Trivia: In step with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers was one half of the most legendary dancing team in film history; she was also a successful dramatic actress, even winning a Best Actress Oscar. Born Virginia McMath on July 16, 1911, in Independence, MO, as a toddler, she relocated to Hollywood with her newly divorced mother, herself a screenwriter. At the age of six, Rogers was offered a movie contract, but her mother turned it down. The family later moved to Fort Worth, where she first began appearing in area plays and musical revues. Upon winning a Charleston contest in 1926, Rogers' mother declared her ready for a professional career, and she began working the vaudeville circuit, fronting an act dubbed "Ginger and the Redheads." After marrying husband Jack Pepper in 1928, the act became "Ginger and Pepper." She soon traveled to New York as a singer with Paul Ash & His Orchestra, and upon filming the Rudy Vallee short Campus Sweethearts, she won a role in the 1929 Broadway production Top Speed.On Broadway, Rogers earned strong critical notice as well as the attention of Paramount, who cast her in 1930's Young Man of Manhattan, becoming typecast as a quick-witted flapper. Back on Broadway, she and Ethel Merman starred in Girl Crazy. Upon signing a contract with Paramount, she worked at their Astoria studio by day and returned to the stage in the evenings; under these hectic conditions she appeared in a number of films, including The Sap From Syracuse, Queen High, and Honor Among Lovers. Rogers subsequently asked to be freed of her contract, but soon signed with RKO. When her Broadway run ended, she went back to Hollywood, starring in 1931's The Tip-Off and The Suicide Fleet. When 1932's Carnival Boat failed to attract any interest, RKO dropped her and she freelanced around town, co-starring with Joe E. Brown in the comedy The Tenderfoot, followed by a thriller, The Thirteenth Guest, for Monogram. Finally, the classic 1933 musical 42nd Street poised her on the brink of stardom, and she next appeared in Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of 1933.Rogers then returned to RKO, where she starred in Professional Sweetheart; the picture performed well enough to land her a long-term contract, and features like A Shriek in the Night and Sitting Pretty followed. RKO then cast her in the musical Flying Down to Rio, starring Delores Del Rio; however, the film was stolen by movie newcomer Astaire, fresh from Broadway. He and Rogers did not reunite until 1934's The Gay Divorcee, a major hit. Rogers resisted typecasting as strictly a musical star, and she followed with the drama Romance in Manhattan. Still, the returns from 1935's Roberta, another musical venture with Astaire, made it perfectly clear what kinds of films audiences expected Rogers to make, and although she continued tackling dramatic roles when the opportunity existed, she rose to major stardom alongside Astaire in classics like Top Hat, 1936's Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance? Even without Astaire, Rogers found success in musical vehicles, and in 1937 she and Katharine Hepburn teamed brilliantly in Stage Door.After 1938's Carefree, Rogers and Astaire combined for one final film, the following year's The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, before splitting. She still harbored the desire to pursue a dramatic career, but first starred in an excellent comedy, Bachelor Mother. In 1940, Rogers starred as the titular Kitty Foyle, winning an Academy Award for her performance. She next appeared in the 1941 Garson Kanin comedy Tom, Dick and Harry. After starring opposite Henry Fonda in an episode of Tales of Manhattan, she signed a three-picture deal with Paramount expressly to star in the 1944 musical hit Lady in the Dark. There she also appeared in Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor and Leo McCarey's Once Upon a Honeymoon. Rogers then made a series of films of little distinction, including 1945's Weekend at the Waldorf (for which she earned close to 300,000 dollars, making her one of the highest-paid women in America), the following year's Magnificent Doll, and the 1947 screwball comedy It Had to Be You. Rogers then signed with the short-lived production company Enterprise, but did not find a project which suited her. Instead, for MGM she and Astaire reunited for 1949's The Barkleys of Broadway, their first color collaboration. The film proved highly successful, and rekindled her sagging career. She then starred in a pair of Warner Bros. pictures, the 1950 romance Perfect Strangers and the social drama Storm Warning. After 1951's The Groom Wore Spurs, Rogers starred in a trio of 1952 Fox comedies -- We're Not Married, Monkey Business, and Dreamboat -- which effectively halted whatever momentum her reunion with Astaire had generated, a situation remedied by neither the 1953 comedy Forever Female nor by the next year's murder mystery Black Widow. In Britain, she filmed Beautiful Stranger, followed by 1955's lively Tight Spot. With 1957's farcical Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, Rogers' Hollywood career was essentially finished, and she subsequently appeared in stock productions of Bell, Book and Candle, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Annie Get Your Gun.In 1959, Rogers traveled to Britain to star in a television musical, Carissima. A few years later, she starred in a triumphant TV special, and also garnered good notices, taking over for Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! She also starred in Mame in London's West End, earning over 250,000 pounds for her work -- the highest sum ever paid a performer by the London theatrical community. In 1965, Rogers entered an agreement with the Jamaican government to produce films in the Caribbean; however, shooting there was a disaster, and the only completed film to emerge from the debacle was released as Quick, Let's Get Married. That same year, she also starred as Harlow, her final screen performance. By the 1970s, Rogers was regularly touring with a nightclub act, and in 1980 headlined Radio City Music Hall. A tour of Anything Goes was among her last major performances. In 1991, she published an autobiography, Ginger: My Story. Rogers died April 25, 1995.

Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma dentist, Van Heflin moved to California after his parents separated. Drawn to a life on the sea, Heflin shipped out on a tramp steamer upon graduating from high school, returning after a year to attend the University of Oklahoma in pursuit of a law degree. Two years into his studies, Heflin was back on the ocean. Having entertained thoughts of a theatrical career since childhood, Heflin made his Broadway bow in Channing Pollock's Mister Moneypenny; when the play folded after 61 performances, Heflin once more retreated to the sea, sailing up and down the Pacific for nearly three years. He revitalized his acting career in 1931, appearing in one short-lived production after another until landing a long-running assignment in S. N. Behrmann's 1936 Broadway offering End of Summer. This led to his film bow in Katharine Hepburn's A Woman Rebels (1936), as well as a brief contract with RKO Radio. Katharine Hepburn requested Heflin's services once more for her Broadway play The Philadelphia Story, and while the 1940 MGM film version of that play cast James Stewart in Heflin's role, the studio thought enough of Heflin to sign him to a contract. One of his MGM roles, that of the alcoholic, Shakespeare-spouting best friend of Robert Taylor in Johnny Eager (1942), won Heflin a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar. After serving in various Army film units in World War II, Heflin resumed his film career, and also for a short while was heard on radio as Raymond Chandler's philosophical private eye Philip Marlowe. He worked in both Hollywood and Europe throughout the 1950s. In 1963, he was engaged to narrate the prestigious TV anthology The Great Adventure. He was forced to pull out of this assignment when cast as the Louis Nizer character in the Broadway play A Case of Libel. Heflin's final film appearance was in the made-for-TV speculative drama The Last Child; he died of a heart attack at the age of 61. Van Heflin was married twice, first to silent film star Esther Ralston, then to RKO contract player Frances Neal (who should not be confused with Heflin's actress sister Frances Heflin).

Trivia: Raft spent his childhood in the tough Hell's Kitchen area of New York, then left home at 13. He went on to be a prizefighter, ballroom dancer, and taxi-driver, meanwhile maintaining close contacts with New York's gangster underworld. He eventually made it to Broadway, then went to Hollywood in the late '20s. At first considered a Valentino-like romantic lead, Raft soon discovered his forte in gangster roles. He was the actor most responsible for creating the '30s cinema image of gangster-as-hero, particularly after his portrayal of coin-flipping Guido Rinaldo in Scarface (1932). He was highly successful for almost two decades, but then bad casting diminished his popularity. By the early '50s he was acting in European films in a vain attempt to regain critical respect, but he was unsuccessful. He starred in the mid-'50s TV series "I Am the Law," a failure that seriously hurt his financial status. In 1959 a Havana casino he owned was closed by the Castro government, further damaging his revenues; meanwhile, he owed a great deal to the U.S. government in back taxes. In the mid '60s he was denied entry into England (where he managed a high-class gambling club) due to his underworld associations. Most of his film appearances after 1960 were cameos. He was portrayed by Ray Danton in the biopic The George Raft Story (1961).

