Trivia: Both an accomplished character actor and leading man, Ben Gazzara made a name for himself on the stage, screen, and television. The son of an Italian immigrant, Gazzara was born in New York City on August 28, 1930. He channeled his excess energy into acting after dropping out of the engineering department at the City College of New York. After studying at the Actors Studio and with private coach Erwin Piscator, Gazzara exploded onto the Broadway scene in 1953, playing warped military academy upper-classman Jocko De Paris in End as a Man. He went on to create the role of Brick in the original 1955 production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He later starred in Michael V. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain, only to see his role go to Don Murray in the 1957 movie version, just as Paul Newman would portray Brick in the 1958 film version of Cat. Fortunately, Gazzara was permitted top film billing in 1957, reprising his stage role in End as a Man in the heavily laundered film-version, The Strange One. Two years later, Gazzara played arrogant murder-trial defendant Lieutenant Manion -- the one with the "irresistible impulse" -- in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, slyly stealing scenes from the film's "official" star, James Stewart. After this promising beginning in films, Gazzara had trouble finding adequate movie roles. He turned to television in 1963, first as a co-star with Chuck Connors in the experimental 90-minute crime weekly Arrest and Trial. In 1965, Gazzara starred as Paul Bryan, an ex-lawyer with only a short time to live, on the TV popular series Run for Your Life; in spite of his character's fatal illness, Gazzara was able to remain with Run for three healthy seasons. With 1970's Husbands, Gazzara made the first of four film appearances under the direction of his old Actors Studio buddy John Cassavetes. Four years later, Gazzara starred as the Leon Uris counterpart in television's first miniseries, QB VII (1974). In the decades that followed, Gazzara took roles that, while not always prestigious, permitted him ample creative elbow room; a fascinating example of this was his bisexual villain in the Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House (1989). In 1998, he did some of the best work of his career portraying a series of beautifully dysfunctional characters in Buffalo '66, Happiness, and the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. The following year, he traveled into the realm of slick international caper with a supporting role in The Thomas Crown Affair, and then returned to his New York roots to portray the leader of organized crime in the Bronx in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. Gazzara remained active up through the end of the following decade, continuing to make onscreen appearances even after severe throat cancer that ravaged his vocal chords. He tackled two of his last assignments in the 2006 omnibus picture Paris, je t'aime and the 2008 comedy-drama Looking for Palladin, prior to his death at age 86 in early February 2012.Gazzara was divorced from the late actress Janice Rule.

Trivia: Actress/model Susan Blakely, the daughter of a U.S. Army colonel, was born in Germany and raised in ports of call ranging from Korea to Hawaii to Texas. After a year at the University of Texas, Blakely struck out for New York, where she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse while pursuing a modeling career. By 1972, she was pulling down 100,000 dollars a year for her appearances on magazine covers and TV advertisements; she also began showing up in bit parts in films like Savages (1972) and The Way We Were (1973). Larger roles came her way in The Lords of Flatbush (1974), Report to the Commissioner (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Shampoo (1975). It was a television production that brought her full-fledged stardom: in 1977, Blakely appeared as Julie Prescott in the ratings-busting miniseries Rich Man Poor Man. She continued to flourish in TV movies into the 1990s, sinking her dazzling teeth into such meaty roles as Eva Braun in The Bunker (1981), Frances Farmer in Will There Really Be a Morning? (1982), and attorney Leslie Abramson in Honor Thy Father and Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Brothers (1994). Susan Blakely has been married to screenwriter Todd Merer and producer Steve Jaffe.

Trivia: Street-smart leading actor Harry Guardino entered films in 1952 after several years of knocking around the New York stages. The best of his early film roles was Cary Grant's comic handyman in 1958's Houseboat. Guardino worked extensively in European productions in the 1960s, playing such parts as Barabbas in 1961's King of Kings. Among Harry Guardino's many TV assignments were the title role in the 1964 New York-based series The Reporter and the "Bogart/Bond" hero on the syndicated 1971 weekly Monty Nash. He made his final film appearance in Fist of Honor (1991).

