Trivia: In a business where public scandal and bad-boy behavior are the rule rather than the exception, Paul Newman is as much a hero offscreen as on. A blue-eyed matinee idol whose career successfully spanned five decades, he was also a prominent social activist, a major proponent of actors' creative rights, and a noted philanthropist. Born January 26, 1925, in Cleveland, OH, Newman served in World War II prior to attending Kenyon College on an athletic scholarship; when an injury ended his sports career, he turned to drama, joining a summer stock company in Wisconsin. After relocating to Illinois in 1947, he married actress Jacqueline Witte, and, following the death of his father, took over the family's sporting-goods store. Newman quickly grew restless, however, and after selling his interest in the store to his brother, he enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. During a break from classes he traveled to New York City where he won a role in the CBS television series The Aldrich Family. A number of other TV performances followed, and in 1952 Newman was accepted by the Actors' Studio, making his Broadway debut a year later in Picnic, where he was spotted by Warner Bros. executives.Upon Newman's arrival in Hollywood, media buzz tagged him as "the new Brando." However, after making his screen debut in the disastrous epic The Silver Chalice, he became the victim of scathing reviews, although Warners added on another two years to his contract after he returned to Broadway to star in The Desperate Hours. Back in Hollywood, he starred in The Rack. Again reviews were poor, and the picture was quickly pulled from circulation. Newman's third film, the charming Somebody Up There Likes Me, in which he portrayed boxer Rocky Graziano, was both a commercial and critical success, with rave reviews for his performance. His next film of note was 1958's The Long Hot Summer, an acclaimed adaptation of a pair of William Faulkner short stories; among his co-stars was Joanne Woodward, who soon became his second wife. After next appearing as Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn's underrated The Left-Handed Gun, Newman starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, scoring his first true box-office smash as well as his first Academy Award nomination.After appearing with Joanne Woodward in Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! -- the couple would frequently team onscreen throughout their careers -- Newman traveled back to Broadway to star in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Upon his return to the West Coast, he bought himself out of his Warner Bros. contract before starring in the 1960 smash From the Terrace. Exodus, another major hit, quickly followed. While by now a major star, the true depths of Newman's acting abilities had yet to be fully explored; that all changed with Robert Rossen's 1961 classic The Hustler, in which he essayed one of his most memorable performances as pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson, gaining a second Oscar nomination. His third nod came for 1963's Hud, which cast him as an amoral Texas rancher. While a handful of creative and financial disappointments followed, including 1964's The Outrage and 1965's Lady L, 1966's Alfred Hitchcock-helmed Torn Curtain marked a return to form, as did the thriller Harper.For 1967's superb chain-gang drama Cool Hand Luke, Newman scored a fourth Academy Award nomination, but again went home empty-handed. The following year he made his directorial debut with the Joanne Woodward vehicle Rachel Rachel, scoring Best Director honors from the New York critics as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The couple next appeared onscreen together in 1969's Winning, which cast Newman as a professional auto racer; motor sports remained a preoccupation in his real life as well, and he was the most prominent of the many celebrities who began racing as a hobby. He then starred with Robert Redford in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which went on to become the highest-grossing Western in movie history. It was followed by 1971's W.U.S.A., a deeply political film reflecting Newman's strong commitment to social activism; in addition to being among Hollywood's most vocal supporters of the civil rights movement, in 1968 he and Woodward made headlines by campaigning full time for Democratic Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.After directing and starring in 1971's Sometimes a Great Notion, Newman announced the formation of First Artists, a production company co-founded by Barbra Streisand and Steve McQueen. Modeled after the success of United Artists, it was created to offer performers the opportunity to produce their own projects. Newman's first film for First Artists' was 1972's Pocket Money, followed by another directorial effort, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. After a pair of back-to-back efforts under director John Huston, 1972's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and the next year's The Mackintosh Man, Newman reunited with Redford in The Sting, another triumph which won the 1973 Best Picture Oscar. He next appeared in the star-studded disaster epic The Towering Inferno, followed by 1975's The Drowning Pool, a sequel to Harper. His next major success was the 1977 sports spoof Slap Shot, which went on to become a cult classic.A string of disappointments followed, including Robert Altman's self-indulgent 1979 effort Quintet. The 1981 Absence of Malice, however, was a success, and for 1982's courtroom drama The Verdict Newman notched his fifth Best Actor nomination. He finally won the Oscar on his sixth attempt, reprising the role of Eddie Felson in 1986's The Color of Money, Martin Scorsese's sequel to The Hustler. After starring in two 1989 films, Blaze and Fat Man and Little Boy, Newman began appearing onscreen less and less. In 1991, he and Joanne Woodward starred as the titular Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and three years later he earned yet another Academy Award nomination for his superb performance in Robert Benton's slice-of-life tale Nobody's Fool. His films since then have been fairly sparse and of mixed quality, with Joel Coen's and Ethan Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) being at the higher end of the spectrum and the Kevin Costner vehicle Message in a Bottle (1999) resting near the bottom. Newman again graced screens in 2000 with Where the Money Is, a comedy that cast him as a famous bank robber who fakes a stroke to get out of prison. For his role as a kindly crime boss in 2002's Road to Perdition, Newman became a ten-time Oscar nominee.Turning 80 in 2005, Newman nonetheless remained a presence in Hollywood. That year, audiences could see him on the small-screen in the critically-acclaimed HBO miniseries Empire Falls, for which he won a Golden Globe, and the following year, he lent his voice to the Pixar animated film Cars.Despite his movement away from Hollywood, Newman remained a prominent public figure through his extensive charitable work; he created the Scott Newman Foundation after the drug-related death of his son and later marketed a series of gourmet foodstuffs under the umbrella name Newman's Own, with all profits going to support his project for children suffering from cancer. Newman died on September 26, 2008 after a battle with lung cancer.

