Trivia: One of the all-time great rock & rollers and an unprecedented, phenomenal show-business success, Elvis Presley also starred in 31 consecutive big-screen hits. He was among the Top Ten box-office attractions in 1957 and from 1961-1966. When he was 13, he moved to Memphis with his family, going on to work as an usher in a movie theater and a truck driver. Presley toured locally as a singer (billed as "The Hillbilly Cat") and recorded several singles for a local label; he was signed by RCA in 1955 and became an instant star, racking up one hit single after another. On-stage, he gyrated his midsection seductively, leading him to acquire the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis." His concert appearances inspired hysteria among his young female fans, and he was considered by many to be a negative moral influence. However, Presley maintained his clean-cut, "mama's boy" image and soon had fans from every generation. He began appearing in films in 1956, debuting in Love Me Tender. Never successful among critics, his films were designed around his casual, good-ol'-boy characters, successful flirtations with his pretty female co-stars, and numerous songs. And each film made money, altogether grossing more than 150 million dollars. After Presley served a tour in the army, his singing career declined in the early '60s, when the Beatles and other new groups dominated the airwaves; he continued making successful films until 1969 (his last was Change of Habit with Mary Tyler Moore, who played a nun). He also appeared in two concert documentaries, That's the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972). In the early '70s, after a decade of few personal appearances, Presley began doing live entertainment again, and his drawing power was as strong as ever. However, he began neglecting his health and gained large amounts of weight. He died of a prescription-drug-induced heart attack in 1977, after which his cult of personality grew to enormous proportions. Presley is perhaps more popular in death than he was during his life.

Trivia: A lovable star with a vivacious personality, mesmerizing smile, and big blue eyes, Joan Blondell, the daughter of stage comic Eddie Blondell (one of the original Katzenjammer Kids), spent her childhood touring the world with her vaudevillian parents and appearing with them in shows. She joined a stock company at age 17, then came to New York after winning a Miss Dallas beauty contest. She then appeared in several Broadway productions and in the Ziegfield Follies before being paired with another unknown, actor James Cagney, in the stage musical Penny Arcade; a year later this became the film Sinners Holiday, propelling her to stardom. Blondell spent eight years under contract with Warner Bros., where she was cast as dizzy blondes and wisecracking gold-diggers. She generally appeared in comedies and musicals and was paired ten times on the screen with actor Dick Powell, to whom she was married from 1936-45. Through the '30s and '40s she continued to play cynical, wisecracking girls with hearts of gold appearing in as many as ten films a year during the '30s. In the '50s she left films for the stage, but then came back to do more mature character parts. Blondell is the author of a roman a clef novel titled Center Door Fancy (1972) and was also married to producer Mike Todd (1947-50).

Trivia: A leading lady of Mexican cinema, Katy Jurado also found fame in Hollywood in the 1950s as a sultry supporting actress in such films as High Noon (1952) and Broken Lance (1954). Rather than abandoning her native country, however, Jurado remained a star of Mexican film as well as an esteemed character actress north and south of the border until she retired from movies in 1998.Born into a wealthy family, Jurado spent her early childhood in luxury until the family's lands were confiscated during the revolution. Nevertheless, her domineering grandmother continued to adhere to "aristocratic ideals," including staunch disapproval of Jurado's desire to become an actress after director Emilio Fernandez discovered her at age 16. Marrying actor/writer Victor Velazquez to escape her family's control, Jurado made her movie debut in No Maturas (1943). The talented sloe-eyed beauty quickly made her mark in the Mexican movie industry, winning three Ariels (Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar), including one for Luis Buñuel's El Bruto (1952). A divorced mother of two by her twenties, Jurado worked as a radio reporter, bullfight critic, and movie columnist between acting jobs to support her family. Spotted by Budd Boetticher and John Wayne at a bullfight, Jurado was subsequently cast in her first American film while on a trip to Hollywood, Boetticher's matador drama The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). Though her English was still limited, and she learned her lines phonetically, Jurado garnered great critical acclaim for her second Hollywood picture, High Noon (1952). As upstanding marshal Gary Cooper's fiery ex-girlfriend, Jurado unforgettably locked horns onscreen with Cooper's prim bride Grace Kelly, and won a Golden Globe award.Refusing to be pigeonholed by signing a Hollywood studio contract, Jurado went home to Mexico between American roles, and continued to star in such Mexican fare as melodrama Nosotros Los Pobres (1957) during the 1950s. Nevertheless, she was still a frequent presence in Hollywood movies, particularly in Westerns. Jurado earned a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her performance as cattle baron Spencer Tracy's Indian wife in Broken Lance (1954) -- and lived up to her sexy image when she noted on the red carpet that her underwear was the same color as her crimson Oscar gown. She also appeared in Man From Del Rio (1956), Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1960), courtroom drama The Trial (1955), and Burt Lancaster's circus extravaganza Trapeze (1955). Jurado's life became Hollywood tabloid fodder when her relationship with her Badlanders (1958) co-star Ernest Borgnine blossomed into a brief, rocky marriage. Married in 1959, Jurado had separated and reconciled with Borgnine amid accusations of spousal abuse by 1961; after wrangling over alimony, the divorce became final in 1964. Having moved to the U.S. to be with Borgnine, Jurado acted less often during the 1960s, including roles in the glossy Barabbas (1961), the Spanish film Un Hombre Solo (1964), the TV Western series Death Valley Days (1964), and the Elvis Presley flick Stay Away, Joe (1968). After attempting suicide in 1968, Jurado moved back home to Mexico for good.Although she worked occasionally in American films shot in Mexico, including co-starring with John Huston in The Bridge in the Jungle (1970) and a supporting role Sam Peckinpah's Western elegy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Jurado focused on Mexican movies, including El Elegido (1977) and Arturo Ripstein's La Seducción (1980), aging gracefully into a prominent character actress. After appearing alongside her former mentor Fernandez in Huston's somber drama Under the Volcano (1984), Jurado began to work behind the scenes in the Mexican industry, promoting her home state of Morelos to filmmakers. Even as she started garnering career laurels from the Santa Fe Western Festival in 1981 and the Mexican Film Promotion Trust in 1992, Jurado remained active, albeit infrequently, onscreen. After winning a special Ariel for lifetime achievement in 1997, Jurado made her last film, playing the leader of a religious cult in Ripstein's Buñuel-ian satire El Evangelico de Las Maravillas (1998). Still the pride of the Mexican film industry, Jurado passed away in 2002. She was survived by her daughter; her son was killed in a car accident in 1981.

