Trivia: In his youth, George Reeves aspired to become a boxer, but gave up this pursuit because his mother was worried that he'd be seriously injured. Attracted to acting, Reeves attended the Pasadena Playhouse, where he starred in several productions. In 1939, Reeves was selected to play one of the Tarleton twins in the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind (1939). He made an excellent impression in the role, and spent the next few years playing roles of varying sizes at Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. He was praised by fans and reviewers alike for his performances in Lydia (1941) and So Proudly We Hail (1943); upon returning from WWII service, however, Reeves found it more difficult to get good roles. He starred in a few "B"'s and in the title role of the Columbia serial The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), but for the most part was shunted away in ordinary villain roles. In 1951, he starred in the Lippert programmer Superman vs. the Mole Men, playing both the Man of Steel and his bespectacled alter ego, Clark Kent. This led to the immensely popular Superman TV series, in which Reeves starred from 1953 through 1957. While Superman saved Reeves' career, it also permanently typecast him. He made an appearance as wagon train leader James Stephen in Disney's Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1956), though the producer felt it expeditious to hide Reeves behind a heavy beard. While it is now commonly believed that Reeves was unable to get work after the cancellation of Superman in 1957, he was in fact poised to embark on several lucrative projects, including directing assignments on two medium-budget adventure pictures and a worldwide personal appearance tour. On June 16, 1959, Reeves died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The official ruling was suicide -- and, since he left no note, it was assumed that Reeves was despondent over his flagging career. Since that time, however, there has been a mounting suspicion (engendered by the actor's friends and family) that George Reeves was murdered.

Trivia: Born in L.A. and raised in Pasadena, Jack Larson's ingenuous, "golly gee" screen image served him well when in 1951 he was cast as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the TV series Superman. He remained with the program until 1957, by which time he had become so thoroughly identified with the role that he had considerable difficulty landing other film assignments. Eventually Larson gave up acting to concentrate on writing plays and musical librettos; one of his more prestigious assignments was a collaboration with noted composer Virgil Thompson. The longtime companion of filmmaker James Bridges, Jack Larson served as the co-producer of such Bridges films as The Paper Chase (1973), Urban Cowboy (1980), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He made a guest appearance in a 1996 episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, playing an older version of Jimmy Olsen. Larson died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: Born and educated in Pennsylvania, John Hamilton headed to New York in his twenties to launch a 25-year stage career. Ideally cast as businessmen and officials, the silver-haired Hamilton worked opposite such luminaries as George M. Cohan and Ann Harding. He toured in the original company of the long-running Frank Bacon vehicle Lightnin', and also figured prominently in the original New York productions of Seventh Heaven and Broadway. He made his film bow in 1930, costarring with Donald Meek in a series of 2-reel S.S.Van Dyne whodunits (The Skull Mystery, The Wall St. Mystery) filmed at Vitaphone's Brooklyn studios. Vitaphone's parent company, Warner Bros., brought Hamilton to Hollywood in 1936, where he spent the next twenty years playing bits and supporting roles as police chiefs, judges, senators, generals and other authority figures. Humphrey Bogart fans will remember Hamilton as the clipped-speech DA in The Maltese Falcon (1941), while Jimmy Cagney devotees will recall Hamilton as the recruiting officer who inspires George M. Cohan (Cagney) to compose "Over There" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Continuing to accept small roles in films until the mid '50s (he was the justice of the peace who marries Marlon Brando to Teresa Wright in 1950's The Men), Hamilton also supplemented his income with a group of advertisements for an eyeglasses firm. John Hamilton is best known to TV-addicted baby boomers for his six-year stint as blustering editor Perry "Great Caesar's Ghost!" White on the Adventures of Superman series.

Trivia: Actor Pierre Watkin looked as though he was born to a family of Chase Manhattan executives. Tall, imposing, imbued with a corporate demeanor and adorned with well-trimmed white mustache, Watkin appeared to be a walking Brooks Brothers ad as he strolled through his many film assignments as bankers, lawyers, judges, generals and doctors. When director Frank Capra cast the actors playing US senators in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) using as criteria the average weight, height and age of genuine senators, Watkin fit the physical bill perfectly. Occasionally Watkin could utilize his established screen character for satirical comedy: in W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, he portrayed Lompoc banker Mr. Skinner, who extended to Fields the coldest and least congenial "hearty handclasp" in movie history. Serial fans know Pierre Watkin as the actor who originated the role of bombastic Daily Planet editor Perry White in Columbia's two Superman chapter plays of the late '40s.

