Trivia: African American actress, singer, dancer Dorothy Dandridge, the daughter of stage and screen actress Ruby Dandridge, began performing professionally in the song-and-dance duo "The Wonder Children" with her sister Vivian at age four; they toured parts of the South, performing at churches, schools, and social gatherings. In the 1930s her family relocated to Los Angeles, and she and her sister appeared briefly in the Marx brothers comedy A Day at the Races (1937). In their teens she and her sister enlisted a third singer and formed a new group, the Dandridge Sisters. They worked with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra and Cab Calloway, appeared at the Cotton Club, and turned up with Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan in the film Going Places (1939). Dandridge started performing solo in the early '40s, appearing in a string of musical shorts made in 1941 and 1942; she also performed in several features in the same years, including Sun Valley Serenade (1942), during the production of which she met her first husband, the dancer Harold Nicholas. After her marriage she put her career on hold for a while, but the birth of a severely brain-damaged daughter strained her marriage and it soon ended in divorce, following which she put most of her energy into her career. She became popular and famous as a sultry nightclub entertainer, then began to make her mark in movies with her notable appearance in Tarzan's Peril (1951), in which she played a sexy African princess. For her work in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones (1954) she received a "Best Actress" Oscar nomination, becoming the first black women to do so. Three years went by before her next role, in Island in the Sun (1957), in which she again made history by being the first black actress cast romantically with a white actor in a film. For her work in Preminger's Porgy and Bess (1959) she won the Golden Globe Award as "Best Actress in a Musical." After a few more years she found it difficult to get lead roles in films, and went back to nightclubs. In 1965 she signed a new film contract, but her rebounding luck was short-lived -- she was found dead from an overdose of anti-depressants.

Trivia: Despite a dazzling film and recording career that spanned the better part of the Twentieth century, and has extended (with occasional film activity) well into the Twenty-first, venerable African American entertainer Harry Belafonte is still best known as "The King of the Calypso." This title -- and Belafonte's concomitant crossover appeal to black and white audiences -- is even more astonishing for first happening over ten years before the Civil Rights movement took full swing. Born March 1, 1927 in poverty-stricken Harlem to first-generation Jamaican immigrants, Belafonte emigrated with his mother back to Jamaica at eight years old, and returned to New York at age thirteen. Midway through high school, he dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. Upon discharge, the young man studied and performed at the Actors Studio (alongside such legends as Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando), Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and The American Negro Theater. A singing role in a theatrical piece led to a string of cabaret engagements, and before long, Belafonte's success enabled him to secure funding to open his own nightclub. His recording career officially began at the age of 22, in 1949, when he presented himself as a pop singer along the lines of Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, but in time he found a more unique niche by delving headfirst into the Library of Congress's archive of folk song recordings and studying West Indian music. What emerged was a highly unique (and unprecedented) blend of pop, jazz and traditional Caribbean rhythms. Belafonte subsequently opened at the Village Vanguard with accompaniment by Millard Thomas, then debuted cinematically with Bright Road (1953) and followed it up with Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, co-starring, in each, with the ravishing (and ill-fated) Dorothy Dandridge. In 1954, Belafonte won a Tony Award for his work in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. His broadest success to date, however, lay two years down the road.In 1956, Belafonte issued two RCA albums: Belafonte, and Calypso. To call the LP popular would be the understatement of the century; each effort crested the pop charts and remained there, the latter album for well over seven months. As a result, calypso music, typified by the twin hits "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" and "Jamaica Farewell," became a national phenomenon. Using his star clout, Belafonte was then able to realize several controversial film roles that studios would have rejected for a man of color in the late 1950s. In 1957's Island in the Sun, Belafonte's character entertains notions of an affair with white Joan Fontaine (thereby incurring the wrath of bigots everywhere). In Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), he plays a bank robber, uncomfortably teamed with a racist partner (Robert Ryan). And in The World, The Flesh and The Devil, also made in 1959, he portrays one of the last three survivors of a world-wide nuclear disaster. Following his SRO Carnegie Hall show in 1959, Belafonte won an Emmy for his 1960 TV special, Tonight With Harry Belafonte (becoming, in the process, the first African American producer in television history). His cinematic activity nonetheless sharply declined during this period as he felt more and more dissatisfied by available film roles, but his recording output and civil rights work crescendoed over the course of the 1960s. In 1970, Belafonte returned to film work for the first occasion in almost ten years, by executive producing and starring alongside Zero Mostel in Czech director Jan Kadar's American debut, the fantasy The Angel Levine (1970). Adapted from a short story by Bernard Malamud, this gentle, sensitively-handled fable won the hearts of critics and devoted filmgoers nationwide, but subsequently fell through the cracks of the video revolution and went largely unseen for three decades. By 1971, Belafonte would act before the cameras only in the company of such close friends as Sidney Poitier, who directed Belafonte in Buck and the Preacher (1972) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). (The latter features the actor - as mustachioed "Geechie Dan" -- doing a particularly funny spoof of Marlon Brando's Godfather). In 1984, Belafonte produced and scored the musical film Beat Street, and in 1985 he won awarded an Emmy for initiating the all-star We Are the World video. After a typically long absence from the screen, Belafonte returned in the 1996 reverse-racism drama White Man's Burden. That year, Belafonte also received some acclaim for his performance as gangster Seldom Seen in Robert Altman's Kansas City, despite the tepid response gleaned by the film at Cannes 1996 and other festivals.For the next fifteen years, Belafonte continued to pursue cinematic activity, though rarely signed for fictional roles. He restricted his involvement for the remainder of the nineties (and into the 2000s) to documentary work and concert films, with participation, often as the host, narrator, or central performer, in such projects as Roots of Rhythm (1997), An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Friends (1997), Fidel (2001), Quincy Jones: In Pocket (2002), Calypso Dreams (2003) and When the Levees Broke (2006). In late 2006, Belafonte essayed another dramatic role as Nelson, an employee of the Ambassador Hotel, in Bobby, Emilio Estevez's highly-anticipated ensemble drama about the RFK assassination. Alongside his recording and cinematic work, Belafonte has accumulated dozens of awards and honors bestowed upon him by various social-service and political organizations. Harry Belafonte is the father of actress/singer Shari Belafonte-Harper. Married to Marguerite Byrd from 1948-1957, he wed his second wife, Julie Robinson in 1957.

Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: At the risk of incurring groans for a clumsy pun, we must note that African-American actress Maidie Norman has been consigned to numerous "maid-y" parts in her long screen career. Most of Maidie's film assignments have been as domestics of some sort or other, which was unfortunately to be expected in the white-bread '50s; a handful of the actress' role were, however, wholly worthy of her talents. Her first film was The Burning Cross (1948), a sincere if low-budget attack on the KKK in which she played the wife of that ubiquitous black character actor Joel Fluellen. Maidie followed this with The Well (1951), another of a brief cycle of '50s films to explore black-white relationships. But once such films were labelled as "leftist" by the Communist hunters of the era, Maidie found herself accepting more and more roles where she played subserviently to white stars. Busy in both films and TV into the '70s, Maidie surprisingly continued to play maids even as Hollywood became more sensitive towards stereotyping; as Olivia De Havilland's faithful servant in Airport '77, she endured a Hattie McDaniel-like scene in which she died in her employer's arms. Maidie's best screen appearance, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), was as yet another domestic. Playing the no-nonsense housekeeper of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Maidie discovers Davis' potentially homicidal intentions for Joan, whereupon she defiantly announces her plans to go to the police. Since this happens at the film's halfway point, just guess how the homicidal Davis "serves notice" to the hapless Maidie Norman.