Trivia: More familiar for his radio work than his film appearances, American actor Ben Wright was active professionally from the early '40s. Dialects were a specialty with Wright, as witness his two-year hitch as Chinese bellhop Hey Boy on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel. Most of Wright's film roles were supporting or bit appearances in such productions as A Man Called Peter (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Fortune Cookie (1964). On TV, Wright was one of Jack Webb's stock company (including fellow radio veterans Virginia Gregg, Stacy Harris, and Vic Perrin) on the '60s version of Dragnet. Ben Wright's most frequently seen film appearance was as the humorless Nazi functionary Herr Zeller in the 1965 megahit The Sound of Music.

Trivia: British actor Patrick Macnee barely had time to earn his Eton school tie when he began training for his career on a scholarship to the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art. While serving with the Royal Navy during World War II, Macnee made his first film appearance with a small role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). He continued essaying such featured roles as Young Marley in the 1951 Christmas Carol before coming to Broadway with the Old Vic troupe in 1954. He decided to stay in Hollywood a while, appearing in several TV shows and such films as Les Girls (1957). He would later describe most of his roles during this period as "villainy in a tri-corner hat." In 1960, Macnee traded his period duds for a bowler and three-piece suit when he began his long run as sophisticated secret agent John Steed on the British TV series The Avengers (incidentally, the murder that Macnee was "avenging" in the early episodes was that of a woman played by his then-wife Kate Woodville). He remained the one permanent fixture on The Avengers until its demise in 1968, appearing opposite three different jumpsuit-clad leading ladies: Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson. Macnee also showed up as a supervisor of sort in the 1977 "retro" series The New Avengers, leaving the karate and gunplay to Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt. In America, Patrick Macnee appeared regularly on the TV series Gavilan (1982), Empire (1984), and Lightning Force (1991). Macnee continued working through the 2000s, including a voice appearance in the 1998 Avengers movie. Patrick Macnee passed away in 2015, at age 93.

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.