Trivia: In his youth, George Reeves aspired to become a boxer, but gave up this pursuit because his mother was worried that he'd be seriously injured. Attracted to acting, Reeves attended the Pasadena Playhouse, where he starred in several productions. In 1939, Reeves was selected to play one of the Tarleton twins in the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind (1939). He made an excellent impression in the role, and spent the next few years playing roles of varying sizes at Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. He was praised by fans and reviewers alike for his performances in Lydia (1941) and So Proudly We Hail (1943); upon returning from WWII service, however, Reeves found it more difficult to get good roles. He starred in a few "B"'s and in the title role of the Columbia serial The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), but for the most part was shunted away in ordinary villain roles. In 1951, he starred in the Lippert programmer Superman vs. the Mole Men, playing both the Man of Steel and his bespectacled alter ego, Clark Kent. This led to the immensely popular Superman TV series, in which Reeves starred from 1953 through 1957. While Superman saved Reeves' career, it also permanently typecast him. He made an appearance as wagon train leader James Stephen in Disney's Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1956), though the producer felt it expeditious to hide Reeves behind a heavy beard. While it is now commonly believed that Reeves was unable to get work after the cancellation of Superman in 1957, he was in fact poised to embark on several lucrative projects, including directing assignments on two medium-budget adventure pictures and a worldwide personal appearance tour. On June 16, 1959, Reeves died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The official ruling was suicide -- and, since he left no note, it was assumed that Reeves was despondent over his flagging career. Since that time, however, there has been a mounting suspicion (engendered by the actor's friends and family) that George Reeves was murdered.

Trivia: American actor Lane Bradford spent most of his film career in westerns - and in so doing carried on the tradition of his father, veteran sagebrush villain John Merton. Breaking into movies in bit parts, Bradford's first verified screen role was in 1946's Silver Range. He came a bit too late to flourish in B westerns (which died out in 1954), but Bradford essayed cowpoke roles, usually menacing in nature, until 1968. Once in a while, Bradford would venture far afield from the Old West - notably as the Martian villain Marex in the 1952 Republic serial Zombies of the Stratosphere. Lane Bradford retired to Hawaii shortly after completing his last film, Journey to Shiloh (1968).

Trivia: American actor Selmer Jackson first stepped before the cameras in the 1921 silent film Supreme Passion. Silver-haired and silver-tongued, Jackson so closely resembled such dignified character players as Samuel S. Hinds and Henry O'Neill that at times it was hard to tell which actor was which -- especially when (as often happened at Warner Bros. in the 1930s) all three showed up in the same picture. During World War II, Jackson spent most of his time in uniform as naval and military officers, usually spouting declarations like "Well, men...this is it!" Selmer Jackson's final film appearance was still another uniformed role in 1960's The Gallant Hours.

