Trivia: A proud descendant of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Marshall Thompson moved from his home town of Peoria, Illinois to the West Coast when his dentist father's health began to flag. Intending to follow his father's example by taking pre-med at Occidental Junior college, Thompson was sidetracked by a love of performing, inherited from his concert-singer mother. His already impressive physique pumped by several summers as a rodeo-rider and cowpuncher, Thompson was offered a $350-per-week contract by Universal studios in 1943. He accepted, expecting to use the money to pay for his college tuition. As it happened, Thompson never returned to the halls of academia; from 1944 onward he worked steadily as a film actor at Universal, 20th Century-Fox, MGM and other studios, sometimes as a lead, more often in supporting roles. For a while, he was typed as a mental case after convincingly portraying a psycho killer in MGM's Dial 119 (1950). He also acted in something like 250 TV programs, and for eight weeks in 1953 co-starred with Janet Blair in the Broadway play A Girl Can Tell. The boyish enthusiasm of his early screen roles a thing of the past, Thompson provided maturity and authority to his two-dimensional roles in such Saturday-matinee melodramas as Cult of the Cobra (1955), It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), Fiend Without a Face (1958), and First Man Into Space (1959), assignments that indirectly led to his first TV-series starring stint as the miniaturized hero of World of Giants (1959). In 1960, Thompson briefly went the "dumb sitcom husband" route in the weekly Angel. In 1961, the staunchly patriotic Thompson starred in and directed the low-budget feature A Yank in Vietnam, which he would later insist, with some justification, was the first up-close-and-personal study of that unfortunate Asian conflict (alas, good intentions do not always make good films; abysmally bad, Yank in Vietnam lay on the shelf until 1965). During the early 1960s, Thompson worked in close association with producer Ivan Tors as an actor and director of animal-oriented short subjects. The actor's fascination with African wildlife was later manifested in his two-year starring stint on Tors' TV series Daktari (1966-68), an outgrowth of the feature film Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion, in which Thompson both starred and collaborated on the script. After playing character parts in such films as The Turning Point (1977) and The Formula (1980), Thompson spent the bulk of the 1980s in Africa, where he assembled the internationally syndicated documentary series Orphans of the Wild. While on a visit to Michigan in 1992, Marshall Thompson died of congestive heart failure.

Trivia: While his name and his participation in British films would suggest some relationship to popular British comedienne Betty Balfour, actor Michael Balfour was actually from the United States, no relation to his more popular namesake. Like Ben Welden and Bernard Nedell before him, Balfour was cast as a "typical" American gangster or tough guy in most of his films -- notably his first, the notorious No Orchids For Miss Blandish (1948). The actor's busiest period was 1950-1960, when he showed up in such films as Obsession (1956) and The Steel Key (1958). Balfour was also a regular on the London-filmed TV detective drama Mark Saber, playing Saber's assistant Barney O'Keefe. The name Michael Balfour might ring a bell with fans of 1950s horror films; he played the unfortunate Sgt. Kasper, whose brains are sucked out by the "Fiend Without a Face" in the 1958 chiller of the same name.

Trivia: In films from 1919, British actor Kynaston Reeves spent the next fifty years before the cameras. From the outset, Reeves specialized in playing scholars, magistrates and military officers. His movie credits include the early-talkie literary derivations The Lodger (1932) and Jew Suss (1934), and such later audience favorites as The Winslow Boy (1949), in which he played the Lord Chief Justice. He was also seen regularly on the BBC TV series Billy Bunter (1952). Kynaston Reeves' final film role was, appropriately enough, "The Old Man" in Billy Wilders The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).

Trivia: Breaking into show business at 16 as the assistant to a "drunken magician" British character actor Peter Madden held down jobs ranging from race-car driver to stand-up comedian before settling into acting. He was frequently cast as slightly tattered politicians, as witness Nothing but the Best (1964) and Dr. Zhivago (1965). His deadpan portrayal of a Tibetan lama was one of the highlights of the otherwise patchy Hope-Crosby vehicle Road to Hong Kong (1962). Espionage fans will remember Peter Madden as Hobbs, John Drake's (Patrick McGoohan) immediate superior, on the mid-1960s TVer Secret Agent.

Trivia: The son of a London bus conductor, Terry Kilburn spent his childhood as a vaudeville performer, doing an act consisting of celebrity imitations. Unlike other professional children cursed with "stage parents," Kilburn talked his mom and dad into bringing him to Hollywood to give movies a try. He made his American debut as a regular on Eddie Cantor's radio show, then made his first film appearance in MGM's Lord Jeff (1938). The best of his early roles included Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1938) and four separate roles (representing four generations of boy's-school students) in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). After high school, Kilburn decided to give movies second priority and concentrate on stage work. He studied drama at UCLA, then made his Broadway bow in a 1952 revival of Shaw's Candida. Though he would continue to sporadically show up in films like Fiend Without a Face (1958) and Lolita (1962), Terence Kilburn ("Terry" no more) would remain committed to live performances, as both actor and director; for many years, he has been artistic director of Rochester, Michigan's Meadow Brook Theatre.