Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: Stuart Whitman, with a rugged build and sensitive face, rose from bit player to competent lead actor, but never did make it as a popular star in film. The San Francisco-born Whitman served three years with the Army Corps of Engineers where he was a light heavyweight boxer in his spare time. He next went on to study drama at the Los Angeles City College where he joined a Chekhov stage group. He began his film career in the early '50s as a bit player. Although never a star, he did manage to quietly accumulate $100 million dollars through shrewd investments in securities, real estate, cattle, and Thoroughbreds. For his role as a sex offender attempting to change in the 1961 British film The Mark, Whitman was nominated for an Oscar. In addition to features, Whitman has also appeared extensively on television.

Trivia: Born Ina Rosenberg, Balin is a tall, slim brunette with the looks of a warm-hearted runway model. She debuted in the '50s on the Perry Como TV show, leading to work on Broadway in Compulsion and A Majority of One. Discovered by Hollywood producers, she made her film debut as Anthony Quinn's daughter in The Black Orchid (1959). In 1961 Balin was voted International Star of Tomorrow by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, by which time she was considered one of 20th Century Fox's most promising young talents. She later left the studio; her career never achieved the heights of her early promise. Balin toured Vietnam in 1970 with a U.S.O. show; there she visited An Lac, a Saigon orphanage. Her association with An Lac led her to be among the ground personnel helping to evacuate Vietnamese and Asian-American orphans at war's end in 1975, after which she adopted three of the children. This experience was dramatized in The Children of An Lac (1980), a TV movie in which Balin played herself.

Trivia: Trivia buffs and diehard fans of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront will know that the non-speaking cab driver in the film's famed 'taxicab scene between Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger was noted character actor Nehemiah Persoff. An American resident from age 9, the Jerusalem-born Persoff spent his early adulthood working for the New York subway system. Asked in later years why he chose acting as a profession, Persoff would comment that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe compelled him to prove himself worthy of his "gift of life." On stage in community and non-professional productions from 1940, he studied with Stella Adler at the Actor's Studio before graduating to Broadway. His first film appearance, in 1948, was in the Manhattan-based The Naked City. After attaining prominence in the mid-1950s, Persoff alternated between villainy and sympathetic roles, utilizing his ear for dialects to depict a wide array of nationalities. He was often cast as a gangster, both serious (Johnny Torrio in the 1959 feature Capone, Jake Guzik on the TV series The Untouchables) and satiric (Little Bonaparte in 1959's Some Like It Hot). His credits in the 1980s included Stalin in the 1980 TV movie FDR: The Last Year, Barbra Streisand's father in Yentl (1983), and the robust voice of Papa Mousekewitz in the 1986 animated feature An American Tail.

