Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: The son of a traveling salesman, actor Richard Widmark had lived in six different Midwestern towns by the time he was a teenager. He entered Illinois' Lake Forest College with plans to earn a law degree, but gravitated instead to the college's theater department. He stayed on after graduation as a drama instructor, then headed to New York to find professional work. From 1938 through 1947, Widmark was one of the busiest and most successful actors in radio, appearing in a wide variety of roles from benign to menacing, and starring in the daytime soap opera "Front Page Farrell." He did so well in radio that he'd later quip, "I am the only actor who left a mansion and swimming pool to head to Hollywood." Widmark's first stage appearance was in Long Island summer stock; in 1943, he starred in the Broadway production of Kiss and Tell, and was subsequently top billed in four other New York shows. When director Henry Hathaway was looking for Broadway-based actors to appear in his melodrama Kiss of Death (1947), Widmark won the role of giggling, psychopathic gangster Tommy Udo. And the moment his character pushed a wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase, a movie star was born. (Widmark always found it amusing that he'd become an audience favorite by playing a homicidal creep, noting with only slightly less amusement that, after the release of the film, women would stop him on the street and smack his face, yelling, "Take that, you little squirt!") The actor signed a 20th Century Fox contract and moved to Hollywood on the proviso that he not be confined to villainous roles; the first of his many sympathetic, heroic movie parts was in 1949's Down to the Sea in Ships. After his Fox contract ended in 1954, Widmark freelanced in such films as The Cobweb (1955) and Saint Joan (1957), the latter representing one of the few times that the actor was uncomfortably miscast (as the childish Dauphin). In 1957, Widmark formed his own company, Heath Productions; its first effort was Time Limit, directed by Widmark's old friend Karl Malden. Widmark spent most of the 1960s making films like The Alamo (1960) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), so that he could afford to appear in movies that put forth a political or sociological message. These included Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Bedford Incident (1965). A longtime television holdout, Widmark made his small-screen debut in Vanished (1970), the first two-part TV movie. He later starred in a 1972 series based upon his 1968 theatrical film Madigan. And, in 1989, he was successfully teamed with Faye Dunaway in the made-for-cable Cold Sassy Tree. Richard Widmark was married for 55 years to Jean Hazelwood, a former actress and occasional screenwriter who wrote the script for her husband's 1961 film The Secret Ways (1961). Their daughter Anne married '60s baseball star Sandy Koufax. Widmark died at age 93 in 2008, of health complications following a fractured vertebra.

Trivia: Laurence Harvey was one of Hollywood's stranger success stories; never a major star, or even the subject of a cult following, his films were rarely hits, and those that were often seemed to achieve their popularity in spite of him. A cold, remote actor, he proved highly unsuited to the majority of the roles which came his way, and his performances were typically the subject of unanimous critical dismissal; even his co-stars frequently derided his abilities. At the same time, however, Harvey enjoyed a career much longer and more prolific than many of his more lauded contemporaries, and was one of the most prominent onscreen presences of the 1960s. Also to his credit, his resumé includes at least one certified classic, 1962's The Manchurian Candidate.Harvey was born Lauruska Mischa Skikne on October 1, 1928, in Joniskis, Lithuania. Raised in South Africa, he served in Egypt and Italy during World War II, and after performing in the army show The Bandoliers he returned to Johannesburg to begin his theatrical career. He later relocated to Britain, where he tenured with the Manchester Library Theater and also worked as a male prostitute. In 1948, Harvey made his feature debut in the horror thriller House of Darkness, and its success earned him a two-year contract with Associated British Studios, resulting in lead roles in 1949's Man on the Run and the following year's Cairo Road. Smaller turns in Landfall and The Black Rose followed before he appeared in a disastrous West End revival of Hassan. Harvey continued to languish in B-movies like 1951's There Is Another Sun before appearing in 1953's Women of Twilight. The picture was not a success, but the studio Romulus was so impressed by his performance that they made his career a top priority and cast him in the comedy Innocents in Paris. Harvey then appeared for the 1952 season with the Memorial Theatre at Stratford, earning almost unanimously poor notices. He responded by giving interviews which claimed that regardless of the critics, he was in fact a great actor, a game of cat-and-mouse with the press that went on for years. Despite his disappointing Shakespearean performances, Harvey was cast in a 1954 film treatment of Romeo and Juliet, delivering a virtually expressionless portrayal of the title hero. He then starred in the Warner Bros. production of King Richard and the Crusaders. Upon returning to Britain, Harvey again worked under the auspices of Romulus, where in 1955 he starred in The Good Die Young. Margaret Leighton, one of his co-stars in the picture, later became his wife. After starring in I Am a Camera, he appeared opposite popular television comedian Jimmy Edwards in 1957's Three Men in a Boat, which became Harvey's first real hit. However, a series of disappointments -- After the Ball, The Truth About Women, and The Silent Enemy -- were to follow before he could again taste success in 1959's Room at the Top. Hollywood again took interest in Harvey, and in 1960 he co-starred with John Wayne in The Alamo, followed by an appearance in the Elizabeth Taylor hit Butterfield 8. A role in the 1961 British production The Long and the Short and the Tall was next, trailed by a pair of Hollywood flops, Two Lovers and Summer and Smoke.Harvey remained a frequent target of reviewers' derision in all of these films, and even co-star Jane Fonda criticized his performance in 1962's Walk on the Wild Side. Finally, in John Frankenheimer's masterful The Manchurian Candidate, he found a role perfectly suited to his talents, portraying a brainwashed assassin shorn of emotion; the performance was the best of his career, but in a cruel twist of irony the film was pulled from distribution by producer/star Frank Sinatra when its plot too closely foreshadowed the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy. With 1963's The Ceremony, Harvey turned screenwriter and director as well as star. The result was a critical lambasting even more severe than usual, with response to both 1964's Of Human Bondage and The Outrage not much better. A small role in John Schlesinger's superb Darling followed in 1965, but both 1966's The Spy With the Cold Nose and 1967's A Dandy in Aspic (which Harvey finished directing upon the death of original helmer Anthony Mann) sank without a trace. He then filmed 1969's Rebus in Italy with Ann-Margret, remaining there to produce and star in L'Assoluto Naturale. Appearances in 1970's The Magic Christian and the next year's Paul Newman vehicle W.U.S.A. followed, but Harvey proved unable to revive his stalling career. After working with Elizabeth Taylor in 1972's Night Watch, he directed and starred in one final film, 1974's Welcome to Arrow Beach, but did not live to see its premiere; he died of cancer on November 25, 1973.