Trivia: Originally a newspaper reporter, Burgess Meredith came to the screen in 1936, repeating his stage role in Winterset, a part written for him by Maxwell Anderson. Meredith has had a long and varied film career, playing everything from George in Of Mice and Men (1939) to Sylvester Stallone's trainer in Rocky (1976). He received Oscar nominations for The Day of the Locust (1975) and Rocky. As comfortable with comedy as with drama, Meredith also appeared in Idiot's Delight (1939); Second Chorus (1940), with Fred Astaire; Diary of a Chambermaid (1942), which he also wrote and produced; The Story of G.I. Joe (1945); and Mine Own Executioner (1947). He also directed Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949). On television, he made countless guest appearances in dozens of dramatic and variety productions, including one of the first episodes of The Twilight Zone, the touching Time Enough at Last, and as host on the first episode of Your Show of Shows. He was a regular on Mr. Novak (1963-64) and Search (1972-73), hosted Those Amazing Animals (1981), co-starred with Sally Struthers in Gloria (1982-83), and made classic appearances as the Penguin on Batman (1966-68). He won an Emmy in 1977 for Tailgunner Joe and has done voiceover work for innumerable commercials, notably Volkswagen. Meredith made his final feature film appearance playing crusty Grandpa Gustafson in Grumpier Old Men (1995), the sequel to Grumpy Old Men (1993) in which he also appeared. In 1996, he played a role in the CD-rom video game Ripper. He was briefly married to Paulette Goddard in the 1940s. Meredith died in his Malibu home at the age of 88 on September 9, 1997.

Trivia: Awarded a scholarship to a prestigious New York drama school at 17, Thomas Gomez first stepped on the Broadway stage as a cadet in Walter Hampden's Cyrano de Bergerac. He joined Alfred Lunt's company in the 1930s, playing character parts of varying sizes. He also made a pioneering television appearance in a 1940 broadcast of a long-forgotten playlet called "A Game of Chess". After garnering good reviews for his performance in the 1942 play Flowers of Virtue, Gomez was signed to play a megalomanic Nazi spy in his first film, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942). By virtue of his weight, his raspy voice and his baleful appearance, Gomez was often cast as heavies, though he evinced a preference for characters with "some rascality, warmth and dimension." Of Spanish heritage, Gomez refused to play Latin characters unless they could be presented "with sympathy, or at least with humanity." In 1947, Gomez was Oscar-nominated for just such a role in Ride the Pink Horse. Amidst his dramatic roles, Gomez proved a worthy foil to such comedians as Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello. Thomas Gomez' extensive television work included the part of a most courtly devil in the 1959 Twilight Zone episode "Escape Clause," Soviet functionary Malenkov in the like-vintage Playhouse 90 drama "The Plot to Kill Stalin," and a Minnesota Fats-type pool player in a well-circulated 1965 Mister Ed installment; he also played Pasquale in the 1953 TV revival of radio's Life With Luigi.