Trivia: Born in L.A. and raised in Pasadena, Jack Larson's ingenuous, "golly gee" screen image served him well when in 1951 he was cast as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the TV series Superman. He remained with the program until 1957, by which time he had become so thoroughly identified with the role that he had considerable difficulty landing other film assignments. Eventually Larson gave up acting to concentrate on writing plays and musical librettos; one of his more prestigious assignments was a collaboration with noted composer Virgil Thompson. The longtime companion of filmmaker James Bridges, Jack Larson served as the co-producer of such Bridges films as The Paper Chase (1973), Urban Cowboy (1980), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He made a guest appearance in a 1996 episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, playing an older version of Jimmy Olsen. Larson died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: Character actor Richard Reeves was one of the most familiar heavies in big- and small-screen crime dramas and westerns of the early/middle 1950s. In just a thin sliver of his total output, he threatened (and even tortured) friends and allies of the Man of Steel in episodes of the Adventures of Superman, murdered district attorney Robert Shayne (and got Lou Costello into terrible trouble) in the Abbott & Costello film Dance With Me, Henry, and helped scare Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz half-to-death as an assassin from Franistan in an episode of I Love Lucy. Richard Jourdan Reeves was born in New York City in 1912, and his acting career seems to have begun in tandem with his World War II military service, in the movie This Is The Army (1943). Solidly built and heavy set with dark, wavy hair, Reeves went into acting in character and bit parts after the war, almost all of them uncredited until the advent of television -- when he did receive billing, it was sometimes as Dick Richards, Richard J. Reeves, and Dick Reeves. He played an array of police officers, soldiers, prison guards, laborers, and drivers in an array of films (including Abraham Polonsky's Force Of Evil and Richard Thorpe's Carbine Williams). But mostly as the 1950s wore on he gravitated toward thugs and henchmen -- though never the "brains" of the outfit -- whether in crime dramas or westerns. He made his first appearance on the Adventures of Superman in the 1951 episode "No Holds Barred" as a tough, somewhat lunk-headed wrestler working for a crooked promoter, and over the next few seasons portrayed various strong-arm men and leg-breakers working in the service of crime, on that show and others. But Reeves' seeming lack of intellect in his portrayals, and a slightly good nature that came through, often made his criminal characters in that series seem just a little sympathetic, at least compared to the men for whom they worked, and that gave his portrayals an edge that young viewers, especially, often remembered fondly. The closest he got to a role with real dignity on television in those days was in the episode of "The Boy Who Hated Superman", one of Reeves' finest acting jobs, culminating in a beautiful scene in which his rough-hewn hood, trying to hijack $5000 intended for his employer, opens a young man's eyes about the real nature of the criminal uncle he has idolized. By the mid-1950s, Reeves was ensconsed in these sorts of character roles, whether criminals, tough military men, or police officers. He also managed to impress directors and producers sufficiently to get asked back a lot on many shows -- after appearing in as an assassin from Franistan in the I Love Lucy episode "The Publicity Agent", Reeves did seven more appearances on the series across the run of the show. And his presence on western series such as The Roy Rogers Show, 26 Men, Cheyenne, and other western series was downright ubiquitous. The television work was broken up by the occasional bit part in feature films such as Androcles And The Lion (1952) and Destry (1954). His role in Dance With Me, Henry (1956) was one of his two biggest movie parts, but not his most challenging. The latter distinction was reserved for Reeves' rare chance to play a character on the side of the angels -- in Sherman A. Rose's sci-fi thriller Target Earth (1954), Reeves was cast opposite Virginia Grey as part of a quartet of survivors of an alien invasion of an American city, hiding out and trying to survive. It was his shining moment on-screen, allowing him to show a heroic, intelligent, and sensitive side (even as he strangles a man -- deservedly so -- with his bare hands in one scene). The actor was busy in the 1960s, appearing in lots of western series, and also had a bit part in Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). Reeves even managed to make an appearance in the first episode of Batman. He was still doing a mixture of television and film work at the time of his death, at age 54, in 1967.

Trivia: Born and educated in Pennsylvania, John Hamilton headed to New York in his twenties to launch a 25-year stage career. Ideally cast as businessmen and officials, the silver-haired Hamilton worked opposite such luminaries as George M. Cohan and Ann Harding. He toured in the original company of the long-running Frank Bacon vehicle Lightnin', and also figured prominently in the original New York productions of Seventh Heaven and Broadway. He made his film bow in 1930, costarring with Donald Meek in a series of 2-reel S.S.Van Dyne whodunits (The Skull Mystery, The Wall St. Mystery) filmed at Vitaphone's Brooklyn studios. Vitaphone's parent company, Warner Bros., brought Hamilton to Hollywood in 1936, where he spent the next twenty years playing bits and supporting roles as police chiefs, judges, senators, generals and other authority figures. Humphrey Bogart fans will remember Hamilton as the clipped-speech DA in The Maltese Falcon (1941), while Jimmy Cagney devotees will recall Hamilton as the recruiting officer who inspires George M. Cohan (Cagney) to compose "Over There" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Continuing to accept small roles in films until the mid '50s (he was the justice of the peace who marries Marlon Brando to Teresa Wright in 1950's The Men), Hamilton also supplemented his income with a group of advertisements for an eyeglasses firm. John Hamilton is best known to TV-addicted baby boomers for his six-year stint as blustering editor Perry "Great Caesar's Ghost!" White on the Adventures of Superman series.

