Trivia: Born to a well-to-do Southern family, Joseph Cotten studied at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington D.C., and later sought out theater jobs in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1930, and seven years later joined Orson Welles' progressive Mercury Theatre company, playing leads in such productions as Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday. He briefly left Welles in 1939 to co-star in Katharine Hepburn's Broadway comeback vehicle The Philadelphia Story. Cotten rejoinedWelles in Hollywood in 1940, making his feature-film debut as Jed Leland in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). As a sort of private joke, Jed Leland was a dramatic critic, a profession which Cotten himself had briefly pursued on the Miami Herald in the late '20s. Cotten went on to play the kindly auto mogul Eugene Morgan in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and both acted in and co-wrote Journey Into Fear, the film that Welles was working on when he was summarily fired by RKO. Cotten remained a close friend of Welles until the director's death in 1985; he co-starred with Welles in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and played an unbilled cameo for old times' sake in the Welles-directed Touch of Evil (1958). A firmly established romantic lead by the early '40s, Cotten occasionally stepped outside his established screen image to play murderers (Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt [1943]) and surly drunkards (Under Capricorn [1949]). A longtime contractee of David O. Selznick, Cotten won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance in Selznick's Portrait of Jennie (1948). Cotten's screen career flagged during the 1950s and '60s, though he flourished on television as a guest performer on such anthologies as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fireside Theatre, The Great Adventure, and as host of The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), The Joseph Cotten Show (1956), On Trial (1959), and Hollywood and the Stars (1963). He also appeared in several stage productions, often in the company of his second wife, actress Patricia Medina. In 1987, Cotten published his engagingly candid autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. He died of pneumonia in 1994 at the age of 88.

Trivia: After apprenticing at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, MA, she debuted on Broadway in 1938 as the lead's understudy in Our Town; the following year her performance in the ingénue part in Life With Father caught film mogul Samuel Goldwyn's attention, and he signed her to a screen contract. Wright debuted onscreen in The Little Foxes (1941), for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The following year she was nominated in both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories for her third and fourth films, The Pride of the Yankees and Mrs. Miniver, respectively; she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She remained busy onscreen through 1959, after which she appeared in only a handful of films during the next three decades. From 1942 to 1952, she was married to novelist and screenwriter Niven Busch; later she married, divorced, and remarried playwright Robert Anderson. In the '70s, she appeared in TV dramas. Her later stage work included Mary, Mary (1962) and the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman (1975).

Trivia: Once Canadian-born actor Jonathan Hale became well known for his portrayal of well-to-do businessmen, he was fond of telling the story of how he'd almost been a man of wealth in real life--except for an improvident financial decision by his father. A minor diplomat before he turned to acting, Hale began appearing in minor film roles in 1934, showing up fleetingly in such well-remembered films as the Karloff/Lugosi film The Raven (1935), the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (1935) and the first version of A Star is Born (1937). In 1938, Hale was cast as construction executive J. C. Dithers in Blondie, the first of 28 "B"-pictures based on Chic Young's popular comic strip. Though taller and more distinguished-looking than the gnomelike Dithers of the comics, Hale became instantly synonymous with the role, continuing to portray the character until 1946's Blondie's Lucky Day (his voice was heard in the final film of the series, Beware of Blondie, though that film's on-camera Dithers was Edward Earle). During this same period, Hale also appeared regularly as Irish-brogued Inspector Fernack in RKO's "The Saint" series. After 1946, Hale alternated between supporting roles and bits, frequently unbilled (e.g. Angel on My Shoulder, Call Northside 777 and Son of Paleface); he had a pivotal role as Robert Walker's hated father in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), though the part was confined to a smidgen of dialogue and a single long-shot. Hale worked prolifically in television in the '50s, with substantial guest roles in such series as Disneyland and The Adventures of Superman. In 1966, after a long illness, Jonathan Hale committed suicide at the age of 75, just months before the TV release of the Blondie films that had won him prominence in the '30s and '40s.

Trivia: Born in Colorado and raised in Oregon, actor Walter Sande was a music student from age six. He dropped out of college to organize his own band, then for many years served as musical director for the West Coast Fox Theater chain. In 1937, Sande entered films with a small role in Goldwyn Follies (1938). He fluctuated thereafter between bits in films like Citizen Kane (1941), in which he played one of the many reporters, and supporting roles in films like To Have and Have Not (1944), in which he portrayed the defaulting customer who is punched out by a boat-renting Humphrey Bogart. On television, Walter Sande played Horatio Bullwinkle on Tugboat Annie (1958) and Papa Holstrum on The Farmer's Daughter (1963-1966).

Trivia: In any given circus picture made between 1938 to 1964, chances were that Eddie Marr was in the cast. Possessed of leather lungs and a slightly larcenous demeanor, Marr was the archetypal sideshow barker, as exemplified by his weekly appearance on the 1956 TVer Circus Boy. One of his rare appearances outside the big top was as composer Buddy DeSylva in the 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. Eddie Marr also appeared frequently on radio, playing a variety of gamblers, gangsters, race track touts, city detectives, travelling salesmen and, yes, carnival barkers in such series as The Damon Runyon Theatre, The Lux Radio Theatre, The Jack Carson Show and Murder Will Out.

