Trivia: The most endlessly talked-about and mythologized figure in Hollywood history, Marilyn Monroe remains the ultimate superstar, her rise and fall the stuff that both dreams and nightmares are made of. Innocent, vulnerable, and impossibly alluring, she defined the very essence of screen sexuality. Rising from pin-up girl to international superstar, she was a gifted comedienne whom the camera adored, a luminous and incomparably magnetic screen presence. In short, she had it all, yet her career and life came crashing to a tragic halt, a Cinderella story gone horribly wrong; dead before her time -- her fragile beauty trapped in amber, impervious to the ravages of age -- Monroe endures as the movies' greatest and most beloved icon, a legend eclipsing all others. Born Norma Jean Mortensen (later Baker) on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, she was seemingly destined for a life of tragedy: Her mother spent the majority of her life institutionalized, she was raised in an endless succession of orphanages and foster homes, and she was raped at the age of eight. By 1942, she was married to one Jim Dougherty, subsequently dropping out of school to work in an aircraft production plant; within a year she attempted suicide. When Dougherty entered the military, Baker bleached her hair and began modeling. By 1946, the year of the couple's divorce, she was accredited to a top agency, and her image regularly appeared in national publications. Her photos piqued the interest of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who scheduled her for a screen test at RKO; however, 20th Century Fox beat him to the punch, and soon she was on their payroll at 125 dollars a week.Rechristened Marilyn Monroe, she began studying at the Actors' Lab in Hollywood; however, when virtually nothing but a bit role in the juvenile delinquent picture The Dangerous Years came of her Fox contract, she signed to Columbia in 1948, where she was tutored by drama coach Natasha Lytess. There she starred in Ladies of the Chorus before they too dropped her. After briefly appearing in the 1949 Marx Brothers comedy Love Happy, she earned her first real recognition for her turn as a crooked lawyer's mistress in the 1950 John Huston thriller The Asphalt Jungle. Good notices helped Monroe win a small role in the classic All About Eve, but she otherwise continued to languish relatively unnoticed in bit parts. While she was now back in the Fox stable, studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck failed to recognize her potential, and simply mandated that she appear in any picture in need of a sexy, dumb blonde. In 1952, RKO borrowed Monroe for a lead role in the Barbara Stanwyck picture Clash by Night. The performance brought her significant exposure, which was followed by the publication of a series of nude photos she had posed for two years prior. The resulting scandal made her a celebrity, and seemingly overnight she was the talk of Hollywood. Zanuck quickly cast her as a psychotic babysitter in a quickie project titled Don't Bother to Knock, and after a series of minor roles in other similarly ill-suited vehicles, Monroe starred in 1953's Niagara, which took full advantage of her sexuality to portray her as a sultry femme fatale. However, lighter, more comedic fare was Monroe's strong suit, as evidenced by her breakout performance in the Howard Hawks musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Like its follow-up How to Marry a Millionaire (just the second film shot in the new CinemaScope process), the picture was among the year's top-grossing ventures, and her newfound stardom was cemented. After starring in the 1954 Western River of No Return, Monroe continued to make headlines by marrying New York Yankees baseball great Joe DiMaggio. She also made a much-publicized appearance singing for American troops in Korea, and -- in a telling sign of things to come -- created a flap by failing to show up on the set of the movie The Girl in Pink Tights. As far back as 1952, Monroe had earned a reputation for her late on-set arrivals, but The Girl in Pink Tights was the first project she boycotted outright on the weakness of the material. The studio suspended her, and only after agreeing to instead star in the musical There's No Business Like Show Business did she return to work. After starring in the 1955 Billy Wilder comedy The Seven Year Itch, Monroe again caused a stir, this time for refusing the lead in How to Be Very, Very Popular. In response, she fled to New York to study under Lee Strasburg at the Actors' Studio in an attempt to forever rid herself of the dumb blonde stereotype. In New York, Monroe met playwright Arthur Miller, whom she wed following the disintegration of her marriage to DiMaggio. In the meantime, her relationship with Fox executives continued to sour, but after pressure from stockholders -- and in light of her own financial difficulties -- she was signed to a new, non-exclusive seven-year deal which not only bumped her salary to 100,000 dollars per film, but also allowed her approval of directors. For her first film under the new contract, Monroe delivered her most accomplished performance to date in Joshua Logan's 1956 adaptation of the William Inge Broadway hit Bus Stop. She then starred opposite Laurence Olivier in 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl. Two years later, she co-starred in Wilder's classic Some Like It Hot, her most popular film yet. However, despite her success, Monroe's life was in disarray -- her marriage to Miller was crumbling, and her long-standing reliance on alcohol and drugs continued to grow more and more serious. After starring in George Cukor's Let's Make Love with Yves Montand, Monroe began work on the Miller-penned The Misfits; the film was her final completed project, as she frequently clashed with director John Huston and co-stars Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, often failed to appear on-set, and was hospitalized several times for depression. In light of her erratic behavior on the set of the follow-up, the ironically titled Something's Got to Give, she was fired 32 days into production and slapped with a lawsuit. Just two months later, on August 5, 1962, Monroe was dead. The official cause was an overdose of barbiturates, although the truth will likely never be revealed. Her alleged affairs with President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, have been the focus of much speculation regarding the events leading to her demise, but many decades later fact and fantasy are virtually impossible to separate. In death, as in life, the legend of Marilyn Monroe continues to grow beyond all expectation.