Trivia: Perhaps better known to the general public as an actor, John Cassavetes' true artistic legacy derives from his work behind the camera; arguably, he was America's first truly independent filmmaker, an iconoclastic maverick whose movies challenged the assumptions of the cinematic form. Obsessed with bringing to the screen the "small feelings" he believed that American society at large attempted to suppress, Cassavetes' work emphasized his actors above all else, favoring character examination over traditional narrative storytelling to explore the realities of the human condition. A pioneer of self-financing and self-distribution, he led the way for filmmakers to break free of Hollywood control, perfecting an improvisational, cinéma vérité aesthetic all his own.The son of Greek immigrants, Cassavetes was born December 9, 1929, in New York City. After attending public school on Long Island, he later studied English at both Mohawk College and Colgate University prior to enrolling at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon graduating in 1950, he signed on with a Rhode Island stock company while attempting to land roles on Broadway and made his film debut in Gregory Ratoff's Taxi in 1953. A series of television roles followed, with Cassavetes frequently typecast as a troubled youth. By 1955, he was playing similar parts in the movies, appearing in pictures ranging from Night Holds Terror to Crime in the Streets. Cassavetes' career as a filmmaker began most unexpectedly. In 1957, he was appearing on Night People, a New York-based radio show, to promote his recent performance in the Martin Ritt film Edge of the City. While talking with host Jean Shepherd, Cassavetes abruptly announced that he felt the film was a disappointment and claimed he could make a better movie himself; at the close of the program, he challenged listeners interested in an alternative to Hollywood formulas to send in a dollar or two to fund his aspirations, promising he would make "a movie about people." No one was more surprised than Cassavetes himself when, over the course of the next several days, the radio station received over 2,000 dollars in dollar bills and loose change; true to his word, he began production within the week, despite having no idea exactly what kind of film he wanted to make.Assembling a group of students from his acting workshop, Cassavetes began work on what was later titled Shadows. The production had no script or professional crew, only rented lights and a 16 mm camera. Without any prior experience behind the camera, Cassavetes and his cast made mistake after mistake, resulting in a soundtrack which rendered the actors' dialogue completely inaudible (consequently creating a three-year delay in release while a new soundtrack was dubbed). A sprawling, wholly improvised piece about a family of black Greenwich Village jazz musicians -- the oldest brother dark-skinned, the younger brother and sister light enough to pass for white -- the film staked out the kind of fringe society to which Cassavetes' work would consistently return, posing difficult questions about love and identity.Unable to find an American distributor, the completed Shadows appeared in 1960, and was widely hailed as a groundbreaking accomplishment. After receiving the Critics Award at that year's Venice Film Festival, it finally was released in the U.S. with the backing of a British distributor. The film's success brought Cassavetes to the attention of Paramount, who hired him to direct the 1961 drama Too Late Blues with Bobby Darin. The movie was a financial and critical disaster, and he was quickly dropped from his contract. Landing at United Artists, he directed A Child Is Waiting for producer Stanley Kramer. After the two men had a falling out, Cassavetes was removed from the project, which Kramer then drastically re-cut, prompting a bitter Cassavetes to wash his hands of the finished product. Stung by his experiences as a Hollywood filmmaker, he vowed to thereafter finance and control his own work, turning away from directing for several years to earn the money necessary to fund his endeavors. A string of acting jobs in films ranging from Don Siegel's The Killers to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby to Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor) wrapped up Cassavetes for all of the mid-'60s, but in 1968 he returned to filmmaking with Faces, the first of his pictures to star his wife, the brilliant actress Gena Rowlands. Another edgy drama shot in Cassavetes' trademark cinéma vérité style, Faces was a tremendous financial and critical success, garnering a pair of Oscar nominations as well as winning five awards at the Venice Film Festival; its success again brought Hollywood calling, but this time the director entertained only those offers affording him absolute creative control and final cut.After coming to terms with Columbia, Cassavetes began work on 1970's Husbands, which co-starred Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. After helming 1971's Minnie and Moskowitz for Universal, he turned to self-financing, creating his masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence, which earned Rowlands an Academy Award nomination in the Best Actress category. With a story he developed with longtime fan Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes next turned to 1976's film noir The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; though also reissued two years later in a truncated version, the picture failed to find an audience, and was barely even circulated. When the same fate befell 1978's Opening Night, Cassavetes was forced to return to Columbia in 1980 to make Gloria.Four years passed before the director's next film, Love Streams. His subsequent effort was 1985's aptly titled Big Trouble, a comedy already in production when Cassavetes took over for writer/director Andrew Bergman, who had abruptly quit the project. The finished film was subsequently recut by its producers, and Cassavetes publicly declared it a disaster. Upon completing the picture, he became ill; regardless, he continued working, turning to the theatrical stage when he could no longer find funding for his films. A Woman of Mystery, a three-act play which was his final fully realized work, premiered in Los Angeles in 1987. On February 3, 1989, John Cassavetes died. Son Nick continued in his father's footsteps, working as an actor as well as the director of the films Unhook the Stars (1996) and She's So Lovely (1997), the latter an adaptation of one of his father's unfilmed screenplays.

