Trivia: Richard Basehart was too much of an actor (and almost too good an actor) to ever be a movie star -- his range was sufficient to allow him to play murderers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and would-be suicides in 20 years' worth of theatrical films in totally convincing fashion, but also to portray a hero in the longest-running science fiction/adventure series on network television. Without ever achieving stardom, he became one of the most respected performers of his generation in theater, film, and television. Born John Richard Basehart in Zanesville, OH, in 1914, he spent a part of his childhood in an orphanage after the death of his mother, when his father, Harry Basehart, found himself unable to look after the four children left in his care. The younger Basehart considered a career in journalism like his father, but when he was 13, he began acting in small roles in a local theater company and came to enjoy performing. In the mid-'30s, he joined Jasper Deeter's famed Hedgerow Theater company in Rose Valley, PA. By the end of the 1930s, he'd set his sights on a Broadway career and moved to New York. During the 1939 season, while working in stock, Basehart met an actress named Stephanie Klein, and the two were married in early 1940. He continued trying to establish a foothold in New York and in 1942, joined Margaret Webster's theater company. Basehart's breakthrough role came during 1945 in the play The Hasty Heart, in which director Bretaigne Windust cast him in the central role of the proud, dying young Scottish soldier. Basehart won the 1945 New York Drama Critics Award for his performance and was named the most promising newcomer of the season. Not only did Broadway producers take notice of Basehart but so did Hollywood, and he was soon signed to a movie contract. Thus began a screen career that lasted nearly 40 years, starting with Repeat Performance (1947), a thriller starring Joan Leslie. He followed this with Cry Wolf (1947), an adventure yarn also starring Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn, and Geraldine Brooks. Basehart was unusually careful as a new Hollywood performer to vary his roles and avoid getting typecast. His first of what proved a string of memorable portrayals was in He Walked By Night (1948), a fact-based thriller in which the actor played a brilliant but sociopathic electronics expert, responsible for a string of burglaries and for killing a police officer. Viewers who grew up knowing Basehart as the heroic figure on the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in the 1960s are often startled to see him 20 years earlier in He Walked By Night as an almost feral presence, quietly fierce, threatening and stealthy in his efforts to escape detection and capture. Over the next two years, Basehart essayed a multitude of roles, in contemporary dramatic subjects and period dramas, the most interesting of which was Anthony Mann's Reign of Terror (1949), in which he portrayed Maximilien Robespierre, one of the chief architects of the bloodbath that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. In 1950, Basehart played one of the most difficult film roles of his career when he was cast in the fact-based movie Fourteen Hours, playing a young man who spends 14 hours on the ledge of an office building, threatening to jump. It was during the shooting of this movie that Basehart's wife, Stephanie, was taken ill with what proved to be a brain tumor, and died very suddenly. He finished work on the film and then left the United States, going to Italy where he began putting his life back together. This began when he met the actress Valentina Cortese, whom he married in 1951. The two worked together in one movie, The House on Telegraph Hill, directed by Robert Wise at 20th Century Fox, in which Basehart played the villain trying to murder Cortese for her estate. Basehart returned to Hollywood only intermittently for the next nine years, and his next appearance in an American movie wasn't until 1953, when he worked in Titanic, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb. It was during the decade that Basehart made his home in Europe that the actor became multilingual, and developed a serious following over there as a leading man; while other, older American performers were entering the final legs of their careers making pictures in France, Italy, or England, he was making important pictures and playing great roles, as the doomed, gentle clown in Federico Fellini's La Strada; a basically honest man driven into crime in The Good Die Young; the movie director threatened by a blackmailer in Joseph Losey's Finger of Guilt, and even an action-adventure hero in an Italian-made version of Cartouche (1957). John Huston specifically chose Basehart for the central role of Ishmael in his superb 1956 film version of Moby Dick. In 1957, Basehart tried reestablishing his Hollywood acting credentials with his portrayal of a conscience-stricken American officer in the movie Time Limit, which got good notices but proved to be a one-off American screen credit. In 1960, the actor divorced his second wife and left Italy behind. He returned to live permanently in America and restart his career, and began a new life, marrying again in 1962. He found that film roles weren't easily forthcoming, however -- the only part that came his way was the title role in Stuart Heisler's 1962 drama Hitler, in which Basehart gave an unusually complex, cerebral portrayal of the Nazi leader. He made numerous appearances in dramatic series such as Combat and Naked City, and television anthology shows including Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame. In 1964, Basehart accepted the offer of a starring role on a television series, beginning a four-year run on the Irwin Allen-produced Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, portraying Admiral Harriman Nelson. Thus began the steadiest work of his career, more than 100 episodes made Basehart a television star. He appeared in one movie during this period, John Sturges' thriller The Satan Bug (1965), in which he played the villain. Following the cancellation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Basehart returned to acting on-stage, interspersed with work in made-for-television movies and occasional feature films, such as Rage (1972), directed by George C. Scott. He won critical acclaim for his work in the drama The Andersonville Trial, directed by George C. Scott, portraying Lt. Col. Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, and made the rounds of guest star roles in television shows, perhaps most memorably the "Dagger of the Mind" episode of Columbo. Basehart and his third wife, Diana, also became known for their dedication to the cause of animal rights, founding the organization Actors and Others for Animals. During the final years of his life, he did some acting on television series such as Knight Rider and appeared in movies such as the hit Being There, but he was also very much in demand as a narrator, working on Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (1980), among other projects. It was as a narrator that he made his final public appearance, at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Basehart suffered a series of strokes, and passed away soon after.