Trivia: Much like Humphrey Bogart before him, Lee Marvin rose through the ranks of movie stardom as a character actor, delivering expertly nasty and villainous turns in a series of B-movies before finally graduating to more heroic performances. Regardless of which side of the law he traveled, however, he projected a tough-as-nails intensity and a two-fisted integrity which elevated even the slightest material. Born February 19, 1924, in New York City, Marvin quit high school to enter the Marine Corps and while serving in the South Pacific was wounded in battle. He spent a year in recovery before returning to the U.S. to begin working as a plumber's apprentice. After filling in for an ailing summer-stock actor, his growing interest in performing inspired him to study at the New York-based American Theater Wing. Upon making his debut in summer stock, Marvin began working steadily in television and off-Broadway. He made his Broadway bow in a 1951 production of Billy Budd and also made his first film appearance in Henry Hathaway's You're in the Navy Now. The following year, Hathaway again hired him for The Diplomatic Courier, and was so impressed that he convinced a top agent to recruit him. Soon Marvin began appearing regularly onscreen, with credits including a lead role in Stanley Kramer's 1952 war drama Eight Iron Men. A riveting turn as a vicious criminal in Fritz Lang's 1953 film noir classic The Big Heat brought Marvin considerable notice and subsequent performances opposite Marlon Brando in the 1954 perennial The Wild One and in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock cemented his reputation as a leading screen villain. He remained a heavy in B-movies like 1955's I Died a Thousand Times and Violent Saturday, but despite starring roles in the 1956 Western Seven Men From Now and the smash Raintree County, he grew unhappy with studio typecasting and moved to television in 1957 to star as a heroic police lieutenant in the series M Squad. As a result, Marvin was rarely seen in films during the late '50s, with only a performance in 1958's The Missouri Traveler squeezed into his busy TV schedule. He returned to cinema in 1961 opposite John Wayne in The Comancheros, and starred again with the Duke in the John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a year later. Marvin, Wayne, and Ford reunited in 1963 for Donovan's Reef. A role in Don Siegel's 1964 crime drama The Killers followed and proved to be Marvin's final performance on the wrong side of the law.Under Stanley Kramer, Marvin delivered a warm, comic turn in 1965's Ship of Fools then appeared in a dual role as fraternal gunfighters in the charming Western spoof Cat Ballou, a performance which won him an Academy Award. His next performance, as the leader of The Dirty Dozen, made him a superstar as the film went on to become one of the year's biggest hits. Marvin's box-office stature had grown so significantly that his next picture, 1968's Sergeant Ryker, was originally a TV-movie re-released for theaters. His next regular feature, the John Boorman thriller Point Blank, was another major hit. In 1969, Marvin starred with Clint Eastwood in the musical comedy Paint Your Wagon, one of the most expensive films made to date. It too was a success, as was 1970's Monte Walsh. Considering retirement, he did not reappear onscreen for two years, but finally returned in 1972 with Paul Newman in the caper film Pocket Money. After turning down the lead in Deliverance, Marvin then starred in Prime Cut, followed in 1973 by Emperor of the North Pole and The Iceman Cometh.Poor reviews killed the majority of Marvin's films during the mid-'70s. When The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday -- the last of three pictures he released during 1976 -- failed to connect with critics or audiences, he went into semi-retirement, and did not resurface prior to 1979's Avalanche Express. However, his return to films was overshadowed by a high-profile court case filed against him by Michelle Triola, his girlfriend for the last six years; when they separated, she sued him for "palimony" -- 1,800,000 dollars, one half of his earnings during the span of their relationship. The landmark trial, much watched and discussed by Marvin's fellow celebrities, ended with Triola awarded only 104,000 dollars. In its wake he starred in Samuel Fuller's 1980 war drama The Big Red One, which was drastically edited prior to its U.S. release. After 1981's Death Hunt, Marvin did not make another film before 1983's Gorky Park. The French thriller Canicule followed, and in 1985 he returned to television to reprise his role as Major Reisman in The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission. The 1986 action tale The Delta Force was Marvin's final film; he died of a heart attack on August 29, 1987, in Tucson, AZ, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery next to the remains of fellow veteran (and boxing legend) Joe Louis.

Trivia: Though best known for his Native American characterizations, Michael Ansara was actually of Lebanese descent. Ansara, born in Syria and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, entered Los Angeles City College in 1941, planning to become a doctor. His shyness in class prompted his professor to suggest that Ansara take a dramatics course to bolster his self-confidence. The medical profession's loss turned out to be the acting community's gain: after training at Pasadena Playhouse, Ansara blossomed as a classical actor with such groups as the Hollywood Players' Ring. The role that brought Ansara to the attention of Hollywood's higher-ups was his brief, uncredited appearance as the tormented Judas in The Robe (1953). He went on to be cast as Cochise in the 1956 TV series version of the 1950 20th Century-Fox feature Broken Arrow; while the role brought him fame and fortune, Ansara noted that "the acting range was rather limited. Cochise could do one of two things--stand with his arms folded, looking noble; or stand with his arms at his sides, looking noble." He was allowed a more flexible acting range, as well as a wider vocabulary, in his next Indian assignment, that of Harvard-educated federal marshal Sam Buckhart in the 1959 western series Law of the Plainsman. In later years, Ansara was active in the lucrative world of TV cartoon voiceover work. He was married for several years to actress Barbara Eden.