Trivia: An icon of machismo and Hollywood action heroism, Sylvester Stallone is responsible for creating two characters who have become a part of the American cultural lexicon: Rocky Balboa, the no-name boxer who overcame all odds to become a champion, and John Rambo, the courageous soldier who specialized in violent rescues and revenge. Both characters are reflections of Stallone's personal experiences and the battles he waged during his transition from a poor kid in Hell's Kitchen to one of the world's most popular stars. According to Stallone, his was not a happy childhood. On July 6, 1946, in the aforementioned part of Manhattan, Sylvester Enzio Stallone was born to a chorine and an Italian immigrant. A forceps accident during his birth severed a facial nerve, leaving Stallone with parts of his lip, tongue, and chin paralyzed. In doing so, the accident imprinted Stallone with some of the most recognizable components of his persona: the distinctively slurred (and some say often nearly incomprehensible) speech patterns, drooping lower lip, and crooked left eye that have been eagerly seized upon by caricaturists. To compound these defects, Stallone was a homely, sickly child who once suffered from rickets. His parents were constantly at war and struggling to support Stallone and his younger brother, Frank Stallone (who became a B-movie actor). The elder brother spent most of his first five years in the care of foster homes. Stallone has said that his interest in acting came from his attempts to get attention and affection from those strangers who tried to raise him. When he was five, his parents moved their family to Silver Spring, MD, but once again spent their time bickering and largely ignored their children. Following his parents' divorce in 1957, the 11-year-old Stallone remained with his stern father. The actor's teen years proved even more traumatic. As Stallone seemed willing to do just about anything for attention, however negative, he had already been enrolled in 12 schools and expelled several times for his behavior problems. His grades were dreadful and his classmates picked on him for being different. Stallone coped by becoming a risk taker and developing elaborate fantasies in which he presented himself as a brave hero and champion of the underdog. At age 15, Stallone moved to Philadelphia to be with his mother and her new husband. By this time, he had begun lifting weights and took up fencing, football, and the discus. He also started appearing in school plays. Following graduation, Stallone received an athletic scholarship for the American College of Switzerland. While there he was a girls' athletic coach and in his spare time starred in a school production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The experience inspired him to become an actor and after returning stateside, he started studying drama at the University of Miami until he decided to move to New York in 1969. While working a variety of odd jobs, Stallone auditioned frequently but only occasionally found stage work, most of which was off-Broadway in shows like the all-nude Score and Rain. He even resorted to appearing in the softcore porn film, Party at Kitty's and Studs, which was later repackaged as The Italian Stallion after Stallone became famous. Stallone's face and even his deep voice were factors in his constant rejection for stage and film roles. He did nab a bit role in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971), but after he was turned down for The Godfather (1971), Stallone became discouraged. Rather than give up, however, Stallone again developed a coping mechanism -- he turned to writing scripts, lots of scripts, some of which were produced. He still auditioned and landed a starring role in Rebel (1973). During his writing phase, he married actress Sasha Czack in late 1974 and they moved to California in the hopes of building acting careers. His first minor success came when he wrote the screenplay for and co-starred in the nostalgic Lords of Flatbush (1974) with Henry Winkler. The film's modest success resulted in Stallone's getting larger roles, but he still didn't attract much notice until he penned the screenplay for Rocky. The story was strong and well written and studios were eager to buy the rights, but Stallone stipulated that he would be the star and must receive a share of the profits. Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff accepted Stallone's terms and Rocky (1976) went on to become one of the biggest movie hits of all time. It also won several Oscars including ones for Best Picture, Best Director for John Avildsen, and a Best Actor nomination for Stallone. Suddenly Stallone found himself on Hollywood's A-list, a status he has largely maintained over the years. In addition to writing four sequels to Rocky, he penned three Rambo films (First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Rambo 3) and F.I.S.T. (1979). Stallone made his directorial debut with Paradise Alley, which he filmed in Hell's Kitchen. He also wrote and directed but did not appear in the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive (1983). In addition, Stallone has continued to appear in the films of other directors, notably Demolition Man (1993), Judge Dredd (1995), and Copland (1997), a film in which he allowed himself to gain 30 pounds in order to more accurately portray an aging sheriff. Occasionally, Stallone has ventured out of the action genre and into lighter fare with such embarrassing efforts as Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) and Oscar (1991), which did not fare well at the box office. Following these missteps, Stallone found greater success with the animated adventure Antz (1998), a film in which his very distinctive voice, if not his very distinctive physique, was very much a part. Stallone was back in shape for the 2000 remake of Get Carter and hit the race tracks in the following year in the CART racing thriller Driven. Though the early 2000s found his career sputtering along with such forgettable duds as D-Tox and Avenging Angelo, Stallone took his career into his own hands by returning to the director's chair to resurrect two of his most iconic characters. Lacing his boxing gloves up once again for Rocky Balboa, the veteran action star proved he still had some fight left in him, and venturing into the jungles of Burma as John Rambo just two years later, he proved that hard "R" action could still sell in the era where most filmmakers were playing it "PG-13"safe. That trend continued with Stallone's all-star action opus The Expendables in 2010, with the success of that film leading to a sequel (with Simon West taking over directorial duties) featuring even more action icons in 2012. Incredibly, not even a broken neck suffered during production of The Expendables proved capable of slowing Stallone down, and 2013 found him teaming with Walter Hill for Bullet to the Head -- which followed a cop and a killer as they teamed up to take down a mutual enemy. In 2015, Stallone returned to Rocky Balboa once more, but this time as a supporting character in the spin-off film Creed. He earned rave reviews and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, making him only the sixth performer to be nominated for playing the same character in two separate films.

