Trivia: Though often overshadowed by some of her female contemporaries as the years passed, Jennifer Jones came to embody one of the preeminent examples of a Hollywood star. With qualities that transcended preternatural beauty, she projected the sort of charisma that cannot be feigned, courting legions of fans in the process, as she graced one film after another with her presence. And then, just as suddenly as she had risen to greatness, Jones dropped out of the limelight and withdrew into anonymity, spending the last several decades of her life well outside of the public eye. Jennifer Jones began life in Tulsa, OK, as Phyllis Isley, the daughter of vaudeville performers. Ensconced in show business from the beginning, she dreamed of establishing herself as an actress from early childhood. As a young woman, Isley studied at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts and revealed incredible promise; during that tenure, she also met and grew enchanted with a young actor named Robert Walker; they did summer stock together, fell deeply in love, married, and parented two children, Robert Walker, Jr., and Michael Ross Walker. Then Hollywood beckoned to Isley, first with a supporting role in a Republic western, and then in the form of a talent agent from megaproducer David O. Selznick, the giant responsible for Gone With the Wind. Though the agent sensed greatness from the ingenue's initial reading and arranged a meeting between Isley and Selznick without hesitation, Isley reportedly felt ashamed by the Republic B picture and attempted to obscure its presence. She needn't have worried; the initial meeting between Selznick and Isley (whom he renamed Jennifer Jones) permanently changed both of their lives and made Jones a household name. For years, film historians have speculated (and fans have gossiped) about the initial exchanges that materialized between Jones and Selznick, the history of their relationship, and some of the tragedies surrounding it. Many of the exact details will never be known, but readily apparent were Selznick's vision of Jones as his next great star, Jones's decision to leave and then divorce Walker and marry Selznick, and Walker's understandable difficulty in handling these events. By all accounts an emotionally fragile individual (though an incredibly kind and sensitive one), Walker himself moved to Hollywood and experienced a brief period of stardom that peaked with a lead role in Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train, but he could never quite emotionally adjust to the end of his marriage, or the fact that Jones had left him and married the single most powerful and wealthy person in Hollywood. On a note of sad irony, the two appeared opposite one another as former lovers in a blockbuster produced by Selznick, the 1944 Since You Went Away. Tragically, Walker struggled for years to cope with the divorce, and his life ended at the age of 32, when, following a nervous breakdown and an institutionalization, he received a fatal dose of sodium amatol from a psychiatrist.Jones did the bulk of her early work under new husband Selznick's aegis, and for 15-20 years her career thrived. Selznick preferred casting her in romantic material (often with a tragic undercurrent), and his instincts struck a chord with the public. After receiving an Oscar for her turn as the scorned and martyred Catholic saint Bernadette in the 1943 religious drama The Song of Bernadette, she starred opposite Joseph Cotten in the 1948 fantasy romance Portrait of Jennie (also a huge hit), played Emma Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 Madame Bovary, and the tragic title character in William Wyler's Theodore Dreiser adaptation Carrie (1952). Yet Jones also unveiled a wicked flair for comedy on a number of occasions, notably as an English cockney plumber in Ernst Lubitsch's magnificent 1946 farce Cluny Brown, and as an English lord's wife plagued by pathological lying in the unfairly maligned John Huston comedy Beat the Devil (1953). Jones continued her acting work into the late '60s, and she racked up a series of four additional Oscar nods for various performances, yet her screen appearances grew less and less frequent. Her private life and marriage to Selznick reportedly brought its share of complications, and the couple's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage; following Selznick's death in June 1965, Jones endured a lengthy period of severe depression. The actress remarried philanthropist Norton Simon in the early '70s, and co-ran a foundation that he chaired, with the assistance of various celebrity friends. The second marriage lasted until Simon's death in the summer of 1993. Jones accepted one of her final screen roles in the 1974 disaster opus The Towering Inferno, a part for which she drew a substantial amount of acclaim. The actress died in December 2009 at the age of 90.