Trivia: The son of actor John Wayne, Patrick Wayne made his earliest film appearances at 14, playing bits in The Quiet Man (1953) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), both directed by "the Duke"'s mentor John Ford. The younger Wayne's first real film role was in Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955); the following year, as Lieutenant Greenhill, Wayne acted opposite his father in The Searchers (1956). After attending Loyola University, he was given an opportunity to co-star in The Young Land, a film which neither starred his dad nor was directed by John Ford. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't ready for stardom just yet, so it was back to supporting parts in The Alamo (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), McClintock (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971). On his own, Patrick Wayne played leads in the special effects-laden adventures People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), co-starred on the TV series The Rounders (1965) and Shirley (1979), and hosted the syndicated variety weekly The Monte Carlo Show (1980).

Trivia: After attending the University of the South in Tennessee, Bruce Cabot bounced around from job to job: working on a tramp steamer, selling insurances, even hauling away the bones of dead animals. While attending a Hollywood party, Cabot met RKO producer David O. Selznick, which resulted in Cabot's first film appearance in Roadhouse Murder. His most famous role while at RKO was as the heroic Jack Driscoll in King Kong (1933), rescuing Fay Wray from the hairy paws of the 50-foot ape. Thereafter, Cabot was most often seen in villainous, brutish roles. It is hard to imagine anyone more venomous or vicious than Bruce Cabot in such roles as the scarred gangster boss in Let 'Em Have It (1936), the treacherous Magua in Last of the Mohicans (1936), or the thick-skulled lynch-mob instigator in Fury (1936). During World War II, Cabot worked in army intelligence and operations in Africa, Sicily and Italy. A good friend of John Wayne, Cabot was frequently cast in "The Duke's" vehicles of the 1960s, including The Green Berets (1968). Among Bruce Cabot's three wives were actresses Adrienne Ames and Francesca de Scaffa.

Trivia: From the end of the '50s until the mid-'60s, perky, buxom Joan O'Brien was one of Hollywood's most promising leading ladies, specializing in comedic roles. Born in Cambridge, MA, she was raised in Southern California and started singing at an early age. At 15, she was discovered by Tennessee Ernie Ford's manager, Cliffie Stone, and was signed up as a regular performer on the local television country music showcase Hometown Jamboree. By 1953, at 17, she had moved to the CBS network as a singer on The Bob Crosby Show, an engagement that lasted four years. She was married very briefly during this period to guitarist Billy Strange, with whom she had one son. O'Brien took her first screen test in 1957 at MGM and earned a co-starring role opposite Dean Jones in David Friedkin's crime drama Handle With Care (1958). By that time, O'Brien was on her second marriage and was pregnant, so she put her fledgling movie career on hold for almost two years. She tested for Blake Edwards' Operation Petticoat (1959) and was cast alongside Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Though the movie made ample use of her 38-inch bosom as part of its plot (about army nurses and an all-male navy crew), it also gave O'Brien a chance to show off her comedic skills as the accident-prone Lt. Crandall, who wins the heart of Cary Grant's character by the movie's end. She later played a role in John Wayne's historical epic The Alamo (1960), but it was soon after her work in this film that O'Brien's personal problems began slowing her career momentum. She continued doing television over the next few years, including episodes of Wagon Train, Bachelor Father, and other television series; however, her performances attracted less attention than her stormy marital problems and other serious personal difficulties. With her looks and comedic skills, O'Brien could easily have been a rival to Barbara Eden, but instead she receded from public life following performances on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Perry Mason in late 1964. Her final big-screen appearances were in the Elvis Presley film It Happened at the World's Fair (1963) and MGM's jukebox movie Get Yourself a College Girl (1964).