Trivia: Starting out in musicals and comedies, leather-lunged character actor Henry Jones had developed into a versatile dramatic actor by the 1950s, though he never abandoned his willingness to make people laugh. Jones scored his first cinematic bullseye when he re-created his Broadway role as the malevolent handyman Leroy in the 1956 cinemadaptation of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed (1956). Refusing to be typed, Jones followed this triumph with a brace of quietly comic roles in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. He returned to Broadway in 1958, winning the Tony and New York Drama Critics' awards for his performance in Sunrise at Campobello. Since that time, Jones has flourished in films, often making big impressions in the tiniest of roles: the coroner in Vertigo (1958), the bicycle salesman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the hotel night clerk in Dick Tracy (1990) and so on. From 1963's Channing onward, Jones has been a regular on several weekly TV series, most notably as Judge Jonathan Dexter in Phyllis (1975-76) and B. Riley Wicker on the nighttime serial Falcon Crest (1985-86). Henry Jones is the father of actress Jocelyn Jones.

Trivia: What do actors Gig Young, Anne Shirley, and L.Q. Jones have in common? All of them lifted their show-biz names from characters they'd portrayed on screen. In 1955, University of Texas alumnus Justice McQueen made his film debut in Battle Cry, playing a laconic lieutenant named L.Q. Jones. McQueen liked his character so much that he remained L.Q. Jones offscreen ever after (though he never made it legal, still listing himself as Justice Ellis McQueen in the 1995 edition of Who's Who). A natural for westerns both vocally and physically, Jones played supporting roles in several big-screen oaters, and was seen on TV as Smitty on Cheyenne (1955-58) and as Belden on The Virginian (1964-67). Jones gained a measure of prominence in the films of Sam Peckinpah, notably Ride the High Country (1961) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Turning to the production side of the business in the early 1970s, L. Q. Jones produced and co-starred in the 1971 film Brotherhood of Satan; he also co-produced, directed, adapted and played a cameo (as a porn-movie actor!) in the fascinating 1975 cinemazation of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog, a tour de force that won Jones a Hugo Award from America's science fiction writers.

Trivia: American character actress Anne Seymour was descended from an Irish theatrical family, active "on the boards" since the early 18th century. On stage from 1928, she went on to become one of the radio industry's busiest leading ladies, starring in such serials as The Story of Mary Marlin, Woman of America, Whispering Streets and (briefly, when actress Lucille Wall fell ill) Portia Faces Life. She appeared with equal frequency on television, accepting innumerable guest-star assignments and co-starring on the weekly series Empire (1962) and The Tim Conway Show (1970). Seymour's first film was the 1949 Oscar-winner All the King's Men, in which she played Lucy Stark, the politically convenient but cruelly neglected wife of Southern demagogue Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford). She went on to appear in such roles as Mrs. Tarbell in Pollyanna (1960) and Aunt Ev in The Miracle Worker (1962). Active up until her death in 1988, Anne Seymour's last film assignment was the small but pivotal role of the Minnesota newspaper editor who puts Kevin Costner on the trail of forgotten baseball player "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster) in Field of Dreams (1989).

Trivia: American character actor Douglas Henderson shifted his activities from stage to screen in 1952, when he appeared in Stanley Kramer's Eight Iron Men. Like many general purpose actors of the era, he was frequently cast in science fiction and horror films along the lines of King Dinosaur and Invasion of the Saucer Men. He was generally cast in authoritative or military roles: officers, congressmen, FBI agents, and the like. Douglas Henderson's final film assignment was the 1970 thriller Zigzag; eight years later, he committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning.

Trivia: In films, American supporting actor Warren Vanders was typically cast as a villain. He is primarily known as a stage actor, but has also appeared in over 100 television episodes. Before becoming an actor, Vanders was a regional Golden Gloves boxing champion and a varsity football player.

Trivia: Best known for creating one of the most iconic, beloved, and instantly recognizable characters in American advertising -- Mr. Whipple of Charmin toilet paper commercials -- Dick Wilson was born in 1916 to a vaudeville family in England. Wilson moved to Canada during his childhood, served in the Canadian Air Force during World War II, and attained U.S. citizenship in 1954. His acting resumé included guest spots on such series as Bewitched (as a recurring drunk), The Paul Lynde Show, M Squad, and The Deputy, as well as a turn in the 1968 Don Knotts vehicle The Shakiest Gun in the West, but far outstripping these accomplishments in terms of fame and recognition was Wilson's 21-year, 500+ commercial stint for Procter & Gamble, warning housewives, "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" -- then turning around to secretly squeeze it himself. Wilson made a droll cameo appearance as a Whipple-like store manager in the Lily Tomlin vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). He died of natural causes at age 91 in November 2007, after a lengthy retirement. Wilson's daughter is Melanie Wilson, who played the statuesque stewardess Jennifer on Perfect Strangers (1986-1993).