Trivia: One of Hollywood's most luminous actresses, Gene Tierney remains best remembered for her performance in the title role of the 1944 mystery classic Laura. Born November 20, 1920, in Brooklyn, NY, Tierney was the daughter of a wealthy insurance broker, and was educated in Connecticut and Switzerland; she traveled in social circles, and at a party met Anatole Litvak, who was so stunned by her beauty that he requested she screen test at Warner Bros. The studio offered a contract, but the salary was so low that her parents dissuaded her from signing; instead, Tierney pursued a stage career, making her Broadway debut in 1938's Mrs. O'Brien Entertains. A six-month contract was then offered by Columbia, which she accepted. However, after the studio failed to find her a project, she returned to New York to star on-stage in The Male Animal. The lead in MGM's National Velvet was offered her, but when the project was delayed Tierney signed with Fox, where in 1940 she made her film debut opposite Henry Fonda in the Fritz Lang Western The Return of Frank James.A small role in Hudson's Bay followed before Tierney essayed her first major role in John Ford's 1940 drama Tobacco Road. She then starred as the titular Belle Starr. Fox remained impressed with her skills, but critics consistently savaged her work. Inexplicably and wholly inappropriately, she was cast as a native girl in three consecutive features: Sundown, The Shanghai Gesture, and Son of Fury. Closer to home was 1942's Thunder Birds, in which Tierney starred as a socialite; however, she was just as quickly returned to more exotic fare later that same year for China Girl. A supporting turn in Ernst Lubitsch's classic 1943 comedy Heaven Can Wait signalled an upward turn in Tierney's career, however, and the following year she starred as the enigmatic Laura in Otto's Preminger's masterful mystery. After 1945's A Bell for Adano, she next appeared as a femme fatale in the melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, a performance which won her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination -- her most successful film to date.Tierney continued working at a steady pace, and in 1946 co-starred with Tyrone Power in an adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel The Razor's Edge. The 1947 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was her last major starring role; from 1948's The Iron Curtain onward, she appeared primarily in smaller supporting performances in projects including the 1949 thriller Whirlpool and Jules Dassin's classic 1950 noir Night and the City. After 1952's Way of a Gaucho, Tierney's Fox contract expired, and at MGM she starred with Spencer Tracy in Plymouth Adventure, followed by the Clark Gable vehicle Never Let Me Go. The latter was filmed in Britain, and she remained there to shoot Personal Affair. While in Europe, Tierney also began a romance with Aly Khan, but their marriage plans were met by fierce opposition from the Aga Khan; dejectedly she returned to the U.S., where she appeared in 1954's Black Widow.After 1955's The Left Hand of God, Tierney's long string of personal troubles finally took their toll, and she left Hollywood and relocated to the Midwest, accepting a job in a small department store; there she was rediscovered in 1959, and Fox offered her a lead role in the film Holidays for Lovers. However, the stress of performing proved too great, and days into production Tierney quit to return to the clinic. In 1960 she married Texas oil baron Howard Lee. Two years later, Fox announced her for the lead role in Return to Peyton Place, but she became pregnant and dropped out of the project. Finally, Tierney returned to screens in 1962's Advise and Consent, followed a year later by Toys in the Attic. After 1964's The Pleasure Seekers, she again retired, but in 1969 starred in the TV movie Daughter of the Mind. Remaining out of the public eye for the next decade, in 1979 Tierney published an autobiography, Self-Portrait, and in 1980 appeared in the miniseries Scruples; the performance was her last -- she died in Houston on November 6, 1991.

Trivia: The son of a barber, Richard Conte held down jobs ranging from truck driver, to Wall Street clerk before finding his place as an actor. In 1935, Conte became a waiter/entertainer in a Connecticut resort, which led to stage work when he was spotted by Group Theatre's Elia Kazan and John Garfield. Through Kazan's help, Conte earned a scholarship to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His first Broadway appearance was in the fast-flop Moon Over Mulberry Street. In 1939, still billed as Nicholas Conte, the actor made his first film, 20th Century-Fox's Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). It was Fox which would build up the intense, brooding Conte as the "New John Garfield" upon signing him to a contract in 1943. His best parts during his Fox years included the wrongly imprisoned man who is exonerated by crusading reporter James Stewart in Call Northside 777 (1947), and the lead role as a wildcat trucker in Thieves' Highway (1949). Among Conte's many TV assignments was a co-starring stint with Dan Dailey, Jack Hawkins and Vittorio De Sica on the 1959 syndicated series The Four Just Men. Appearing primarily in European films in his last years, Conte directed the Yugoslavian-filmed Operation Cross Eagles. Richard Conte's most important Hollywood role in the 1970s was as rival Mafia Don Barzini in the Oscar-winning The Godfather (1972).