Trivia: A graduate of Santa Monica Junior College, Jack Elam spent the immediate post-World War II years as an accountant, numbering several important Hollywood stars among his clients. Already blind in one eye from a childhood fight, Elam was in danger of losing the sight in his other eye as a result of his demanding profession. Several of his show business friends suggested that Elam give acting a try; Elam would be a natural as a villain. A natural he was, and throughout the 1950s Elam cemented his reputation as one of the meanest-looking and most reliable "heavies" in the movies. Few of his screen roles gave him the opportunity to display his natural wit and sense of comic timing, but inklings of these skills were evident in his first regular TV series assignments: The Dakotas and Temple Houston, both 1963. In 1967, Elam was given his first all-out comedy role in Support Your Local Sheriff, after which he found his villainous assignments dwindling and his comic jobs increasing. Elam starred as the patriarch of an itinerant Southwestern family in the 1974 TV series The Texas Wheelers (his sons were played by Gary Busey and Mark Hamill), and in 1979 he played a benign Frankenstein-monster type in the weekly horror spoof Struck By Lightning. Later TV series in the Elam manifest included Detective in the House (1985) and Easy Street (1987). Of course Elam would also crack up audiences in the 1980s with his roles in Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II. Though well established as a comic actor, Elam would never completely abandon the western genre that had sustained him in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1993, a proud Elam was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Two short years later the longitme star would essay his final screen role in the made for television western Bonanza: Under Attack.

Trivia: Intending to become a dentist like his father, American actor Edgar Buchanan wound up with grades so bad in college that he was compelled to take an "easy" course to improve his average. Buchanan chose a course in play interpretation, and after listening to a few recitations of Shakespeare he was stagestruck. After completing dental school, Buchanan plied his oral surgery skills in the summertime, devoting the fall, winter and spring months to acting in stock companies and at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was given a screen test by Warner Bros. studios in 1940, received several bit roles, then worked himself up to supporting parts upon transferring to Columbia Pictures. Though still comparatively youthful, Buchanan specialized in grizzled old westerners, with a propensity towards villainy or at least larceny. The actor worked at every major studio (and not a few minor ones) over the next few years, still holding onto his dentist's license just in case he needed something to fall back on. Though he preferred movie work to the hurried pace of TV filming, Buchanan was quite busy in television's first decade, costarring with William Boyd on the immensely popular Hopalong Cassidy series, then receiving a starring series of his own, Judge Roy Bean, in 1954. Buchanan became an international success in 1963 thanks to his regular role as the lovably lazy Uncle Joe Carson on the classic sitcom Petticoat Junction, which ran until 1970. After that, the actor experienced a considerably shorter run on the adventure series Cade's County, which starred Buchanan's close friend Glenn Ford. Buchanan's last movie role was in Benji (1974), which reunited him with the titular doggie star, who had first appeared as the family mutt on Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: With his haughty demeanor and near-satanic features, British actor Henry Daniell was the perfect screen "gentleman villain" in such major films of the 1930s and 1940s as Camille (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). An actor since the age of 18, Daniell worked in London until coming to America in an Ethel Barrymore play. He co-starred with Ruth Gordon in the 1929 Broadway production Serena Blandish, in which he won critical plaudits in the role of Lord Iver Cream. Making his movie debut in Jealousy (1929)--which co-starred another stage legend, Jeanne Eagels--Daniell stayed in Hollywood for the remainder of his career, most often playing cold-blooded aristocrats in period costume. He was less at home in action roles; he flat-out refused to participate in the climactic dueling scene in The Sea Hawk (1940), compelling star Errol Flynn to cross swords with a none too convincing stunt double. Daniell became something of a regular in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films made at Universal in the 1940s--he was in three entries, playing Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945). Though seldom in pure horror films, Daniell nonetheless excelled in the leading role of The Body Snatcher (1945). When the sort of larger-than-life film fare in which Daniell specialized began disappearing in the 1950s, the actor nonetheless continued to prosper in both films (Man in the Grey Flannel Suit [1956], Witness for the Prosecution [1957]) and television (Thriller, The Hour of St. Francis, and many other programs). While portraying Prince Gregor of Transylvania in My Fair Lady (1964), under the direction of his old friend George Cukor, Daniell died suddenly; his few completed scenes remained in the film, though his name was removed from the cast credits.