Trivia: Small, sad eyed actor, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Actor Frank Campanella's physical form almost single-handedly defined his Hollywood typecasting. A 6' 5" barrel-chested Italian with a great, hulking presence and memorably stark facial features, Campanella excelled as a character player, almost invariably appearing as toughs and heavies. Born to a piano builder father who played in the orchestras of Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Al Jolson, Campanella studied music exhaustively as a young man, and trained as a concert pianist, but discovered a rivaling passion for drama and entered Manhattan College as an acting major. Campanella's career as an actor began somewhat uncharacteristically, on a light and jovial note, by playing Mook the Moon Man during the first season of the Dumont network's infamous and much-loved kiddie show Captain Video and his Video Rangers (1949-1954). One- and two-episode stints on many American television programs followed for Campanella, most on themes of crime and law enforcement, including Inside Detective (1952), The Man Behind the Badge (1954), Danger (1954), and episodes of the anthology series Playwrights '56 (1956), Studio One (1956), and Suspicion (1957) that called for gritty, thuggish, urban types. During the 1960s, Campanella sought out the same kinds roles in feature films -- a path he pursued for several decades. Turns included John Frankenheimer's 1966 Seconds (as the Man in the Station); Mel Brooks' 1968 The Producers (as a bartender); 1970's The Movie Murderer (as an arson lieutenant); the Steve Carver-directed, Roger Corman-produced gangster film Capone (1975, as Big Jim Colosimo); Ed Forsyth's 1976 Chesty Anderson -- U.S. Navy (as the Baron); Conway in Warren Beatty's 1978 Heaven Can Wait; and Judge Neal A. Lake in Michael Winner's 1982 Death Wish 2. Campanella teamed with director Garry Marshall seven times: as Col. Cal Eastland in The Flamingo Kid (1984), Remo in Nothing in Common (1986), Captain Karl in Overboard (1987), Frank the Doorman in Beaches (1988), Pops in Pretty Woman (1990), a retired customer in Frankie and Johnny (1991), and a Wheelchair Walker in Exit to Eden (1994). Campanella re-teamed with Warren Beatty for the first time since 1978 as Judge Harper in Dick Tracy (1990) and again as the Elevator Operator in Love Affair (1994). Additional series in which Campanella appeared during the 1970s and '80s included Maude, Hardcastle & McCormick, Quincy, M.E., The Love Boat, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files, The Fall Guy, St. Elsewhere, and many others. In middle age, Campanella parlayed his early musical training into two career choices that blended music and drama: a part on a commercial that required him to play the piano and a job as co-host of a musical program on KCSN Radio called "Offbeat Notes on Music." He also appeared on Broadway in such musicals as Guys and Dolls and Nobody Loves an Albatross. After many years of inactivity, Frank Campanella ultimately died at his home in the San Fernando Valley, of unspecified causes. He was 87. Survivors included his brother, actor Joseph Campanella, his sister-in-law, and 13 nephews and nieces.

