Trivia: American actress Patrice Wymore first stepped on-stage at age six during a Chautauqua tent show. Her mother, a pianist and singer on the tent circuit, trained Wymore for a performing career. At age 16, she hit the road for New York with money given her by her trucking-line executive father. Thanks to her musical training, Wymore was cast in several Broadway musicals, notably Hold It and All for Love. In 1949, she was signed to a movie contract by Warner Bros. Her first appearance was a singing role in Tea for Two (1950), co-starring with Doris Day and Gordon MacRae. Wymore was then cast opposite Errol Flynn in Rocky Mountain (1950); she and Flynn fell in love and were married shortly afterward. The union produced a daughter, Arnella, in 1953. Unfortunately, Flynn was on the downward spiral thanks to 25 years' worth of high living and an increasing dependence upon barbituates. Wymore retired from her career to stay by her husband's side, buoying his self-confidence and offering strong moral support during these darkest years of his life, until the situation became impossible. Though separated from Flynn at the time of his death in 1959, Wymore was still his widow -- a status hotly contested by Flynn's final amour, 16-year-old Beverly Aadland, who had both eyes on the Flynn estate. Picking up the pieces after Flynn's demise, Wymore hit the nightclub trail as a singer, gradually building up a following in regional productions of such musicals as Guys and Dolls and Irma La Douce. Patrice Wymore's comeback was complete upon her being cast in the 1965 ABC soap opera Never Too Young and in the 1966 Warner Bros. chiller Chamber of Horrors (1966). Sitcom fans will remember her comic appearance as "black widow" Hermione Gooderly on a 1966 episode of F Troop. She died in 2014.

Trivia: Actor/dancer Ken Berry was brought to Broadway as a member of the Billy Barnes revue. His early TV work included the recurring role of Woody the bellhop on The Ann Sothern Show (1959-60). In 1965, Berry was cast in his most celebrated TV role: bumbling Cavalry captain Wilton Parmenter on F Troop (1965-67). When Andy Griffith decided to leave his highly rated TV sitcom in 1968, the series' title was changed to Mayberry RFD and Berry was cast in the central role of town-councillor Sam Jones. CBS' peremptory cancellation of Mayberry in 1971 left Berry in a financial bind, compelling him to accept a hosting stint on a doomed-from-the-start variety series, Ken Berry's WOW (1972). More recently, Berry has been seen as Vint Harper on the well-distributed Vicki Lawrence sitcom Mama's Family (1983-1989). For many years, Ken Berry was married to dancer/comedienne Jackie Joseph, of Little Shop of Horrors fame.

Trivia: Forrest Tucker occupied an odd niche in movies -- though not an "A" movie lead, he was, nonetheless, a prominent "B" picture star and even a marquee name, who could pull audiences into theaters for certain kinds of pictures. From the early/mid-1950s on, he was a solid presence in westerns and other genre pictures. Born Forrest Meredith Tucker in Plainfield, Indiana in 1919, he was bitten by the performing bug early in life -- he made his debut in burlesque while he was still under-age. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1937, he enlisted in the United States Army, joining a cavalry unit. Tucker next headed for Hollywood, where his powerful build and six-foot-four frame and his enthusiasm were sufficient to get him a big-screen debut in The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Signed to Columbia Pictures, he mostly played anonymous tough-guy roles over the next two years, primarily in B pictures, before entering the army in 1943. Resuming his career in 1946, he started getting bigger roles on a steady basis in better pictures, and in 1948 signed with Republic Pictures. He became a mainstay of that studio's star roster, moving up to a co-starring role in Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), which also brought him into the professional orbit of John Wayne, the movie's star. Across the early/middle 1950s, Tucker starred in a brace of action/adventure films and westerns, alternating between heroes and villains, building up a significant fan base. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the company's top box-office draws. As it also turned out, Tucker's appeal was international, and he went to England in the second half of the decade to play starring roles in a handful of movies. At that time, British studios such as Hammer Films needed visiting American actors to boost the international appeal of their best productions, and Tucker fulfilled the role admirably in a trio of sci-fi/horror films: The Crawling Eye, The Cosmic Monsters, and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Part of Tucker's motivation for taking these roles, beyond the money, he later admitted, was his desire to sample the offerings of England's pubs -- Tucker was a two-fisted drinker and, in those days, was well able to handle the effects of that activity so that it never showed up on-screen. And he ran with the opportunity afforded by those three science fiction movies -- each of those films, he played a distinctly different role, in a different way, but always with a certain fundamental honesty that resonated with audiences. When he returned to Hollywood, he was cast as Beauregard Burnside in Auntie Mame (1958), which was the top-grossing movie of the year. Then stage director Morton De Costa, seeing a joyful, playful romantic huckster in Tucker (where others had mostly seen an earnest tough-guy), picked him to star as Professor Harold Hill in the touring production of The Music Man -- Tucker played that role more than 2000 times over the years that followed. He was also the star of the 1964 Broadway show Fair Game For Lovers (in a cast that included Leo Genn, Maggie Hayes, and a young Alan Alda), which closed after eight performances. The Music Man opened a new phase for Tucker's career. The wily huckster became his image, one that was picked up by Warner Bros.' television division, which cast him in the role of Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, the charmingly larcenous post-Civil War cavalry soldier at the center of the western/spoof series F-Troop. That series only ran for two seasons, but was in syndicated reruns for decades afterward, and though Tucker kept his hand in other media -- returning to The Music Man and also starring in an unsold pilot based on the movie The Flim-Flam Man (taking over the George C. Scott part), it was the part of O'Rourke with which he would be most closely identified for the rest of his life. He did occasionally take tougher roles that moved him away from the comedy in that series -- in one of the better episodes of the series Hondo, entitled "Hondo And The Judas", he played Colonel William Clark Quantrill very effectively. At the end of the decade, he returned to straight dramatic acting, most notably in the John Wayne western Chisum, in which he played primary villain Lawrence Murphy. That same year, he appeared in a challenging episode of the series Bracken's World entitled "Love It Or Leave It, Change It Or Lose It", playing "Jim Grange," a sort of film-a-clef version of John Wayne -- a World War II-era film star known for his patriotism, Grange is determined to express his political views while working alongside a young film star (portrayed by Tony Bill) who is closely associated with the anti-war movement. Tucker continued getting television work and occasional film roles, in addition to returning to the straw-hat circuit, mostly as Professor Harold Hill. None of his subsequent series lasted very long, but he was seldom out of work, despite a drinking problem that did worsen significantly during his final decade. In his final years, he had brought that under control, and was in the process of making a comeback -- there was even talk of an F-Troop revival in film form -- when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. He died in the fall of 1986 at age 67.