Trivia: Where does one go after one has played The Devil Himself in one's very first film? Richard Devon, who indeed portrayed Satan in 1957's The Undead, was consigned to ordinary "mortal" parts for the remainder of his film career. Usually he played Latino types in such films as The Comancheros (1961), Kid Galahad (the 1962 Elvis Presley version) and Magnum Force (1973). More recently, Richard Devon has cast aside his horns and cloven hooves from The Undead to play a Cardinal in Seventh Sinner (1988).

Trivia: An economics major at the Brown University and the University of Chicago, cadaverous character actor John Dierkes spent the 1930s as an ad-copy writer and as head of an independent polling service. After serving with the Red Cross in World War II, Dierkes worked for the U.S. Treasury; it was in this capacity that he was sent to Hollywood in 1946 to act as technical advisor for MGM's To the Ends of the Earth. A talent scout for Orson Welles spotted Dierkes and convinced him to audition for the part of Ross in Welles' upcoming film version of MacBeth. Dierkes won the part, and remained in Hollywood for the next two decades. He went on to critical acclaim as the Tall Soldier in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), topping this assignment with his best screen role, that of "Morgan" in George Stevens' Shane (1953). Suffering from emphysema, John Dierkes gradually cut down on his film and TV appearances in the 1970s; he was last seen in a fleeting role in the Stanley Kramer production Oklahoma Crude (1973).

Trivia: Born Robert Bradbury, he began appearing (at age 14) in semi-documentary nature shorts directed by his father, prolific silent director Robert North Bradbury; he later appeared in juvenile parts in some Westerns his father directed. In 1927 he began starring in cowboy films, maintaining his career in screen Westerns through the early '40s; he was one of the "Three Mesquiteers" in the series of that name. He also played straight dramatic roles, including the part of Curly in Of Mice and Men (1940). After the mid '40s he played character roles, appearing in films every few years until the early '70s. He was a regular on the '60s TV sitcom "F Troop."

Trivia: Nicknamed "Big Boy" by his friend and frequent coworker Will Rogers, beefy Western star Guinn Williams was the son of a Texas congressman. After attending North Texas State College, Williams played pro baseball and worked as a rodeo rider before heading to Hollywood in his teens to try his luck in films. While he starred in several inexpensive silent and sound Westerns, Williams is better known for his comedy relief work in such films as Private Worlds (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Professor Beware (1938), and Santa Fe Trail (1940). "Big Boy" Williams is also a familiar name to devotees of Orson Welles; it was Williams who once accosted Welles in a parking lot and cut off the "boy wonder's" necktie.

Trivia: Actor Jon Lormer appeared in several films from the late '50s through the mid-'80s. He was also a teacher and director at the American Theater Wing in New York. Lormer guest starred in many television series and made-for-TV movies.

Trivia: Lead actor Dennis Cole has appeared as a film actor since 1964 but first appeared as an extra, double, stunt man, and chorus dancer in Bye Bye Birdie.

Trivia: This callow, mustachioed American actor showed up in utility roles in films beginning in the early 1930s. Usually playing bits in features, Brodie was given a wider range in short subjects, notably as gentleman thief "Baffles" in the 1941 El Brendel 2-reeler Yumpin' Yiminy. Some of his more notable credits include his voiceover work in the Disney cartoon feature Dumbo and his subtly sleazy portrayal of the used car salesman in the noir classic Detour (1946). He also worked off and on as a dialogue director.

Trivia: Chubby, rubber-faced comedian Alan Carney knocked around vaudeville for years as a comic dialectician. After making his first film, 1941's Convoy, Carney signed a contract at RKO, appearing in choice supporting roles in such films as Mr. Lucky (1943). In 1943, Carney was teamed with Wally Brown (see entry 9048) as RKO's answer to Abbott and Costello. In addition to their inexpensive starring vehicles, Brown and Carney co-starred in Step Lively (1943), a musical remake of the Marx Bros.' Room Service (1938) (Wally played Chico's part, while Carney filled in for Harpo; the "Groucho" role was essayed by, of all people, Adolphe Menjou). Brown and Carney were also featured on a live USO tour arranged by the studio. After 1946's Genius at Work, RKO terminated the team's contracts. Alan Carney continued in films and TV as a supporting player, working prolifically at Disney Studios in the 1960s and 1970s; one of Carney's best latter-day roles was as Mayor Dawgmeat in the 1959 film musical Li'l Abner.