Trivia: Rough-hewn American leading man Richard Boone was thrust into the cold cruel world when he was expelled from Stanford University, for a minor infraction. He worked as a oil-field laborer, boxer, painter and free-lance writer before settling upon acting as a profession. After serving in World War II, Boone used his GI Bill to finance his theatrical training at the Actors' Studio, making his belated Broadway debut at age 31, playing Jason in Judith Anderson's production of Medea. Signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1951, Boone was given good billing in his first feature, Halls of Montezuma; among his Fox assignments was the brief but telling role of Pontius Pilate in The Robe (1953). Boone launched the TV-star phase of his career in the weekly semi-anthology Medic, playing Dr. Konrad Steiner. From 1957 through 1963, Boone portrayed Paladin, erudite western soldier of fortune, on the popular western series Have Gun, Will Travel. He directed several episodes of this series. Boone tackled a daring TV assignment in 1963, when in collaboration with playwright Clifford Odets, he appeared in the TV anthology series The Richard Boone Show. Unique among filmed dramatic programs, Boone's series featured a cast of eleven regulars (including Harry Morgan, Robert Blake, Jeanette Nolan, Bethel Leslie and Boone himself), who appeared in repertory, essaying different parts of varying sizes each week. The Richard Boone Show failed to catch on, and Boone went back to films. In 1972 he starred in another western series, this one produced by his old friend Jack Webb: Hec Ramsey, the saga of an old-fashioned sheriff coping with an increasingly industrialized West. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador. Richard Boone died at age 65 of throat cancer.

Trivia: One of the more talented members of the "Philadelphia school" of rock-n-rollers, Frankie Avalon was the reigning teen singing idol from 1958 through 1960. Devotees of American Bandstand will hold affectionate memories of such Avalon top-tenners as "Gingerbread" and "Venus." Avalon made a gradual transition from singer to actor beginning in 1957. He successfully essayed supporting roles in such films as Guns of the Timberland (1960) and The Alamo (1960) before starring in a string of inexpensive but moneymaking "Beach Party" flicks for American-International. As his film stardom eclipsed in the early 1970s, Avalon returned to singing, briefly starring in the 1976 nostalgia-oriented TV variety series Easy Does It. In 1987, Frankie Avalon was reteamed with his "Beach Party" leading lady Annette Funicello in the retro film musical Back to the Beach (1987), which he also co-produced. Over the next few years he could be seen in cameo performances portraying himself in a diverse string of projects including Troop Beverly Hills, the kid-friendly ABC sitcom Full House, and Martin Scorsese's violent Vegas gangster film Casino. In 1995 he reteamed with many of his old co-horts, including Annette and Dick Clark, for the feel-good made-for-TV showbiz film A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: The Annette Funicello Story.