Trivia: José Ferrer (born José Vincente Ferrer de Otero y Cintron in Puerto Rico) decided to become an actor while in college. Early in his career he appeared with James Stewart and Joshua Logan at the Triangle Theater. In 1935 he debuted on Broadway with a walk-on part; he soon began to land bigger roles and quickly established his reputation as a highly versatile actor, performing in roles ranging from the comic title role in Charlie's Aunt to the evil Iago in Othello, and he began directing Broadway productions in 1942. Ferrer debuted onscreen as the Dauphin opposite Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948), for which he received a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination. He later became internationally famous, and won a "Best Actor" Oscar for reprising his theatrical lead in the film version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1950). Ferrer earned another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of painter Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge (1952). While both roles definitely enhanced his career, he later complained that they lead him to become typecast, and sometimes went years between film offers. In the mid-'50s he began directing films (usually ones in which he appeared), starting with The Shrike (1955). Also in the mid-'50s he made several successful recordings with his third wife, singer Rosemary Clooney. After 1962 he gave up directing and concentrated on stage and screen character acting, usually being typecast in his films as a swarthy foreigner. He continued to appear frequently in films into the '90s, meanwhile doing much TV work. His first wife was actress Uta Hagen.

Trivia: Hard-fighting, strong, durable redhead Charles Bickford graduated from MIT before he began appearing in burlesque in 1914. After serving in World War I, he started a career on Broadway in 1919. He didn't come to Hollywood until the birth of the Sound Era in 1929. His first film was Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite, during the production of which, he punched out DeMille. He became a star after playing Greta Garbo's lover in Anna Christie (1930), but didn't develop into a romantic lead, instead becoming a powerful character actor whose screen appearances commanded attention throughout a career spanning almost four decades, in films such as Duel in the Sun (1946) and Johnny Belinda (1948). His craggy, intense features lent themselves to roles as likable fathers, businessmen, captains, etc. He sometimes played stubborn or unethical roles, but more often projected honesty or warmth. He co-authored a play, The Cyclone Lover (1928) and wrote an autobiography, Bulls, Balls, Bicycles, and Actors (1965). He was Oscar-nominated three times but never won the award. Late in his life he starred in the TV show The Virginian.

Trivia: Born to a blue-blooded New England family, Barbara O'Neil was 21 when she made her first Broadway appearance. During the summer season, she acted with the Provincetown Players, often in the company of her first husband, producer Joshua Logan. She made her film debut in 1937, marking time in traditional leading lady roles until cast as Scarlett O'Hara's mother in Gone With the Wind (1939), delivering an utterly convincing performance despite the fact that she was exactly three years older than her "daughter" Vivien Leigh. Her finest screen showing was as Charles Boyer's spiteful, dangerously neurotic wife in All This and Heaven Too (1940), for which she earned an Oscar nomination. Barbara O'Neil made only a handful of film appearances after that, retiring from show business after a successful run in the Broadway production Little Moon of Alban.

Trivia: Erudite, distinguished-looking American actor Eduard Franz started his stage career with the Provincetown Players. He was a leading Broadway actor for nearly 20 years before making his film bow in 1947's The Wake of the Red Witch. Franz was at his best when playing such worldly intellectuals as Justice Louis Brandeis in The Magnificent Yankee (1950). In 1963, Eduard Franz was cast in the tailor-made role of psychiatric clinic director Edward Raymer on the weekly TV drama Breaking Point.