Trivia: One of the last of the serial queens, Canadian-born Aline Towne (born Bouchard) played the female lead in no less than five chapter plays between 1950 and 1953, all for Republic Pictures. By the 1950s, however, the once so thriving genre was threatened by television, which basically offered the same kind of juvenile excitement for free; in addition, Towne was less memorable than such earlier Republic cliffhanger stars as Jungle Girl's Frances Gifford and The Leopard Woman's Linda Stirling. To compound matters, Towne's leading men were far from top caliber: Richard Webb (Invisible Monster, 1950), Ken Curtis (Don Daredevil Rides Again, 1951), George Wallace (Radar Men From the Moon, 1952), Judd Holdren (Zombies From the Stratosphere, 1952), and Harry Lauter (Trader Tom of the China Seas, 1953). In 1952, she filmed Republic's 12-episode television sci-fi Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, also starring Judd Holdren and created by serial veterans Fred C. Brannon and Franklin Afreon. A series rather than a cliffhanging serial, the project proved a distinct failure and was dumped on the unsuspecting viewing audience as a mid-summer replacement. Undeterred, Towne continued to appear in supporting roles on television and the occasional A-movie until 1970.

Trivia: William Hudson was a character actor and sometime leading man on television and in movies. Born William Woodson Hudson, Jr. in Gilroy, California in 1925, he was the younger brother of future actor John Hudson, though he actually seemes to have entered movies first, during the mid-1940's, appearing in uncredited roles while in his teens, in such distinguished productions as Destination Tokyo (1943) and Objective, Burma! (1945), as well as lesser movies such as Weird Woman (1944). His late 1940's appearances included work in Allan Dwan's Sands Of Iwo Jima and R. G. Springsteen's early Red Scare drama The Red Menace (both 1949). Hudson didn't get a credited screen appearance until 1951, in Ida Lupino's drama Hard, Fast And Beautiful, in which he played an intern. He started doing television around this time, including supporting roles in series such as Racket Squad and Dragnet, but it was his role in the series I Led Three Lives, as FBI agent Mike Andrews, that gave him his first taste of stardom. He also played the recurring role of Ranger Clark on Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, which seemed to herald a move toward science fiction focused roles in his broader career. Most of his subsequent work was confined to television and lower-budgeted movies, usually as well-intended if sometimes weak or less-than-resourceful figures. His major film performances included the B-science fiction staples The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), The Man Who Turned To Stone (1957), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), the latter offering him a rare chance to do something different, in terms of playing a villain. In between pictures like that, and an important supporting role in one installment of Man Into Space, he played much smaller parts in the major Universal releases Man Of A Thousand Faces and My Man Godfrey (both 1957). Hudson continued working into the 1970's, and his last performances included a small role in Ross Hunter's sprawling production of Airport (1970). Among the oddest work that Hudson -- or any other actor -- ever did, were his two performances in the series Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea. In the 1964 pilot episode, "Eleven Days To Zero", he was seen as the doomed first commander of the submarine Seaview, Capt. John Phillips, who is killed in an attempt on the life of Admiral Nelson (Richard Basehart); in "The X Factor", an episode from the following season, Hudson played the role of Captain Shire, who is killed off using the exact same footage depicting his character's death in the pilot episode. Thus, Hudson may well have had the odd distinction of being the only actor in television history to play two completely different characters on the same series killed off using the exact same filmed sequences. He died in 1974 of cirrhosis, at the age of 49.

Trivia: Chances are when a doctor made a house call in a '40s movie, that doctor was portrayed by Sam Flint. Silver-haired, authoritative, and distinguished by an executive-style moustache, Flint entered films in the early '30s after a long stage career. Though his movie roles were usually confined to one or two scenes per picture, Flint was always instantly recognizable in his characterizations of businessmen, bankers, chairmen of the board, politicians, publishers, fathers of the bride--and, as mentioned before, doctors. In addition to his prolific feature-film work, Sam Flint was always welcome in short subjects, appearing in support of everyone from Our Gang to the Three Stooges.

Trivia: There was always something slightly sinister about American actor Carleton G. Young that prevented him from traditional leading man roles. Young always seemed to be hiding something, to be looking over his shoulder, or to be poised to head for the border; as such, he was perfectly cast in such roles as the youthful dope peddler in the 1936 camp classic Reefer Madness. Even when playing a relatively sympathetic role, Young appeared capable of going off the deep end at any minute, vide his performance in the 1937 serial Dick Tracy as Tracy's brainwashed younger brother. During the 1940s and 1950s, Young was quite active in radio, where he was allowed to play such heroic leading roles as Ellery Queen and the Count of Monte Cristo without his furtive facial expressions working against him. As he matured into a greying character actor, Young became a special favorite of director John Ford, appearing in several of Ford's films of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it is Young, in the small role of a reporter, who utters the unforgettable valediction "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact...print the legend." Carleton G. Young was the father of actor Tony Young, who starred in the short-lived 1961 TV Western Gunslinger.

Trivia: Long before embarking on his talking picture career, Tom Powers was a firmly established Broadway star. He began as a musical comedy lead, then moved on to dynamic dramatic roles in such Theatre Guild productions as Strange Interlude, in which he created the role of Charles Marsden. Except for a brief flurry of activity at the Vitagraph studios in 1910, Powers barely gave movies a second thought until he was invited to play the murder victim in 1944's Double Indemnity. Powers spent the rest of his professional life before the cameras, usually playing coarse, blunt detectives and businessmen. In the early '50s, Powers remained on call at 20th Century Fox for unbilled minor roles in such films as Deadline U.S.A. (1952), We're Not Married (1952), and Phone Call From a Stranger (1952). He also appeared in a dozen of TV programs, among them The Lone Ranger, Fireside Theatre, Four Star Playhouse, and Climax. A prolific writer, Tom Powers published the best-selling memoir He Knew Them All, and in 1935 starred in a syndicated radio series in which he read his own poetry.