Trivia: The son of actor John Wayne, Patrick Wayne made his earliest film appearances at 14, playing bits in The Quiet Man (1953) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), both directed by "the Duke"'s mentor John Ford. The younger Wayne's first real film role was in Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955); the following year, as Lieutenant Greenhill, Wayne acted opposite his father in The Searchers (1956). After attending Loyola University, he was given an opportunity to co-star in The Young Land, a film which neither starred his dad nor was directed by John Ford. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't ready for stardom just yet, so it was back to supporting parts in The Alamo (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), McClintock (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971). On his own, Patrick Wayne played leads in the special effects-laden adventures People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), co-starred on the TV series The Rounders (1965) and Shirley (1979), and hosted the syndicated variety weekly The Monte Carlo Show (1980).

Trivia: Argentinian actress Linda Cristal made her first American film in 1956. Typecast by virtue of her accent and her exotic Latino features, Linda could usually be found in westerns, notably Comanche (1956), The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958), The Alamo (1960) and Two Rode Together (1961). She also showed up in such European sword-and-sandal affairs as The Pharoah's Woman (1961). In 1959, Linda was given a rare opportunity to display her comic know-how as a temperamental Hollywood starlet in the Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh vehicle The Perfect Furlough. From 1967 through 1971, Linda Cristal played Victoria Cannon on the TV western The High Chaparral.

Trivia: From the end of the '50s until the mid-'60s, perky, buxom Joan O'Brien was one of Hollywood's most promising leading ladies, specializing in comedic roles. Born in Cambridge, MA, she was raised in Southern California and started singing at an early age. At 15, she was discovered by Tennessee Ernie Ford's manager, Cliffie Stone, and was signed up as a regular performer on the local television country music showcase Hometown Jamboree. By 1953, at 17, she had moved to the CBS network as a singer on The Bob Crosby Show, an engagement that lasted four years. She was married very briefly during this period to guitarist Billy Strange, with whom she had one son. O'Brien took her first screen test in 1957 at MGM and earned a co-starring role opposite Dean Jones in David Friedkin's crime drama Handle With Care (1958). By that time, O'Brien was on her second marriage and was pregnant, so she put her fledgling movie career on hold for almost two years. She tested for Blake Edwards' Operation Petticoat (1959) and was cast alongside Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Though the movie made ample use of her 38-inch bosom as part of its plot (about army nurses and an all-male navy crew), it also gave O'Brien a chance to show off her comedic skills as the accident-prone Lt. Crandall, who wins the heart of Cary Grant's character by the movie's end. She later played a role in John Wayne's historical epic The Alamo (1960), but it was soon after her work in this film that O'Brien's personal problems began slowing her career momentum. She continued doing television over the next few years, including episodes of Wagon Train, Bachelor Father, and other television series; however, her performances attracted less attention than her stormy marital problems and other serious personal difficulties. With her looks and comedic skills, O'Brien could easily have been a rival to Barbara Eden, but instead she receded from public life following performances on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Perry Mason in late 1964. Her final big-screen appearances were in the Elvis Presley film It Happened at the World's Fair (1963) and MGM's jukebox movie Get Yourself a College Girl (1964).

Trivia: He began performing in early childhood, going on to appear in tent shows, vaudeville, and stock throughout the Southwest. He formed Chill Wills and the Avalon Boys, a singing group in which he was the leader and bass vocalist, in the '30s. After appearing with the group in several Westerns, beginning with his screen debut, Bar 20 Rides Again (1935), he disbanded the group in 1938. For the next fifteen years he was busy onscreen as a character actor, but after 1953 his film work became less frequent. He provided the voice of Francis the Talking Mule in the "Francis" comedy series of films. In the '60s he starred in the TV series "Frontier Circus" and "The Rounders." For his work in The Alamo (1960) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In 1975 he released a singing album--his first.

Trivia: Maltese-born character actor Joseph Calleila first came to prominence as a concert singer in England and Europe. He made his screen bow in 1935's Public Hero Number 1, playing the first of many gangsters. Usually a villain, Calleila often leavened his screen perfidy with a subtle sense of humor, notably as the masked bandit who motivates the plot of the Mae West/W.C. Fields comedy My Little Chickadee (1940). In 1936, Calleila tried his hand at screenwriting with Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), a fanciful western based on the criminal career of Joaquin Murietta. Joseph Calleila delivered some of his best and most varied screen performances in the last years of his film career, especially as the kindly Mexican priest in Disney's The Littlest Outlaw (1955) and the weary border-town detective in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).