Trivia: Distinguished British actress Constance Collier began her career as a chorus dancer at the turn of the century. She established herself not only as a leading actress, but as a playwright, producer, director and acting coach. Her film career began with D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916); for the next four decades, she would occasionally visit Hollywood's shooting stages, though the theater remained her first choice. Of her talkie appearances, Ms. Collier is perhaps best remembered as the "den mother" of the all-female theatrical boarding house in 1937's Stage Door. All told, Constance Collier devoted over sixty years of her life to the theater and film arts.

Trivia: A law student at the University of Madrid, Fortunio Bonanova switched his major to music at Madrid's Real Conservatory and the Paris Conservatory. Bonanova inaugurated his operatic career as a baritone at the age of 17. By age 21 he was in films, producing, directing and starring in a silent production of Don Juan (1921). He spent most of the 1920s singing at the Paris opera and writing books, plays and short stories; he arrived in America in 1930 to co-star with Katherine Cornell on Broadway. At the invitation of his friend Orson Welles, Bononova portrayed the feverish singing teacher Signor Matisti in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Fortunio Bonanova remained gainfully employed in Hollywood as a character actor into the early 1960s.

Trivia: In films from 1932, American actress Ruth Lee was an expert at portraying middle-America matriarchs. One of Lee's largest roles was as the "June Cleaver" mother in the classic 1939 promotional feature The Middleton Family at the World's Fair. From 1939 to 1943, Lee was a regular in the Robert Benchley one-reelers at both MGM and Paramount, superbly cast as the gently bellicose Mrs. Benchley. Ruth Lee remained active until 1962, when she essayed a minor role in Sergeants Three.

Trivia: Flint-eyed American character actor Ian MacDonald began appearing in films in 1941. The war interrupted MacDonald's screen career, but he was back at his post in 1947. Nearly always a villain on-screen, his most celebrated role was Frank Miller, the vindictive gunman who motivates the plot of High Noon (1952). Likewise memorable were his portrayals of Bo Creel in White Heat (1949) and Geronimo in Taza, Son of Cochise (1954). In films until 1959, Ian MacDonald also occasionally dabbled in screenwriting.

Trivia: A master purveyor of smug, condescending character roles, Minnesota-born Larry Keating was the nephew of heavyweight boxing champ Tommy Burns. Keating built his acting reputation in radio, as master of ceremonies for such variety series as The Fitch Bandwagon and as narrator of the long-running This is Your FBI. He began his film career in 1949, generally playing curt doctors or no-nonsense business executives; one of his more warmhearted characterizations was as a blind attorney in 1951's Bright Victory. In 1953, Keating replaced Fred Clark as acerbic next door neighbor Harry Morton on the popular TV sitcom The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. He continued in this vein in 1961 as Wilbur Post's pompous neighbor Roger Addison in the George Burns-produced Mister Ed. Larry Keating remained with this last-named series until his death from leukemia at the age of 64.

Trivia: A narrow-faced supporting actor from Sweden, dark-haired Mauritz Hugo (born Mauritz Hugo Ekelöv) was especially effective in action serials of the 1940s and 1950s, and was perhaps at his very best as Barnett, the villainous saloon-keeper in one of Republic's final chapterplays, The Man with the Steel Whip (1954). The son of a pioneer movie theater proprietor, the adventurous Hugo emigrated to the United States at the tender age of 15. After a stint as a salesman, Hugo became a stock company player and may have been in Hollywood films as early as 1938. He was firmly established as a competent supporting actor by 1943 and, having dropped any trace of an accent along the way, was never cast as a "foreigner." Often appearing in Westerns, Hugo was equally proficient in serials, of which he did at least seven. One of the first actors to embrace television, the dapper actor played an important guest-star role in a dual episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe and also appeared on such programs as The Cisco Kid, Sky King, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bewitched, and Family Affair. He retired around 1970 and died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Along with such colleagues as William Conrad, John Dehner, Vic Perrin, Sam Edwards, Barney Phillips, and Virginia Gregg, bald-pated American character actor Lawrence Dobkin was one of the mainstays of network radio in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Dobkin began popping up in films in 1949, playing any number of doctors, lawyers, attachés, military officials, and desk sergeants. Most of his parts were fleeting, many were unbilled: he can be seen as a soft-spoken rabbi in Angels in the Outfield (1951), one of the three psychiatrists baffled by alien visitor Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), an angered citizen of Rome in Julius Caesar (1953), and so on. Enjoying larger roles on TV, Dobkin was generally cast as a scheming villain (e.g., Dutch Schultz on The Untouchables). One of his showiest assignments was as the demented Gregory Praxas, horror film star turned mass murderer, in the 1972 pilot film for Streets of San Francisco. From the early '60s onward, Dobkin was busier as a writer and director than as an actor. He amassed a respectable list of TV directorial credits, as well as one theatrical feature, Sixteen (1972). Habitués of "speculation" docudramas of the 1970s and 1980s will recognize Lawrence Dobkin as the bearded, avuncular narrator of many of these efforts; he also appeared as Pontius Pilate in the speculative 1979 four-waller In Search of Historic Jesus.

