Trivia: American actress Ann Harding, born Dorothy Walton Gatley, spent her childhood as an "army brat" constantly moving around the U.S. and Cuba. In her late teens, she worked as a freelance script reader for the Famous Players-Lasky company. In 1921 she made her stage acting debut with the Provincetown Players of Greenwich Village; later that year she appeared on Broadway. Soon she was a well-respected leading lady on Broadway and in stock, and as a result, was signed to a movie contract with Pathe in 1929. She was a Hollywood star within a year. Especially popular with women, she was usually cast as a gentle, refined heroine. For her work in Holiday (1930) she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. For several years she remained a top star, but her career was hurt by typecasting; again and again she appeared in sentimental tearjerkers in which she played the noble woman who makes a grand sacrifice. After marrying symphony conductor Warner Janssen, she quit making films in 1937. Five years later she returned to the screen as a character actress, going on to make a number of films over the next decade, followed by another break of several years and then one last spurt of film acting in 1956. Later she went on to star on Broadway and appear in guest-star roles on TV. Her first husband was actor Harry Bannister.

Trivia: A longtime theater actress with a handful of movies to her credit and work in dozens of filmed and live prime-time television dramas, Frances Reid was best known for the last 44 years of her life for her portrayal of Alice Horton on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. From the show's first broadcast on NBC, on November 8, 1965, until her last on-air appearance in 2007, she was the matriarchal presence on the series -- a loving wife, mother, and grandmother (and, ultimately, great-great-grandmother), known for her wise counsel, patient nature, occasional bravery, and also for her homemade doughnuts. Reid was born in 1914, in Wichita Falls, TX, but was raised in Berkeley, CA, where her father was a banker. She trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in the 1930s appeared in a series of Broadway shows, as well as in a handful of movies, in small, uncredited roles (most notably in Gregory La Cava's Stage Door [1937], starring Katharine Hepburn). Reid made her television debut unusually early, in a 1939 production of Little Women in the role of Beth March, on NBC. As a New York-based actress in the late '40s and '50s, she worked regularly in television, mostly in dramatic roles and on anthology series, and Reid's East Coast presence also allowed her to get her voice into Alfred Hitchcock's New York-filmed production of The Wrong Man (1956). She also starred in two soap operas, Portia Faces Life and As the World Turns, in the 1950s and early '60s, and admitted to not appreciating the grind of the daytime drama format. During the 1950s, Reid was also busy primarily in theater, and won special praise for her work in the classics, most notably her Roxane, opposite José Ferrer, in Cyrano De Bergerac, which was described as "enchanting" by Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times critic. By 1965, however, Reid had turned 40 and discovered that roles for women in that age group were increasingly scarce. It was then that she took on the part of Alice Horton on Days of Our Lives. Her character's main issues in that more innocent age concerned her oldest son, Tommy, who had been reported as missing in action in the Korean War; and the empty nest left behind as her other children had grown up and moved out. In later decades, the plots involving Alice Horton and her doctor husband, Tom (played by Hitchcock alumnus MacDonald Carey), came to involve kidnappings and other, wilder notions, and even Alice's apparent death. She outlived Carey by 15 years, and continued in the role onscreen through 2007 -- long before that, even non-soap opera fans marveled at the love and devotion that Reid displayed in her long-running portrayal. The series' annual Christmas tree-decorating episode, in which Alice Horton was inevitably at the center, remained a beloved event, right into the 21st century. Reid received a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 for her work on the series.

Trivia: Robert Bray entered films as an RKO contractee in 1946. The studio was billing the leathery, laconic Bray as the "next Gary Cooper," even though there was still plenty of life left in the original Cooper. One of his better roles under the RKO banner was western outlaw John Younger in Best of the Bad Men. Free-lancing in the 1950s, Bray played roles of all sizes and varieties. He played doggedly moralistic bus driver Carl in 1956's Bus Stop, followed by a violent, amoral Mike Hammer in My Gun is Quick. His TV-series credits include a secondary role on the 1959 western Man from Blackhawk and the larger assignment of driver/family man Simon Kane in 1960's Stagecoach West. Viewers of the 1960s knew Robert Bray best as forest ranger Corey Stewart in the long-running weekly series Lassie.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: American character actor Philip Bourneuf interrupted a lengthy stage career for his first film, 1944's Winged Victory. Like all other male members of the cast, Bourneuf was billed by his military rank; though he played a Colonel in Winged Victory, he was really just plain Corporal Philip Bourneuf. Few of his film roles allowed Bourneuf much room for expression; in the lavish historical drama Joan of Arc (1949), for example, the actor was listed way down the cast list for his role as Jean D'Estivet. Better roles came Bourneuf's way in The Big Night, where as a well-dressed nightclub denizen he shared several scenes with star John Barrymore, and in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), in which as a district attorney Bourneuf maneuvers the apparently innocent Dana Andrews into the electric chair. Philip Bourneuf's last film appearance was a typically minor role in 1970's The Molly Maguires.