Trivia: The son of a traveling salesman, actor Richard Widmark had lived in six different Midwestern towns by the time he was a teenager. He entered Illinois' Lake Forest College with plans to earn a law degree, but gravitated instead to the college's theater department. He stayed on after graduation as a drama instructor, then headed to New York to find professional work. From 1938 through 1947, Widmark was one of the busiest and most successful actors in radio, appearing in a wide variety of roles from benign to menacing, and starring in the daytime soap opera "Front Page Farrell." He did so well in radio that he'd later quip, "I am the only actor who left a mansion and swimming pool to head to Hollywood." Widmark's first stage appearance was in Long Island summer stock; in 1943, he starred in the Broadway production of Kiss and Tell, and was subsequently top billed in four other New York shows. When director Henry Hathaway was looking for Broadway-based actors to appear in his melodrama Kiss of Death (1947), Widmark won the role of giggling, psychopathic gangster Tommy Udo. And the moment his character pushed a wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase, a movie star was born. (Widmark always found it amusing that he'd become an audience favorite by playing a homicidal creep, noting with only slightly less amusement that, after the release of the film, women would stop him on the street and smack his face, yelling, "Take that, you little squirt!") The actor signed a 20th Century Fox contract and moved to Hollywood on the proviso that he not be confined to villainous roles; the first of his many sympathetic, heroic movie parts was in 1949's Down to the Sea in Ships. After his Fox contract ended in 1954, Widmark freelanced in such films as The Cobweb (1955) and Saint Joan (1957), the latter representing one of the few times that the actor was uncomfortably miscast (as the childish Dauphin). In 1957, Widmark formed his own company, Heath Productions; its first effort was Time Limit, directed by Widmark's old friend Karl Malden. Widmark spent most of the 1960s making films like The Alamo (1960) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), so that he could afford to appear in movies that put forth a political or sociological message. These included Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Bedford Incident (1965). A longtime television holdout, Widmark made his small-screen debut in Vanished (1970), the first two-part TV movie. He later starred in a 1972 series based upon his 1968 theatrical film Madigan. And, in 1989, he was successfully teamed with Faye Dunaway in the made-for-cable Cold Sassy Tree. Richard Widmark was married for 55 years to Jean Hazelwood, a former actress and occasional screenwriter who wrote the script for her husband's 1961 film The Secret Ways (1961). Their daughter Anne married '60s baseball star Sandy Koufax. Widmark died at age 93 in 2008, of health complications following a fractured vertebra.

