Trivia: A witty and stylish lead actress of stage and screen, Russell tended to play successful career women who were skilled in repartee. She trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then began her stage career in her early '20s. She debuted onscreen in 1934 and immediately had a very busy film career. At first appearing in routine films, in the '40s she began to specialize in light, sophisticated comedies, for which she had a unique talent. In the '50s her career briefly declined and she went to Broadway, where she starred in three successful productions. One of these was Auntie Mame, later made into a film in which she reprised her stage role (1958). She went on to appear in a handful of films before she was struck by crippling arthritis. Known for her charity work, in 1972 she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a special Oscar. Russell received four Academy Award nominations during her career. She was married to producer Frederick Brisson. She authored an autobiography, Life is a Banquet.

Trivia: The daughter of British actor John Mills and playwright Mary Hayley Bell, Hayley Catherine Rose Vivien Mills made her first screen appearance as an infant in 1947's So Well Remembered. It wasn't until a decade later, however, that Hayley Mills made her formal film debut, portraying the preteen murder witness who is nearly destroyed by her connection to the criminal in 1959's Tiger Bay. Playing many scenes alongside her own father,Mills gave an uncannily affecting performance that won her the British Film Academy's Most Promising Newcomer Award. The movie also brought her to the attention of Walt Disney, ever on the lookout for talented child actors. In 1959, Mills entered Disney's orbit, and the producer placed her into the most meticulous and artistic live-action film in his studio's history up to that time: Pollyanna (1960). The movie transformed Mills from a precociously talented juvenile player into a full-fledged star, and earned her a special Academy Award for her performance. Ironically, Pollyanna was somewhat mis-marketed at the time as a film intended principally for younger girls and their mothers -- in actuality, it is a sentimental film whose dramatic content and visual craftsmanship place it closer in spirit to pictures like The Music Man, or even Shenandoah, perfectly suitable for general audiences; as a result, it was never as big a hit in theaters as it should have been, and Mills' biggest success for Disney turned out to be her next feature, The Parent Trap (1961). This movie, about a set of estranged identical twin sisters who conspire to get their divorced parents back together, gave the 15-year-old actress the chance to play two separate characters, with two distinctly different personalities. She was able to convince a major part of the audience that she was two different people (a gambit later picked up by the creators of The Patty Duke Show), and she also hit the pop music charts with a song from the film, called "Let's Get Together." In the years that followed, Mills' output for Disney proved somewhat uneven, The Moon-Spinners (1964) failing to impress critics, while the more dramatically demanding The Chalk Garden (1964), in which she played an emotionally crippled adolescent, was some of her best work, and reunited her onscreen with her father; and she excelled in the drama Whistle Down the Wind (1962), directed by Bryan Forbes and made for Rank, playing a girl who shelters an escaped criminal, who thinks he's Jesus. The advent of the British Invasion in popular music, which imparted an appeal to all things British in America for about two years, helped sustain Mills' popularity, and her final Disney film, That Darn Cat (1965), was a hit and one of her best comedies, though she was outshone (as she might well have been) by old hands like William Demarest. Her first film after leaving the Disney fold was Gypsy Girl (1966), which marked a break from the American producer's tendency toward light comedy -- directed by her father and written by her mother, it presented Mills in the role of a retarded teenager. She was engaged by John and Roy Boulting to star in The Family Way (1966), a comedy about close-quarter familiar relations (best remembered today because of its score, written by Paul McCartney) -- that picture exploded her lingering goody-two-shoes image by offering Mills in a well-publicized nude scene, and what the scene itself didn't accomplish in changing her image, her romance and marriage to director Roy Boulting, some 33 years her senior, did, and the two had a daughter before their divorce in 1976. Mills would also have a lengthy relationship and eventually a son with actor Leigh Lawson. Curtailing her film appearances in the early '70s, Mills devoted most of her time to television productions; in 1986, she came back to the Disney fold with a Parent Trap TV-movie sequel, and she earned a place in the hearts of a new generation with the title role on 1987's Good Morning, Miss Bliss, the TV precursor to Saved by the Bell. Mills would take a break during the 90's, but returned to TV full force in 2007 with a starring role on the series Wild at Heart.