Trivia: The daughter of actors Theodore Westman and Lily Wren, Nydia Westman joined the family vaudeville act as a child. Westman was seen on Broadway from 1920, and in films from 1932. A short, pudgy lady with an air of perpetual consternation, she was ideally cast as maids, busybodies and spinsters. She was at her best fending off the wisecrackery of Bob Hope in 1939's Cat and the Canary. Westman returned to the stage full-time in the early 1950s, then resumed her film and TV career in the last decade of her life; among her credits was the regular role of Mrs. Featherstone in the 1962 TV-series adaptation of Going My Way.

Trivia: Dialect comedians may not be politically acceptable these days, but American comic actor Larry Storch has never lacked work all the same. A product of the New York ethnic "melting pot," Storch amused his childhood friends (including lifelong chum Don Adams) with his dead-on impressions of the many Italians, Hispanics, Germans and Jews in his neighborhood. He advanced his skills for mimicry by virtually living in the local movie houses, memorizing the speech patterns of such character actors as Victor McLaglen, Guy Kibbee and Charley Grapewin. One of his first jobs after World War II navy service was as a writer on The Kraft Music Hall, where he was frequently required to substitute for the star, blustery actor Frank Morgan; years later, he revived his Morgan impression as Chumley on the cartoon series Tennessee Tuxedo (in which his old pal Don Adams voiced the title character). In 1951 Storch appeared in the Chicago revue Red White and Blue, which led to a stint as summer replacement for Jackie Gleason on the Dumont TV series Cavalcade of Stars. Storch's most common stamping grounds in the '50s was the nightclub stage; at one point he even ran his own club. Storch made his film bow in The Prince who was a Thief (51) which starred a friend from his Navy days, Tony Curtis. When Storch's career was on the wane in the early '60s, Curtis cast him in several of his vehicles of that period, including Who was That Lady (1960), wherein Storch recreated his Broadway role as an emotional Russian spy. After a semi-recurring role as Charlie the Drunk (who became besotted simply by talking about drinking) on the early '60s sitcom Car 54, Where are You?, Storch was cast as Corporal Agarn, comic sidekick of conniving cavalry sergeant O'Rourke (Forrest Tucker) on the western comedy weekly F Troop (1965-66). In addition to Agarn, Storch was permitted to play various foreign branches of the Agarn family, with appropriate broad accents. Since the cancellation of F Troop in 1966, Larry Storch has been a regular on The Queen and I (1969) and The Ghost Busters (1976), has worked periodically in films, and has appeared with great frequency in clubs (still doing "characterization" routines rather than one-liners) and on stage. In 1991, Larry Storch garnered excellent notices for his brief character turn in the off-Broadway play Breaking Legs.

Trivia: Manhattan native Bartlett Robinson headed to Los Angeles in the mid-'30s for the express purpose of becoming a radio actor. He appeared in innumerable soap operas and anthologies, and starred as Erle Stanley Gardner's super-lawyer Perry Mason in a 1943 radio series. His stage credits on both coasts included Sweet River, Merchant of Yonkers, and Point of No Return. In films from 1956 to 1973, he was often cast as doctors and military officials. Bartlett Robinson's TV credits include the recurring roles of Willard Norton in Wendy and Me (1964) and Frank Campbell in Mona McCluskey (1965).