Trivia: An actress since high school, Audrey Totter was by 1939 a well-established radio performer. Signed to an MGM contract in 1945, Totter played brittle, no-nonsense leading ladies and femme fatales in such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Lady in the Lake (1946). During her MGM years, Totter starred in the radio sitcom Meet Millie, but was contractually prevented from appearing in the TV version (she was replaced by Eleana Verdugo). As her film career waned, Totter agreed to sign on as a regular on the 1958 TV Western Cimarron City. In 1962, Audrey Totter co-starred with Stanley Holloway in the weekly sitcom Our Man Higgins; ten years later, she came out of retirement to play a recurring role on still another TV series, Medical Center. Her final acting role was on a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote. Totter died in 2013, just days before her 96th birthday.

Trivia: Actor Barry Sullivan was a theater usher and department store employee at the time he made his first Broadway appearance in 1936. His "official" film debut was in the 1943 Western Woman of the Town, though in fact Sullivan had previously appeared in a handful of two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios in the late '30s. A bit too raffish to be a standard leading man, Sullivan was better served in tough, aggressive roles, notably the title character in 1947's The Gangster and the boorish Tom Buchanan in the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. One of his better film assignments of the 1950s was as the Howard Hawks-style movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Sullivan continued appearing in movie roles of varying importance until 1978. A frequent visitor to television, Barry Sullivan starred as Sheriff Pat Garrett in the 1960s Western series The Tall Man, and was seen as the hateful patriarch Marcus Hubbard in a 1972 PBS production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.

Trivia: "When you've danced with Cyd Charisse, you stay danced with." So said Fred Astaire, in tribute to the ability and allure of his last big-screen dancing partner. Cyd Charisse was the last great musical star to come out of MGM, and she barely made it to stardom before the musical genre began its decline. One of the greatest dancers ever to come out of Hollywood, Charisse worked in movies for almost a decade before being allowed to take center stage in a major musical feature; but when she did, she fairly exploded onscreen in The Band Wagon, Vincente Minnelli's greatest musical.Charisse was born in Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, TX, and took to dancing at an early age, encouraged by her father, who loved the ballet. By age 14, she was dancing with the Ballet Russe under the more glamorous (and European-sounding) name Felia Sidorova -- the Sidorova came from her childhood nickname "Sid," which she carried into adulthood. She later studied dance in Los Angeles with Nico Charisse, who became her first husband. Charisse appeared both solo and with her first husband (working as "Nico and Charisse") in several early '40s "soundies" and played small roles in Mission to Moscow and Something to Shout About (both 1943), working under the name Lily Norwood. In 1945 Charisse was signed to MGM; Lily Norwood disappeared and Sid became Cyd, while the Charisse -- the one major legacy of the failed marriage -- remained. Charisse appeared in some lesser studio productions during the second half of the '40s, of which the most notable was The Unfinished Dance, a notoriously bad MGM remake of a pre-World War II French film. At the time, Ann Miller was getting all of the really good high-profile dancer co-star roles in the studio's biggest songbook musicals, while Charisse got featured dancer roles in composer-tribute movies such as Till the Clouds Roll By (based loosely on the career of Jerome Kern) and Words and Music (based loosely on Richard Rodgers' and Lorenz Hart's careers). During the late '40s, she married singer Tony Martin, a union that would last more than 50 years. Charisse had the chance to work opposite Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, but turned it down as she and Martin were starting a family, a decision that she never regretted, even if it cheated film audiences of a brilliant showcase for her work. Finally, in 1952, she made it into a frontline studio production in as prominent a role as a dancer could possibly have without dialogue, playing the vamp who appears in the middle of the "Broadway Ballet" segment of Singin' in the Rain.In 1953, with the help of Fred Astaire and director Vincente Minnelli, Charisse emerged a full-blown star in The Band Wagon. The movie, one of the greatest musicals ever made, was even more impressive as a total vehicle for Charisse -- her eight years at the studio had allowed her to absorb a fair amount of acting training, which made her just as impressive in her dramatic, romantic, and comedic scenes as she was when she danced. And when she and Astaire danced, it was literally poetry in motion, before that phrase was overused. Charisse got to work alongside Gene Kelly again in Brigadoon and It's Always Fair Weather, in which she again got to showcase her acting ability (her singing was dubbed by vocalist India Adams in most of her movies). She got to do one more major Hollywood musical, Silk Stockings (1957), acting and dancing opposite her greatest dancing partner, Fred Astaire, in a screen adaptation of Cole Porter's last great stage musical, before the musical genre disappeared. During the 1960s, she moved her career to Europe for one last dazzling musical film, Black Tights, and onto television, where Charisse became an Emmy-winning performer, and then onto the stage. Luckily for Charisse, she was a good enough actress to credibly work in straight drama and comedy, and was so striking a physical presence that she kept her career going well into the 1970s, including a successful nightclub act with Tony Martin. She scored a hit in the Australian production of No No Nanette in 1972, and she and Martin authored a joint-autobiography, The Two of Us, in 1976. Charisse published a successful workout book in the early '90s, and remains one of the most beloved performers from the world of Hollywood musicals. In 2000, she received the first Nijinsky Award from Princess Caroline of Monaco for her lifelong contribution to dance.