Trivia: A dark-haired, earthy beauty and a versatile actress, Anne Bancroft has actually had two film careers. The first, which took place during the 1950s, was generally undistinguished and featured her in films that usually failed to fully utilize her talents. The second, which began in the early '60s, established her as an actress of great acclaim in films like The Miracle Worker and granted her screen immortality with roles such as that of the iconic Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. A first generation Italian-American hailing from the Bronx, Bancroft (born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano) was four years old when she began taking acting and dancing lessons. Billing herself as Anne Marno, she began appearing on television in 1950. Two years later she signed a contract with Fox and launched a six-year career in second-string Westerns and crime dramas that began with Don't Bother to Knock in 1952. By 1958, Bancroft had enough of Hollywood and turned her attentions to Broadway, where she spent the next five years. She proved her mettle as a serious dramatic actress by winning a Tony for Two for the Seesaw in 1958. Two years later, she won her second Tony and a New York Drama Critics Award for her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. Armed with these triumphs, Bancroft returned to Hollywood to appear in the movie version of The Miracle Worker (1962), reprising her role opposite Patty Duke who played Helen Keller. Her performance earned her an Oscar for Best Actress; unable to attend the ceremony because she was performing on Broadway in Mother Courage, she was presented with the award by Joan Crawford a week later on the Broadway stage. Bancroft followed this victory with a string of emotional dramas that included The Pumpkin Eater, which was released in 1964, the same year she married filmmaker/comedian Mel Brooks. Just when it would look like she would be typecast in such dramas, Bancroft showed up in Mike Nichols' seminal comedy The Graduate, playing Mrs. Robinson, the ultimate "older woman," to Dustin Hoffman's confused Benjamin Braddock. Her role in the landmark film won her an Oscar nomination, to say nothing of a permanent dose of notoriety. Although Bancroft seemed destined for a stellar career and she remained one of the more well-respected actresses in Hollywood, a long string of so-so films kept her from reaching major stardom. Still, Bancroft turned in a number of memorable performances in films such as The Turning Point (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), To Be or Not to Be (her 1983 collaboration with husband Brooks), Agnes of God (1985), 84 Charing Cross Road (1986), and Torch Song Trilogy (1988). In 1980, Bancroft made her debut as a director/screenwriter in the darkly comic Dom DeLuise vehicle Fatso. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, Bancroft continued to be visible onscreen, appearing in films like How to Make an American Quilt (1995), Home for the Holidays (1995), and Keeping the Faith (2000). Sadly, she became stricken with uterine cancer and succumbed to the disease in 2005. Her last performance would come postumously with a voice-role in the animated adventure Delgo.

Trivia: Donna Corcoran was the second oldest child of MGM studio policeman Bill Corcoran. When the call went out for child extras for an upcoming MGM production, Corcoran sent Donna down to audition, thereby launching his daughter's six-year film career. Reportedly, screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley selected Corcoran for the important role of Bridget White in Angels in the Outfield (1951) after sitting behind the girl at Mass. Outside of Angels, Corcoran's showiest film assignment was on loan-out to 20th Century Fox, in Don't Bother to Knock in which the poor child was jeopardized by psychotic baby-sitter Marilyn Monroe. After that, her screen roles dwindled in importance. One of her last appearances, as a Quaker child in Fox's Violent Saturday (1955), went uncredited. Featured in that film with Corcoran were her siblings Kevin Corcoran, who went on to a sizeable career at Disney under the nickname of "Moochie," and Noreen Corcoran, who would play John Forsythe's niece in the popular TV sitcom Bachelor Father (1957-1963). By the late '50s, Donna Corcoran decided to retire from show business altogether, leaving the field open to her brothers, Kevin, Brian, and Hugh, and her sisters, Noreen and Kerry (her older brother, Bill Corcoran Jr., became a dentist after briefly pursuing his own acting career).

Trivia: The younger sister (20 years younger) of actor James Cagney, Jeanne Cagney inaugurated her own acting and modelling career in the late 1930s, making her stage bow at the Pasadena Playhouse. While all the Cagneys looked out for one another both personally and professionally, Jeanne was able to succeed on her own merits. Still, some of her most memorable film work was concentrated in brother Jimmy's films, notably Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and The Time of Your Life (1948). Perhaps her best film role was the trashy femme fatale who leads Mickey Rooney down the path to perdition in Quicksand (1950). Jeanne Cagney's television work included a lengthy stint as fashion commentator on the daytime audience-participation series Queen for a Day.

Trivia: Raised on a ranch near the Arizona border, American actress Lurene Tuttle took acting lessons in Phoenix while still a child. Feisty and naturally funny, she found work with Murphy's Comedians, a vaudeville troupe, then played traditional ingenues in a San Antonio stock company. Though she never appeared on Broadway, Tuttle was a busy stage actress throughout the '20s and '30s. When stock work dried up in the Depression, Ms. Tuttle entered radio, where she became one the busiest actresses in the business, playing everything from sugary high schoolers to hardbitten gun molls. Many of her fans feel that her best radio work was as Effie Perrine, the effusive and efficient secretary on The Adventures of Sam Spade, in which Howard Duff played private eye Spade. Concentrating on films and television as big-time radio faded, Tuttle played small character parts in several movies and was a regular on the TV sitcoms Life with Father, Father of the Bride and Julia. One of the actress' final performances was in the post-apocalyptic film drama Testament (1983), in which she was reunited with Leon Ames, her Life with Father and Father of the Bride costar. In private life, Lurene Tuttle was the wife of radio actor/announcer Mel Ruick, and the mother of musical comedy actress Barbara Ruick.

