Trivia: Steve McQueen was the prototypical example of a new sort of movie star which emerged in the 1950s and would come to dominate the screen in the 1960s and '70s -- a cool, remote loner who knew how to use his fists without seeming like a run-of-the-mill tough guy, a thoughtful man in no way an effete intellectual, a rebel who played by his own rules and lived by his own moral code, while often succeeding on his own terms. While McQueen was one of the first notable examples of this new breed of antihero (along with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman), he was also among the most successful, and was able to succeed as an iconoclast and one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws at the same time.Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Indianapolis, IN, on March 24, 1930. In many ways, McQueen's childhood was not a happy one; his father and mother split up before his first birthday, and he was sent to live with his great uncle on a farm in Missouri. After he turned nine, McQueen's mother had married again, and he was sent to California to join her. By his teens, McQueen had developed a rebellious streak, and he began spending time with a group of juvenile delinquents; McQueen's misdeeds led his mother to send him to Boys' Republic, a California reform school. After ninth grade, McQueen left formal education behind, and after a spell wandering the country, he joined the Marine Corps in 1947. McQueen's hitch with the Leathernecks did little to change his anti-authoritarian attitude; he spent 41 days in the brig after going Absent With Out Leave for two weeks.After leaving the Marines in 1950, McQueen moved to New York City, where he held down a number of short-term jobs while trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At the suggestion of a friend, McQueen began to look into acting, and developed an enthusiasm for the theater. In 1952, he began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. After making an impression in a number of small off-Broadway productions, McQueen was accepted into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actor's Studio, where he further honed his skills. In 1956, McQueen made his Broadway debut and won rave reviews when he replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead of the acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain. The same year, McQueen made his film debut, playing a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me alongside Paul Newman, and he married dancer Neile Adams. In 1958, after two years of stage work and television appearances, McQueen scored his first leading role in a film as Steve, a noble and rather intense teenager in the sci-fi cult item The Blob, while later that same year he scored another lead, in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's moody performances as bounty hunter Josh Randall elevated him to stardom, and in 1960, he appeared in the big-budget Western The Magnificent Seven (an Americanized remake of The Seven Samurai), confirming that his new stardom shone just as brightly on the big screen. In 1961, McQueen completed his run on Wanted: Dead or Alive and concentrated on film roles, appearing in comedies (The Honeymoon Machine, Love With a Proper Stranger) as well as action roles (Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover). In 1963, McQueen starred in The Great Escape, an action-packed World War II drama whose blockbuster success confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men; McQueen also did his own daredevil motorcycle stunts in the film, reflecting his offscreen passion for motorcycle and auto racing. (McQueen would also display his enthusiasm for bikes as narrator of a documentary on dirt-bike racing, On Any Sunday).Through the end of the 1960s, McQueen starred in a long string of box-office successes, but in the early '70s, he appeared in two unexpected disappointments -- 1971's Le Mans, a racing film that failed to capture the excitement of the famed 24-hour race, and 1972's Junior Bonner, an atypically good-natured Sam Peckinpah movie that earned enthusiastic reviews but failed at the box office. Later that year, McQueen would team up again with Peckinpah for a more typical (and much more successful) action film, The Getaway, which co-starred Ali MacGraw. McQueen had divorced Neile Adams in 1971, and while shooting The Getaway, he and MacGraw (who was then married to producer Robert Evans) became romantically involved. In 1973, after MacGraw divorced Evans, she married McQueen; the marriage would last until 1977.After two more big-budget blockbusters, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, McQueen disappeared from screens for several years. In 1977, he served as both leading man and executive producer for a screen adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which fared poorly with both critics and audiences when it was finally released a year and a half after it was completed. In 1980, it seemed that McQueen was poised for a comeback when he appeared in two films -- an ambitious Western drama, Tom Horn, which McQueen co-directed without credit, and The Hunter, an action picture in which he played a modern-day bounty hunter -- and he wed for a third time, marrying model Barbara Minty in January of that year. However, McQueen's burst of activity hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a highly virulent form of lung cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. After conventional treatment failed to stem the spread of the disease, McQueen traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he underwent therapy at an experimental cancer clinic. Despite the efforts of McQueen and his doctors, the actor died on November 7, 1980. He left behind two children, Chad McQueen, who went on to his own career as an actor, and daughter Terry McQueen, who died of cancer in 1998.