Trivia: Much like Humphrey Bogart before him, Lee Marvin rose through the ranks of movie stardom as a character actor, delivering expertly nasty and villainous turns in a series of B-movies before finally graduating to more heroic performances. Regardless of which side of the law he traveled, however, he projected a tough-as-nails intensity and a two-fisted integrity which elevated even the slightest material. Born February 19, 1924, in New York City, Marvin quit high school to enter the Marine Corps and while serving in the South Pacific was wounded in battle. He spent a year in recovery before returning to the U.S. to begin working as a plumber's apprentice. After filling in for an ailing summer-stock actor, his growing interest in performing inspired him to study at the New York-based American Theater Wing. Upon making his debut in summer stock, Marvin began working steadily in television and off-Broadway. He made his Broadway bow in a 1951 production of Billy Budd and also made his first film appearance in Henry Hathaway's You're in the Navy Now. The following year, Hathaway again hired him for The Diplomatic Courier, and was so impressed that he convinced a top agent to recruit him. Soon Marvin began appearing regularly onscreen, with credits including a lead role in Stanley Kramer's 1952 war drama Eight Iron Men. A riveting turn as a vicious criminal in Fritz Lang's 1953 film noir classic The Big Heat brought Marvin considerable notice and subsequent performances opposite Marlon Brando in the 1954 perennial The Wild One and in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock cemented his reputation as a leading screen villain. He remained a heavy in B-movies like 1955's I Died a Thousand Times and Violent Saturday, but despite starring roles in the 1956 Western Seven Men From Now and the smash Raintree County, he grew unhappy with studio typecasting and moved to television in 1957 to star as a heroic police lieutenant in the series M Squad. As a result, Marvin was rarely seen in films during the late '50s, with only a performance in 1958's The Missouri Traveler squeezed into his busy TV schedule. He returned to cinema in 1961 opposite John Wayne in The Comancheros, and starred again with the Duke in the John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a year later. Marvin, Wayne, and Ford reunited in 1963 for Donovan's Reef. A role in Don Siegel's 1964 crime drama The Killers followed and proved to be Marvin's final performance on the wrong side of the law.Under Stanley Kramer, Marvin delivered a warm, comic turn in 1965's Ship of Fools then appeared in a dual role as fraternal gunfighters in the charming Western spoof Cat Ballou, a performance which won him an Academy Award. His next performance, as the leader of The Dirty Dozen, made him a superstar as the film went on to become one of the year's biggest hits. Marvin's box-office stature had grown so significantly that his next picture, 1968's Sergeant Ryker, was originally a TV-movie re-released for theaters. His next regular feature, the John Boorman thriller Point Blank, was another major hit. In 1969, Marvin starred with Clint Eastwood in the musical comedy Paint Your Wagon, one of the most expensive films made to date. It too was a success, as was 1970's Monte Walsh. Considering retirement, he did not reappear onscreen for two years, but finally returned in 1972 with Paul Newman in the caper film Pocket Money. After turning down the lead in Deliverance, Marvin then starred in Prime Cut, followed in 1973 by Emperor of the North Pole and The Iceman Cometh.Poor reviews killed the majority of Marvin's films during the mid-'70s. When The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday -- the last of three pictures he released during 1976 -- failed to connect with critics or audiences, he went into semi-retirement, and did not resurface prior to 1979's Avalanche Express. However, his return to films was overshadowed by a high-profile court case filed against him by Michelle Triola, his girlfriend for the last six years; when they separated, she sued him for "palimony" -- 1,800,000 dollars, one half of his earnings during the span of their relationship. The landmark trial, much watched and discussed by Marvin's fellow celebrities, ended with Triola awarded only 104,000 dollars. In its wake he starred in Samuel Fuller's 1980 war drama The Big Red One, which was drastically edited prior to its U.S. release. After 1981's Death Hunt, Marvin did not make another film before 1983's Gorky Park. The French thriller Canicule followed, and in 1985 he returned to television to reprise his role as Major Reisman in The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission. The 1986 action tale The Delta Force was Marvin's final film; he died of a heart attack on August 29, 1987, in Tucson, AZ, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to the remains of fellow veteran (and boxing legend) Joe Louis.