Trivia: It was while attending Colorado College that American actor/singer Ken Curtis discovered his talent for writing music. After an artistic apprenticeship on the staff of the NBC radio network's music department in the early '30s, Curtis was hired as male vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, then went on to work for bandleader Shep Fields. Preferring country-western to swing, Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers singing group in the 1940s, and in this capacity appeared in several western films. Columbia Pictures felt that Curtis had star potential, and gave the singer his own series of westerns in 1945, but Ken seemed better suited to supporting roles. He worked a lot for director John Ford in the '40s and '50s, as both singer and actor, before earning starring status again on the 1961 TV adventure series Ripcord. That was the last we saw of the handsome, clean-shaven Ken Curtis; the Ken Curtis that most western fans are familiar with is the scraggly rustic deputy Festus Haggen on the long-running TV Western Gunsmoke. Ken was hired to replace Dennis Weaver (who'd played deputy Chester Good) in 1964, and remained with Gunsmoke until the series ended its 20-year run in 1975. After that, Ken Curtis retired to his spread in Fresno, California, stepping back into the spotlight on occasion for guest appearances at western-movie conventions.

Trivia: Yes, that was her real name. Born in Massachussetts, Veda Ann Borg established herself as a model in New York in the early 1930s. Though she'd never had any previous acting experience, Veda was given a secret screen test by Paramount in 1936 and signed on the spot. After a few years of nondescript roles, Veda was nearly killed in a serious automobile accident in 1939. Her face completely reconstructed by plastic surgery, Veda emerged from the bandages with a harder, more distinctive countenance than before--one that proved ideal for the many brassy chorus girls, gun molls and "kept women" that she would portray over the next twenty years. Usually laboring away in B pictures, Veda began picking up some impressive "A" credits in the 1950s, notably as Vivian Blaine's showgirl pal in the mammoth musical Guys and Dolls (1955). Her last appearance was as an bedraggled Indian woman in the John Wayne-directed The Alamo (1960). For eleven years, Veda Ann Borg was the wife of director Andrew V. McLaglen.

Trivia: An economics major at the Brown University and the University of Chicago, cadaverous character actor John Dierkes spent the 1930s as an ad-copy writer and as head of an independent polling service. After serving with the Red Cross in World War II, Dierkes worked for the U.S. Treasury; it was in this capacity that he was sent to Hollywood in 1946 to act as technical advisor for MGM's To the Ends of the Earth. A talent scout for Orson Welles spotted Dierkes and convinced him to audition for the part of Ross in Welles' upcoming film version of MacBeth. Dierkes won the part, and remained in Hollywood for the next two decades. He went on to critical acclaim as the Tall Soldier in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), topping this assignment with his best screen role, that of "Morgan" in George Stevens' Shane (1953). Suffering from emphysema, John Dierkes gradually cut down on his film and TV appearances in the 1970s; he was last seen in a fleeting role in the Stanley Kramer production Oklahoma Crude (1973).

Trivia: Had he been born a decade earlier, American actor Denver Pyle might well have joined the ranks of western-movie comedy sidekicks. Instead, Pyle, a Colorado farm boy, opted for studying law, working his way through school by playing drums in a dance band. Suddenly one day, Pyle became disenchanted with law and returned to his family farm, with nary an idea what he wanted to do with his life. Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he moved on to the shrimp boats of Galveston, Texas. A short stint as a page at NBC radio studios in 1940 didn't immediately lead to a showbiz career, as it has for so many others; instead, Pyle was inspired to perform by a mute oilfield coworker who was able to convey his thought with body language. Studying under such masters as Michael Chekhov and Maria Ouspenskaya, Pyle was able to achieve small movie and TV roles. He worked frequently on the western series of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry; not yet bearded and grizzled, Pyle was often seen as deputies, farmers and cattle rustlers. When his hair turned prematurely grey in his early '30s, Pyle graduated to banker, sheriff and judge roles in theatrical westerns -- though never of the comic variety. He also was a regular on two TV series, Code 3 (1956) and Tammy (1966). But his real breakthrough role didn't happen until 1967, when Pyle was cast as the taciturn sheriff in Bonnie and Clyde who is kidnapped and humilated by the robbers -- and then shows up at the end of the film to supervise the bloody machine-gun deaths of B&C. This virtually nonspeaking role won worldwide fame for Pyle, as well as verbal and physical assalts from the LA hippie community who regarded Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes! From this point forward, Denver Pyle's billing, roles and salary were vastly improved -- and his screen image was softened and humanized by a full, bushy beard. Returning to TV, Pyle played the star's father on The Doris Day Show (1968-73); was Mad Jack, the costar/narrator of Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978-80); and best of all, spent six years (1979-85) as Uncle Jesse Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. Looking stockier but otherwise unchanged, Denver Pyle was briefly seen in the 1994 hit Maverick, playing an elegantly dishonest cardshark who jauntily doffs his hat as he's dumped off of a riverboat. Pyle died of lung cancer at Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center at age 77.