Trivia: Earl Rowe was long a familiar figure to members of the New York theater community, as well as to science fiction cultists. A veteran of Broadway, off-Broadway, and industrial shows since the 1950s, he appeared in only two movies, one of which was the Irvin S. Yeaworth classic The Blob (1958). Born in 1920, Rowe auditioned successfully for 20th Century Fox in the summer of 1941, but the worsening war situation caused studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck to cancel the hiring of any new male contract players, thus short-circuiting his film career before it started. Rowe served in the infantry during World War II, commanding a mortar squad, and returned to acting after the war. In addition to work on the New York stage and in Philadelphia (some of it in association with the Hedgerow Theater Company in Rose Valley, PA), he appeared in industrial shows, on television, and in commercials; he was very visible in the late '50s in an Armor Ham television ad in which he voiced the emphatic tag line, "Now that's good ham." In 1957, Rowe was chosen to play the role of the sympathetic police chief in The Blob, an unusually good sci-fi thriller that had the special attributes of being shot in color and on location on the East Coast; it also starred a young Steve McQueen in his first major movie role. As a result, the film has been re-shown and re-released theatrically for decades, and on television, home video, and, more recently, on DVD. After The Blob's release, Rowe looked into doing more film work but was told that his heavy-set build would probably limit him to villainous roles, so he chose to remain on the stage and television. He worked for three years on the NBC soap opera The Doctors, and his next and final film appearance was as a guard captain (in a role written specifically for him) in the docudrama Attica (1980), directed by Marvin Chomsky. Rowe recalled in a 1988 interview that, because of The Blob and the sympathetic role that he played in it, whenever he appeared before audiences of sci-fi fans, he always received a positive reception. Rowe passed away in 2002 from Parkinson's disease.

Trivia: Ralph Roseman has been best known on Broadway from the 1970s onward as a manager and later a producer, involved with such successes as Me and My Girl, starring Robert Lindsay. His one and only film appearance occurred in 1958, as an actor in The Blob. A member of the Hedgerow Theater Company (of whose advisory board he was still a member in the spring of 2000), whose actors appeared in various roles in the film, he worked for one afternoon in the role of the angry, hapless automobile mechanic who is dissolved by the gelatinous alien invader as he works underneath a car. Roseman says he knew they had little time and money and played the scene for all it was worth, despite the fact that his face is hardly seen.

Trivia: Robert Fields has always been a far busier stage actor than a film performer, but this hasn't prevented him from appearing in a number of notable theatrical and made-for-television features since the 1950s. His first break came in 1957 when he was chosen for the role of Tony, one of the "teenagers" (though he was well into his twenties at the time) in The Blob, an independently produced sci-fi/horror film being shot in Pennsylvania. Fields was a friend of Steve McQueen, who starred in the film, and their scenes together had a dynamism in the acting that made them one of the most effective parts of the movie, which has become regarded as a classic of the sci-fi genre. Fields was absent from films for the next decade but did a considerable amount of theater work, including Marat/Sade. He next appeared on screen in The Incident, a tense drama about a group of people victimized by a pair of thugs on a New York City subway. Following the hit They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the next two films in which Fields worked, Cover Me Babe and The Sporting Club, fared so poorly among critics and at the box office that they virtually disappeared without a trace. But in 1973, he played an assistant district attorney in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which was one of the most watched made-for-television features of the decade. Fields also played major roles in such films as the international production Vertigo En Manhattan during the early 1980s and appeared in Bob Fosse's Star 80, but has had his most visible big-screen success to date with his performance as the male lead in Anna, directed by Yurek Bogayevicz and starring Sally Kirkland.

Trivia: Actress Aneta Corseaut made her feature film debut appearing opposite young Steve McQueen and an oozy pile of goo in The Blob (1958). She subsequently played occasional leads and supporting roles in feature films and television. Fans of the nostalgic sitcom The Andy Griffith Show will recognize her as school teacher Helen Crump, longtime girlfriend of Mayberry sheriff Andy Taylor (Griffith). Other television roles include that of Nurse Bradley on House Calls during the late '70s and early '80s. Corseaut's additional film credits include Bad Ronald (1974) and The Toolbox Murders (1978).

Trivia: The younger brother of actress Jobyna Howland, Olin Howland established himself on Broadway in musical comedy. The actor made his film debut in 1918, but didn't really launch his Hollywood career until the talkie era. Generally cast as rustic characters, Howland could be sly or slow-witted, depending on the demands of the role. He showed up in scores of Warner Bros. films in the 1930s and 1940s, most amusingly as the remonstrative Dr. Croker (sic) in The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934). A favorite of producer David O. Selznick, Howland played the laconic baggage man in Nothing Sacred (1937), the grim, hickory-stick wielding schoolmaster in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and an expansive Yankee businessman in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1940s, he could often as not be found at Republic, appearing in that studio's westerns and hillbilly musicals. One of his best screen assignments of the 1950s was the old derelict who kept shouting "Make me sergeant in charge of booze!" in the classic sci-fier Them (1954). Howland made several TV guest appearances in the 1950s, and played the recurring role of Swifty on the weekly Circus Boy (1956). In the latter stages of his career, Olin Howland billed himself as Olin Howlin; he made his final appearance in 1958, as the first victim of The Blob.