Trivia: One of Hollywood's most luminous actresses, Gene Tierney remains best remembered for her performance in the title role of the 1944 mystery classic Laura. Born November 20, 1920, in Brooklyn, NY, Tierney was the daughter of a wealthy insurance broker, and was educated in Connecticut and Switzerland; she traveled in social circles, and at a party met Anatole Litvak, who was so stunned by her beauty that he requested she screen test at Warner Bros. The studio offered a contract, but the salary was so low that her parents dissuaded her from signing; instead, Tierney pursued a stage career, making her Broadway debut in 1938's Mrs. O'Brien Entertains. A six-month contract was then offered by Columbia, which she accepted. However, after the studio failed to find her a project, she returned to New York to star on-stage in The Male Animal. The lead in MGM's National Velvet was offered her, but when the project was delayed Tierney signed with Fox, where in 1940 she made her film debut opposite Henry Fonda in the Fritz Lang Western The Return of Frank James.A small role in Hudson's Bay followed before Tierney essayed her first major role in John Ford's 1940 drama Tobacco Road. She then starred as the titular Belle Starr. Fox remained impressed with her skills, but critics consistently savaged her work. Inexplicably and wholly inappropriately, she was cast as a native girl in three consecutive features: Sundown, The Shanghai Gesture, and Son of Fury. Closer to home was 1942's Thunder Birds, in which Tierney starred as a socialite; however, she was just as quickly returned to more exotic fare later that same year for China Girl. A supporting turn in Ernst Lubitsch's classic 1943 comedy Heaven Can Wait signalled an upward turn in Tierney's career, however, and the following year she starred as the enigmatic Laura in Otto's Preminger's masterful mystery. After 1945's A Bell for Adano, she next appeared as a femme fatale in the melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, a performance which won her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination -- her most successful film to date.Tierney continued working at a steady pace, and in 1946 co-starred with Tyrone Power in an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel The Razor's Edge. The 1947 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was her last major starring role; from 1948's The Iron Curtain onward, she appeared primarily in smaller supporting performances in projects including the 1949 thriller Whirlpool and Jules Dassin's classic 1950 noir Night and the City. After 1952's Way of a Gaucho, Tierney's Fox contract expired, and at MGM she starred with Spencer Tracy in Plymouth Adventure, followed by the Clark Gable vehicle Never Let Me Go. The latter was filmed in Britain, and she remained there to shoot Personal Affair. While in Europe, Tierney also began a romance with Aly Khan, but their marriage plans were met by fierce opposition from the Aga Khan; dejectedly she returned to the U.S., where she appeared in 1954's Black Widow.After 1955's The Left Hand of God, Tierney's long string of personal troubles finally took their toll, and she left Hollywood and relocated to the Midwest, accepting a job in a small department store; there she was rediscovered in 1959, and Fox offered her a lead role in the film Holidays for Lovers. However, the stress of performing proved too great, and days into production Tierney quit to return to the clinic. In 1960 she married Texas oil baron Howard Lee. Two years later, Fox announced her for the lead role in Return to Peyton Place, but she became pregnant and dropped out of the project. Finally, Tierney returned to screens in 1962's Advise and Consent, followed a year later by Toys in the Attic. After 1964's The Pleasure Seekers, she again retired, but in 1969 starred in the TV movie Daughter of the Mind. Remaining out of the public eye for the next decade, in 1979 Tierney published an autobiography, Self-Portrait, and in 1980 appeared in the miniseries Scruples; the performance was her last -- she died in Houston on November 6, 1991.

Trivia: The daughter of an ambitious "stage mother," Peggy Ann Garner worked as a model and in summer stock before her sixth birthday. At seven she arrived in Hollywood, appearing briefly in several films; by the early '40s she showed a strong acting talent in larger roles. For her work at age 13 in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn she won a special Oscar as the "Outstanding Child Performer of 1945." Most of her later roles, however, were unrewarding, and her film career all but ended in the early '50s. In 1950 she debuted on Broadway, appearing in many plays in New York and on tour; she also eventually did much work on TV, appearing in TV dramas and series episodes and enjoying a very brief run in a Saturday-afternoon sitcom on ABC called Two Girls Named Smith (1951). By the late '60s she had given up her acting career, though she went on to appear prominently in Robert Altman's film A Wedding (1978). She married and divorced actors Richard Hayes and Albert Salmi, and died of pancreatic cancer at age 52.