Trivia: The son of a wholesale grocer who later became one of the founders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Robert Shayne studied business administration at Boston University. Intending to study for the ministry, Shayne opted instead to work as field secretary for the Unitarian Layman's League. He went on to sell real estate during the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s before heading northward to launch an acting career. After Broadway experience, Shayne was signed to a film contract at RKO radio in 1934. When this led nowhere, Shayne returned to the stage. While appearing with Katharine Hepburn in the Philip Barry play Without Love, Shayne was again beckoned to Hollywood, this time by Warner Bros. Most of his feature film roles under the Warner banner were of the sort that any competent actor could have played; he was better served by the studio's short subjects department, which starred him in a series of 2-reel "pocket westerns" built around stock footage from earlier outdoor epics. He began free-lancing in 1946, playing roles of varying size and importance at every major and minor outfit in Hollywood. In 1951, Shayne was cast in his best-known role: Inspector Henderson on the long-running TV adventure series Superman. He quit acting in the mid-1970s to become an investment banker with the Boston Stock Exchange. The resurgence of the old Superman series on television during this decade thrust Shayne back into the limelight, encouraging him to go back before the cameras. He was last seen in a recurring role on the 1990 Superman-like weekly series The Flash. Reflecting on his busy but only fitfully successful acting career, Robert Shayne commented in 1975 that "It was work, hard and long; a terrible business when things go wrong, a rewarding career when things go right."

Trivia: Diminutive, baby-faced actress Noel Neill entered films as a Paramount starlet in 1942. Though she was showcased in one of the musical numbers in The Fleet's In (1944) and was starred in the Oscar-nominated Technicolor short College Queen (1945), most of her Paramount assignments were thankless bit parts. She fared better as one of the leads in Monogram's Teen Agers series of the mid- to late '40s. In 1948 she was cast as intrepid girl reporter Lois Lane in the Columbia serial The Adventures of Superman, repeating the role in the 1950 chapter play Atom Man vs. Superman. At the time, she regarded it as just another freelance job, perhaps a little better than her cameos in such features as An American in Paris (in 1951 as the American art student) and DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1953). But someone was impressed by Neill's appealingly vulnerable interpretation of Lois Lane, and in 1953 she was hired to replace Phyllis Coates as Lois in the TV version of Superman. She remained with the series for 78 episodes, gaining an enormous fan following (consisting primarily of ten-year-old boys) if not a commensurately enormous bank account. Retiring to private life after the cancellation of Superman in 1958, she was brought back into the limelight during the nostalgia craze of the 1970s. She made countless lecture appearances on the college and film convention circuit, and in 1978 returned to films as Lois Lane's mother in the big-budget Superman: The Movie: alas, most of her part ended up on the cutting-room floor, and neither she nor fellow Adventures of Superman alumnus Kirk Alyn received billing. Noel Neill's last TV appearance to date was a guest spot in a 1991 episode of the syndicated The Adventures of Superboy; she made a cameo appearance in 2006's Superman Returns. Neill died in 2016, at age 95.

Trivia: General-purpose actor Larry Blake made his screen debut playing a young Adolf Hitler in James Whale's troubled The Road Back (1937), only to see his scenes end up on the cutting room floor. A difficult actor to pigeonhole, Blake went on to play everything from cops to robbers in a long career that lasted through the late '70s and included such television shows as The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Superman, Yancy Derringer, Perry Mason, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, Ironside, Little House on the Prairie, and Kojak. His son is Michael F. Blake, a well-known makeup artist and the biographer of silent screen star Lon Chaney.

Trivia: A narrow-faced supporting actor from Sweden, dark-haired Mauritz Hugo (born Mauritz Hugo Ekelöv) was especially effective in action serials of the 1940s and 1950s, and was perhaps at his very best as Barnett, the villainous saloon-keeper in one of Republic's final chapterplays, The Man with the Steel Whip (1954). The son of a pioneer movie theater proprietor, the adventurous Hugo emigrated to the United States at the tender age of 15. After a stint as a salesman, Hugo became a stock company player and may have been in Hollywood films as early as 1938. He was firmly established as a competent supporting actor by 1943 and, having dropped any trace of an accent along the way, was never cast as a "foreigner." Often appearing in Westerns, Hugo was equally proficient in serials, of which he did at least seven. One of the first actors to embrace television, the dapper actor played an important guest-star role in a dual episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe and also appeared on such programs as The Cisco Kid, Sky King, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bewitched, and Family Affair. He retired around 1970 and died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.