Trivia: From his first film appearance in 1946 until his retirement sometime in the late 1960s, the wizened, rusty-voiced actor William Fawcett specialized in cantankerous farmers, grizzled old prospectors and Scroogelike millionaires. He worked frequently at Columbia, appearing in that studio's quota of "B" westerns and Arabian Nights quickies, as well as such serials as The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), in which he played the juicy bad-guy role of Merlin the Magician. Though occasionally seen in sizeable parts in "A" pictures--he played Andy Griffith's septuagenarian father in No Time For Sergeants (1957)--Fawcett's appearances in big-budgeters frequently went unbilled, as witness The Music Man (1962) and What a Way to Go (1964). Baby boomers will fondly recall William Fawcett as ranch-hand Pete ("who cut his teeth on a brandin' iron") in the Saturday-morning TV series Fury (1956-60).

Trivia: The son of actors Harry Carey and Olive Golden, Harry Carey Jr. never answered to "Harry" or "Junior"; to his friends, family and film buffs, he was always "Dobe" Carey. Raised on his father's California ranch, the younger Carey spent his first six adult years in the Navy. While it is commonly assumed that he made his film debut under the direction of his dad's longtime friend John Ford, Carey in fact was first seen in a fleeting bit in 1946's Rolling Home, directed by William Berke. It wasn't until his third film, Three Godfathers (dedicated to the memory of his father) that Carey worked with Ford. Honoring his promise to Harry Sr. that he'd "look after" Dobe, Ford saw to it that the younger Carey was given a starring assignment (along with another of the director's proteges, Ben Johnson), in Wagonmaster (1950). Though he handled this assignment nicely, exuding an appealing earnest boyishness, Carey wasn't quite ready for stardom so far as the Hollywood "higher-ups" were concerned, so he settled for supporting roles, mostly in westerns. John Ford continued to use Carey whenever possible; in 1955's The Long Gray Line, the actor has a few brief scenes as West Point undergraduate Dwight D. Eisenhower. Carey was also featured on the "Spin and Marty" segments of Walt Disney's daily TVer The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-59). In later years, Carey's weather-beaten face was seen in choice character assignments in films ranging from The Whales of August (1987) to Back to the Future III (1990); he was also hired by such John Ford aficionados as Peter Bogdanovich, who cast Carey as an old wrangler named Dobie (what else?) in Nickelodeon (1976), and as an ageing bike-gang member named Red in Mask (1985). In 1994, Harry Carey Jr. published his autobiography, Company of Heroes. Carey died of natural causes at age 91 in late December 2012.

Trivia: A legendary stuntman/stunt coordinator, Cliff Lyons was as handsome as any of the stars he doubled and had indeed starred in his own series of silent Westerns under the name of Tex Lyons. Having begun his professional career performing with minor rodeos, Lyonsdrifted to Hollywood in the early '20s, where he found work as a stuntman in such films as Ben-Hur (1925) and Beau Geste (1927). In between these major releases, the newcomer did yeoman duty for Poverty Row entrepreneur Bud Barsky, who produced eight Westerns in Sequoia National Park starring, alternately, Lyons and Al Hoxie. Lyons would do a second series of eight equally low-budget jobs for producer Morris R. Schlank, filmed at Kernville, CA, and released 1928-1930. This time, he would alternate with another cowboy star, Cheyenne Bill. Commented Lyons: "We would go on location and make two pictures at a time -- one of Cheyenne Bill's and one of mine -- and also play the villain in each other's." Sound put an end to Lyons' starring career and he spent the next four decades or so as a riding double for the likes of Johnny Mack Brown, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and even Tom Mix (in the 1935 serial The Miracle Rider). In his later years he became closely associated with good friends John Wayne and John Ford, for whom he also did some second-unit directing. Although not as remembered today as Yakima Canutt, Lyons was a major force in the burgeoning stunt business and many of his innovations are still used by modern practitioners of the craft. He was married from 1938 to 1955 to B-Western heroine Beth Marion, with whom he had two sons.

