Trivia: An art major at Yale University, Tom Tryon attended the Art Student's League in New York, then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Working both on-stage and backstage with several stock companies, Tryon began picking up TV work in the 1950s. His first burst of fame was the result of his starring stint in the Texas John Slaughter episodes of TV's Walt Disney Presents. In 1962, he was signed to a contract by producer/director Otto Preminger, who cast Tryon in the lead of the 1963 big-budgeter The Cardinal. Tryon later quit acting to become a successful novelist, specializing in gothic horror. Tom Tryon's best-selling novels include The Other, Harvest Home, and Crowned Heads, all of which were adapted to film.

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 in Brooklyn, NY, Peggy Wood was the daughter of a popular Manhattan columnist. Gifted with a lilting soprano voice, she began her stage career in musicals and operettas. Her chief Broadway fame rested in multilayered dramatic roles, though she was also an expert comedienne when the occasion arose. In her heyday, Wood was a member of the New York "intellectual" circuit, making occasional lunchtime stopovers at the Algonquin Round Table. A star on stage, Wood seldom appeared in anything larger than supporting roles in films; for example, she had only one scene as the sympathetic central-casting secretary in David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born (1937). From 1949 through 1957, Wood starred on the popular TV series Mama, reportedly exerting a great deal of script and casting control. Peggy Wood's last screen appearance was as the Mother Abbess in the Oscar-winning musical The Sound of Music (1965); sadly, her once beautiful singing voice was a thing of the past, and she had to be dubbed.

Trivia: Though of the same era as her Swedish compatriots Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, talented and beautiful leading lady of stage and screen Viveca Lindfors never achieved their superstar status due in large part to working in movies that inadequately displayed the full extent of her ability and charismatic personality. Still, she earned accolades and awards from critics and film societies around the world, including two awards from the prestigious Berlin Film Festival. Born Elsa Viveca Torstensdotter Lindfors in Uppsala, Sweden, she learned to act at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. She made her Swedish film debut in Snurriga Familjen (1940). For the next six years, she would appear in more films and establish a stage career. Moving to Hollywood in 1946, she contracted herself to Warner Bros. studios and two years later starred opposite Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan (1948); however, in 1947, she appeared in Night Unto Night, Ronald Reagan's first starring role, but the film was not released until 1949. The following year, she debuted in her first French film, Singoalla. She made her first Broadway appearance playing the lead in Anastasia. Other memorable stage roles include Miss Julie (1955), Brecht on Brecht (1961), and I Am Woman (1973), a one-woman show. For her filmwork, Lindfors won her first Best Actress Award from the BFF in 1951 for Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep). Her second BFF Best Actress Award was for her role in Huis Clos (No Exit) (1962). In her personal life, Lindfors was renowned for her numerous romantic liaisons -- this in a decade when such behavior was considered shocking. She claims to have married the first of her four husbands just to prove that a promiscuous woman could indeed marry a decent man. Unlike many actresses for whom the aging process marks the death of their careers, Lindfors grew gracefully into her latter years, gaining a dignified beauty and an even more commanding presence in such films as Welcome to L.A. and Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978). In 1985, she made her debut as a screenwriter and director with Unfinished Business. Lindfors made her final film appearance in Henry Jaglom's Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995). She died in October that year of complications from rheumatoid arthritis in her home town of Uppsala.

Trivia: Educated at the Pratt Institute, Jeff Morrow was a commercial artist before turning to acting. During his many years on Broadway, Morrow was seen in such productions as Billy Budd and MacBeth. Equally busy on radio, he was one of several actors to play the title character on Dick Tracy. He made his film debut in the 1953 costume epic The Robe. Most of his films were in the sci-fi/fantasy category, typified by 1956's This Island Earth (possibly his best role, as white-haired alien Exeter) and 1957's The Giant Claw On TV, Jeff Morrow starred as Bart McClelland in the 1958 syndie Union Pacific, and was co-starred as Dr. Lloyd Axton in the 1973 networker Temperatures Rising.

Trivia: Actor Thayer David did quite well for himself on stage, screen and television. By virtue of his prominent eyebrows and chin and his brutish frame, David tended to be typecast as villains, notably as the odious Count Sacnusson in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1959), the shadowy arsonist in Save the Tiger (1973) and the untrustworthy boxing promoter in Rocky (1976). But in 1977, David was on the verge of TV hero-dom, thanks to an excellent showing in the title role in the 90-minute pilot film Meet Nero Wolfe. Alas, he died of a heart attack before the pilot could be spun off into a series. Thayer David was at one time married to actress Valerie French.