Trivia: Bald, lanky, laconic American actor Hank Worden made his screen debut in The Plainsman (1936), and began playing simpleminded rustics at least as early as the 1941 El Brendel two-reel comedy Love at First Fright. A member in good standing of director John Ford's unofficial stock company, Worden appeared in such Ford classics as Fort Apache (1948) and Wagonmaster (1950). The quintessential Worden-Ford collaboration was The Searchers (1955) wherein Worden portrayed the near-moronic Mose Harper, who spoke in primitive, epigrammatic half-sentences and who seemed gleefully obsessed with the notion of unexpected death. Never a "normal" actor by any means, Worden continued playing characters who spoke as if they'd been kicked by a horse in childhood into the '80s; his last appearance was a recurring role in the quirky David Lynch TV serial Twin Peaks. In real life, Hank Worden was far from addled and had a razor-sharp memory, as proven in his many appearances at Western fan conventions and in an interview program about living in the modern desert, filmed just before Worden's death for cable TV's Discovery Channel.

Trivia: William (Bill) Henry was eight years old when he appeared in his first film, Lord Jim. During his teen years, Henry dabbled with backstage duties as a technician, but continued taking roles in student productions while attending the University of Hawaii. As an adult actor, Henry was prominently billed in such films as Geronimo (1939), Blossoms in the Dust (1941) and Johnny Come Lately (1943); he also briefly starred in Columbia's "Glove Slingers" 2-reel series. In the last stages of his movie career, William Henry was something of a regular in the films of John Ford appearing in such Ford productions as Mister Roberts (1955), The Last Hurrah (1958), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

Trivia: Chuck Roberson was a rancher before serving in World War II. Upon his discharge, he sought out film work as a stunt man. While under contract to Republic Pictures, Roberson doubled for John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch (1948). Thereafter, he worked in virtually all of Wayne's films as stunt double, action coordinator, second-unit director and bit actor. His best speaking part was Sheriff Lordin in the Duke's McClintock (1963). Chuck Roberson's career served as the inspiration for the Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy (1981-86).

Trivia: Nicknamed "Big Boy" by his friend and frequent coworker Will Rogers, beefy Western star Guinn Williams was the son of a Texas congressman. After attending North Texas State College, Williams played pro baseball and worked as a rodeo rider before heading to Hollywood in his teens to try his luck in films. While he starred in several inexpensive silent and sound Westerns, Williams is better known for his comedy relief work in such films as Private Worlds (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Professor Beware (1938), and Santa Fe Trail (1940). "Big Boy" Williams is also a familiar name to devotees of Orson Welles; it was Williams who once accosted Welles in a parking lot and cut off the "boy wonder's" necktie.

Trivia: Olive Carey began her long career acting in silent films under the name Olive Golden. She made her film debut in 1913 with The Sorrowful Shore. She later became one of D.W. Griffith's original stock players. Golden married cowboy star Harry Carey in 1916 and went on to play the female lead in many of his silent westerns. She is said to have had a role in helping illustrious director John Ford get his start; she even worked as his manager. From the '30s through 1947, she was semi-retired, but following her husband's death in 1947, she staged a comeback using her married name. She is best remembered for appearing opposite John Wayne in The Searchers and The Alamo.