Trivia: Gregg Palmer started out as a radio disc jockey, billed under his given name of Palmer Lee. He launched his film career in 1950, usually appearing in Westerns and crime melodramas. During the 1950s, he could most often be seen in such inexpensive sci-fi fare as A Creature Walks Among Us (1956) and Zombies of Moro Tau. Before his retirement in 1983, Gregg Palmer logged in a great many TV credits, including a 13-week stint as a Chicago gunman named Harry in Run Buddy Run (1966).

Trivia: James Edward Grant occupied an all but unique niche in Hollywood for just over 20 years, as a writer who was part of John Wayne's closest circle of friends and business associates. It was in that position that he exerted a unique degree of influence on the onscreen persona that Wayne presented, and on the content of a dozen of the actor's movies. Some actors had producers or directors that they preferred to work with, but Grant was unusual in his relationship to Wayne as a writer; the actor also trusted him sufficiently to let Grant direct one key film in the actor's output.Grant was also an unlikely denizen of Hollywood, and seems only to have moved to the film mecca as a result of some unfortunate events in his hometown of Chicago. He was born in the Windy City in 1905, and by the end of the 1920s was an up-and-coming journalist, in addition to writing fiction for magazines such as Liberty and Argosy. He was known best in Chicago as a newspaper reporter, but beginning in 1931 his major source of income was not obvious to the public -- Grant continued working as a reporter, but he was also secretly the speechwriter for Anton J. Cermak, who was elected mayor that year. For the next year or so, Grant led a double life, with most of his income derived from his relationship with Cermak -- and when the mayor was killed in an assassination attempt against President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, there went a big chunk of Grant's income. He turned to writing fiction in earnest, and his first book, The Green Shadow, was published in 1935. He later went out to Hollywood when the film rights were sold to RKO, for a movie version directed by Charles Vidor and starring Preston Foster (under the title Muss 'Em Up). Grant provided the stories to several films over the next year or two, and also turned to screenwriting with an early Otto Preminger-directed effort at 20th Century Fox starring Ann Sothern and Jack Haley, entitled Danger: Love at Work (1937).Grant kept selling stories and finally moved permanently to Hollywood, where he authored screenplays over the next few years, building up his reputation as a reliable and occasionally inspired writer with a gift for good dialogue. His big success came at MGM with Boom Town (1940), a Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy vehicle that showed both actors at (or near) their toughest and most virile. Grant scored a similar triumph with Mervyn LeRoy's Johnny Eager, which was a change-of-pace tough-guy vehicle for Robert Taylor. If not one of best writing talents available, Grant did deliver solid, reliable work, and most of the pictures that he wrote were successful, a few even getting good notices in the writing department. By the first half of the 1940s, he was successful enough to own a cattle ranch in the Central Valley.By 1945, Grant had moved over to Warner Bros., where he produced as well as wrote The Great John L., about the renowned prizefighter John L. Sullivan, portrayed by Errol Flynn, then the studio's top action star. It was around this time that Grant became close friends with John Wayne, who, over the previous five years, had ascended to his own unique brand of action stardom, mostly at Republic Pictures. Wayne was taking a closer interest than was typical among actors in the quality of the movie scripts he was offered -- he'd endured a decade of very lean times, of leading roles in B-Westerns and lesser parts in small major studio productions, and wanted to safeguard the stardom that had finally become his with John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Wayne also needed to shelter some of his rapidly growing income by shifting it from salaried studio work as an actor to capital gains as a producer, and it was because of that -- and his desire to get his feet wet in the field of film production -- that he decided to take advantage of a clause in his contract that allowed him to produce movies.The result was Angel and the Badman (1947), in which Wayne cast himself as Quirt Evans, a fast-gun who is found near death by a Quaker family and nursed back to health, but who takes a little longer to understand their philosophy or appreciate it, or the attentions of their daughter (Gail Russell). Grant wrote the story and was chosen by Wayne to direct the movie, and the result was not only the one of the