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Michigan, Strother Martin was the National Junior Springboard Diving Champion when he came to Hollywood as a swimming coach in the late 1940s. He stuck around Lala-land to play a few movie bits and extra roles before finally receiving a role of substance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Lean and limber in his early day, Martin was frequently cast in parts which called upon his athletic prowess (e.g. a drawling big-league ball player in 1951's Rhubarb). As his face grew more pocked and his body more paunched with each advancing year, Martin put his reedy, whiny voice and sinister squint to excellent use as a villain, most often in westerns. It took him nearly 20 years to matriculate from character actor to character star. In 1967, Martin skyrocketed to fame as the sadistic prison-farm captain in Cool Hand Luke: his character's signature line, "What we have here is a failure t' communicate," became a national catchphrase. While he continued accepting secondary roles for the rest of his career, Martin was awarded top billing in two sleazy but likeable programmers, Brotherhood of Satan (1971) and Ssssssss (1973). A veteran of scores of television shows, Strother Martin was seen on a weekly basis as Aaron Donager in Hotel De Paree (1959) and as star Jimmy Stewart's country cousin in Hawkins (1973).

Trivia: Most 1970s-era couch potatoes first saw lissome leading lady Christine Belford when she portrayed insurance investigator Carlie Kirkland during the second season (1973-74) of the George Peppard TV series Banacek. It would not be the last time that Christine would appear as a series regular: In chronological order, she played Aunt Emily in Married: The First Year (1979); Jackie Willow, wife of Richard Masur in Empire (1984); and sheriff Maggie Randall on Outlaws (1987). She also co-hosted (with Steve Edwards) the 1983 daytime-magazine series Personal & Confidential. Christine Belford's feature-length films include Pocket Money (1972), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), and the made-for-TV Kenny Rogers as the Gambler (1980).

Trivia: In films from the early 1930s, Fred Graham was one of Hollywood's busiest stunt men and stunt coordinators. A fixture of the Republic serial unit in the 1940s and 1950s, Graham was occasionally afforded a speaking part, usually as a bearded villain. His baseball expertise landed him roles in films like Death on the Diamond (1934), Angels in the Outfield (1951) and The Pride of St. Louis (1952). He was also prominently featured in several John Wayne vehicles, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Fighting Kentuckian (1949), The Horse Soldiers (1959) and The Alamo (1960). After retiring from films, Fred Graham served as director of the Arizona Motion Pictures Development Office.

Trivia: The son of a Rhodes Scholar, Wayne Rogers attended Princeton University and acted with the college's Triangle Club players, then forgot all about performing for several years. After navy service, Rogers headed to New York to learn the intricacies of the world of finance. But with aspiring actor Peter Falk as his roommate, it was only a matter of time before Rogers would again yearn for the smell of greasepaint. He took classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse while supporting himself as a busboy and lifeguard. During these lean years, Rogers amazed Falk and his other friends with his uncanny ability to invest his meager earnings into winning propositions. Even after making it as an actor, Rogers continued dispensing wise financial advice to his show-biz buddies, earning the affectionate soubriquet "The Wizard." After Broadway, film, and daytime soap opera experience, Rogers landed his first prime time TV starring role, playing hard-riding Luke Perry on the 1960 series Stagecoach West. During a lull in his acting career in the mid-1960s, Rogers suddenly turned producer, bankrolling a horror quickie called The Astro Zombies, from which he earned back a 2000% profit on a $47,000 investment. In 1972, Rogers was cast as irreverent army surgeon "Trapper John" McIntyre on a new sitcom called M*A*S*H. Three years later, he abruptly stopped showing up on the set. Claiming that the producers had promised him that he'd be the star of M*A*S*H, Rogers was incensed that Alan Alda had emerged as top dog, so he quit the series cold. The producers slapped on a $2.9 million breach of contract suit, whereupon Rogers countersued; these legal volleys went back and forth for over a year before an amenable settlement was ironed out. Like many other M*A*S*H bailouts, Rogers had difficulty finding success as a solo TV performer: of his three subsequent starring series, City of Angels, House Calls and High Risk, only House Calls (1979-82) lasted beyond its first season. Wayne Rogers has had better luck as the star of such made-for-TV movies as Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan (1975), It Happened One Christmas (1977), The Girl Who Spelled Freedom (1986) and American Harvest (1987). The founder of the Wayne Rogers & Company investment firm, the veteran film and television actor was given his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005. He died in 2015, at age 82.