Trivia: The son of a wealthy California businessman, Robert Stack spent his teen years giving skeet shooting lessons to such Hollywood celebrities as Carole Lombard and Clark Gable; it was only natural, then, that he should gravitate to films himself after attending the University of Southern California. At age 20, he made his screen debut in Deanna Durbin's First Love (1939) in which he gave his teenaged co-star her very first screen kiss. Two years later he appeared opposite his former "pupil" Carole Lombard in the Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be or Not to Be (1942). After serving with the navy in WWII he resumed his film career, avoiding typecasting with such dramatically demanding film assignments as The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), The Tarnished Angels (1957), and John Paul Jones (1959). He earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance as a self-destructive alcoholic in Written on the Wind (1956). In 1959 he gained a whole new flock of fans when he was cast as humorless federal agent Elliot Ness in TV's The Untouchables, which ran for four seasons and won him an Emmy award. He continued playing taciturn leading roles in such TV series as Name of the Game (1969-1971), Most Wanted (1976-1977), and Strike Force (1981), and from 1987 to 2002 was the no-nonsense host of the TV anthology Unsolved Mysteries. Not nearly as stoic and serious in real life, Stack was willing to spoof his established screen image in Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979) and Zucker-Abraham-Zucker's Airplane! (1980). The warmer side of Robert Stack could be glimpsed in the TV informational series It's a Great Life (1985), which he hosted with his wife Rosemarie, and in his 1980 autobiography, Straight Shooting. Though film appearances grew increasingly sporatic through the 1990s, Stack remained a familiar figure to television viewers thanks to syndicated reruns of Unsolved Mysteries well into the new millennium. Memorable film roles in 1990s included lending his voice to Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) and appearing as himself in the 1999 comedy drama Mumford. In October of 2002 Stack underwent successful radiation treatment for prostate cancer. On May 14, 2003, Robert Stack's wife Rosemarie found the actor dead in their Los Angeles home. He was 84.

Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A proud descendant of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Marshall Thompson moved from his home town of Peoria, Illinois to the West Coast when his dentist father's health began to flag. Intending to follow his father's example by taking pre-med at Occidental Junior college, Thompson was sidetracked by a love of performing, inherited from his concert-singer mother. His already impressive physique pumped by several summers as a rodeo-rider and cowpuncher, Thompson was offered a $350-per-week contract by Universal studios in 1943. He accepted, expecting to use the money to pay for his college tuition. As it happened, Thompson never returned to the halls of academia; from 1944 onward he worked steadily as a film actor at Universal, 20th Century-Fox, MGM and other studios, sometimes as a lead, more often in supporting roles. For a while, he was typed as a mental case after convincingly portraying a psycho killer in MGM's Dial 119 (1950). He also acted in something like 250 TV programs, and for eight weeks in 1953 co-starred with Janet Blair in the Broadway play A Girl Can Tell. The boyish enthusiasm of his early screen roles a thing of the past, Thompson provided maturity and authority to his two-dimensional roles in such Saturday-matinee melodramas as Cult of the Cobra (1955), It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), Fiend Without a Face (1958), and First Man Into Space (1959), assignments that indirectly led to his first TV-series starring stint as the miniaturized hero of World of Giants (1959). In 1960, Thompson briefly went the "dumb sitcom husband" route in the weekly Angel. In 1961, the staunchly patriotic Thompson starred in and directed the low-budget feature A Yank in Vietnam, which he would later insist, with some justification, was the first up-close-and-personal study of that unfortunate Asian conflict (alas, good intentions do not always make good films; abysmally bad, Yank in Vietnam lay on the shelf until 1965). During the early 1960s, Thompson worked in close association with producer Ivan Tors as an actor and director of animal-oriented short subjects. The actor's fascination with African wildlife was later manifested in his two-year starring stint on Tors' TV series Daktari (1966-68), an outgrowth of the feature film Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion, in which Thompson both starred and collaborated on the script. After playing character parts in such films as The Turning Point (1977) and The Formula (1980), Thompson spent the bulk of the 1980s in Africa, where he assembled the internationally syndicated documentary series Orphans of the Wild. While on a visit to Michigan in 1992, Marshall Thompson died of congestive heart failure.

Trivia: A native Californian, red-headed Kipp Hamilton (born Rita Hamilton) made an auspicious screen debut as Robert Stack's young wife in the Fox drama Good Morning Miss Dove (1955). She mainly played second leads thereafter but was extremely busy on television in such shows as Perry Mason, Rawhide, My Three Sons, and Dragnet.

Trivia: After two years' study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, British actor Robert Douglas ascended to leading-man status on the London stage. Among his earliest film appearances was a co-starring stint with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the Technicolor Alexander Korda production Over the Moon (1936). He spent six years as a pilot in the British Navy, then began his Hollywood career, playing dark-purposed, humorless villains opposite such swashbuckling leading men as Errol Flynn in 1949's The Adventures of Don Juan, Burt Lancaster in 1950's Flame and the Arrow, and Stewart Granger in 1952's The Prisoner of Zenda. He was starred as Benedict Arnold in The Scarlet Coat (1954) and as Agamemnon in Helen of Troy (1955). Rechanneling his energies into directing, Robert Douglas helmed several British and American TV productions, including 18 episodes of the 1960s series 12 O'Clock High. Robert Douglas' only big-screen directorial credit was 1964's Night Train, which starred Sean Flynn, the son of Douglas' Don Juan duelling opponent Errol Flynn.