Trivia: Born in London, Les Tremayne moved to America in his early teens. Educated at Northwestern, Columbia and UCLA, Tremayne went on the stage in the early 1930s, where his distinguished demeanor and mellifluous voice served him well. He rose to stardom on radio, appearing in literally thousands of "Golden Age" broadcasts, notably as star of the long-running anthology The First Nighter Program. In films from 1951, Tremayne brought a large dose of sober credibility to many an otherwise hard-to-swallow science fiction opus. At his best as General Mann in War of the Worlds (1953)--the General's explanation of the Martian's invasion strategy remains one of the finest pieces of pure exposition in all of "fantastic" cinema--Tremayne was also successful in maintaining his dignity in cheapies of the Angry Red Planet (1959) and Slime People (1965) variety. The actor's contributions to the sci-fi genre were hosannahed in the direct-to-video production The Attack of the B-Movie Monsters (1985). In addition, Tremayne showed up in several non-genre efforts, usually in small but substantial roles like the auctioneer in North by Northwest (Tremayne's single scene in this 1959 Hitchcock classic also featured his old First Nighter colleague Olan Soule). Busiest on television as a commercial spokesman and voiceover artist, Tremayne found time to appear on the prime-time TV version of radio's One Man's Family (1951); as Inspector Richard Queen on the 1958-59 incarnation of the venerable Ellery Queen; and as Mentor on the Saturday morning Captain Marvel-inspired weekly Shazam! (1974-77). In 1995, Les Tremayne, as golden-throated as ever, was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame during a moving, nationally broadcast ceremony from Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting.

Trivia: Versatile actress Lili Valenty appeared in a wide variety of films. A native of Poland, she got her start on the German stage where she was a major star. In the early '30s, she emigrated to New York and launched a successful career on radio and the Broadway stage. She later made guest appearances on numerous television shows.

Trivia: John Gabriel was 19 when he made his first brief film appearance in 1950. He went on to play nondescript secondary roles in such films as South Pacific (1958), finally attaining co-starring parts in the mid-'60s Westerns Stagecoach and El Dorado. He was far more successful on television, especially in the specialized world of the soap opera: He spent several fruitful years playing such daytime drama roles as Seneca Beaulac in Ryan's Hope and Zack Conway in Loving. John Gabriel harbors no regrets for the one plum role he didn't land: The Professor in Gilligan's Island (1964-1967), a part he essayed in the pilot episode before he was replaced by Russell Johnson.

Trivia: Of Russian descent, American actor Basil Ruysdael was a successful opera singer in the 'teens and twenties. Firmly based in New York, Ruysdael made his first screen appearance in the Marx Brothers Astoria-filmed The Cocoanuts (1929). His portrayal of Detective Hennessy in this film was ordinary enough, save for his hilarious vocal rendition of "Tale of a Shirt," an elaborate parody of "The Toreador Song" from Bizet's Carmen. Ruysdael remained in Manhattan for nearly two decades after Cocoanuts, working on the stage, in radio, and in the occasional film short. He moved to California in 1949, showing up in no fewer than six films during his first year in Hollywood. Active until his death in 1960, Ruysdael was invariably cast as orotund authority figures: military officers, judges, governors, college deans. During the early 1950s, Basil Ruysdael was the radio and TV spokesperson for Lucky Strike cigarettes, imparting in pear-shaped tones the vital message "L.S.M.F.T....Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco."

Trivia: Actor John Banner was forced out of his native Austria in 1938 when Hitler marched in. Though most familiar to filmgoers and TV viewers as a man of considerable heft, he was a trim 180 pounds when, while touring with an acting troupe in Switzerland, he found he couldn't return to Austria because he was Jewish. Banner came to America as a refugee; though unable to speak a word of English, he was almost immediately hired as emcee for a musical revue, From Vienna, for which he had to learn all his lines phonetically. Picking up the language rapidly, Banner was cast in several films of the 1940s, starting with Pacific Blackout. Because of his accent and Teutonic features, he most often played Nazi spies -- a grim task, in that Banner's entire family in Austria was wiped out in the concentration camps. Tipping the scales at 280 pounds in the 1950s, Banner worked steadily as a character man in films and on television; he can be seen as a variety of foreign-official types on such vintage TV series as The Adventures of Superman and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. In 1965, Banner was cast as Sgt. Schultz in the long-running wartime sitcom Hogan's Heroes. A far cry from the villainous Nazis he'd played in the 1940s, Schultz was a pixieish, lovable blimp of a man who'd rather have been working as a toymaker than spending the war guarding American POWS, and who, to protect his own skin, overlooked the irregularities occurring in Stalag 13 (which as every TV fan knows was Colonel Hogan's secret headquarters for American counterespionage) by bellowing "I know nothing! I see nothing! Nothing!" John Banner enjoyed playing Schultz, but bristled whenever accused of portraying a cuddly Nazi: "I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of goodness in every generation," the actor told TV Guide in 1967. As to the paradox of an Austrian Jew playing a representative of Hitler's Germany, Banner replied, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Or who could play them funnier than John Banner?

