Trivia: More a sex goddess than an actress, the statuesque Raquel Welch was one of the most popular celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s. While she appeared in dozens of films, they earned little notice, her success depending almost exclusively on her stature as a buxom pin-up. Born Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940, in Chicago, she began taking dancing lessons as a child and by her teens was already winning beauty contests. At the age of 18, she married high school sweetheart James Welch; the couple had two children before divorcing in 1961. After working in Dallas, TX, as a waitress and model, Welch relocated to Hollywood in 1963; within three days, she had already landed a manager, Patrick Curtis, and soon they formed a promotions company, Curtwell Enterprises. After appearing in Life magazine in a revealing bikini, she began working on the ABC series Hollywood Palace, and in 1964 made her feature debut with an unbilled appearance in the Elvis Presley vehicle Roustabout. Welch next appeared as a prostitute in 1964's A House Is Not a Home, followed by another uncredited appearance a year later in Do Not Disturb. In 1965, she scored her first lead role in the pop musical A Swingin' Summer, resulting in a contract with 20th Century Fox, which cast her in the sci-fi hit Fantastic Voyage before loaning her to the British horror studio Hammer. There she starred in a 1967 remake of One Million Years B.C.; clad in little more than strategically placed strips of fur, Welch's publicity stills appeared everywhere, and she became a major sex symbol -- still, few went to actually see the movie itself. Despite the publicity, Fox was clearly wary of her talents, and did not ask her to return to Hollywood; instead she remained in Europe, starring with Edward G. Robinson and Vittorio de Sica in 1968's The Biggest Bundle of Them All and with Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale in Le Fate. While in Paris, Welch and manager Curtis married, issuing a series of provocative wedding night publicity photos.After appearing as Lust incarnate in Stanley Donen's seven-deadly-sins comedy Bedazzled, Welch finally returned to the U.S. Fox used her judiciously in pictures like the 1968 James Stewart Western Bandolero! and the Frank Sinatra mystery Lady in Cement. Following in 1969 was 100 Rifles, a controversial Western which paired Welch with Jim Brown, and a year later she earned her first real starring role in the disastrous Myra Breckenridge. Her situation was unusual; she was certainly a star and a household name, yet few people ever went to see her movies -- neither 1971's Hannie Caulder nor the following year's Fuzz did anything to alter the dilemma, and when the 1973 roller-derby melodrama Kansas City Bomber also tanked at the box office, Welch divorced Curtis and returned to Europe to appear in Bluebeard. While both 1973's The Three Musketeers and its sequel The Four Musketeers were well received, she earned little credit for their success, and when the 1976 black comedy Mother, Jugs and Speed failed, Hollywood largely washed their hands of her.Welch instead turned to nightclubs, concert stages, and television; she also continued making films in Europe, including 1977's The Prince and the Pauper and L' Animal, co-starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1980, she was tapped to star in Cannery Row, but was fired a month into production; she filed suit against MGM for damages, and was awarded 11 million dollars. Welch spent the entirety of the 1980s away from theaters, focusing primarily on television productions like 1982's The Legend of Walks Far Woman and 1987's Right to Die, in which she delivered one of her strongest performances as a woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. After an absence of over a decade, in 1994 Welch returned to cinema in the comedy The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. Throughout the decade, she also made a number of infomercials and exercise videos, and in 1995 also starred in the short-lived nighttime soap opera CPW. In 1997, she took over for Julie Andrews in the troubled Broadway musical Victor/Victoria, which closed less than a month after Welch's debut performance. In the years to come, Welch would remain active on screen, playing Aunt Dora on the massively popular sitcom American Family.

Trivia: Anthony Franciosa burst onto the scene (after several years' servitude in bit parts) in the 1955 drug-addiction play A Hatful of Rain. He was brought to Hollywood to recreate his stage role in Rain-- winning an Oscar nomination for his part--but his first film appearance was as a taciturn nightclub owner in the MGM comedy This Could Be the Night. From 1957 through 1963, Franciosa essayed a number of hot-headed screen characterizations, including the role of tempestuous artist Francisco Goya in The Naked Maja (1960). Sensing he needed an image change in 1963, Franciosa changed his screen billing to the lighter "Tony Franciosa" and signed on as star of the frothy TV sitcom Valentine's Day (1964). Franciosa has since successfully juggled a film career with such weekly video series as The Name of the Game (1969-71), Search (1972), Matt Helm (1975), and Finder of Lost Loves (1984). From 1957-60 Tony Franciosa was married to actress Shelley Winters.

Trivia: British actor Tom Adams played leading and supporting roles in films of the '60s and '70s, most notably The Great Escape (1963). Adams also appeared in television series such as Remington Steele and Dr. Who as well as performing in the occasional television movie. Adams died in 2014, at age 76.

Trivia: A purveyor of priggish military and law-enforcement types, British actor Ronald Fraser began his film and TV career in 1954 as a bit actor, then graduated to supporting roles. On occasion, Fraser was allowed to play a compassionate human being, but for the most part he was the personification of the "nasty little nit." Some of his larger film appearances are in The Sundowners (1960), The Best of Enemies (1961), Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Bed Sitting Room (1969). American audiences are probably most familiar with Ronald Fraser's performance as Sergeant Watson, one of the gutsier members of Jimmy Stewart's ill-fated airplane crew in Flight of the Phoenix (1965).

Trivia: British leading man Richard Briers appeared in several TV adaptations of venerable stage plays in the 1960s. His interpretation of cross-dressing Lord Fancourt Babberly in Charley's Aunt managed to find a berth on American public television in 1968. The warm gust of applause greeting the actor's appearance indicated that he was already an audience favorite - as indeed he was, having appeared in such films as Girls at Sea (1962) and Fathom (1967). When American viewers next saw Briers, he was starring with Felicity Kendall on an agreeable BBC sitcom, Good Neighbors (Briers' second starring series). The series was a light, easy-going account of two city dwellers trying to make a go at country living; Richard Briers and his superb supporting cast made the slender material seem far funnier than it really was.

Trivia: Born in New Zealand, comic actor Clive Revill attended that country's Rongotai College, then made his first stage appearance in Auckland at age 20. After appearing on Broadway in the 1952 musical Mr. Pickwick, Revill spent three years with Britain's Ipswich Repertory. He was nominated for Tony Awards for his performances in Broadway's Irma La Douce and Oliver!; his later New York appearances included the starring roles of Sheridan Whiteside in Sherry, the 1972 musicalization of The Man Who Came to Dinner, and playwright/critic Max Beerbohm in The Incomparable Max. In films, Revill essayed "campy" characterizations in such 1960s projects as Modesty Blaise (1966), Fathom (1967) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1969); on television, he was brilliantly cast as Charlie Chaplin in the 1980 TV movie The Scarlet O'Hara Wars, and portrayed "black arts" purveyor Vector in the 1983 series Wizards and Warriors. Clive Revill's most recent credits include a cameo as the Sherwood Forest fire marshal in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and the voice of Alfred the Butler on the Fox Television Network's Batman: The Animated Series (1992- ).

Trivia: Norwegian dancer/choreographer Tutte Lemkow entered the British film industry as a bit player in the early 1950s. Lemkow went on to stage the dance sequences for such otherwise nonmusical efforts as The Captain's Paradise (1953) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958). Most of his screen appearances were confined to eccentric character roles in films like Ben-Hur (1959), The Wrong Box (1967), Theatre of Blood (1973) and Red Sonja (1985). Tutte Lemkow also essayed the non-speaking title role in the 1970 movie version of Fiddler on the Roof.