Trivia: The son of a wholesale grocer who later became one of the founders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Robert Shayne studied business administration at Boston University. Intending to study for the ministry, Shayne opted instead to work as field secretary for the Unitarian Layman's League. He went on to sell real estate during the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s before heading northward to launch an acting career. After Broadway experience, Shayne was signed to a film contract at RKO radio in 1934. When this led nowhere, Shayne returned to the stage. While appearing with Katharine Hepburn in the Philip Barry play Without Love, Shayne was again beckoned to Hollywood, this time by Warner Bros. Most of his feature film roles under the Warner banner were of the sort that any competent actor could have played; he was better served by the studio's short subjects department, which starred him in a series of 2-reel "pocket westerns" built around stock footage from earlier outdoor epics. He began free-lancing in 1946, playing roles of varying size and importance at every major and minor outfit in Hollywood. In 1951, Shayne was cast in his best-known role: Inspector Henderson on the long-running TV adventure series Superman. He quit acting in the mid-1970s to become an investment banker with the Boston Stock Exchange. The resurgence of the old Superman series on television during this decade thrust Shayne back into the limelight, encouraging him to go back before the cameras. He was last seen in a recurring role on the 1990 Superman-like weekly series The Flash. Reflecting on his busy but only fitfully successful acting career, Robert Shayne commented in 1975 that "It was work, hard and long; a terrible business when things go wrong, a rewarding career when things go right."

Trivia: Phillip Pine was a character actor whose chameleon-like presence graced the entertainment world for more than 50 years as an actor, in addition to work as a screenwriter and director. Pine was born in Hanford, CA, 1920, and made his stage debut in a play written in Portugeuse. He later worked on showboats along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and made the jump to small roles in movies in the mid-'40s, when he was in his twenties. His dark features frequently got him cast as gangsters and thugs in the early part of his career, and he moved in more prominent roles -- usually of a villainous nature -- in the 1950s.In 1954, Pine worked on-stage in See the Jaguar and The Immoralist and crossed paths with James Dean at the outset of the latter's career in New York. He played the title role in the stage version of A Stone for Danny Fisher, in a production that also featured Zero Mostel, Joe de Santis, and Susan Cabot. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the play in The New York Times, wrote that Pine turned in "a good performance. He makes the character shifty and shallow, but likable, also, like a heel who means well weakly." With very expressive eyes and a minimum of words, Pine could melt into a role and make the most of only a few seconds' screen time. His feature films included William Keighley's crime thriller The Street with No Name (1948), Robert Wise's The Set Up, Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart, and William Wellman's Battleground, all released in 1949. He was also a veteran of hundreds of television shows, from Superman ("The Case of the Talkative Dummy," "The Mystery of the Broken Statues") to The Twilight Zone to Star Trek ("The Savage Curtain"), all of them as villains of a crafty and devious nature. Pine's biggest feature film role was in Irving Lerner's 1958 thriller Murder By Contract, in which he portrayed one of a pair of hoods working with hired assassin Vince Edwards. Pine passed away in 2006 at the age of 86.

Trivia: Born on her family's cattle ranch in Texas, American actress Phyllis Coates left home to attend UCLA. Shortly afterward she secured a dancing job with Ken Murray's Blackouts, a long-running LA-based stage review. She later danced for producer Earl Carroll and in a USO tour of Anything Goes. Through the auspices of her first husband, director Richard Bare, Phyllis entered films in 1948 as leading lady of Warner Bros.' Behind the Eight-Ball short subjects series, playing Mrs. Joe McDoakes (George O'Hanlon). Coates stayed with the Eight-Ball series even after her marriage to Bare ended, and also appeared in supporting parts in such Warners features as Look for the Silver Lining (1949). In 1951, Coates was cast as reporter Lois Lane in Lippert Productions' "B"-feature Superman and the Mole Men, wherein George Reeves played the dual role of Superman and Clark Kent for the first time. This week-long assignment led to both Reeves and Phyllis being cast in the subsequent Superman TV series. While Phyllis thrived on the rigors of the hectic production schedule and was a good friend of Reeves', she was compelled to leave Superman after its first season when a possible starring role in another TV weekly came her way. That project died, but Phyllis remained in films until the early 1960s, mostly in westerns (Marshall of Cedar Creek [1953] and Blood Arrow [1958]) and also as the lead in one of the last Republic serials, Panther Girl of the Kongo (1953). She appeared in quite a few sci-fi and horror films as well; in Invasion USA (1952) one of her fellow cast members was Noel Neill, the actress who'd replaced her as Lois Lane on Superman. Phyllis remained active in television throughout her career, co-starring on the short-lived 1958 sitcom This is Alice and playing good guest roles in a multitude of series like Perry Mason, The Untouchables and The Patty Duke Show. Long in retirement, Phyllis Coates returned to films and TV in the early 1990s; one of her best latter-day roles was on the newest Superman TV incarnation, Lois and Clark where she plays Lois Lane's mother!

Trivia: Scrawny supporting actor Syd Saylor managed to parlay a single comic shtick -- bobbing his adam's apple -- into a four-decade career. He starred in several silent two-reel comedies from 1926 through 1927, then settled into character parts. During the late '30s and early '40s, Saylor frequently found himself in B-Westerns as the comical sidekick for many a six-gun hero, though he seldom lasted very long in any one series. Syd Saylor was still plugging away into the 1950s, playing "old-timer" bits in such films as Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Jackpot (1950), and such TV series as Burns and Allen and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Trivia: Before becoming a star of action movies in Hollywood, American actor Robert Kent, born Douglas Blackley, Jr., was an amateur boxer and adolescent lead in theatrical productions. In the mid-1930s he appeared frequently in Hollywood "B" movies as a hard-fighting leading man; he frequently played opposite Rochelle Hudson. In the credits he alternated between his stage name and his real name. Kent was married to actress Astrid Allwyn.