Trivia: The son of an insurance man who'd aspired to appear onstage but never had the chance, British-born actor Reginald Gardiner more than made up for his dad's unrealized dreams with a career lasting 50 years. Graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gardiner started as a straight actor but drifted into musical revues, frequently working in the company of such favorite British entertainers as Bea Lillie. His Broadway bow occurred in the 1935 play At Home Abroad, and though he'd made his film debut nearly ten years earlier in Hitchcock's silent The Lodger (1926), he suddenly became a "new" Hollywood find. Handsome enough to play romantic leads had he so chosen (he gets away with it in the 1939 Laurel and Hardy comedy Flying Deuces), Gardiner preferred the sort of kidding-on-the-square comedy he'd done in his revue days. His turn as a traffic cop who imagines himself a symphony conductor in his first American film Born to Dance (1936) was so well received that he virtually repeated the bit--this time as a butler who harbors operatic aspirations--in Damsel in Distress (1937). For most of his film career, Gardiner played suave but slightly untrustworthy British gentlemen; a break from this pattern occurred in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), in which Gardiner played a fascist military man who turns his back on dictator "Adenoid Hinkel" to cast his lot with a community of Jews. Devoting his private life to the enjoyment of classical music, rare books, painting, and monitoring the ghost that supposedly haunted his Beverly Hills home, Reginald Gardiner flourished as a stage, film and television actor into the 1960s; one of his latter-day assignments was his weekly dual role in the 1966 Phyllis Diller sitcom, Pruitts of Southampton.

Trivia: Erudite, silver-haired stage and screen actor Otto Kruger was a grandnephew of South African president Ohm Kruger. While attending the University of Michigan and Columbia University, Kruger switched his field of interest from music to acting. After several seasons in regional theatre, the 30-year-old Kruger made his Broadway bow in The Natural Law in 1915. That same year, he appeared in his first film, but did not actively pursue moviemaking until the talkie era. Kruger often exploited his respectable, sophisticated veneer to play villainous roles, such as the solid citizen-cum-Nazi ringleader in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). He was equally effective in parts calling for kindness and compassion, notably as Dr. Emil Behring, the real-life Nobel Prize winner, in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. During World War II, Kruger, an ardent home gardener, worked as a food coordinator for the Los Angeles Country Agricultural Department. While appearing in the pre-Broadway tryouts for Advise and Consent in 1960, Kruger suffered the first of several strokes that would eventually render him inactive. Otto Kruger made his last film, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1964; he died 10 years later, on his 89th birthday.

Trivia: British actress Cathleen Nesbitt took the first step toward a career that would span nine decades when she made her stage debut in the 1910 London revival of Pinero's The Cabinet Minister. While appearing with the Irish Players, Nesbitt made her first journey to America in 1915, where she would star in the Broadway premiere of Playboy of the Western World. After four years in the U.S., Nesbitt returned to England in 1919, where she concentrated on classic roles and where she would make her first film in 1922. Hundreds of stage roles later, Ms. Nesbitt appeared in her first American movie, 1954's Three Coins in the Fountain. Two years later, she played Mrs. Higgins in the Broadway hit My Fair Lady. When she accepted a co-starring role as William Windom's mother in the 1963 TV sitcom The Farmer's Daughter, some observers opined that this would be the capper of her long career. Not so: Cathleen Nesbitt had over 15 years of work still in her, including the demanding role of an octogenarian drug addict in The French Connection II. And in 1981, at the age of 92, Ms. Nesbitt again portrayed Mrs. Higgins in the Broadway revival of My Fair Lady. Cathleen Nesbitt wrote her autobiography, A Little Love and Good Company, in 1973.

Trivia: Child actor Skip Homeier began acting on radio in his native Chicago, which in the early 1930s was a major network center. Billed as "Skippy," he was one of the kiddie regulars on Let's Pretend, and for a while played the son of the heroine on the long-running soap opera Portia Faces Life. He was also frequently tapped for stage work in both the Midwest and New York. It was Homeier's chilling portrayal of a preteen Nazi in the Broadway production Tomorrow the World that led to his film debut in the 1944 movie version of that play. Typecast as a troublesome teenager thereafter, Homeier was finally permitted a comparatively mature role in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1950). He worked steadily in westerns and crime films thereafter, occasionally billed as G. V. Homeier. It was back to "Skip" for his 1960 TV series Dan Raven. Alternating between Skip and G. V. Homeier for the rest of his career, the actor went on to co-star as Dr. Hugh Jacoby in the weekly TVer The Interns (1970-71) and to play supporting roles in such films as The Greatest (1977) and the made-for-TV The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979). Homeier died in 2017, at age 86.

