Trivia: Radiantly beautiful blonde actress Virginia Mayo was a chorus dancer when she began her film career as a bit player in 1942. She rose to face as Danny Kaye's leading lady in a series of splashy Technicolor musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Though never regarded as a great actress, she was disturbingly convincing as Dana Andrews' faithless wife in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and as James Cagney's sluttish gun moll in White Heat (1949). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mayo was one of the most popular female stars at Warner Bros., appearing in musicals, melodramas and westerns. Many of her characters were so outre that one wonders whether Mayo was having some sport with us: her turn as Jack Palance's paramour in The Silver Chalice (1955) and as Cleopatra in the guilty pleasure The Story of Mankind (1957) immediately come to mind. And it is Mayo who, in Warners' King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), utters the immortal high-camp line "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever do, Dick Plantagenet!" When her film career faltered in the 1960s, Mayo turned to stage work on the touring-company and dinner-theatre circuit; more recently, she has been a frequent interview subject on TV documentaries dealing with the old Hollywood studio system. Virginia Mayo is the widow of actor Michael O'Shea.

Trivia: Helen Westcott launched her stage career at the age of 5. It has long been presumed that she made only one screen appearance in her preteen years, as a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); in fact, she played a major role in the 1934 B western Thunder Over Texas, which starred Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. Be that as it may, Westcott would not achieve film prominence until the late 1940s--early 1950s, with such roles as Gregory Peck's ex-wife in The Gunfighter (1950) and the imperiled heroine of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). When her starring career in films faded, Helen Westcott turned to television, where she flourished as a character actress; her last screen appearance was as Mrs. Burrows in 1970's I Love My...Wife.

Trivia: American actor Robert Hutton had a briefly thriving Hollywood career thanks to something called "victory casting." While many of the major stars were in uniform during World War II, the Hollywood studios scrambled to find young actors who could substitute for their departed favorites. Hutton happened to have many of the shy, self-effacing characteristics of Jimmy Stewart, which served him well in such Warner Bros. pictures as Destination Tokyo (1943), Janie (1944) and Roughly Speaking (1945). Warners allowed Hutton a major showcase in the all-star morale booster Hollywood Canteen (1945); it was Hutton's puppy-love attraction to Joan Leslie which motivated the film's plotline. When the Big Names came marching home in 1945, "victory" fill-in actors suddenly found themselves expendable. Hutton was able to hang on longer than most with supporting roles in such films as The Younger Brothers (1949), Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950), The Steel Helmet (1951), Casanova's Big Night (1954) and The Colossus of New York (1958). Still relatively boyish in middle age, Hutton was personally selected by Jerry Lewis to play one of Lewis' "wicked stepbrothers" in Cinderfella (1960). Like many '40s male leads, Hutton spent plenty of time in horror and science-fiction films of the '50s and '60s, including The Man Without a Body (1957), Invisible Invaders (1959) and The Slime People (1963), which Hutton also produced and directed and which got better bookings than it deserved thanks to a robust promotional campaign. Hutton lived in England from 1964 through 1974, popping up as a character actor in films like You Only Live Twice (1967) The Torture Garden (1968) and Tales from the Crypt (1971). Before Robert Hutton returned to the States, he wrote the screenplay for the British-produced Persecution (1974), a turgid thriller distinguished by the astonishing presence of Trevor Howard and Lana Turner.

Trivia: Runyonesque American character actor Tom D'Andrea came to films when the Broadway production This is the Army was transferred to the screen in 1943. This led to a Warner Bros. contract for D'Andrea; he went on to play supporting roles in a number of the studio's films, the best of which was the sympathetic cabbie in Dark Passage (1948). An amusing supporting role as a myopic ballplayer in the William Bendix comedy Kill the Umpire (1950) led to D'Andrea being cast as Bendix's buddy Gillis on the TV sitcom The Life of Riley in 1953. He left Riley briefly to co-star with Hal March in the 1956 series The Soldiers, but returned to the role of Gillis when his own series was cancelled after a single season. Tom D'Andrea's last regular TV role was Biff the bartender in Dante (1960); his final screen appearance was in the Polly Adler biopic A House is Not a Home (1964).

Trivia: Supporting actor Richard Rober came to films in 1947 most often playing character bits, frequently unbilled, at 20th Century-Fox. His one-and-only film starring role was as Sheriff Ben Kellogg in United Artists' The Well (1950), a low-budget but well-intentioned plea for racial tolerance. Richard Rober was 46 years old when he was killed in an automobile accident in 1952; he made his last screen appearance five years later, when producer Howard Hughes finally released his 1950 production Jet Pilot.

Trivia: Richard Benedict came to the U.S. from his native Sicily when he was 7. Before entering the army, Benedict pursued a reasonably successful career as a prizefighter. In Hollywood from 1945, Benedict was often cast as an amiable second lead (as in Olsen and Johnson's See My Lawyer), though he also could be a persuasive heavy if that's what the part called for. His biggest A-picture role was as the entombed prospector in Billy Wilder's trenchant The Big Carnival (1951, aka Ace in the Hole). In the early 1960s, Richard Benedict turned to directing, working on such network TV series as Hawaiian Eye and Charlie's Angels.

Trivia: As a youth, Ben Welden was trained to be a concert violinist. He chose instead a stage career, heading to London rather than New York to realize his goal. During the early '30s, the bald, barracuda-faced Welden was a valuable British movie commodity, playing American gangster types in such films as The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1937). He returned to the U.S. in 1937, where he appeared in picture after picture at Warner Bros., playing vicious thugs and "torpedoes" in several gritty urban efforts, among them Marked Woman (1937), City for Conquest (1940), and The Big Sleep (1946). Welden's work in such two-reelers as Columbia's The Awful Sleuth (1951) and Three Dark Horses (1952), and such sitcoms as The Abbott and Costello Show, revealed a flair for broad comedy that the actor would carry over into his many Runyon-esque bad-guy assignments on the Superman TV series. Gradually retiring from acting in the mid-'60s, Ben Welden (in real life a gentle, likeable man) maintained his comfortable living standard by operating a successful California candy popcorn business.

