played such peripheral roles as gas station attendants, cabdrivers, reporters, photographers, servicemen and murder victims (for some reason, he made a great corpse). As anonymous as ever, Frank Marlowe made his final appearance as a barfly in 1957's Rockabilly Baby.

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: One of the most popular, and recognizable, character actors in B-Western history, pudgy, mustachioed Bud Osborne (real name Leonard Miles Osborne) was one of the many Wild West show performers who parlayed their experiences into lengthy screen careers. Especially noted for his handling of runaway stagecoaches and buckboards, Osborne began as a stunt performer with Thomas Ince's King-Bee company around 1912, and by the 1920s he had become one of the busiest supporting players in the business. Rather rakish-looking in his earlier years, the still slender Osborne even attempted to become a Western star in his own right. Produced by the Bud Osborne Feature Film Company and released by low-budget Truart Pictures, The Prairie Mystery (1922) presented Osborne as a romantic leading man opposite B-movie regular Pauline Curley. Few saw this little clunker, however, and Osborne quickly returned to the ranks of supporting cowboys, often portraying despicable villains with names like Satan Saunders, Piute Sam, or Bull McKee. Playing an escaped convict masquerading as a circuit rider in both the 1923 Leo Maloney short Double Cinched and Shootin' Square, a 1924 Jack Perrin feature Western, Osborne even demonstrated an affinity for comedy. The now veteran Bud Osborne continued his screen career into the sound era and became even busier in the 1930s and 1940s. As he grew older and his waistline expanded, Osborne's roles became somewhat smaller and instead of calling the shots himself, as he often had in the silent era, he now answered to the likes of Roy Barcroft and Charles King. But he seems to pop up in every other B-Western and serial released in those years, appearing in more than 65 productions for Republic Pictures alone. By the 1950s, the now elderly Osborne became one of the many veteran performers courted by maverick filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr., for whom he did Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1954), an unsold television pilot, Jailbait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Night of the Ghouls (1958). When all is said and done, it was a rather dismal finish to a colorful career.

Trivia: Had he been born a decade earlier, American actor Denver Pyle might well have joined the ranks of western-movie comedy sidekicks. Instead, Pyle, a Colorado farm boy, opted for studying law, working his way through school by playing drums in a dance band. Suddenly one day, Pyle became disenchanted with law and returned to his family farm, with nary an idea what he wanted to do with his life. Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he moved on to the shrimp boats of Galveston, Texas. A short stint as a page at NBC radio studios in 1940 didn't immediately lead to a showbiz career, as it has for so many others; instead, Pyle was inspired to perform by a mute oilfield coworker who was able to convey his thought with body language. Studying under such masters as Michael Chekhov and Maria Ouspenskaya, Pyle was able to achieve small movie and TV roles. He worked frequently on the western series of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry; not yet bearded and grizzled, Pyle was often seen as deputies, farmers and cattle rustlers. When his hair turned prematurely grey in his early '30s, Pyle graduated to banker, sheriff and judge roles in theatrical westerns -- though never of the comic variety. He also was a regular on two TV series, Code 3 (1956) and Tammy (1966). But his real breakthrough role didn't happen until 1967, when Pyle was cast as the taciturn sheriff in Bonnie and Clyde who is kidnapped and humilated by the robbers -- and then shows up at the end of the film to supervise the bloody machine-gun deaths of B&C. This virtually nonspeaking role won worldwide fame for Pyle, as well as verbal and physical assalts from the LA hippie community who regarded Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes! From this point forward, Denver Pyle's billing, roles and salary were vastly improved -- and his screen image was softened and humanized by a full, bushy beard. Returning to TV, Pyle played the star's father on The Doris Day Show (1968-73); was Mad Jack, the costar/narrator of Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978-80); and best of all, spent six years (1979-85) as Uncle Jesse Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. Looking stockier but otherwise unchanged, Denver Pyle was briefly seen in the 1994 hit Maverick, playing an elegantly dishonest cardshark who jauntily doffs his hat as he's dumped off of a riverboat. Pyle died of lung cancer at Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center at age 77.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: Diminutive, frequently mustached character actor Charles Wagenheim made the transition from stage to screen in or around 1940. Wagenheim's most memorable role was that of "The Runt" in Meet Boston Blackie (1941), a part taken over by George E. Stone in the subsequent "Boston Blackie" B-films. Generally cast in unsavory bit parts, Wagenheim's on-screen perfidy extended from Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) to George Stevens' Diary of Anne Frank (1959), in which, uncredited, he played the sneak thief who nearly gave away the hiding place of the Frank family. Wagenheim kept his hand in the business into the 1970s in films like The Missouri Breaks (1976). In 1979, 83-year-old Charles Wagenheim was bludgeoned to death by an intruder in his Hollywood apartment, five days before another veteran actor, Victor Kilian, met the same grisly fate.