Trivia: Actress/singer Hilda Simms gained her first professional experience with the American Negro Theater in the early '40s. She debuted on Broadway in a 1944, all-black production of Anna Lucasta. When the show went to London, she went too. Finding Europe to her liking, Simms moved to Paris and, billing herself as Julie Riccardo, built a successful nightclub career as a singer. In 1953, she returned to the U.S. and obtained a co-starring role in The Joe Louis Story (1953). The film was a hit, but Simms preferred the stage. She would only appear in one more film, The Black Widow (1954). During the 1960s, Simms played the role of Nurse Ayres on the dramatic television series The Nurses (1962-1965).

Trivia: Not to be confused with the later 20th Century-Fox contract player of the same name, silent screen actor Harry Carter had appeared in repertory with Mrs. Fiske and directed The Red Mill for Broadway impresario Charles Frohman prior to entering films with Universal in 1914. Often cast as a smooth villain, the dark-haired Carter made serials something of a specialty, menacing future director Robert Z. Leonard in The Master Key (1914); playing the title menace in The Gray Ghost (1917); and acting supercilious towards Big Top performers Eddie Polo and Eileen Sedgwick in Lure of the Circus (1918). In addition to his serial work, Carter played General Von Kluck in the infamous propaganda piece The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918). It was back to chapterplays in the 1920s, where he menaced Claire Anderson and Grace Darmond in two very low-budget examples of the genre: The Fatal Sign (1920) and The Hope Diamond Mystery (1921).

Trivia: No one played supercilious, judgmental mothers-in-law with as much enthusiasm as Mabel Albertson. The sister of comic actor Jack Albertson, Albertson made a few tentative stabs at a film career in the 1920s and 1930s, but chose instead to concentrate on stage work. Returning to Hollywood in 1953, she became a semi-regular on several television series, and also contributed sharply honed character performances in films like Home Before Dark (1958) (as Jean Simmons' disastrously well-meaning stepmother) and The Gazebo (1959) (as a garrulous real estate agent). She hit her stride in the 1960s playing the self-pitying mother and mother-in-law of such TV actors as Tom Ewell, Dick Van Dyke, and Bewitched's Dick York and Dick Sargent. Though the roles may have been stereotyped, she always managed to make them hilariously -- and sometimes disturbingly -- real. Mabel Albertson died of Alzheimer's disease at the age of 81.

Trivia: The son of an immigrant Russian tailor, Aaron Spelling grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Dallas. Traumatized by constant bullying from his WASP schoolmates, Spelling psychosomatically lost the use of his legs at age eight and was confined to bed for a year. He spent his solitude with the written works of Mark Twain, O. Henry, and other masters, developing his own storytelling skills in the process. After wartime service with the Army Air Force, Spelling attended Southern Methodist University, then headed to New York, hoping to find work as an actor and writer. No one was interested in his writing, though he did eventually secure a few good film and TV roles (he was the squirrelly murderer in Vicki, the 1952 remake of 1941's I Wake Up Screaming). He then moved to California in the company of his wife, actress Carolyn Jones. While her career flourished, his dreams of becoming a great writer dwindled, and he reluctantly returned to acting. Spelling's writing skills finally came to the attention of actor/production executive Dick Powell, who hired Spelling as a scripter and producer for Powell's Four Star Productions. Spelling's strong suit during this period was the ability to woo TV-shy film actors into the Four Star fold by writing the sort of parts they'd like to play, but had never been permitted to by the Hollywood typecasting system. After Dick Powell died, Spelling became aligned with comedian/TV mogul Danny Thomas, for whom Spelling produced the hit series The Mod Squad in 1968. His new-found industry clout permitted Spelling to produce one TV hit after another: The Rookies, Starsky & Hutch, S.W.A.T., Charlie's Angels, Dynasty, among others. Whenever accused of merely turning out "schlock," Spelling could point with pride to his highly regarded weekly drama Family, and, much later, to his Emmy win for Day One, a 1989 TV movie about the wartime Manhattan Project. After several years of indifferent projects, Aaron Spelling once more became the king of youth-oriented television with his 1990 series Beverly Hills 90210 (which co-starred his daughter, Tori) and the equally popular follow-up, Melrose Place. Spelling's name continued to grace the credits of numerous youth-oriented soaps on the fledgling WB and UPN networks right up until his death in June of 2006.