Trivia: Actress Binnie Barnes enjoyed a 30-year career on both sides of the Atlantic, and despite appearances in several notable films in her native England, she found her most lasting success in Hollywood, where she was best remembered for her tart-tongued portrayals. She was born Gittel Enoyce Barnes in London to a British father who was Jewish and an Italian mother. She was raised Jewish, although she converted to Catholicism upon her second marriage; later in life, she also took the formal name Gertrude Maude Barnes. It took until her teens before she actually entered performing, as a trick-rope artist in vaudeville (billed as "Texas Binnie Barnes"). Around that career start at 15, she also worked as a nurse, chorus girl, dance hostess, and milkmaid over the next few years. Barnes didn't start formal acting until age 26, working with Charles Laughton on stage. And apart from one appearance in a 1923 silent, she made her proper screen debut in 1931 in a series of short films, cast opposite comedian Stanley Lupino. Barnes was later signed to Alexander Korda's fledgling London Films, through which she was cast in movies such as Counsel's Opinion (1932) and other minor productions, earning the princely sum of 35 pounds (roughly $180) a week, which was actually very good money by ordinary standards, but hardly as star's compensation. She had something of a breakthrough in Korda's 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII portraying Catherine Howard, which gave her valuable exposure in England and America (where the movie was extraordinarily popular). Barnes was in the stage version of Cavalcade which, in turn, led to Hollywood to do the movie version and marked the beginning of her American career. Although she was initially uncomfortable in Hollywood, it was there that she spent most of the rest of her screen career. It helped that during the next few years she suppressed her English accent and developed a new, sassier persona as a wise-cracking female character lead, with her tall, imposing beauty and good looks, she was still attractive, but was usually cast as the heroine's best friend or older sister, and frequently with the best lines in those roles. At her best in those years, Barnes was a sort of trans-Atlantic rival to Eve Arden, cast in the same kind of sarcastic, knowing, yet attractive female roles. She still occasionally worked in films in England, including Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan and The Divorce of Lady X (a remake of Counsel's Opinion, in which Merle Oberon played her former role, while Barnes played the wife in the comedy of mistaken identity).Barnes had a sense of humor about herself that allowed her to work comfortably opposite performers such as the Ritz Brothers (The Three Musketeers), in which she was turned upside down and shaken by the comic trio; Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in The Time of Their Lives, in which she had one of the funniest "in" joke lines in the history of Hollywood (when meeting the intense, taciturn housekeeper played by Gale Sondergaard, Barnes' character remarks, "Didn't I see you in 'Rebecca'?"). She also got to portray a lusty side to her screen persona as the lady pirate Anne Bonney in The Spanish Main (a role originally slated for June Duprez), which afforded her a great death scene as well as some fierce and entertaining interactions with Maureen O'Hara, as the two contended for the affections of Paul Henried.In 1940, she married her second husband, actor/announcer-turned-film executive Mike Frankovich, and the two eventually moved to Italy following the end of the Second World War. There she produced movies, as well as acting in them, including Decameron Nights (1953) (in which -- shades of Alec Guinness -- she played eight different roles). Barnes retired in 1955 to devote herself to her home life, but in the mid-'60s, at her husband's insistence, she started to work again, on television and in feature films. She resumed acting on The Donna Reed Show, in two episodes three seasons apart, and played Sister Celestine in The Trouble With Angels (1967) and its sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968). Barnes' last screen appearance was in 40 Carats (1973), and during that same year she was a guest on The Tonight Show. She enjoyed a long and happy retirement, and passed away in 1998 at the age of 95, six years after her husband passed away.