Trivia: Joan Weldon was lucky enough as an actress to get in briefly at the end of the Hollywood studio system, make some good movies (and one great one), and then land on her feet in musical theater, which is where she wanted to be in the first place. Born Joan Louise Welton in San Francisco, she was the daughter of a prominent attorney. As a child, she showed a keen interest in music and studied piano and voice. She joined the chorus of the San Francisco Grand Opera Company and later sang with the Civic Light Opera Company. It was during a performance with the latter that she was spotted by screenwriter-turned-producer Stanley Rubin (Macao, The Narrow Margin, River of No Return), who arranged for her to have a screen test at 20th Century Fox. The studio passed on her, however, because it wasn't in the market for vocalists. Meanwhile, she appeared on television as a singer on the series This Is Your Music and later crossed paths with William T. Orr, the son-in-law of Warner Bros. co-founder Jack L. Warner (and later the executive in charge of the company's television division), which led to a contract with Warners. Her last name was changed to Weldon and she narrowly missed out being cast as a victim of Vincent Price's malevolence in André De Toth's 3-D horror classic House of Wax. Instead, her contribution to the 3-D movie craze was as the second female lead in De Toth's The Stranger Wore a Gun amid a cast that included veterans Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, and George Macready and future stars Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Weldon was also loaned out to MGM in the Sigmund Romberg bio-musical Deep in My Heart (1954), and ended up cut from the picture for her trouble. Weldon was cast in a series of Westerns, including The Command and Riding Shotgun, but her greatest contribution to the screen was as the female lead in Gordon Douglas' Them! The first and best of Hollywood's radioactive/giant monster movies, the film relied more on characters than most others in the genre and featured an extraordinary cast, including one Oscar-winner (Edmund Gwenn), one Oscar-nominee (James Whitmore), one future TV star (James Arness) in the lead, and another two (Fess Parker and Leonard Nimoy) in small roles. Weldon broke some cinematic ground, playing a notably intelligent and assertive female character who also happened to be beautiful. "We took the movie very seriously," she recalled in a 2004 interview, "exactly like any other drama." Of her co-star Edmund Gwenn, she said, "He was the sweetest man, and he was quite elderly by then and riven with arthritis, but he worked as hard as any of us; when the director called 'Action,' he did everything asked of him, all of the climbing and the walking through the desert. It was just that, when they called 'Cut!,' he had a manservant that would rush over to him and get him to a chair." Weldon's career in movies ended with the expiration of her Warner Bros. contract in 1954. She resumed her singing career with Jimmy McHugh and was later in the road company production of The Music Man, playing Marian Paroo. Weldon made her way to Broadway in Kean, starring opposite Alfred Drake, and opened the State Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York playing opposite John Raitt in a scene from Carousel. She later toured with Fess Parker in Oklahoma and, in 1967, played the lead in a production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow at Lincoln Center. Weldon retired from the stage in 1980, but was still well remembered by opera and musical fans in the early 2000s. She also attracted a crowd when she turned up as a member of the audience in March 2004 at a rare 3-D screening of The Stranger Wore a Gun in New York.

Trivia: South African-born actress Cecil Weston came to America with her husband, cinematographer/producer Fred Balshofer, in the early teens. Weston's best-known talkie-film role was Mrs. Thatcher in the 1931 version of Huckleberry Finn. She went on to play scores of minor roles as mothers, dowagers, and nurses. After a few more character parts at 20th Century Fox, Cecil Weston retired in 1962.

Trivia: "A very funny guy -- funnier than most gave him credit for," as one director described him, lanky, slow-moving Guy Wilkerson is fondly remembered for playing comedy sidekick Panhandle Perkins in the 1942-1945 PRC Texas Rangers film series, a low-rent competition for Republic Pictures' popular Three Mesquiteers Westerns. As Panhandle, Wilkerson's comedy was never intrusive and often used merely as a slow-witted counterpoint to the action. In Hollywood from at least 1937 (some sources claim he appeared onscreen as early as the 1920s), Wilkerson had honed his skills in minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, but away from his sidekick duties at PRC, he was usually seen playing less humorous characters, notably ministers or undertakers. Appearing in hundreds of feature films and television series over three decades, Guy Wilkerson was last seen in the crime thriller The Todd Killings in 1971, the year of his death from cancer.

Trivia: An amiable, big-nosed former vaudevillian from Tennessee, Brit Wood's main claim to cinematic fame was his brief 1939-1940 stint as William Boyd's comic sidekick Speedy in the long-running Hopalong Cassidy B-Western series. Although he was summarily replaced with the better-known (and plain better) Andy Clyde, Wood wasn't too annoying and could actually play dramatic scenes better than most B-Western rubes. An accomplished harmonica virtuoso, Wood supplied hillbilly tunes to several B-Westerns, including "The Covered Wagon Rolled Right Along" from Gene Autry's Saddle Pals (1947).

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.