Trivia: American actor Elisha Cook Jr. was the son of an influential theatrical actor/writer/producer who died early in the 20th Century. The younger Cook was in vaudeville and stock by the time he was fourteen-years old. In 1928, Cook enjoyed critical praise for his performance in the play Her Unborn Child, a performance he would repeat for his film debut in the 1930 film version of the play. The first ten years of Cook's Hollywood career found the slight, baby-faced actor playing innumerable college intellectuals and hapless freshmen (he's given plenty of screen time in 1936's Pigskin Parade). In 1940, Cook was cast as a man wrongly convicted of murder in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and so was launched the second phase of Cook's career as Helpless Victim. The actor's ability to play beyond this stereotype was first tapped by director John Huston, who cast Cook as Wilmer, the hair-trigger homicidal "gunsel" of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941). So far down on the Hollywood totem pole that he wasn't billed in the Falcon opening credits, Cook suddenly found his services much in demand. Sometimes he'd be shot full of holes (as in the closing gag of 1941's Hellzapoppin'), sometimes he'd fall victim to some other grisly demise (poison in The Big Sleep [1946]), and sometimes he'd be the squirrelly little guy who turned out to be the last-reel murderer (I Wake Up Screaming [1941]; The Falcon's Alibi [1946]). At no time, however, was Cook ever again required to play the antiseptic "nerd" characters that had been his lot in the 1930s. Seemingly born to play "film noir" characters, Cook had one of his best extended moments in Phantom Lady (1944), wherein he plays a set of drums with ever-increasing orgiastic fervor. Another career high point was his death scene in Shane (1953); Cook is shot down by hired gun Jack Palance and plummets to the ground like a dead rabbit. A near-hermit in real life who lived in a remote mountain home and had to receive his studio calls by courier, Cook nonetheless never wanted for work, even late in life. Fans of the 1980s series Magnum PI will remember Cook in a recurring role as a the snarling elderly mobster Ice Pick. Having appeared in so many "cult" films, Elisha Cook Jr. has always been one of the most eagerly sought out interview subjects by film historians.

Trivia: Ohio-born actor Jim Backus's stage career began in summer stock, where, according to his then-roommate Keenan Wynn, he was as well known for his prowess with the ladies as he was for his on-stage versatility. Backus continued acting in New York, vaudeville, and especially radio in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a regular on radio's The Alan Young Show, portraying Eastern Seaboard snob Hubert Updike III, the prototype for his "Thurston Howell III" characterization on the 1960s TV sitcom Gilligan's Island. In 1949, Backus provided the voice of the nearsighted Mr. Magoo for the first time in the UPA cartoon Ragtime Bear; the actor later claimed that he based this character on his own businessman father. Also in 1949, Backus made his first film appearance in Easy Living, which starred his childhood friend Victor Mature. Backus' most famous screen role was as James Dean's weak-willed, vacillating father in Rebel without a Cause. On television, Backus co-starred with Joan Davis on the I Love Lucy-like 1950s sitcom I Married Joan, and played the leading role of fast-talking news service editor Mike O'Toole on the 1960 syndicated series Hot Off the Wire (aka The Jim Backus Show). In the 1960s, Backus continued to provide the voice of Mr. Magoo in several TV projects, and was seen on-camera in the aforementioned Gilligan's Island, as well as the 1968 TV version of Blondie, wherein Backus played Mr. Dithers. Co-starring as Mrs. Dithers was Backus' wife Henny, who also collaborated with her husband on several amusing volumes of memoirs. Jim and Henny Backus' last two books, Backus Strikes Back and Forgive Us Our Digressions, commented humorously on a deadly serious subject: Parkinson's Disease, the ailment which would eventually cost Backus his life at the age of 76.

Trivia: Actress Verna Felton had spent years honing her craft on the stage before she established her reputation on radio. Felton's contributions to the airwaves ranged from the part of Mme. DeFarge in a Lux Radio Theatre version of Tale of Two Cities to the recurring role of the Mean Widdle Kid's grandma on The Red Skelton Show. After the death of her actor/husband Lee Millar in 1941, Felton began her screen career. Her movie assignments consisted largely of voiceover work for Walt Disney's animated features: she can be heard as a gossiping elephant in Dumbo (1941), the Fairy Godmother who sings "Bibbidy Bobbidy Boo" in Cinderella (1950), the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Flora the good fairy in Sleeping Beauty (1959), and still another elephant in The Jungle Book (1967). She carried her voiceover activities into television, supplying the voice of Fred Flintstone's eternally nagging mother-in-law in The Flintstones (1960-66). Verna Felton is best-known to TV fans as Hilda Crocker on the popular sitcoms December Bride (1954-58) and Pete and Gladys (1960-62).