Trivia: Mario Gallo played character roles in Hollywood features from the early '60s through the early '80s. Before coming to films, he performed on stage.

Trivia: American actor Russ Marin played supporting roles on stage, radio, television, and films of the '70s and '80s. He started out in radio in 1950.

Trivia: Comic actor George Chandler entered the University of Illinois after World War I service, paying for his education by playing in an orchestra. He continued moonlighting in the entertainment world in the early 1920s, working as an insurance salesman by day and performing at night. By the end of the decade he was a seasoned vaudevillian, touring with a one-man-band act called "George Chandler, the Musical Nut." He began making films in 1927, appearing almost exclusively in comedies; perhaps his best-known appearance of the early 1930s was as W.C.Fields' prodigal son Chester in the 1932 2-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer. Chandler became something of a good-luck charm for director William Wellman, who cast the actor in comedy bits in many of his films; Wellman reserved a juicy supporting role for Chandler as Ginger Rogers' no-good husband in Roxie Hart (1942). In all, Chandler made some 330 movie appearances. In the early 1950s, Chandler served two years as president of the Screen Actors Guild, ruffling the hair of many prestigious stars and producers with his strongly held political views. From 1958 through 1959, George Chandler was featured as Uncle Petrie on the Lassie TV series, and in 1961 he starred in a CBS sitcom that he'd helped develop, Ichabod and Me.

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.