Trivia: Red-haired character-actor Michael Gough was brought to Hollywood in 1948 after 14 years on Broadway. Gough's burgeoning film career was cut short when he was blacklisted on the basis of alleged communist ties; likewise prohibited from working in films was Gough's wife, Karen Morley. The most immediate effect of Gough's blacklisting occurred in the opening titles of RKO's Rancho Notorious (1952); though Gough was prominently cast as the film's principal villain, RKO head man Howard Hughes, a rabid commie-hater, demanded that the actor's name be removed from the credits. Gough retreated to the stage, returning before the cameras in the 1960s, by which time Hollywood's witch-hunt mentality had dissipated. One of his first "comeback" roles was as Michael Axford in the 1966 TV series The Green Hornet. In the 1976 film The Front, Lloyd Gough was reunited with several other former blacklistees, including actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and Joshua Shelley, director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein.

Trivia: Runyonesque American character actor Tom D'Andrea came to films when the Broadway production This is the Army was transferred to the screen in 1943. This led to a Warner Bros. contract for D'Andrea; he went on to play supporting roles in a number of the studio's films, the best of which was the sympathetic cabbie in Dark Passage (1948). An amusing supporting role as a myopic ballplayer in the William Bendix comedy Kill the Umpire (1950) led to D'Andrea being cast as Bendix's buddy Gillis on the TV sitcom The Life of Riley in 1953. He left Riley briefly to co-star with Hal March in the 1956 series The Soldiers, but returned to the role of Gillis when his own series was cancelled after a single season. Tom D'Andrea's last regular TV role was Biff the bartender in Dante (1960); his final screen appearance was in the Polly Adler biopic A House is Not a Home (1964).

Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Beginning his stage career in his native Holland in 1927, Phil Van Zandt moved to America shortly afterward, continuing to make theatrical appearances into the late '30s. From his first film (Those High Gray Walls [1939]) onward, the versatile Van Zandt was typed as "everyday" characters whenever he chose not to wear his mustache; with the 'stache, however, his face took on a sinister shade, and he found himself playing such cinematic reprobates as evil caliphs, shady attorneys, and heartless Nazis. Because of deliberately shadowy photography, the audience barely saw Van Zandt's face at all in one of his best roles, as the Henry Luce-like magazine editor Rawlston in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Though many of his feature-film assignments were bits, Van Zandt was permitted generous screen time in his many appearances in two-reel comedies. Beginning with the Gus Schilling/Dick Lane vehicle Pardon My Terror (1946), Van Zandt was a fixture at the Columbia Pictures short subjects unit, usually playing crooks and mad scientists at odds with the Three Stooges. He established his own acting school in Hollywood in the 1950s, though this and other ventures ultimately failed. Philip Van Zandt died of a drug overdose at the age of 54.