Trivia: Dapper, rotund character actor Don Beddoe was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati, where his father headed the Conservatory of Music. Beddoe's professional career began in Cincinnati, first as a journalist and then an actor. He made his Broadway debut in the unfortunately titled Nigger Rich, which starred Spencer Tracy. Beddoe became a fixture of Columbia Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s, playing minor roles in "A"s like Golden Boy, supporting parts ranging from cops to conventioneers in the studio's "B" features, and flustered comedy foil to the antics of such Columbia short subject stars as The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde and Charley Chase. Beddoe kept busy until the mid-1980s with leading roles in 1961's The Boy Who Caught a Crook and Saintly Sinners, and (as a singing leprechaun) in 1962's Jack the Giant Killer.

Trivia: Joan's lookalike younger sister, Gloria Blondell discovered that there was only room for one saucer-eyed, wisecracking blonde in Hollywood and although she enjoyed a rare co-starring turn opposite Ronald Reagan in Warners' Accidents Will Happen (1938), her other roles were minor. In the 1950s, she became a regular on the television series Life With Riley.

Trivia: American actress Grace Hayle spent most of her screen time playing bejeweled dowagers, huffy department store customers and aggressive lady journalists. Hayle proved a worthy Margaret Dumont type in Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (1933), supplied laughs as a ruddy-faced cyclist in The Women (1939) and played a most unlikely rhumba dancer in Two-Faced Woman (1940). One of her few credited roles was the long-suffering Madame Napaloni in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). Grace Hayle remained in Hollywood long enough to appear in an early Elvis Presley film.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Vic Perrin's first significant stage credit was in the touring company of Helen Hayes' Victoria Regina. While working as a news announcer with the ABC radio network in the mid-'40s, he decided to return to acting, and within a few years was one of radio's busiest character players. He was one of the regulars on the long-running soap opera One Man's Family, and could also be heard on such prestigious anthologies as Escape and Suspense. He is most closely associated with the original radio versions of Dragnet and Gunsmoke, writing several scripts for the latter series. He continued his association with Dragnet creator Jack Webb into the TV versions of the 1950s and 1960s, playing a wide variety of kindly priests, two-bit crooks, soft-spoken detectives, suburban alcoholics, liberal professors, and homicidal maniacs. In films from 1952, he was seen as a publicity-seeking gunman in The Racket (1953), a gay art director in Forever Female (1956), and a bearded pedant in The Bubble (1969), among other films. A prolific voice-over specialist, Vic Perrin provided countless characterizations for such television cartoon series as Jonny Quest and Fantastic Four; he is perhaps best known for his two-year stint as the unseen Control Voice ("There is nothing wrong with your television set?") on TV's The Outer Limits (1963-1965).

Trivia: Starting his Hollywood career in or around 1951, American actor Robert Foulk was alternately passive and authoritative in such westerns as Last of the Badmen (1957), The Tall Stranger (1957), The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Cast a Long Shadow (1958). He remained a frontiersmen for his year-long stint as bartender Joe Kingston on the Joel McCrea TV shoot-em-up Wichita Town (1959) (though he reverted to modern garb as the Anderson family's next-door neighbor in the '50s sitcom Father Knows Best). In non-westerns, Foulk usually played professional men, often uniformed. Some of his parts were fleeting enough not to have any designation but "character bit" (vide The Love Bug [1968]), but otherwise there was no question Foulk was in charge: as a doctor in Tammy and the Doctor (1963), a police official in Bunny O'Hare (1971) or a railroad conductor in Emperor of the North (1973). Robert Foulk was given extensive screen time in the Bowery Boys' Hold That Hypnotist (1957), as the title character; and in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), playing straight as Sheriff Glick opposite such "Merrie Men" as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin Sammy Davis Jr. and Bing Crosby.

