Trivia: Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, Joan Fontaine began her acting career in her late teens with various West Coast stage companies under the name Joan Burfield. She also used that name when she made her 1935 feature film debut in No More Ladies, in which she had a minor role. The daughter of '40s actress Lilian Fontaine, she returned to the screen as Joan Fontaine after two more years of stage work, although appearing primarily in B-movies. Two exceptions were A Damsel in Distress (1937) opposite Fred Astaire and Gunga Din (1939) with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Her career took off in the early '40s due largely to leads in two Alfred Hitchcock films. Fontaine received Best Actress Oscar nominations for her work in the director's Rebecca (1940) and The Constant Nymph (1943), and won an Oscar for her performance in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). She starred in many subsequent films, at first playing innocent, well-bred types, but later maturing into roles as sophisticated, worldly, often hot-headed or maliciously calculating women. Appearing in few films after 1958, Fontaine was also a licensed pilot, champion balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, expert golfer, licensed interior decorator, and Cordon Bleu cook. The sister of actress Olivia de Havilland (with whom she supposedly had many feuds), the first three of Fontaine's four husbands were actor Brian Aherne, producer William Dozier, and producer/screenwriter Collier Young. She published an autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978 and made two rare TV movie and miniseries appearances in 1986. Joan Fontaine's final big-screen appearance was the intelligent British horror/drama The Devil's Own; her last TV work was in the 1994 production Good King Wenceslas. She died in 2013 at age 96.

Trivia: A rugged, craggy-faced, bushy-browed lead actor and character player, he began his stage career in 1937, which was interrupted by service in World War Two. He debuted onscreen in Winged Victory (1944), but did not begin regularly appearing in films until 1949; he was usually cast as grim, determined, humorless men in action features. From 1950-60 he was married to actress Bette Davis, with whom he appeared in three films. His many TV credits include a role in the series Young Dr. Kildare. He was politically active in liberal causes, and played a part in rejuvenating Maine's Democratic party; he also helped elect Edmund Muskie to governor of that state in 1953. In 1965 he took part in the Selma-Montgomery civil rights march. At odds with President Johnson's Vietnam policy, he switched parties and in 1968 tried unsuccessfully to win a Republican nomination to the Maine legislature as an anti-war, pro-environmentalist primary candidate. He authored an autobiography, Bette, Rita and the Rest of My Life (1989); "Rita" refers to actress Rita Hayworth, with whom he'd had a romantic affair.

Trivia: Character actress, onscreen from 1957.

Trivia: Having played one of the students in the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland songfest Strike up the Band (1940), brunette starlet Melinda Leighton did her fair share of B-Westerns -- including Gene Autry's Cowboy Serenade (1942) -- before changing her name to Linda Johnson and earning a starring role opposite Kane Richmond in the Columbia serial Brick Bradford (1947). Those were the highlights in a screen career that came to a close with a 1953 episode of the popular television series The Cisco Kid.