Trivia: Swedish actress Camilla Sparv was brought to Hollywood by Columbia Pictures in 1965. Sparv was third-billed as Sister Constance in The Trouble With Angels (1966), then was consigned to a string of standard sexy-foreigner roles. At least she was permitted to utter the best line in the 1967 "Matt Helm" espionager Murderer's Row; cast as the mistress of villain Karl Malden, Sparv comforted her lover after his latest doomsday device has failed by murmuring "Cheer up. Maybe you can run someone over on the way home." Outside of her brief starring career, Camilla Sparv's chief claim to fame was as one of producer Robert Evans' four wives.

Trivia: "I'm not a comic," insisted Mary Wickes. "I'm an actress who plays comedy." True enough; still Wickes was often heaps funnier than the so-called comics she supported. The daughter of a well-to-do St. Louis banker, Wickes was an excellent student, completing a political science degree at the University of Washington at the age of 18. She intended to become a lawyer, but she was deflected into theatre. During her stock company apprenticeship, Wickes befriended Broadway star Ina Claire, who wrote the young actress a letter of introduction to powerful New York producer Sam Harris. She made her Broadway debut in 1934, spending the next five seasons in a variety of characterizations (never the ingenue). In 1939, she found time to make her film bow in the Red Skelton 2-reeler Seein' Red. After a string of Broadway flops, Wickes scored a hit as long-suffering Nurse Preen (aka "Nurse Bedpan") in the Kaufman-Hart comedy classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was brought to Hollywood to repeat her role in the 1941 film version of Dinner. After a brief flurry of movie activity, Wickes went back to the stage, returning to Hollywood in 1948 in a role specifically written for her in The Decision of Christopher Blake. Thereafter, she remained in great demand in films, playing an exhausting variety of nosy neighbors, acerbic housekeepers and imperious maiden aunts. Though her characters were often snide and sarcastic, Wickes was careful to inject what she called "heart" into her portrayals; indeed, it is very hard to find an out-and-out villainess in her manifest. Even when she served as the model for Cruella DeVil in the 1961 animated feature 101 Dalmations, Cruella's voice was dubbed by the far more malevolent-sounding Betty Lou Gerson. Far busier on TV than in films, Wickes was a regular on ten weekly series between 1953 and 1985, earning an Emmy nomination for her work on 1961's The Gertrude Berg Show. She also has the distinction of being the first actress to essay the role of Mary Poppins in a 1949 Studio One presentation. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Wickes did a great deal of guest-artist work in colleges and universities; during this period she herself went back to school, earning a master's degree from UCLA. Maintaining her professional pace into the 1990s, Wickes scored a hit with modern moviegoers as Sister Mary Lazarus in the two Sister Act comedies. Mary Wickes' final performance was a voiceover stint as one of the gargoyles in Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame; she died a few days before finishing this assignment, whereupon Jane Withers dubbed in the leftover dialogue.

Trivia: A gifted leading lady and character actress, Marge Redmond enjoyed a five-decade career that took her from the stage to television to feature films. Born Margery Redmond in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924 (some sources say 1930), Redmond became the first wife of future actor Jack Weston at the start of the 1950s, when both of them were working at the Cleveland Play House. They moved from regional theater to Hollywood, and were lucky enough to arrive in the film mecca just as television production was booming there. Redmond went on to appear in dozens of television shows, from My Three Sons to The Virginian, interspersed with the occasional feature film, of which The Trouble With Angels probably gave the actress her most notable role, as Sister Liquori, the best friend of the Mother Superior played by Rosalind Russell. That part pre-figured what became Redmond's most familiar small-screen portrayal, of Sister Jacqueline on The Flying Nun. The latter series only ran for two seasons, but thanks to the fact that Sally Field was its star, it has been seen in syndicated reruns for close to 50 years. She has since worked in virtually every genre of television show, right into the 1990s and Law And Order, and was still doing voice work for animated productions in the twenty-first century.

Trivia: Actress Marglo Gillmore appeared in numerous plays between 1917 and the early 1960s. The daughter of Actors Equity founder Frank Gillmore, she made her film debut in 1932 in Wayward. After that she didn't work in films again until the 1950s.

