Trivia: Although her film career rested on portraying dumb blondes, American actress Judy Holliday scored 172 on her early IQ tests. A voracious reader and theater devotee, Holliday was determined to become a classical actress even though she was rejected for admission to Yale Drama School. She worked as a switchboard operator and a stage manager for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, then took a job in a comedy revue at a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1938. In the company of her friends Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Alvin Hammer and John Frank, Holliday was a member of the Revuers, an aggregation specializing in wildly satirical songs and sketches. Working their way up the club date grapevine, the Revuers caught the attention of a 20th Century-Fox talent scout, who wanted to hire only Holliday. She loyally refused to enter movies without her co-workers -- to little avail, since the group's premiere performance in Greenwich Village (1944) was trimmed down to near-nonexistence. Holliday stayed at Fox for a bit in Something for the Boys (1944) and a good supporting role in Winged Victory (1944), but was dropped by the studio as having limited potential. The seriocomic role of a prostitute in the 1945 stage play Kiss Them for Me revitalized her career somewhat, but her biggest break came when Jean Arthur dropped out of the Garson Kanin play Born Yesterday. With less than three days' rehearsal, Judy stepped into the role of Billie Dawn, the dimwitted "kept girl" of crooked junk dealer Paul Douglas, and overnight became the hottest new "find" on Broadway. Columbia Pictures bought the film rights for Born Yesterday, but Columbia president Harry Cohn didn't care for Holliday, so her chances at being hired for the movie were slim. She took an excellent part as a would-be husband killer in Adam's Rib (1949), and it was this performance that convinced Columbia to allow Holliday to recreate Billie Dawn for the screen version of Born Yesterday (1950). The result was an Academy Award for Holliday and a lucrative Columbia contract. Some of her Columbia pictures tended to recast Holliday as Billie Dawn (under different names) over and over again. Though this dumb-dumb characterization was irritating to the star, it came in handy when she was called to testify for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. By playing "stupid", Holliday managed to survive accusations of Communist activity that would have killed her career. Tired of Hollywood by 1956, she signed to star in a musical comedy written by her old Revuers companions Comden and Green. Bells Are Ringing, which cast Holliday as a "Miss Fixit" telephone operator, ran several seasons, and was ultimately adapted as a film in 1960; this time there was no question that she would repeat her stage role for the movie. Unhappily, Bells Are Ringing was Holliday's last film. Domestic problems and the debilitating failures of her 1960 play based on the life of Laurette Taylor and the bedeviled Broadway musical Hot Spot were only part of the problem; an earlier bout with cancer had recurred, and this time proved fatal. Holliday died at the age of 43 -- a brilliant, singular talent allowed to perform at only half steam in most of her Hollywood films.

