Trivia: His parents wanted him to be lawyer, but S. Yewell Tompkins decided instead to major in liberal arts at the University of Wisconsin. A professional actor from 1928, he toured in stock companies then spent several lean years in New York, during which time he changed his name to Tom Ewell. He appeared in the first of a string of Broadway flops in 1934, occasionally enjoying longer runs in such productions as Brother Rat and Family Portrait. A trip to Hollywood in 1940 led to a handful of bit parts but little else. After four years in the Navy, Ewell finally landed a bona fide Broadway hit starring in John Loves Mary in 1947. This led to his "official" screen debut as Judy Holliday's philandering husband in Adam's Rib (1949). Hardly the romantic lead type, Ewell's crumpled "everyman" countenance served him well in such screen roles as Bill Mauldin's archetypal G.I. Willie in Up Front (1951) and Willie and Joe Back at the Front (1952). Back on Broadway in 1954, he won a Tony Award for his peerless performance as a "summer bachelor" in George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch, repeating this characterization opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 screen version. He went on to play wry variations of this role in Frank Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1955) and The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which his screen partners included such lovelies as Sheree North, Rita Moreno, and Jayne Mansfield. In 1960, he starred in The Tom Ewell Show, a one-season sitcom in which he played a standard harried suburbanite. Various illnesses and recurrent alcoholism made it increasingly difficult for Ewell to find work in the 1970s; his best showing during this period was as Robert Blake's disheveled pal Billy on the weekly TVer Baretta. Tom Ewell retired in 1983, after a brief stint as Doc Killian in TV's Best of the West and a character role in the Rodney Dangerfield film Easy Money.

Trivia: Born Vera Jane Palmer, Jayne Mansfield was the daughter of a lawyer who died when Mansfield was six, at which time her mother moved the family from Pennsylvania to Dallas. While attending Southern Methodist University, the 16-year-old Palmer married student Paul James Mansfield. Lacking the funds for day-care service, Jayne attended acting classes in Los Angeles with her infant daughter strapped on her back like a papoose. After briefly working as a candy vendor in an L.A. theater, Mansfield caught the eye of a TV producer. It was difficult for Mansfield, whose measurements were 40-21-35, not to gain attention in her subsequent TV and film works. More famous as a cheesecake model than an actress, by 1955 Mansfield first gained critical plaudits for her classic performance as a Monroe-like movie starlet in George Axelrod's Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. This role won her a contract at 20th Century Fox, where she fell within the sphere of comedy director Frank Tashlin, who regarded Mansfield as a "living cartoon" and directed her accordingly in the film version of Rock Hunter and in 1956's The Girl Can't Help It. Despite good dramatic performances in such films as The Wayward Bus (1957), Kiss Them for Me (1957), and The Burglar (1957), Mansfield was forever typed as a parody Marilyn Monroe. When not acting, the publicity-hungry Mansfield aggressively sought out any press agent or photo op that was handy, as did her second husband, muscleman Mickey Hargitay, to whom she was married from 1958 through 1963 (their daughter, Mariska Hargitay, became a busy actress in her own right). Mansfield's third husband, Matt Cimber, became her agent, and guided her through a series of increasingly tawdry projects like Promises, Promises (1963), wherein Mansfield became the first major actress to appear nude onscreen. Her later career dwindled into cheap European films, slapped-together American quickies like Single Room Furnished (1965), and plenty of nightclub and summer-theater work. While driving to a club engagement in New Orleans, 34-year-old Jayne Mansfield was killed (but not decapitated, contrary to popular belief) in an automobile accident.

Trivia: Reportedly a neighbor of Harry Houdini while growing up in the Bronx, American actor Edmond O'Brien decided to emulate Houdini by becoming a magician himself. The demonstrative skills gleaned from this experience enabled O'Brien to move into acting while attending high school. After majoring in drama at Columbia University, he made his first Broadway appearance at age 21 in Daughters of Atrus. O'Brien's mature features and deep, commanding voice allowed him to play characters far older than himself, and it looked as though he was going to become one of Broadway's premiere character actors. Yet when he was signed for film work by RKO in 1939, the studio somehow thought he was potential leading man material -- perhaps as a result of his powerful stage performance as young Marc Antony in Orson Welles' modern dress version of Julius Caesar. As Gringoire the poet in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), O'Brien was a bit callow and overemphatic, but he did manage to walk off with the heroine (Maureen O'Hara) at the end of the film. O'Brien's subsequent film roles weren't quite as substantial, though he was shown to excellent comic advantage in the Moss Hart all-serviceman play Winged Victory, in a role he repeated in the 1944 film version while simultaneously serving in World War II (he was billed as "Sergeant Edmond O'Brien"). Older and stockier when he returned to Hollywood after the war, O'Brien was able to secure meaty leading parts in such "films noir" as The Killers (1946), The Web (1947) and White Heat (1949). In the classic melodrama D.O.A. (1950), O'Brien enjoyed one of the great moments in "noir" history when, as a man dying of poison, he staggered into a police station at the start of the film and gasped "I want to report a murder...mine." As one of many top-rank stars of 1954's The Barefoot Contessa, O'Brien breathed so much credibility into the stock part of a Hollywood press agent that he won an Academy Award. On radio, the actor originated the title role in the long-running insurance-investigator series "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar" in 1950. On TV, O'Brien played a Broadway star turned private eye in the 1959 syndicated weekly "Johnny Midnight," though the producers refused to cast him unless he went on a crash vegetarian diet. Plagued by sporadic illnesses throughout his life, O'Brien suffered a heart seizure in 1961 while on location in the Arabian desert to play the Lowell Thomas counterpart in Lawrence of Arabia, compelling the studio to replace him with Arthur Kennedy. O'Brien recovered sufficiently in 1962 to take the lead in a TV lawyer series, "Sam Benedict;" another TV stint took place three years later in "The Long Hot Summer." The actor's career prospered for the next decade, but by 1975 illness had begun to encroach upon his ability to perform; he didn't yet know it, but he was in the first stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Edmond O'Brien dropped out of sight completely during the next decade, suffering the ignominity of having his "death" reported by tabloids several times during this period. The real thing mercifully claimed the tragically enfeebled O'Brien in 1985.