Trivia: Originally dismissed as little more than a pretty boy, Tony Curtis overcame a series of bad reviews and undistinguished pictures to emerge as one of the most successful actors of his era, appearing in a number of the most popular and acclaimed films of the late '50s and early '60s. Born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, in New York City, he was the son of an impoverished Hungarian-born tailor, and was a member of an infamous area street gang by the age of 11. During World War II, Curtis served in the navy, and was injured while battling in Guam. After the war, he returned to New York to pursue a career in acting, touring the Borscht circuit before starring in a Greenwich Village revival of Golden Boy. There Curtis came to the attention of Universal, who signed him to a seven-year contract. In 1948, he made his film debut, unbilled, in the classic Robert Siodmak noir Criss Cross. A series of bit roles followed, and he slowly made his way up through the studio's ranks.While 1950's Kansas Raiders was nominally headlined by Brian Donlevy, Curtis was, for many, the real draw; dark and handsome, he was hugely popular with teens and fan-magazine readers, and his haircut alone was so admired that Universal was receiving upwards of 10,000 letters a week asking for a lock of his hair. There was even a contest, "Win Tony Curtis for a week." Clearly, he was on the brink of stardom and earned top billing in his next picture, 1951's The Prince Who Was a Thief, which co-starred another up-and-comer, Piper Laurie. Despite his surging popularity, however, he still had much to learn about his craft and spent the remainder of the year training in voice, dramatics, and gymnastics. In 1952, Curtis finally returned to the screen as a boxer in Flesh and Fury. Two more pictures with Laurie, No Room for the Groom and Son of Ali Baba, followed. In 1953 Paramount borrowed Curtis to portray Houdini, which cast him opposite his wife, Janet Leigh.Despite continued -- albeit measured -- box-office success, Curtis was roundly panned by critics for his performances, a problem exacerbated by Universal's reliance on formula filmmaking. Pictures like 1954's Beachhead (a war drama), Johnny Dark (an auto-racing tale), and The Black Shield of Falworth (a medieval saga) were all by-the-numbers products. Finally, in 1956 United Artists borrowed him for the Burt Lancaster vehicle Trapeze; not only was it Curtis' first serious project, but it was also his first true commercial smash, resulting in another long-term Universal package. Still, the studio cast him in low-rent programmers like The Rawhide Years and The Midnight Story, and he was forced to fight executives to loan him out. Lancaster tapped him to co-star in 1957's The Sweet Smell of Success, and the resulting performance won Curtis the best reviews of his career. Similar kudos followed for The Vikings, co-starring Kirk Douglas, and Kings Go Forth, a war story with Frank Sinatra.In 1958, Curtis and Sidney Poitier starred in Stanley Kramer's social drama The Defiant Ones as a pair of escaped convicts -- one white, the other black, both manacled together -- who must overcome their prejudices in order to survive; their performances earned both men Academy Award nominations (the only such nod of Curtis' career), and was among the most acclaimed and profitable films of the year. He returned to Universal a major star and a much better actor; upon coming back, he first starred in a Blake Edwards comedy, The Perfect Furlough, then made the best film of his career -- 1959's Some Like It Hot, a masterful Billy Wilder comedy which cast him and Jack Lemmon as struggling musicians forced to dress in drag to flee the mob. Curtis next starred with his avowed idol, Cary Grant, in Edwards' comedy Operation Petticoat, another massive hit followed in 1960 by Who Was That Lady? with Leigh and Dean Martin.For director Stanley Kubrick, Curtis co-starred in the 1960 epic Spartacus, followed a year later by The Great Impostor. He delivered a strong performance in 1961's The Outsider, but the film was drastically edited prior to release and was a box-office disaster. After exiting the Gina Lollobrigida picture Lady L prior to production, Curtis made a brief appearance in John Huston's acclaimed The List of Adrian Messenger before appearing opposite Gregory Peck in Captain Newman, M.D. With second wife Christine Kauffman, he starred in 1964's Wild and Wonderful, which was reported to be his last film for Universal. Curtis then focused almost solely on comedy, including Goodbye Charlie, the big-budget The Great Race, and, with Jerry Lewis, Boeing Boeing. None were successful, and he found his career in dire straits; as a result, he battled long and hard to win the against-type title role in 1968's The Boston Strangler, earning good critical notices.However, Curtis returned to comedy, again with disappointing results: The 1969 Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies was the unsuccessful follow-up to the hit Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, while 1970's Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? found even fewer takers. Curtis then attempted a 1971 television series, The Persuaders, but it lasted barely a season. In 1973, he toured in the play Turtlenecks and appeared in the TV movie The Third Girl on the Left. That summer he announced his retirement from films, but was back onscreen for 1975's Lepke. Curtis also attempted another TV series, McCoy, but it too was unsuccessful. In 1976, he appeared in the all-star drama The Last Tycoon, and published a novel, Kid Cody and Julie Sparrow. In 1978, he was also a regular on the hit series Vega$. Ultimately, the decades to come were no more successful than the 1970s, and although Curtis continued to work prolifically, his projects lacked distinction. Still, he remained a well-liked Hollywood figure, and was also the proud father of actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

