Trivia: For as long as she could remember, Irene Ryan was performing on some stage or other. From the 1920s onward, she and her husband Timothy Ryan formed the popular vaudeville duo Tim and Irene. They carried over their song, dance and snappy patter into a brief series of two-reel comedies and several radio programs. During her first burst of filmmaking activity in the 1940s, Ryan played comedy relief parts in a number of B pictures scripted by her husband. Her standard characterization at this time was the traditional wisecracking, man-hungry spinster. During and after her divorce, Ryan continued accepting roles of varying sizes in such pictures as Woman on the Beach (1948), My Dear Secretary (1948), Mighty Joe Young (1949), Bonzo Goes to College (1952) and Blackbeard the Pirate (1952). By the early 1960s, Ryan was (as she would later cheerfully admit) pretty much washed up in show business. All this changed when she was invited to audition for an upcoming sitcom about a family of mountaineers who suddenly come into a fortune. Ryan read one single line and was hired on the spot: she played Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies from 1962 through 1971, never missing an opportunity to express gratitude for her involvement in so popular a project. No sooner had Hillbillies folded than Irene Ryan was cast in a show-stopping role in the 1971 Broadway musical Pippin, scoring yet another personal success--which, sadly, turned out to be her last.

Trivia: The son of a clergyman, round-faced character actor Edward Andrews took to the stage at age twelve. He made his Broadway debut in 1935's How Beautiful With Shoes; three years later he co-starred in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life. Sporting spectacles from the early 1950s onward, Andrews was ideally cast as pompous, overly ambitious military officers, politicians and attorneys. His screen persona was malleable enough to allow for villainy (he played a viciously racist small-town politico in his first film, 1955's The Phenix City Story), though he preferred comedy, taking pride in a particular "finger-waggling" gesture of his that always resulted in loud audience laughter. In 1964, he co-starred with Kathy Nolan in the distaff McHale's Navy rip-off TV sitcom Broadside. Edward Andrews joined several fellow acting veterans in Gremlins (1985), his last film.

Trivia: American actor Jim Hutton was performing in a military show in Germany when he was discovered by director Douglas Sirk. Sirk promptly cast Hutton in A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), which though released by Universal, led to an MGM contract for the young actor. Evidently MGM had plans to turn Hutton into the new Jimmy Stewart, for the studio insisted upon casting their young star in roles calling for ingenuous clumsiness. Perhaps the quintessential Hutton role was as The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962), in which his constant bumbling eventually transforms him into a war hero. MGM frequently paired Hutton with another player of acute comic skill, Paula Prentiss; they worked so well together that many fans assumed Hutton and Prentiss were married -- which must have been amusing to Paula's longtime husband Richard Benjamin. Hutton was allowed a few non-comedy "outdoors" roles in Major Dundee (1965) and The Green Berets (1969), but for the most part was locked into playing gangling young goofs. Oddly, Hutton's screen persona worked quite well for his TV-series role as Ellery Queen in the mid-1970s. The actor was charming and convincing as the self-effacing, deceptively preoccupied criminologist, especially when he turned to the camera 45 minutes into each Ellery Queen episode and invited the folks at home to help him solve the mystery. Hutton died of cancer at age 46 -- too soon to fully realize the success of his son, actor Timothy Hutton.

Trivia: After her eye-catching debut as Nurse Dish in the 1970 film version of MASH, American leading lady Jo Ann Pflug remained on call for sexy, come-hither roles. Pflug spent the bulk of her career on television, playing regular roles on Operation Petticoat (1978-79, as Lieutenant Katherine O'Hara) and The Fall Guy (1981-82 as "Big Jack"). She also played Nora Charles in an abortive mid-1970s attempt to revive The Thin Man as a weekly series. While starring as Taylor von Platen on the syndicated soap opera Rituals (1984), Jo Ann Pflug became a born-again Christian; rebelling against the prurient content of Rituals, Pflug quit the program, thereafter devoting herself to religious radio and television projects.