Trivia: Popular culture is a medium of strange currents and eddies, as Jasper Deeter's career proves. One of the leading lights in New York theater of the early '20s, and in off-Broadway and regional theater as an actor, director, producer, and teacher for 50 years after that, Deeter's screen work is confined to two cameo appearances in a pair of horror films from the late '50s, The Blob and 4D Man. Two-thirds of the way through The Blob (1958), when the teenagers (led by Steve McQueen) decide to wake the town up to the danger they face, they set off sirens, and the action cuts to one old man who doesn't know whether to wear his volunteer fireman's helmet or his civil defense helmet -- that old man is played by Jasper Deeter -- and it was members of his acting company, the Hedgerow Theater of Rose Valley, PA, who played many of the parts in The Blob and in the producers' follow-up film, 4D Man. Jasper Deeter was born in 1893 in Mechanicsburg, PA. The grandson of an auto parts magnate, he came from a family of achievers; one of his sisters was the National Director of the Girl Scouts of America. He seemed the least likely to succeed, as he was expelled from Dickinson College and went through several failed attempts at a career, including a stint as a newspaper cub reporter. He chanced early in his life to see the actor James O'Neill in a stage production of The Count of Monte Cristo, which made an impression on him. In 1914, at 21, and having gone through several failures, Deeter turned to acting, and soon moved into leading roles with his portrayal of Ned Malloy in the play Exorcism. In 1918, he hooked up with James O'Neill's son, Eugene O'Neill, who had lately embarked on a career as a playwright. The two became friends and colleagues, and Deeter not only portrayed Smithers in the original production of The Emperor Jones at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, but was responsible for convincing O'Neill to cast a black actor in the title role, rather than a white actor in blackface, which had been his original intention and the custom of the era. The result was a breakthrough work in American theater on a multitude of levels that transcended the theater. Deeter and O'Neill parted company, however, over the decision to move the play uptown, rather than keeping it at the playhouse in Greenwich Village, as Deeter urged, and using it as the basis for establishing a repertory company; he felt O'Neill and the producers were squandering the chance to build something that could last for many years longer than the simple Broadway run of a play. He left New York in 1924 and moved to Philadelphia, hoping to pursue theater on his terms, and it was while driving past an abandoned barn in a rural stretch not too far from the city that he found what he was looking for. With ten dollars to his name, he decided to base his company there -- thus was formed the Hedgerow Theater, which went on to became the most famous and most long-lived regional theater company in the United States and the world. For season after season, aspiring actors, technicians, designers, and playwrights from all over the country came out to the Hedgerow to work with, learn from, and study with Deeter, living in conditions akin to a summer camp and on a minimal living stipend, putting on performances in a repertory that grew to more than 200 plays. The theater's teaching programs usually tided them over in the lean times and helped keep ticket prices down, but when the going got tough, as it often did during the Great Depression, Deeter's friend, O'Neill, would provide them with one or another of his plays to pull in large audiences and get the bills paid. During World War II, they managed to tour extensively and entertain audiences in need of an escape from long working hours and bad news. Over the years, the Hedgerow became the theatrical equivalent of the little engine that could, pulling in aspiring theater professionals including such future luminaries as Everett Sloane, Richard Basehart, Ann Harding, and Henry Jones. The company enjoyed a reputation rivaling the best off-Broadway acting companies, despite its being several hours' driving "off" of Broadway, and was respected by theater producers and playwrights throughout the country and around the world. By 1956, however, the Hedgerow company had hit another financial crisis and was forced to temporarily close its doors. It was around that time that producer Jack H. Harris was putting together the production of his first feature film, originally to be called "The Molten Meteor," in tandem with director Irvin S. Yeaworth and a small film studio that also happened to be in Pennsylvania. Harris ended up hiring many of the Hedgerow actors, including John Benson and George Karas, to play lead and supporting roles in the movie, which was finished under the title The Blob. Harris not only hired them but, as he was using Deeter's acting company, the producer gave the man himself his very first screen role in four decades of working in drama, as that befuddled fireman/civil defense volunteer. It worked out so well that, a year later -- with the Hedgerow company up and running again -- Harris and Yeaworth used the Hedgerow players and Deeter himself again, this time in the larger role of Mr. Welles, the laboratory owner, in 4D Man. Those two screen vignettes aside, Deeter never aspired to movie work. During the 1960s, he was regarded as an elder statesman of the theater and a respected teacher, though he was so unpretentious and so iconoclastic in his approach to living, he would have been amused at that description of himself.