Trivia: Character actress Marjorie Eaton came to films in middle age. From 1946 on, she appeared onscreen in such films as Anna and the King of Siam (1946), The Time of Their Lives (1946), Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and Mary Poppins (1964), usually cast as domestics. She also did some voiceover work in the Disney feature-length cartoons of the 1950s and 1960s. Marjorie Eaton died shortly after appearing in her last film, 1986's Crackers.

Trivia: It's probable that no one had ever heard the word "ecdysiast" until Gypsy Rose Lee looked it up. To the world at large, self-proclaimed ecdysiast Lee was a striptease artist -- indeed, the most celebrated of that sorority. Lee's early life (fancifully recounted in her autobiography, which served as the source of the play and film Gypsy) consisted of touring the provinces in a vaudeville act managed by her mother. The star attractions of "Madame Rose's Dancing Daughters" were little Rose Louise Hovick and her younger sister June. When June struck out on her own as June Havoc, Rose Louise reinvented herself as "intellectual stripper" Gypsy Rose Lee, star of Minsky's Burlesque. When Mayor LaGuardia closed all the burlesque houses in New York in 1937, Lee went to Hollywood, where she was billed in her first films as Louise Hovick so as not to arouse the ire of the blue-noses. From 1943 on, her onscreen billing was Gypsy Rose Lee: while she seldom exhibited more than a trim ankle in these later film appearances, she was a welcome comedy-relief presence in such films as Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Screaming Mimi (1958). Lee penned the mystery novel The G-String Murders and the stage play The Naked Genius; these were adapted to film as, respectively, Lady of Burlesque (1943) and Doll Face (1945). In the 1950s and 1960s, the witty, self-mocking Lee was a frequent TV guest star, and on at least two occasions hosted her own talk show. Long after Gypsy Rose Lee's death, film director Otto Preminger revealed that Lee had borne one of his children.

Trivia: American character actor Jim Boles has also worked as a voice artist and is known for his impersonations of Abraham Lincoln.

Trivia: American actor Jim Hutton was performing in a military show in Germany when he was discovered by director Douglas Sirk. Sirk promptly cast Hutton in A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), which though released by Universal, led to an MGM contract for the young actor. Evidently MGM had plans to turn Hutton into the new Jimmy Stewart, for the studio insisted upon casting their young star in roles calling for ingenuous clumsiness. Perhaps the quintessential Hutton role was as The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962), in which his constant bumbling eventually transforms him into a war hero. MGM frequently paired Hutton with another player of acute comic skill, Paula Prentiss; they worked so well together that many fans assumed Hutton and Prentiss were married -- which must have been amusing to Paula's longtime husband Richard Benjamin. Hutton was allowed a few non-comedy "outdoors" roles in Major Dundee (1965) and The Green Berets (1969), but for the most part was locked into playing gangling young goofs. Oddly, Hutton's screen persona worked quite well for his TV-series role as Ellery Queen in the mid-1970s. The actor was charming and convincing as the self-effacing, deceptively preoccupied criminologist, especially when he turned to the camera 45 minutes into each Ellery Queen episode and invited the folks at home to help him solve the mystery. Hutton died of cancer at age 46 -- too soon to fully realize the success of his son, actor Timothy Hutton.

Trivia: Actor Harry Harvey Sr. started out in minstrel shows and burlesque. His prolific work in Midwestern stock companies led to film assignments, beginning at RKO in 1934. Harvey's avuncular appearance (he looked like every stage doorman named Pop who ever existed) won him featured roles in mainstream films and comic-relief and sheriff parts in B-westerns. His best known "prestige" film assignment was the role of New York Yankees manager Joe McCarthy in the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic Pride of the Yankees. Remaining active into the TV era, Harry Harvey Sr. had continuing roles on two series, The Roy Rogers Show and It's a Man's World, and showed up with regularity on such video sagebrushers as Cheyenne and Bonanza.