Trivia: From the end of the 1940s until the beginning of the 1960s, Dimitri Tiomkin was one of the more prominent composers in movies; decades after his death, he remains one of the most problematic creative figures of his era in Hollywood. Tiomkin was born in Kremenchuk, Ukraine in 1894. Raised in St. Petersburg, Russia and educated in that city's conservatory, his teachers included renowned classical composer Alexander Glazunov. He came of age amid the turmoil of revolutionary Russia and fled to Western Europe, studying in Berlin and later establishing himself as a performer as part of a piano duo. Tiomkin subsequently became a concert pianist and, among his other credits as a performing musician, he gave the European premiere of George Gershwin's "Concerto in F," in 1928. With the advent of talking pictures, Tiomkin and his wife relocated to Hollywood. He made his debut as a film composer in 1930 with Our Blushing Brides, a drama starring Joan Crawford, and his subsequent movie projects included Broadway to Hollywood, Paramount's Alice in Wonderland (both 1933), and Mad Love (1935). His association with director Frank Capra started with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), but he didn't achieve prominence until the release of Capra's Lost Horizon in 1937. That fantasy adventure film featured one of the most prominent scores of any movie of the 1930s; Tiomkin's music was uncommonly bold for the era, the action sequences written in a manner recalling Max Steiner, while the portions of the score covering the parts of the movie depicting Shangri-la, filled with rich, Eastern-sounding melodies and lush choruses, were even more striking, and brought him to the attention of the mass public. Tiomkin became Capra's composer-of-choice for the next few years, helping to close out the director's Columbia Pictures career and open his period as an independent director/producer on Meet John Doe (1941). Tiomkin continued to work on other independent productions, including The Moon and Sixpence (1941), mixed with the occasional big-studio project such as Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and he later scored the Capra-produced wartime documentary series called Why We Fight (1943). Tiomkin's career took off in the post-World War II era. He worked on independent and medium-budget studio productions such as Dillinger (1945) and Angel on My Shoulder (1946), but it was his selection to write the music for David O. Selznick's mammoth production of Duel in the Sun (1946) that put Tiomkin into the front rank of screen composers. Although ostensibly a Western, Duel in the Sun was really an overheated drama of sex and passion that happened to be set in the 19th-century American West. Tiomkin's main struggle was delivering a piece of music to accompany a love scene between the characters played by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones that "felt" to Selznick like a sexual climax. Duel in the Sun was ridiculed by most critics, but it did earn a substantial box-office gross.Tiomkin's relationship with Capra ended with a disagreement over the scoring for It's a Wonderful Life (1946), but he was involved in arranging Claude Debussy's music for Selznick's Portrait of Jennie (1948), and his next big break came when Howard Hawks engaged him to write the music for his epic Western Red River (1948). The movie was everything that Selznick's lust-in-the-dust epic hadn't been, and it was a huge hit, critically and commercially, helped in no small measure by Tiomkin's rousing central theme. Around the same time, Tiomkin was engaged by producer Stanley Kramer for the first time, on So This Is New York (1948). The latter was a failure at the box office, but Tiomkin's association with Kramer's next two movies, Home of the Brave and Champion (both 1949) proved fortuitous.Tiomkin was one of the busiest composers in Hollywood in 1950 and 1951, scoring six movies in each year, among them the pioneering big-studio science fiction production of Howard Hawks' The Thing, for RKO, and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train at Warner Bros., as well as the independent production The Well. In 1952, he scored nine movies, among them Hawks' epic The Big Sky, but his most important scoring assignment was for a movie that seemed destined for failure. Stanley Kramer's production of High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann, had been pegged as a box-office bomb and was even turned down by Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn as part of Kramer's new contract with the studio. Tiomkin was called in to see if a musical score could save the movie, and he delivered a full score as well as a ballad called "High Noon". The song became a hit several times over, including a pop release by Frankie Laine and a country single by Ritter himself, while Tiomkin earned two Oscars for his work. Additionally, Tiomkin became one of the Hollywood community's more visible composers, thanks to his somewhat flamboyant manner and his mangling of English pronunciation, calling the cowboy singer "Tax Ritter" and otherwise establishing an image as a cheerful, volatile Russian émigré. The movie was more than a career-defining release for Tiomkin -- it was a career-expanding one. Over the next decade, Tiomkin would periodically write ballads (especially on Western themes) for movies and television shows, and enjoyed another hit with the theme for the television series Rawhide. He would occasionally steal from himself -- some of his music from Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs was borrowed liberally from his own score for Lost Horizon -- and not all of the ballads were memorable (few people remembered the songs from Take the High Ground or Blowing Wild), but he was generally in the top rank of film composers, working on such major (and respected) movies as Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (both 1954), and George Stevens' Giant (1956). The latter yielded a song that was later adopted by the state of Texas as its official song. Tiomkin was engaged by producer Hal Wallis for a pair of Westerns, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Last Train From Gun Hill (1959). Tiomkin also became John Wayne's composer of choice, on the actor/producer's outsized production of The Alamo (1960), in addition to scoring the Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo (1959), also starring Wayne. The 1960s were less kind to the composer. He started off well enough with The Guns of Navarone and Town Without Pity (both 1961), both of which received Academy Award nominations, but by the middle of the decade, Tiomkin was working on far fewer movies than he had in the previous one. In 1963, Tiomkin moved his base of operations to Europe and became a kind of front-ranked bottom-feeder, replacing Miklos Rozsa as the principal composer at producer Samuel Bronston's Spanish-based studio. Rozsa had walked away from his relationship with Bronston, and no other major composer would go near the man's outsized but frequently shapeless epic films; Tiomkin took the work and was responsible for scoring 55 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), both of which saw release as soundtrack albums and received Academy Award nominations. He also closed out Bronston's epics with Circus World (1964), but by the end of the 1960s, with the move by most Hollywood producers to a less densely orchestral, more pop-oriented brand of soundtrack music, Tiomkin's activities came to a halt. His last Academy Award nomination was for Tchaikovsky in 1971.