Trivia: Broderick Crawford was the typical example of "overnight" success in Hollywood -- the 1949 release of All the King's Men turned him into one of the most popular "character" leads in Hollywood, a successor to Wallace Beery and a model for such unconventional leading men to come as Ernest Borgnine. His "overnight" success, however, involved more than a decade of work in routine supporting roles in more than 20 movies, before he was ever considered as much more than a supporting player. Crawford was born into a performing family -- both of his maternal grandparents, William Broderick and Emma Kraus, were opera singers, and his mother, Helen Broderick, was a Broadway and screen actress, while his father, Lester Crawford, was a vaudeville performer. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he accompanied his parents on tour as a boy and later joined them on-stage. He attended the Dean Academy in Franklin, MA, and excelled in athletics, including football, baseball, and swimming. Crawford entered show business by way of vaudeville, joining his parents in working for producer Max Gordon. With vaudeville's decline in the later 1920s, he tried attending college but dropped out of Harvard after just three months, preferring to make a living as a stevedore on the New York docks, and he also later served as a seaman on a tanker. Crawford returned to acting through radio, including a stint working as a second banana to the Marx Brothers. He entered the legitimate theater in 1934 when playwright Howard Lindsay selected him for a role in the play She Loves Me Not, portraying a football player in the work's London run -- although the play only ran three weeks, that was enough time for Crawford to meet Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (then theater's leading "power couple" on either side of the Atlantic) and come to the attention of Noel Coward, who selected him for a role in his production of Point Valaine, in which the acting couple was starring. After a string of unsuccessful plays, Crawford went to Hollywood and got a part as the butler in the comedy Woman Chases Man, produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Crawford's theatrical breakthrough came in 1937 when he won the role of the half-witted Lennie in the theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. His performance won critical accolades from all of the major newspapers, and Crawford was on his way, at least as far as the stage was concerned -- when it came time to do the movie, however, the part went to Lon Chaney Jr.. In movies, Crawford made the rounds of the studios in one-off roles, usually in relatively minor films such as Submarine D-1, Undercover Doctor, and Eternally Yours. The murder mystery Slightly Honorable gave him a slight boost in both billing and the size of his role, but before he could begin to develop any career momentum the Second World War intervened. Crawford served in the U.S. Army Air Force and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned to civilian life, he immediately resumed his screen career with a series of fascinating films, including The Black Angel and James Cagney's production20of The Time of Your Life. True stardom however, still eluded him. That all changed when director-producer Robert Rossen selected Crawford to portray Willie Stark in All the King's Men. In a flash, Crawford became a box-office draw, his performance attracting raves from the critics and delighting audiences with its subtle, earthy, rough-hewn charm. His portrayal of the megalomaniac political boss of a small state, based on the life and career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, won Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor. He signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1949, which resulted in his starring in the comedy hit Born Yesterday (1950). That was to be his last major hit as a star, though Crawford continued to give solid and successful lead performances for much of the next five years, portraying a tough undercover cop in the crime drama T he Mob, and a villainous antagonist to Clark Gable in Vincent Sherman's Lone Star. During the early '50s, Crawford was Hollywood's favorite tough-guy lead or star antagonist, his persona combining something of the tough charm of Spencer Tracy and the rough-hewn physicality of Wallace Beery -- he could be a charming lunkhead, in the manner of Keenan Wynn, or dark and threatening, calling up echoes of his portrayal of Willie Stark. In the mid-'50s at 20th Century Fox, he added vast energy and excitement to such films as Night People and Between Heaven and Hell -- indeed, his performance in the latter added a whole extra layer of depth and meaning to the film, moving it from wartime melodrama into territory much closer to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with his character Waco serving as the dramatic stand-in for Kurtz. In 1955, after working on the melodrama Not As a Stranger and Fellini's Il Bidone (his portrayal of the swindler Augusto being one of his best performances), Crawford became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era to make the jump to television. He signed to do the series Highway Patrol for Ziv TV, which was a hit for three seasons. In its wake, however, Crawford was never able to get movies or roles of the same quality that he'd been offered in the early '50s. He did two more series, King of Diamonds and The Interns, and did play the title role in Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which attracted some offbeat notice; otherwise, Crawford's work during his final 30 years of acting involved roles as routine as the ones he'd muddled through while trying for his break at the other end of his career. One of his most visible screen appearances took place on television, in a 1977 episode of CHiPS that played off of his work in Highway Patrol, with Crawford making a gag appearance as himself, a motorist pulled over and cited for a moving violation by the series' motorcycle police officers.

Trivia: The son of a chemical analyst, American actor William Holden plunged into high school and junior college sports activities as a means of "proving himself" to his demanding father. Nonetheless, Holden's forte would be in what he'd always consider a "sissy" profession: acting. Spotted by a talent scout during a stage production at Pasadena Junior College, Holden was signed by both Paramount and Columbia, who would share his contract for the next two decades. After one bit role, Holden was thrust into the demanding leading part of boxer Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy (1939). He was so green and nervous that Columbia considered replacing him, but co-star Barbara Stanwyck took it upon herself to coach the young actor and build up his confidence -- a selfless act for which Holden would be grateful until the day he died. After serving as a lieutenant in the Army's special services unit, Holden returned to films, mostly in light, inconsequential roles. Director Billy Wilder changed all that by casting him as Joe Gillis, an embittered failed screenwriter and "kept man" of Gloria Swanson in the Hollywood-bashing classic Sunset Boulevard (1950). Wilder also directed Holden in the role of the cynical, conniving, but ultimately heroic American POW Sefton in Stalag 17 (1953), for which the actor won an Oscar. Holden became a man of the world, as it were, when he moved to Switzerland to avoid heavy taxation on his earnings; while traversing the globe, he developed an interest in African wildlife preservation, spending much of his off-camera time campaigning and raising funds for the humane treatment of animals. Free to be selective in his film roles in the '60s and '70s, Holden evinced an erratic sensibility: For every Counterfeit Traitor (1962) and Network (1976), there would be a walk-through part in The Towering Inferno (1974) or Ashanti (1978). His final film role was in S.O.B. (1981), which, like Sunset Boulevard, was a searing and satirical indictment of Hollywood. But times had changed, and one of the comic highlights of S.O.B. was of a drunken film executive urinating on the floor of an undertaker's parlor. Holden's death in 1981 was the result of blood loss from a fall he suffered while alone.