Trivia: Olan Soule was so familiar as a character actor in movies and television during the 1950s and 1960s -- and right into the 1980s -- that audiences could be forgiven for not even reckoning with his 25-year career on radio. Soule was born in 1909 in La Harpe, Illinois, to a family that reportedly could trace its ancestry back to three passengers on the Mayflower. He began acting in tent shows in his teens, and made his first appearance on radio in 1926. With his rich, expressive voice -- which frequently seemed to belong to characters that audiences thought of as more physically imposing than the slightly built, 135-pound actor -- he quickly found himself in demand for a multitude of roles. Soule ultimately became closely associated with two series, spending more than a decade on the radio soap opera Bachelor's Children, and a nine-year run on The First Nighter, starting in the 1940s. He made the jump to television in 1949, but even in the visual medium his voice was initially part of his fortune -- one of his early movie assignments was as the narrator of the feature film Beyond The Forest (1949), starring Bette Davis. And many of those early on-screen assignments in features were uncredited, such as his appearance as Mr. Krull in Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Still, Soule did attract attention, with his signature thin physique and the fact that he seemed to show up dozens of times a year, all over television and in movies. By the start of the 1960s, he'd amassed literally hundreds of screen appearances, making him one of the most recognizable character actors of the time period.One producer who took full advantage of Soule's skills early and often was Jack Webb, himself a radio veteran, who cast him in well over two dozen episodes of the original in 1950s Dragnet television series, principally in the recurring role of Ray Pinker. When Webb revived Dragnet in the second half of the 1960s, Soule was no less active, showing up at least a half dozen times each season, often in the role of police-lab scientist Ray Murray. Soule's studious, cerebral portrayal of Murray was reminiscent of the lab technician portrayed by Webb himself in He Walked By Night, the movie that led Webb to create Dragnet in the first place. In between those assignments, Soule appeared in dozens of features and was seen on the small screen in everything from Bonanza and Petticoat Junction to My Three Sons and the Herschel Bernardi series Arnie. Later in his career, Soule returned to his roots, lending his vocal talent to the animated series Super Friends.

Trivia: Character actor Emmett Vogan appeared in films from 1934 through 1956. A peppery gentleman with steel-rimmed glasses and an executive air, Vogan appeared in hundreds of films in a variety of small "take charge" roles. Evidently he had a few friends in the casting department of Universal Pictures, inasmuch as he showed up with regularity in that studio's comedies, serials and B-westerns. Comedy fans will recognize Emmett Vogan as the engineer partner of nominal leading man Charles Lang in W.C. Fields' Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and as the prosecuting attorney in the flashback sequences of Laurel and Hardy's The Bullfighters (1945).

Trivia: The faces of most movie extras are unmemorable blurs in the public's memory. Not so the elegant, statuesque Bess Flowers, who was crowned by appreciative film buffs as "Queen of the Hollywood Dress Extras." After studying drama (against her father's wishes) at the Carnegie Inst of Technology, Flowers intended to head to New York, but at the last moment opted for Hollywood. She made her first film in 1922, subsequently appearing prominently in such productions as Hollywood (1922) and Chaplin's Woman of Paris (1923). Too tall for most leading men, Flowers found her true niche as a supporting actress. By the time talkies came around, Flowers was mostly playing bits in features, though her roles were more sizeable in two-reel comedies; she was a special favorite of popular short-subject star Charley Chase. Major directors like Frank Lloyd always found work for Flowers because of her elegant bearing and her luminescent gift for making the people around her look good. While generally an extra, Flowers enjoyed substantial roles in such films as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's Private Worlds and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937). In 1947's Song of the Thin Man, the usually unheralded Flowers was afforded screen billing. Her fans particularly cherish Flowers' bit as a well-wisher in All About Eve (1950), in which she breaks her customary screen silence to utter "I'm so happy for you, Eve." Flowers was married twice, first to Cecil B. DeMille's legendary "right hand man" Cullen Tate, then to Columbia studio manager William S. Holman. After her retirement, Bess Flowers made one last on-camera appearance in 1974 when she was interviewed by NBC's Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Authoritative, sandy-haired character actor Willis Bouchey abandoned a busy Broadway career in 1951 to try his luck in films. Bouchey's striking resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower enabled him to play roles calling for quick decisiveness and unquestioned leadership; he even showed up as the President of the United States in 1952's Red Planet Mars, one year before the "real" Ike ascended to that office. The actor's many judge, executive, military, and town-marshal characterizations could also convey weakness and vacillation, but for the most part there was no question who was in charge when Bouchey was on the scene. A loyal and steadfast member of the John Ford stock company, Willis Bouchey was seen in such Ford productions as The Long Gray Line (1955), The Last Hurrah (1958), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1962).