Trivia: An actor of seemingly boundless range, New York-born Hector Elizondo began his career as a dancer. His initial training was at the Ballet Arts school of Carnegie Hall, from which he moved on to the Actors Studio. After several years' stage work, Elizondo made an inauspicious movie debut as "The Inspector" in the low-budget sex film The Vixens (1969). He was shown to better advantage in his next film, Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970), which he followed up with strong character parts in such Manhattan-based productions as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and Thieves (1977). With Young Doctors in Love (1982), Elizondo began his long association with director Garry Marshall, who has since cast the actor in all of his films, in roles both sizable (Matt Dillon's dad in The Flamingo Kid [1984], the cafe owner in Frankie and Johnny [1991]), and microscopic (Overboard [1987]). Elizondo's screen roles have run the gamut from scrungy garbage scow captains to elegant concierges (Pretty Woman). In addition, he has been a regular on several mediocre television series: Popi, Freebie and the Bean, Casablanca (in the old Claude Rains role of Inspector Renault), a.k.a. Pablo, Foley Square, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, In 1994, Elizondo took on a co-starring role as a demanding chief of surgery on the popular TV medical drama Chicago Hope. Other non-Marshall highlights in his filmography include Tortilla Soup, Overboard, Necessary Roughness, and Music Within.

Trivia: Angular Anglo-Latino actor Gregory Sierra began showing up on screen in 1971 in such films as The Wrath of God. Sierra quickly familiarized himself with TV viewers via his continuing role as Julio Fuentes in the weekly sitcom Sanford and Son. He left Sanford in January of 1975 to accept the part of detective sergeant Chano Amenguale on Barney Miller, a role he held down until the fall of 1976. Next up, Sierra starred as Dr. Tony Menzies on A.E.S. Hudson Street, a 1978 TV comedy that folded after six weeks despite positive critical comment. Two years later, he was cast as South American revolutionary "El Puerco" on the nighttime serial spoof Soap, figuring prominently in the series' up-in-the-air final episode in 1981. Gregory Sierra's more recent television roles have included Lt. Victor Maldonado on the NBC sci-fier Something is Out There (1988), and the ill-fated Lt. Lou Rodriguez on the trendy 1980's cop show Miami Vice.

Trivia: Terrence Malick is one of the great enigmas of contemporary filmmaking, a shadowy figure whose towering reputation rests largely on a very small body of work. A visual stylist beyond compare, Malick emerged during the golden era of 1970s American movie-making, bringing to the screen a dreamlike, ethereal beauty countered by elliptical, ironic storytelling; resonant and mythic, his films illuminated themes of love and death with rare mastery, their indelible images distinguished by economy and precision.Born in Waco, TX, on November 30, 1943, Malick spent many of his formative summers working as a farmhand, an experience upon which he would draw extensively in his films. Upon graduating from Harvard with a degree in philosophy, he entered Magdalen College in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but exited prior to completing his final thesis. On returning to the U.S., he became a freelance journalist, with his byline appearing in such publications as Life, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. While tenuring as a philosophy professor at M.I.T., Malick enrolled in a colleague's film course. In 1969, he was accepted into the first graduating class at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Studies, financing his studies by rewriting the screenplays for such films as Deadhead Miles (which did not see release until 1982), Dirty Harry, and Drive, He Said. Upon completing his AFI studies with 1972's 12-minute short Lanton Mills, Malick earned his first feature screenwriting credit on Stuart Rosenberg's Pocket Money. That same year, he also began production on his directorial debut, Badlands. Rejecting all studio offers, Malick gathered financing through a partnership agreement with a group of several small investors, shooting with a non-union crew on a budget of less than 350,000 dollars. The finished 1973 product, an iconic and loose retelling of the Starkweather/Fugate murder spree of the 1950s, bore little trace of its low-budget genesis, however, and was widely hailed as a masterpiece upon its release. However, a follow-up was not quickly forthcoming, and apart from the script for Jack Starrett's 1974 crime caper The Gravy Train, penned under the pseudonym David Whitney, Malick fell silent for five years.When he finally resurfaced with 1978's Days of Heaven, the critical praise was even more thunderous. Shot with impeccable beauty by cinematographer Nestor Almendros (who won an Academy Award for his work), the tale of wheat harvesters in the Texas Panhandle at the turn of the century was an elegy for America's past, a heartland corrupted by greed and progress. After the picture's release, Malick -- who won a Cannes Best Director award for the film -- relocated to Paris, where he lived in virtual seclusion without publicly commenting on his past movie work or on the possibility of future projects. Finally, after nearly two decades of silence, in 1997, Malick announced his return to filmmaking with an adaptation of the James Jones novel The Thin Red Line. The highly anticipated 1998 film, while not the long-awaited masterpiece many were expecting, met with positive reviews and earned Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations for Malick. Filled with the kind of stunning imagery that defined Days of Heaven, the film effectively convinced many observers that although Malick may have been lost to Hollywood for years, he had in no way lost his touch. Seven years later, another Malick film, the historical drama The New World, followed, also to positive reviews. Six years later, Malick returned with The Tree of Life, a philosophical essay about God, life, fate, and family that garnered a thunderous critical buzz after winning the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival, but opened to indifferent business. Still, the film's passionate defenders were vindicated when the Academy awarded the film Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Director.