Trivia: A stage actor of long standing (he started out in 1925), Howard St. John moved into films with 1949's Shockproof. St. John spent the next twenty years essaying blowhard big-business types like General Bullmoose in Li'l Abner (1959) and Coca-Cola executive J. J. Hazeltine in Billy Wilder's One Two Three. He offered a more three-dimensional characterization as Jim Devery, the well-educated "sellout" flunkey to ruthless junk dealer Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday (1950). Howard St. John's many TV credits include the roles of journalist Lloyd Prior in the 1958 cop series The Investigator and blustery college dean Lewis Royal on the 1965 sitcom Hank; towards the end of the 1960s, he was seen with increasing frequency in the "Honeymooners" musical sketches on The Jackie Gleason Show.

Trivia: Though only 35 when she launched her movie career in 1941, American actress Barbara Brown was almost immediately typed in maternal roles. Brown went on to play Joan Leslie's strict mother in Hollywood Canteen (1944), Ann Blyth's snooty mother-in-law in Mildred Pierce (1945), reproving Mrs. Latham in Monogram's Henry series (with Walter Catlett and Raymond Walburn) and haughty Mrs. Elizabeth Parker in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle films. She broke away from her standard characterization as girl's-school dean (and second-reel murder victim) Miss Keyes in The Falcon and the Co-Eds (1943). Barbara Brown was still essaying movie moms at the time of her retirement in 1955.

Trivia: Actor Grandon Rhodes worked steadily on stage, television, and in over 40 films during his four-decade career. On television, he had recurring roles on Bonanza (as a doctor) and Perry Mason.

Trivia: Brassy, bleached-blonde Claire Carleton was a reliable supporting actress on Broadway, in films and on TV for nearly thirty years. Carleton's New York stage credits include The Body Beautiful, 20th Century and The Women. In films, she was usually cast as"B"-girls, strippers, gum-chewing manicurists and divorce correspondents: her character names were generally along the lines of Mamie, Tessie, Nellie or simply "The Blonde." She was afforded leading roles in the two-reelers of such comedians as The Three Stooges and Leon Errol, entering into the slapstick proceedings with relish and abandon: in the 1946 Columbia short Headin' for a Weddin', Carleton has a light bulb broken in her mouth, and in the final scene engages in a knock-down, drag-out fight with star Vera Vague. A frequent TV performer, Claire Carleton co-starred as Mickey Rooney's mother (she was eight years older than he!) in the 1955 sitcom Hey, Mulligan!, and played Alice Purdy on the 1958 western Cimarron City.

Trivia: American actor Robert "Smoki" Whitfield entered films in 1948, at a time when opportunities for black performers were still extremely limited. When he wasn't playing Pullman porters or family servants, Whitfield could usually be found in heavy "African" makeup as a tribal chieftain or medicine man. He was a regular in Monogram's Bomba the Jungle Boy series, playing a friendly native named Eli (in the first Bomba, however, he was called Hadji). Smoki Whitfield made his last film appearance in 1955.

Trivia: In films since 1932, Charles Cane seldom rose above the status of bit player, usually cast as patrolmen and desk sergeants. After a featured role as a teamster in Bob Hope's My Favorite Blonde (1942) Cane went off on a new career tangent, playing scores of truck drivers. Active until 1961, he was briefly billed as Charles R. Cane in the mid-1950s.