Trivia: James Edward Grant occupied an all but unique niche in Hollywood for just over 20 years, as a writer who was part of John Wayne's closest circle of friends and business associates. It was in that position that he exerted a unique degree of influence on the onscreen persona that Wayne presented, and on the content of a dozen of the actor's movies. Some actors had producers or directors that they preferred to work with, but Grant was unusual in his relationship to Wayne as a writer; the actor also trusted him sufficiently to let Grant direct one key film in the actor's output.Grant was also an unlikely denizen of Hollywood, and seems only to have moved to the film mecca as a result of some unfortunate events in his hometown of Chicago. He was born in the Windy City in 1905, and by the end of the 1920s was an up-and-coming journalist, in addition to writing fiction for magazines such as Liberty and Argosy. He was known best in Chicago as a newspaper reporter, but beginning in 1931 his major source of income was not obvious to the public -- Grant continued working as a reporter, but he was also secretly the speechwriter for Anton J. Cermak, who was elected mayor that year. For the next year or so, Grant led a double life, with most of his income derived from his relationship with Cermak -- and when the mayor was killed in an assassination attempt against President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, there went a big chunk of Grant's income. He turned to writing fiction in earnest, and his first book, The Green Shadow, was published in 1935. He later went out to Hollywood when the film rights were sold to RKO, for a movie version directed by Charles Vidor and starring Preston Foster (under the title Muss 'Em Up). Grant provided the stories to several films over the next year or two, and also turned to screenwriting with an early Otto Preminger-directed effort at 20th Century Fox starring Ann Sothern and Jack Haley, entitled Danger: Love at Work (1937).Grant kept selling stories and finally moved permanently to Hollywood, where he authored screenplays over the next few years, building up his reputation as a reliable and occasionally inspired writer with a gift for good dialogue. His big success came at MGM with Boom Town (1940), a Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy vehicle that showed both actors at (or near) their toughest and most virile. Grant scored a similar triumph with Mervyn LeRoy's Johnny Eager, which was a change-of-pace tough-guy vehicle for Robert Taylor. If not one of best writing talents available, Grant did deliver solid, reliable work, and most of the pictures that he wrote were successful, a few even getting good notices in the writing department. By the first half of the 1940s, he was successful enough to own a cattle ranch in the Central Valley.By 1945, Grant had moved over to Warner Bros., where he produced as well as wrote The Great John L., about the renowned prizefighter John L. Sullivan, portrayed by Errol Flynn, then the studio's top action star. It was around this time that Grant became close friends with John Wayne, who, over the previous five years, had ascended to his own unique brand of action stardom, mostly at Republic Pictures. Wayne was taking a closer interest than was typical among actors in the quality of the movie scripts he was offered -- he'd endured a decade of very lean times, of leading roles in B-Westerns and lesser parts in small major studio productions, and wanted to safeguard the stardom that had finally become his with John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Wayne also needed to shelter some of his rapidly growing income by shifting it from salaried studio work as an actor to capital gains as a producer, and it was because of that -- and his desire to get his feet wet in the field of film production -- that he decided to take advantage of a clause in his contract that allowed him to produce movies.The result was Angel and the Badman (1947), in which Wayne cast himself as Quirt Evans, a fast-gun who is found near death by a Quaker family and nursed back to health, but who takes a little longer to understand their philosophy or appreciate it, or the attentions of their daughter (Gail Russell). Grant wrote the story and was chosen by Wayne to direct the movie, and the result was not only the one of the most interesting and rewarding of Wayne's early starring vehicles (at least, among those not directed by John Ford), but one of the most complex, in the script and the acting. And it was a success, and launched Wayne's career as a producer. Grant and Wayne collaborated on 11 more projects over the next 19 years. Although he was not involved in the writing of most of the films that Ford made with Wayne, he was responsible for Flying Leathernecks (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Trouble Along the Way, and Hondo (both 1953), and directed as well as provided the story to the Wayne-produced thriller Ring of Fear (1954). Additionally, they were personally very close drinking buddies who played chess all the time (with Grant reportedly never winning a game in 19 years).Additionally, Grant had Wayne's ear when it came to dialogue -- Wayne was reportedly convinced that, outside of the writers used by Ford in his films, Grant wrote the best dialogue he ever had to work with, and understood exactly what Wayne's fans wanted from the actor. Also, if Grant wrote strong parts for Wayne and other actors, he tended to write relatively weak roles for women, and that mix worked in most of the dozen movies he did with Wayne. Equally to the point, Grant reportedly knew exactly what Wayne wanted to hear, and was, in a sense, the ultimate sycophant/employee. According to director Frank Capra in his autobiography, in their contact over the filmmaker's abortive involvement with the movie Circus World (1964), Grant took pride in having helped persuade Wayne to stop making movies with Ford -- in doing this, however, he may have overplayed his hand as the actor's friend. Grant contributed to The Alamo (1960), as well as The Comancheros (1961), and worked on a Ford production the following year with Donovan's Reef. And when Wayne needed to get his production company out of the hole it had dug with immense cost of The Alamo, it was to Grant that he turned. The result was McLintock! (1963), a deceptively complex and serious comedy, which proved the most profitable of all of Wayne's 1960s releases.Somewhat ironically, McLintock! also proved a swan song for Grant's major influence on Wayne's career. By 1964, while contending with his own health problems, Wayne had come to recognize Grant's weaknesses, personal and otherwise; the man was obviously an alcoholic and was in declining health, and was becoming something of a burden, as when he managed to drive Capra off the shooting of Circus World. But Wayne never objected to the ideological statements that Grant put into his dialogue for Wayne, which defined the actor for the rest of his life. Beyond his work with Wayne, Grant also wrote the screenplays for such films as The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) (bullfighting being one of his pet interests) and The Last Wagon (1956), and the original story for The Proud Rebel (1958). He died in early 1966, and his last film credit appeared over four years later with the release of Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), which was based on Grant's screenplay.