Trivia: A distinguished member of Broadway's famed Group Theater, with whom he appeared in Casey Jones (1938) and Night Music (1940), Clancy Cooper entered films with Warner Bros. in 1941. But despite his distinctive theater pedigree, Cooper's busy screen career proved middling at best and he mainly played bit roles. A notable exception came in the 1944 serial Haunted Harbor, as one of hero Kane Richmond's two sidekicks. A veteran of more than 100 feature films, the veteran actor went on to also embrace television, appearing in over 200 episodes in shows such as The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Gunsmoke, Twilight Zone, Maverick, Dr. Kildare, and The Wild Wild West. Married to novelist Elizabeth Cooper, Clancy Cooper died of a heart attack while driving in Hollywood.

Trivia: In the '30s, tall, sandy-haired, deep-voiced American actor Eddie Dunn was frequently cast as a laconic police officer in the 2-reelers of comedy producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. The actor's feature-film roles consisted mainly of small-town bullies, prison guards, bartenders, military policemen and private detectives. Eddie Dunn was last seen in a fleeting role as a sheriff in the 1950 MGM musical Summer Stock.

Trivia: Supporting and occasional leading actress Randy Stuart was a regular on television during the '50s and in feature films of the '40s and '50s, including The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) in which she played the title character's loving wife. Stuart was born in Iola, Kansas, the daughter of parents involved in vaudeville. When she was old enough, Stuart joined them on stage. In 1943, she joined Fox Studios and was relegated to parts in films ranging from Whirlpool, to I Was a Male War Bride (both 1949), to All About Eve (1950), to New Day at Sundown (1957). Some of her notable television roles include that of the "Hubba-Hubba girl" on The Jack Carson Show and as the wife of Alan Hale, Jr. on Biff Baker U.S.A. Between 1952 and 1956, Stuart played Emily Fisher on the drama This Is the Life. She was also a regular on the short-lived The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1959-60). On Dragnet, Stuart occasionally played the wife of Harry "Joe Friday" Morgan. Her additional television credits include appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Cheyenne and Cavalcade of America.

Trivia: Helen Westcott launched her stage career at the age of 5. It has long been presumed that she made only one screen appearance in her preteen years, as a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); in fact, she played a major role in the 1934 B western Thunder Over Texas, which starred Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. Be that as it may, Westcott would not achieve film prominence until the late 1940s--early 1950s, with such roles as Gregory Peck's ex-wife in The Gunfighter (1950) and the imperiled heroine of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). When her starring career in films faded, Helen Westcott turned to television, where she flourished as a character actress; her last screen appearance was as Mrs. Burrows in 1970's I Love My...Wife.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Howard Negley made his screen bow as Nelson in 20th Century Fox's Smokey. Negley went on to reasonably prominent character parts in such B-pictures as Charlie Chan in the Trap (1947). For the most part, he played nameless bit parts as police captains, politicians, and reporters. Howard Negley was last seen as the Twentieth Century Limited conductor in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

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: Classically-trained dancer, and actress on stage, screen and television, Phyllis Hill got her start professionally dancing with the Metropolitan Opera ballet company and then joined the ballet corps at the Radio City Music Hall. From there she began playing dramatic roles in theater and this lead her to Broadway. Hill eventually became a performer in the international road-production of Rosalinda. Hill was a television actress in the mid 1950s and may be best remembered for playing Mrs. Dawson for many years on General Hospital. From the mid-'60s through the early '70s, Hill was also a regular on That Girl.