Trivia: Argenziano, a supporting actor, appeared onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Large and muscular at an early age, American actor Dick Miller entered the Navy during World War II while still a teenager, distinguishing himself as a boxer. He attended CCNY, Columbia University and New York University, supporting himself with semi-pro football jobs, radio DJ gigs and as a psychological assistant at Bellevue. At age 22, he was host of a Manhattan-based TV chat show, Midnight Snack. Stage and movie work followed, and Miller joined the stock company/entourage of low-budget auteur Roger Corman. His first great Corman role was as the hyperthyroid salesman in Not of this Earth (1956); a handful of rock-and-roll quickies followed before Miller received his first sci-fi lead in War of the Satellites (1958). In Corman's Bucket of Blood (1959), Miller originated the role of Walter Paisley, the nebbishy sociopath who "creates" avant-garde sculpture by murdering his subjects and dipping them in plaster. He was then cast in the immortal Little Shop of Horrors (1960); Miller not only makes a terrific entrance by buying a bouquet of flowers and then eating them, but also narrates the picture. Miller stayed with Corman into the 1970s, at which time the director was in charge of New World Pictures. Seldom making a liveable income in films, Miller remained an unknown entity so far as the "big" studios were concerned -- but his teenaged fans were legion, and he was besieged on the streets and in public places for autographs. When the adolescent science-fiction fans of the 1950s became the directors of the 1980s, Miller began receiving some of the best roles of his career. In Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984), Miller was paired with his Little Shop costar Jackie Joseph, as a rural couple whose house is bulldozed by a group of hostile gremlins. Miller and Joseph returned in the sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1989), in which the actor heroically helped squash the gremlins' invasion of New York. Miller's most Pirandellian role was as the "decency league" activist in Matinee (1993) who is actually an actor in the employ of William Castle-like showman John Goodman. Directed again by longtime Miller fan Dante, Matinee contains a wonderful "in" joke wherein Miller is identified as a fraud via his photograph in a Famous Monsters of Filmland-type fanzine -- the very sort of publication which canonized Miller throughout the 1970s.

Trivia: American actor Robert Phillips played supporting roles on television and in feature films of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Phillips specializes in playing villains. His daughter, Barbara Livermore, is also an actress.

Trivia: Like many New York actors, Martin Kove was willing to go unbilled to pick up extra paychecks in such East Coast-filmed efforts as Little Murders (1971) and Last House on the Left (1972). By 1984, Kove was pulling down third billing in such films as The Karate Kid, wherein he played Kreese, the "bad" karate expert who trained the film's principal heavy William Zabka for his bout against the simon-pure Ralph Macchio (Kove replaced Chuck Norris, who turned down the role of Kreese because he didn't want karate trainers to be shown in an unsympathetic light). Martin Kove's work on series TV has included the roles of detective Victor Isbecki on Cagney and Lacey and an extraterrestrial named Jesse on Hard Time on Planet Earth.

Trivia: Pasty-faced American actor John Davis Chandler played his first unregenerate punk in 1961's The Young Savages. Chandler's subsequent unsavory screen characters included the implicitly incestuous Jimmy Hammond in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1961) and the title role in Mad Dog Coll (1961). From time to time he has attempted sympathetic characterizations, billing himself as John Chandler. Though he periodically left show business for other lines of work, John Davis Chandler was still showing up in films and on TV into the late '70s.

Trivia: Character actor John Finnegan first appeared onscreen in the '70s.