Trivia: A longtime movie producer in addition to being the eldest son of cowboy legend John Wayne, Michael Wayne made a name for himself as the man behind such features as McLintock! (1963) and Chisum (1970). Born in Los Angeles in 1934, as an adult Wayne would develop a reputation as a tough businessman. In addition to keeping an ever-present, watchful eye on his productions, he served on the board of the Motion Picture and Television Fund and was The John Wayne Foundation's president and chairman of the board. Following the death of his father in 1979, Wayne focused increasingly on keeping control of his father's cinematic legacy. Wayne would marry wife Gretchen in 1958, and together they would organize the John Wayne Foundation's annual Odyssey Ball fundraiser. Remaining together until Wayne's death resulting from heart failure in April of 2003, the longtime couple raised five children together.

Trivia: WWI-veteran Jack Pennick was working as a horse wrangler when, in 1926, he was hired as a technical advisor for the big-budget war drama What Price Glory? Turning to acting in 1927, Pennick made his screen bow in Bronco Twister. His hulking frame, craggy face, and snaggle-toothed bridgework made him instantly recognizable to film buffs for the next 35 years. Beginning with 1928's Four Sons and ending with 1962's How the West Was Won, Pennick was prominently featured in nearly three dozen John Ford films. He also served as Ford's assistant director on How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Fort Apache (1947), and as technical advisor on The Alamo (1960), directed by another longtime professional associate and boon companion, John Wayne. Though pushing 50, Jack Pennick interrupted his film career to serve in WWII, earning a Silver Star after being wounded in combat.

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: Expert horseman Boyd "Red" Morgan entered films as a stunt man in 1937. Morgan was justifiably proud of his specialty: falling from a horse in the most convincingly bone-crushing manner possible. He doubled for several top western stars, including John Wayne and Wayne's protégé James Arness. He could also be seen in speaking roles in such films as The Amazing Transparent Man (1959), The Alamo (1960), True Grit (1968), The Wild Rovers (1969) and Rio Lobo (1970). According to one report, Boyd "Red" Morgan served as the model for the TV-commercial icon Mister Clean.

Trivia: Born in Northern Australia, Gil Perkins distinguished himself in his teen years as a champion athlete, trackman and swimmer. Perkins left his homeland at age 18 to go to sea; nearly a decade later he found himself in Hollywood, where he sought out acting roles, the first of which was in The Divine Lady (1928). Though a personable screen presence, he found that his true forte was stunt work. Over a period of thirty years, he doubled for dozens of male stars, from William Boyd ("Hopalong Cassidy") to Red Skelton (whom he closely resembled). While he was willing to tackle the riskiest of stunts, Perkins was far from reckless, always working out in advance the safest and least painful method of pulling off his "gags." He was especially in demand for slapstick comedies, eventually receiving so many pies in the face that the very sight of the pastry made him physically ill. Perkins did more acting than stunting in the latter stages of his career (he can be seen as Jacob of Bethlehem in 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told), and also kept busy as a stunt coordinator. A most engaging and candid interview with Gil Perkins can be found in Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein's 1970 book of Hollywood reminiscences, The Real Tinsel.

Trivia: Former Olympic athlete Dean Smith worked as a stuntman and supporting actor on television and in feature films. In addition to participating in the 1952 Olympic Games at Helsinki, Smith also played football and was a champion rodeo rider.

Trivia: A veteran of the Yiddish Art Theater, Robert H. Harris made his first Broadway appearance in 1937. He gained TV fame in 1953 as Jake on the long-running dramedy The Goldbergs, remaining with the series until 1954. He also directed quite a few live productions during television's Golden Age, and co-starred as Dr. LeMoyne Snyder in the weekly crime drama Court of Last Resort (1957). Usually seen in featured roles in films, Robert H. Harris was afforded a starring part as a vengeful Hollywood makeup man in the quickie American-International horror flick How to Make a Monster (1958).

Trivia: Charles Saunders (often misspelled Sanders) was active in the British film industry from at least 1930. Saunders started out as an art director, then served as editor for films as diverse as the chop-licking meller Murder in the Red Barn (1935) and the patriotic We Dive at Dawn (1943). His first directorial credit was the 1944 comedy Tawny Pipit. Active until 1962, Charles Saunders spent the 1950s specializing in unsubtle melodramas, notably Kill Her Gently (1957) and Womaneater (1959).