Trivia: The daughter of a building contractor, lissome leading lady Marianna Hill travelled all over the world as a youngster, picking up several languages along the way. By the time she reached the age of 15, Marianna was a seasoned stock-company and summer theater actress. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, she began showing up with regularity in TV western and adventure series, in which she was often cast as tempestuous Latinos (she was in fact half-Spanish, half-German). Towards the end of the 1960s, she began displaying a predilection for nude or nearly-nude scenes in films like Medium Cool (1969) and El Condor (1970). One of her flashiest roles of the 1970s was as inebriated Mafia princess Deanna Corleone in The Godfather II (1974). More recently, Marianna Hill has been an acting instructor at the Lee Strasberg studios in London.

Trivia: The remarkably named Joy Bang was a memorable cult figure across a string of movies and television shows of the late 1960s and early 1970s, usually typecast as "hippie" chicks who were free and easy-going in their sexuality. Born Joy Wener in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945, she was raised in New York City, and turned to acting in the 1960s, working under the name Joy Bang. Her screen debut came with a small role in Jack Bond's drama Separation (1968). At the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s, Bang appeared in a string of low-budget movies such as Maidstone and The Sky Pirate. At one point, she also briefly became part of Don Kirshner's extended stable of talent when she was cast in the pilot for a proposed musical/western series called The Kowboys. The series, co-starring a young Michael Martin Murphey and Boomer Castleman, both of the band the Lewis & Clark Expedition, was an odd western/musical adventure series, sort of The Monkees meets Here Come The Brides, and failed to sell, though the pilot did air in the summer of 1970. Bang resumed her career as a perennial guest star, working in television dramas (Mission Impossible, The Bold Ones, The Young Lawyers, Hawaii Five-0) before returning to feature film work in Red Sky At Morning and Pretty Maids All In A Row. In most of these movies, and in her television work in a toned-down manner, Bang usually played a gentle free-spirited girl, evocative of the popular perception of the "hippie" ethos, seemingly innocent about yet cognizant of her youthful sexuality, and all the more provocative for that combination of attributes. As a point of reference, Carly Simon had achieved something of a similar portrayal with her on-screen acting/performing appearance in Milos Forman's Taking Off at just about this same time. And with her image, innocent looks, and inherently provocative name, Bang should have been a natural for the talk-show circuit (one can just imagine Johnny Carson, in his "Art Fern/Tea-Time Movie" voice, having merciless fun announcing her as a guest) and media stardom. But it never quite happened that way, and she remained a working actress with a small (but growing) cult following.Bang did move up to a better class of movie and much larger big-screen roles in 1972, in Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike and Paul Williams' Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, before making what should have been a career-defining appearance in Woody Allen's film of his own stage hit Play It Again, Sam (1972), as Julie, the willowy, free-loving girl that Allen's nebish-y protagonist takes out on a disastrous date. (Ironically, Diane Keaton, who co-starred in the movie Play It Again, Sam and the original play, had been up for the role that Bang won in The Kowboys pilot). That same year, she had a co-starring role in Night Of The Cobra Woman, a low-budget Philippines-made horror picture in which Bang -- playing a research scientist -- battles a supernatural menace. This picture, rather than Allen's movie, seemed to define the path of her career -- by the following year, she was co-starring in the horror film Messiah Of Evil (which earned her screen credits alongside the likes of Elisha Cook, Jr. and Royal Dano). These pictures weren't enough to sustain a career, however -- horror stardom at that production level wouldn't become a route to enduring work until the following decade, and the advent of made-for-cable and direct-to-video genre films -- and after appearances in episodes of Adam-12 and Police Story she retired from acting. As of the start of the twenty-first century, she reportedly was working as a professional in the health-care field.

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.

Trivia: American actor Elisha Cook Jr. was the son of an influential theatrical actor/writer/producer who died early in the 20th Century. The younger Cook was in vaudeville and stock by the time he was fourteen-years old. In 1928, Cook enjoyed critical praise for his performance in the play Her Unborn Child, a performance he would repeat for his film debut in the 1930 film version of the play. The first ten years of Cook's Hollywood career found the slight, baby-faced actor playing innumerable college intellectuals and hapless freshmen (he's given plenty of screen time in 1936's Pigskin Parade). In 1940, Cook was cast as a man wrongly convicted of murder in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and so was launched the second phase of Cook's career as Helpless Victim. The actor's ability to play beyond this stereotype was first tapped by director John Huston, who cast Cook as Wilmer, the hair-trigger homicidal "gunsel" of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941). So far down on the Hollywood totem pole that he wasn't billed in the Falcon opening credits, Cook suddenly found his services much in demand. Sometimes he'd be shot full of holes (as in the closing gag of 1941's Hellzapoppin'), sometimes he'd fall victim to some other grisly demise (poison in The Big Sleep [1946]), and sometimes he'd be the squirrelly little guy who turned out to be the last-reel murderer (I Wake Up Screaming [1941]; The Falcon's Alibi [1946]). At no time, however, was Cook ever again required to play the antiseptic "nerd" characters that had been his lot in the 1930s. Seemingly born to play "film noir" characters, Cook had one of his best extended moments in Phantom Lady (1944), wherein he plays a set of drums with ever-increasing orgiastic fervor. Another career high point was his death scene in Shane (1953); Cook is shot down by hired gun Jack Palance and plummets to the ground like a dead rabbit. A near-hermit in real life who lived in a remote mountain home and had to receive his studio calls by courier, Cook nonetheless never wanted for work, even late in life. Fans of the 1980s series Magnum PI will remember Cook in a recurring role as a the snarling elderly mobster Ice Pick. Having appeared in so many "cult" films, Elisha Cook Jr. has always been one of the most eagerly sought out interview subjects by film historians.