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: Silent-film leading man Creighton Hale was brought to America from his native Ireland via a theatrical touring company. While starring in Charles Frohman's Broadway production of Indian Summer, Hale was spotted by a representative of the Pathe film company and invited to appear before the cameras. His first film was the Pearl White serial The Exploits of Elaine, after which he rose to stardom in a series of adventure films and romantic dramas. Director D.W. Griffith used Hale as comedy relief in his films Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922)--possibly Hale's least effective screen appearances, in that neither he nor Griffith were comedy experts. Despite his comparative failure in these films, Hale remained a popular leading man throughout the 1920s. When talking pictures arrived, Hale's star plummeted; though he had a pleasant, well-modulated voice, he was rapidly approaching fifty, and looked it. Most of Hale's talkie roles were unbilled bits, or guest cameos in films that spotlighted other silent movie veterans (e.g. Hollywood Boulevard and The Perils of Pauline). During the 1940s, Hale showed up in such Warner Bros. productions as Larceny Inc (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1943); this was due to the largess of studio head Jack Warner, who kept such faded silent favorites as Hale, Monte Blue and Leo White on permanent call. Creighton Hale's final appearance was in Warners' Beyond the Forest (1949).

Trivia: A music-hall favorite in his native England, dapper, diminutive Leo White was brought to America by theatrical impresario Daniel Frohman. In 1914, White joined the Essanay film company, where he appeared in support of Wallace Beery in the Sweedie comedies. Within a year he was a member in good standing of Charlie Chaplin's stock company, playing a variety of dandies, noblemen, and anarchists. He moved to Hal Roach's "Rollin'" comedies in 1917, where he co-starred with such funmakers as Harold Lloyd, Harry "Snub" Pollard, Bebe Daniels, and Bud Jamison. White showed up in several features of the 1920s, including Lloyd's Why Worry (1923), Valentino's Blood and Sand (1922), and the mighty Ben-Hur (1926, as Sallanbat). In the talkie era, he played supporting roles in Columbia and RKO two-reel comedies, and bits in features: in the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera, for example, he's one of the three bearded Russian aviators. From 1934 to 1948, he was on call at Warner Bros. for bits and extra roles. Leo White spent his last decade essaying one-scene roles in such Warner features as Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and The Fountainhead (1949), and even had a part in the animated Looney Tune Eatin' on the Cuff (1943).

Trivia: American stage actress Edna Mae Harris made her first film appearance as Zeba in The Green Pastures (1936). Like most black performers in 1930s Hollywood, Harris found it hard to get worthwhile roles in mainstream films. She did rather better in those low-budget pictures aimed at "colored" audiences, playing leads in such productions as The Spirit of Youth (a 1938 vehicle for boxer Joe Louis), Paradise in Harlem, and Murder on Lennox Avenue. Edna Mae Harris apparently retired in 1943.

Trivia: Actor Philo McCullough began his movie career at the Selig Company in 1912. At first, McCullough specialized in light comedy roles, often playing cads and bounders. After a brief stab at directing with 1921's Maid of the West, he found his true niche as a mustachioed, oily-haired, jack-booted heavy. During the 1920s he appeared in support of everyone from Fatty Arbuckle to Rin Tin Tin. Talkies reduced him to such bit parts as the "Assistant Exhausted Ruler" in Laurel & Hardy's Sons of the Desert (1933) and Senator Albert in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). One of his few roles of consequence in the 1930s was the principal villain in the 1933 serial Tarzan the Fearless. Philo McCullough remained active until 1969, when he appeared with several other silent-screen veterans in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: A rakish-looking, often mustachioed bit-part player, Eddie Foster (born Eddie Eleck) could play any nationality -- including Mexican (Men of the Night, 1934) and Egyptian (The Mummy's Hand, 1940) -- but was almost exclusively cast as thugs. Onscreen from 1932, Foster appeared in a total of ten serials, including Queen of the Jungle (1935), Mandrake the Magician (1939), and Captain Video (1951). He continued his skullduggery well into the television era and became a regular on Commando Cody: Skymaster of the Universe (1953).

Trivia: Slight, grey-templed, bespectacled actor Harry Hayden was cast to best advantage as small-town store proprietors, city attorneys and minor bureaucrats. Dividing his time between stage and screen work from 1936, Hayden became one of the busiest members of Central Casting, appearing in everything from A-pictures like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) to the RKO 2-reelers of Leon Errol and Edgar Kennedy. Among his better-known unbilled assignments are horn factory owner Mr. Sharp (his partner is Mr. Pierce) in Laurel and Hardy's Saps at Sea (1940) and Farley Granger's harrumphing boss who announces brusquely that there'll be no Christmas bonus in O. Henry's Full House (1951). Hayden's final flurry of activity was in the role of next-door-neighbor Harry on the 1954-55 season of TV's The Stu Erwin Show (aka The Trouble with Father), in which he was afforded the most screen time he'd had in years -- though he remains uncredited in the syndicated prints of this popular series. From the mid '30s until his death in 1955, Harry Hayden and his actress wife Lela Bliss ran Beverly Hills' Bliss-Hayden Miniature Theatre, where several Hollywood aspirants were given an opportunity to learn their craft before live audiences; among the alumni of the Bliss-Hayden were Jon Hall, Veronica Lake, Doris Day, Craig Stevens, Debbie Reynolds, and Marilyn Monroe.