Trivia: Berry Kroeger (pronounced "Kroger", not "Kreeger") got his start in network radio, where his velvety voice was heard announcing several major dramatic anthologies; he also played a variety of leading radio roles, including the heroic soldier-of-fortune The Falcon. While appearing on Broadway in Saint Joan, Kroeger was discovered by filmmaker William Wellman, who cast the actor in The Iron Curtain. This 1948 Cold-War film represented the first of many unsympathetic movie assignments for Kroeger, ranging from the smarmy Packett in director Joseph L. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949) to the mad-scientist mentor of Bruce Dern in The Incredible Two Headed Transplant (1971). Kroeger's marked resemblance to Sydney Greenstreet served him well when he essayed a Greenstreet take-off in "Maxwell Smart, Private Eye," an Emmy-winning episode of TV's Get Smart. Most of Barry Kroeger's film characters can be summed up in a single word: slime.

Trivia: Primarily a television actor, Jon Silo also appeared in a few films during the '60s. He made his film debut playing "Tacher" in The Story of Ruth (1960). Silo first appeared on television in the early '50s, and by 1952 he was starring as "Luchek" in the dramatic television series Not for Publication. Silo also guest-starred on many programs, including Have Gun Will Travel, Ben Casey, Mission Impossible, and Welcome Back Kotter.

Trivia: Robust American character actor Donald Diamond was generally typecast as a Spaniard or a Native American. He worked frequently on television and in films from the '50s through the early '70s.

Trivia: Diminutive, frequently mustached character actor Charles Wagenheim made the transition from stage to screen in or around 1940. Wagenheim's most memorable role was that of "The Runt" in Meet Boston Blackie (1941), a part taken over by George E. Stone in the subsequent "Boston Blackie" B-films. Generally cast in unsavory bit parts, Wagenheim's on-screen perfidy extended from Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) to George Stevens' Diary of Anne Frank (1959), in which, uncredited, he played the sneak thief who nearly gave away the hiding place of the Frank family. Wagenheim kept his hand in the business into the 1970s in films like The Missouri Breaks (1976). In 1979, 83-year-old Charles Wagenheim was bludgeoned to death by an intruder in his Hollywood apartment, five days before another veteran actor, Victor Kilian, met the same grisly fate.

Trivia: A favorite of producer/director Jack Webb, character actor Ralph Moody was a familiar face to viewers of Dragnet in both its 1950s and 1960s incarnations -- but that would be an unfair (as well as inaccurate) way to describe an actor who amassed hundreds of film and television appearances in barely 20 years of movie and television work. Born in St. Louis, MO, in 1886, Moody didn't make his screen debut until 1948, with a small role in Man Eaters of Kumaon. Already in his sixties, he always looked older than he was, and his craggy features could also impart a fierceness that made him threatening. Although Moody was known for playing kindly or crotchety old men, he occasionally brought that fierceness to bear, as in the Adventures of Superman episode "Test of a Warrior", in which he played the sinister medicine man Okatee. But in between that and dozens of other one-off television assignments, Moody also managed to work in scenes as the coffin-boat skipper in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street and one of the rescue workers in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Moody was one of those actors who could work quickly and milk a line or a scene for all its emotional worth. What's more, he could do it without over-emoting. He was the kind of character player that directors and producers in budget-conscious television of the 1950s needed. In an episode of Circus Boy, he played a touching scene with a young Micky Dolenz, as an aging railroad engineer introducing the boy to the world of locomotives and trains. After that, Moody got called back to do three more episodes. But it was Jack Webb who really put him to work in Dragnet and many of his other productions, in radio and feature films as well as television. His more memorable appearances on Dragnet included "The Big Producer", as a once-famous movie producer who is reduced to selling pornographic pictures to high-school students, and "The Hammer", from the 1967 revival of the series, in which he portrayed the neighbor of a murder victim. Moody continued working regularly in television until a year before his death in 1971, at age 84. His final appearance was in the Night Gallery episode "The Little Black Bag".

Trivia: Charles Horvath entered films in the immediate postwar years as a stunt man. From 1951 onward, Horvath began receiving speaking roles, most often in westerns. He occasionally accepted contemporary parts, playing rednecks and toughs in such films as Damn Citizen (1957). Charles Horvath spent his last decade playing featured roles in films like A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and The Domino Principle (1977).

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.