Trivia: Barrel-chested American actor Dewey Robinson was much in demand during the gangster cycle of the early '30s. Few actors could convey muscular menace and mental vacuity as quickly and as well as the mountainous Mr. Robinson. Most of his roles were bits, but he was given extended screen time as a polo-playing mobster in Edward G. Robinson's Little Giant (1933), as a bored slavemaster in the outrageously erotic "No More Love" number in Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals (1933) and as a plug-ugly ward heeler at odds with beauty contest judge Ben Turpin in the slapstick 2-reeler Keystone Hotel (1935). Shortly before his death in 1950, Dewey Robinson had a lengthy unbilled role as a Brooklyn baseball fan in The Jackie Robinson Story, slowly metamorphosing from a brainless bigot to Jackie's most demonstrative supporter.

Trivia: Stern-visaged American actress Virginia Brissac was a well-established stage actress in the early part of the 20th century. For several seasons in the 1920s, she headed a travelling stock company bearing her name. Once Brissac settled down in Hollywood in 1935, she carved a niche in authoritative parts, spending the next twenty years playing a steady stream of schoolteachers, college deans, duennas and society matrons. Once in a while, Virginia Brissac was allowed to "cut loose" with a raving melodramatic part: in Bob Hope's The Ghost Breakers, she dons a coat of blackface makeup and screams with spine-tingling conviction as the bewitched mother of zombie Noble Johnson.

Trivia: A former boxer, John Indrisano entered films via the sponsorship of several Hollywood sports fans, notably Mae West, who cast Indrisano in a small role in Every Day's a Holiday (1937). Sometimes typecast as a pugilist, Indrisano was more often seen as a trainer or referee. Non-boxing fans can spot him in such "civilian" roles as the chauffeur in Murder My Sweet (1944), one of his many film noir appearances. He also served as a technical advisor for the prizefight scenes in such films as The Kid From Brooklyn (1946) The Set Up (1949) and Carmen Jones (1954). John Indrisano was 62 years old when he hung himself in his San Fernando Valley home.

Trivia: The son of an Episcopal priest, John Gallaudet commenced his professional acting career after graduating from Williams College. He appeared on both Broadway and in stock opposite actors ranging from Fred Astaire to Helen Hayes. The slight, thinnish-haired Gallaudet spent several years in the 1930s as the resident character star of Columbia Pictures' "B" unit, playing everything from kindhearted doctors to serpentlike crooks. He owns the distinction of being one the few actors to ever "murder" Rita Hayworth, dispatching the lovely young actress with a poisoned baseball glove in the 1937 potboiler Girls Can Play. Active in films until the 1950s, John Gallaudet was well known and highly regarded throughout the film community for his off-camera vocation as a champion golfer.

Trivia: Stage actor Peter Brocco made his first film appearance in 1932's The Devil and Deep. He then left films to tour in theatrical productions in Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Returning to Hollywood in 1947, Brocco could be seen in dozens of minor and supporting roles, usually playing petty crooks, shifty foreign agents, pathetic winos and suspicious store clerks. His larger screen roles included Ramon in Spartacus (1960), The General in The Balcony (1963), Dr. Wu in Our Man Flint (1963), and the leading character in the Cincinnati-filmed black comedy Homebodies (1974). The addition of a fuzzy, careless goatee in his later years enabled Brocco to portray generic oldsters in such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1977), The One and Only(1977), Throw Momma From the Train (1989) and War of the Roses (1983). In 1983, Peter Brocco was one of many veterans of the Twilight Zone TV series of the 1950s and 1960s to be affectionately cast in a cameo role in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

Trivia: Well versed in virtually every aspect of live entertainment, American performer Tim Ryan spent the greater part of his professional career as one-half of the team of Tim and Irene. The other half was Tim's wife Irene Ryan, better known to modern audiences as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. The Ryans appeared on Broadway, starred in a mid-'30s radio series, headlined a brief series of 2-reelers for Educational studios, and guested in such medium-budget musical films as 1943's Hot Rhythm. Even after Tim and Irene divorced, they frequently found themselves working at the same studio, and sometimes even the same soundstage. On his own, Ryan appeared in numerous films as cops, plainclothes detectives and newspaper editors. His best opportunities came at modest little Monogram studios in the '40s and early '50s, where he not only showed up in featured roles, but also wrote several screenplays. In Detective Kitty O'Day (1945), one can spot the reflection of Tim Ryan in a highly polished hubcap, listening intently as leading man Peter Cookson recites the long comic monologue that Ryan had written for him.