Trivia: No one can accuse Richard Farnsworth of taking the easy road to film stardom: by the time he finally got name-above-the-title billing, he was 61 years old, and had been in films for 34 of those years. A veteran Hollywood stunt man, he eventually became a respected actor in his own right, and earned widespread adulation for two outstanding lead performances, first as the veteran train robber released into a changed world in 1982's The Grey Fox and then as the dedicated Alvin Straight in 1999's The Straight Story.Born in Los Angeles on September 1, 1920, Farnsworth was a high-school dropout who became a rodeo rider at the age of 16. When the call went out from MGM for expert horsemen to appear in the Marx Brothers comedy A Day at the Races (1937), Farnsworth was hired as a combination stunt man/extra. The stint was the beginning of a decades-long Hollywood career, over the course of which he did stunt work for many a cowboy star and swashbuckler. For nearly a decade, he was exclusive stunt man/stand-in for Roy Rogers, accepting such occasional outside assignments as Guy Madison's riding double on the 1950s TV Western Wild Bill Hickok (three decades later, Farnsworth would himself impersonate Hickok in the theatrical feature The Legend of the Lone Ranger). Farnsworth's studio years were fairly lucrative; in addition to working with directors ranging from Cecil B. De Mille and Sam Peckinpah, it was not unusual for the stunt man to receive a bigger paycheck than the actors for whom he doubled. In the 1960s, the performer used his considerable clout in his field to co-create the Stuntman's Association, a group which would fight to safeguard the rights and working conditions of the men and women who risked life and limb for Hollywood.As he grew older, Farnsworth thought it wise to cut back on the athletics and to seek out speaking roles. By 1976, he was working as a full-time actor, his weather-beaten countenance and self-assuredness enlivening many an otherwise "flat" scene. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting appearance as Dodger in Comes a Horseman (1978); the star of that film was Jane Fonda, whose father, Henry, had been doubled by Farnsworth in The Tin Star (1957). In 1982, Farnsworth won Canada's Genie Award for his starring role as an elderly, elegant bank robber in The Grey Fox. On two occasions -- the 1984 baseball flick The Natural and the 1992 TV series Boys of Twilight -- the actor co-starred with another venerable stunt man-cum-character actor, Wilford Brimley. Farnsworth continued to craft a career not unlike Brimley's, making small but memorable supporting appearances in many A-list Hollywood productions, including Misery and Havana (both 1990).Farnsworth had been living in semi-retirement on his New Mexico ranch for most of the 1990s when he received a call from director David Lynch to star in The Straight Story, the real-life tale of an elderly widower who drives a tractor from his Iowa home to the Wisconsin bedside of his estranged, gravely ill brother (Harry Dean Stanton). The film received a warm reception, much of which was directed at the septuagenarian's understated, plainspoken performance. Honored with a Golden Globe nomination and an Independent Spirit Award for his work, Farnsworth would also receive a Best Actor nod at the 2000 Academy Awards -- becoming the oldest person to be nominated for the award. Though stricken with terminal bone cancer, Farnsworth continued to make public appearances -- at film festivals, award ceremonies, and even the National Cowboy Symposium -- until the debilitating disease caused him to take his own life at his New Mexico home in October 2000. The actor's namesake, Richard "Diamond" Farnsworth, continued his father's legacy by becoming a Hollywood stunt man.