Trivia: Sultry blues vocalist Julie London began her film career long before she achieved fame as a recording artist. In 1945, 18-year-old London was selected to play a bargain-basement jungle princess, appearing opposite a gorilla in the PRC cheapie Nabonga. She was pretty bad, but no worse than the film itself. By the time she was cast as a sexy teenager in The Red House (1947), her acting had improved immensely, and by the time she played the female lead in the 1951 programmer The Fat Man, it looked as though she actually had a future in films. Still, London's greatest claim to fame was her long string of hit records ("Cry Me a River" et. al.) of the 1950s; many male admirers bought her albums simply to gaze upon her come-hither countenance on the dust jacket. Her status as every red-blooded American boy's wish dream was gently lampooned in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which she appears as a spectral vision who transfixes a wistful Tom Ewell. Her best dramatic film appearances of this period include her leading-lady gigs in Voice in the Mirror (1958) and Man of the West (1958). From 1945 through 1955, Julie London was the wife of actor/producer Jack Webb; years after the divorce, London played Nurse Dixie McCall on the popular Jack Webb-produced TV series Emergency, in which she co-starred with her second husband, actor/jazz musician Bobby Troup.

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: African-American actress Juanita Moore entered films in the early '50s, a time in which few black actresses were given much to do in major-studio films. Fortunately, Juanita's roles began improving as Hollywood tentatively developed a social consciousness toward the end of the decade. In 1959, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Imitation of Life (1959), a glossy updating of a once-controversial Fannie Hurst novel about racial inequity. Within the next decade Hollywood underwent several sociological upheavals, and Juanita Moore was one of the beneficiaries; she became a fixture of such black-oriented films of the '70s as Uptight (1969), Thomasine and Bushrod (1974) and Abby (1974). She continued to work sporatically through the 1980s and '90s, appearing as a grandmother in Disney's The Kid (2000) and in an episode of Judging Amy in 2001. Moore died in 2014 at age 99.

Trivia: "I am what I am! Shut up!" So went the catchphrase shrieked by flamboyantly pompadoured R&B legend Little Richard whenever he made one of his frequent 1970s talk-show appearances. One of the earliest African American singers to cross over into the "white" charts, Little Richard was also among the first black pop artists of the 1950s to show up in a mainstream film. That production was 1956's The Girl Can't Help It, wherein Little Richard belted forth the title tune and a second number, "She's Got It." Most of Little Richard's subsequent film appearances have been guest shots, though he did have an extended supporting role -- playing a thinly disguised version of himself named "Orvis Goodnight" -- in the 1986 comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

Trivia: Born Antoine Domino, black blues singer Fats Domino first appeared onscreen in 1956.

Trivia: Actor Richard Collier was more a fixture in the realm of television, having made well over 1000 appearances on the small screen, but was nonetheless employed frequently for films. A native of Boston, Collier started acting as most people do, on stage in the theater circuit throughout Massachusetts. When World War II broke out, his acting career was put on hold as he served in the U.S. Army. Only after the war did Collier begin making appearances in film and the new medium of television. Some of the many television shows the actor appeared on include The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, and Batman. Collier died, at the age of 80, in early 2000.

Trivia: Barry Gordon was seven years old when he entered the ranks of the record industry, singing the novelty hit "I'm Gettin' Nuthin for Christmas" (1955). Gordon followed this triumph with "Rock N Roll Mother Goose," which was no chart-buster but did land him a spot in the 1956 Frank Tashlin-directed feature The Girl Can't Help It (though his song was cut from the final release version, he can be seen as a wise-beyond-his-years paper boy, ogling Jayne Mansfield as she swivels by). By the late 1950s, Gordon was best known for his guest appearances on The Jack Benny Program, expertly impersonating that series' venerable star. At age 14, he was nominated for a Tony award for his portrayal of Nick in Herb Gardner 's Broadway hit A Thousand Clowns, a role he repeated in the 1965 film version. In 1967, he essayed his only film-starring role, playing a brainy high school nerd in Out of It (his on-screen nemesis was none other than Jon Voight). Developing into an Woody Allen-esque comic supporting player, Gordon appeared regularly in such sitcoms as The New Dick Van Dyke Show, A Family For Joe, Archie Bunker's Place and Good Time Harry. More recently, Gordon has carved himself a niche as one of the busiest and most versatile voiceover artists in the TV animation industry: one of his better-known characterizations is Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Barry Gordon is a past president of the Screen Actors Guild.