most interesting and rewarding of Wayne's early starring vehicles (at least, among those not directed by John Ford), but one of the most complex, in the script and the acting. And it was a success, and launched Wayne's career as a producer. Grant and Wayne collaborated on 11 more projects over the next 19 years. Although he was not involved in the writing of most of the films that Ford made with Wayne, he was responsible for Flying Leathernecks (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Trouble Along the Way, and Hondo (both 1953), and directed as well as provided the story to the Wayne-produced thriller Ring of Fear (1954). Additionally, they were personally very close drinking buddies who played chess all the time (with Grant reportedly never winning a game in 19 years).Additionally, Grant had Wayne's ear when it came to dialogue -- Wayne was reportedly convinced that, outside of the writers used by Ford in his films, Grant wrote the best dialogue he ever had to work with, and understood exactly what Wayne's fans wanted from the actor. Also, if Grant wrote strong parts for Wayne and other actors, he tended to write relatively weak roles for women, and that mix worked in most of the dozen movies he did with Wayne. Equally to the point, Grant reportedly knew exactly what Wayne wanted to hear, and was, in a sense, the ultimate sycophant/employee. According to director Frank Capra in his autobiography, in their contact over the filmmaker's abortive involvement with the movie Circus World (1964), Grant took pride in having helped persuade Wayne to stop making movies with Ford -- in doing this, however, he may have overplayed his hand as the actor's friend. Grant contributed to The Alamo (1960), as well as The Comancheros (1961), and worked on a Ford production the following year with Donovan's Reef. And when Wayne needed to get his production company out of the hole it had dug with immense cost of The Alamo, it was to Grant that he turned. The result was McLintock! (1963), a deceptively complex and serious comedy, which proved the most profitable of all of Wayne's 1960s releases.Somewhat ironically, McLintock! also proved a swan song for Grant's major influence on Wayne's career. By 1964, while contending with his own health problems, Wayne had come to recognize Grant's weaknesses, personal and otherwise; the man was obviously an alcoholic and was in declining health, and was becoming something of a burden, as when he managed to drive Capra off the shooting of Circus World. But Wayne never objected to the ideological statements that Grant put into his dialogue for Wayne, which defined the actor for the rest of his life. Beyond his work with Wayne, Grant also wrote the screenplays for such films as The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) (bullfighting being one of his pet interests) and The Last Wagon (1956), and the original story for The Proud Rebel (1958). He died in early 1966, and his last film credit appeared over four years later with the release of Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), which was based on Grant's screenplay.

Trivia: No relation to Leonard Bernstein, American film composer Elmer Bernstein was a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. He dabbled in all aspects of the arts (including dance) before devoting himself to composing; his first major stint was for United Nations radio. In the early '50s, Bernstein was willing to take any job available just to establish himself -- which possibly explains why his name is on the credits of that "golden turkey" Robot Monster. The composer's big breakthrough came with his progressive jazz score for The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), after which he switched artistic gears with his Wagnerian orchestrations for DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Bernstein's pulsating score for The Magnificent Seven (1960) has since become a classic -- so much so that Bernstein is often mistakenly credited for Jerome Moross' similar theme music for The Big Country (1958). As film tastes changed in the late '60s and early '70s, Bernstein's over-arranged compositions seemed a bit anachronistic, a fact that the composer himself apparently realized, as witnessed by his semi-satirical score for National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). Bernstein remained active throughout the '90s, rearranging Bernard Herrmann's original score for the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, underlining the innate romanticism of such films as Rambling Rose (1991), and earning Oscar nominations for his work on The Age of Innocence (1993) and Far From Heaven (2002). In 1967, Bernstein won his only Academy Award for Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which he wrote only the background music and none of the individual songs.