Trivia: A tough-looking, blond Warner Bros. starlet of the mid-'40s, Minnesota-born Peggy Knudsen made an auspicious screen debut as Mona Mars in the noir classic The Big Sleep (1946). Although a mere bit -- one scene, a couple of lines of dialogue -- the character was much discussed prior to actually appearing in the film and demanded an actress who could match the buildup. The pivotal scene, in which protagonist Humphrey Bogart finds himself at a disadvantage in gangster Eddie Mars' coastal hideaway, had originally been filmed in 1944 with Pat Clarke in the role of Mrs. Mars. But when negative previews necessitated scenes to be added or re-shot, director Howard Hawks replaced Miss Clarke with Knudsen, a much more vibrant presence who made her few moments count. It should have been a major breakthrough for the actress but Warner Bros. missed the opportunity and instead assigned her standard "other woman" roles opposite Erroll Flynn in the marital comedy Never Say Goodbye (1946) and Ronald Reagan in the horse breeding drama Stallion Road (1947). 20th Century Fox borrowed her for a couple of B-movies, in one of which, Trouble Preferred (1948), she was top-billed as a policewoman in training, but they were too inexpensive to have much impact. Missing out on stardom, she went on to appear in supporting roles through the 1950s, both in feature films and on television, retiring after a guest spot on Texas John Slaughter (1961). The victim of a crippling arthritic condition that eventually necessitated five operations, Knudsen was reportedly cared for by lifelong friend Jennifer Jones. Her death in 1980 was attributed to cancer.

Trivia: Relatively few people remember the name Biff Elliot today, but as an actor, he carved a special place for himself in popular culture during the '50s -- in a role that he spent years living down. Born Leon Shalek in Lynn, MA, a working-class town, he aspired to an acting career and came to New York in pursuit of that goal. He got some stage and television work, mostly playing tough, working-class characters, and then a seemingly big break in Hollywood playing the lead role in the crime thriller I, The Jury (1953), directed by Harry Essex. In the history of popular culture, Ralph Meeker might have earned a place playing Mike Hammer in the best movie ever made from one of Mickey Spillane's books; Spillane himself may have played the best Mike Hammer on the big-screen (and Brian Keith the best Mike Hammer on the small-screen); but Biff Elliot had the honor of being the first actor to portray Mike Hammer anywhere in that 1953 movie (made in 3-D) based on the first of the Hammer books. It should have been a breakthrough role, but the movie ended up being an albatross around his neck. Over the next few years, there were other offers for more roles in which, in the manner of Spillane's hero, he was mostly pummeling other characters. Elliot did get some film work in movies such as Between Heaven and Hell, Good Morning, Miss Dove, and The Enemy Below (as the ship's quartermaster) at Fox, and Pork Chop Hill for Lewis Milestone at United Artists, but mostly he worked in television. In 1959, Elliot got a seemingly good break when playwright Clifford Odets happened to see I, The Jury and offered him a role in The Story on Page One, which Odets wrote and directed. Alas, the latter movie fizzled -- mostly thanks to Odets's convoluted approach to directing -- and did nothing to help the career of anyone in it. Elliot was mostly seen on television over the next decade or so in roles of varying sizes -- in the Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark" as Schmitter, the mining colony crewman joking about the anticipated arrival of the Starship Enterprise who is dissolved by the title creature in the pre-credit sequence. During the '70s and '80s, he was once again seen regularly in movies, including the Jack Lemmon vehicles Save the Tiger (1973), The Front Page (1975) and That's Life (1986). Elliot died of natural causes at age 89 in 2012.

Trivia: Born in San Francisco, Jerry Paris was a graduate of New York University and UCLA, and joined the Actors Studio after serving in the navy during World War II. His earliest stage performances were in productions of Medea, Anna Christie, and The Front Page. He entered films in 1950, and his early screen credits include Outrage, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny, Marty, and The Naked and the Dead. Paris was also a regular on the series The Untouchables from 1959 thru 1961 in the role of G-man Martin Flaherty. In 1961, he joined the cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show as Jerry Helper, the next door neighbor to Rob and Laura Petrie. During the early run of the show, Paris began pestering producer Carl Reiner for a chance to direct, and was given his opportunity in 1962 with the classic episode "It May Look Like a Walnut," a comic take on science fiction chillers that was highlighted by the spectacle of costar Mary Tyler Moore sliding out of a closet filled with 1100 pounds of walnuts. Paris became a regular director on the show and won and Emmy in 1964 for his work. He subsequently went into feature filmmaking, including Viva Max and The Star-Spangled Girl, before returning to television, directing the pilot episode of Love American Style. He directed 35 episodes of The Odd Couple, and later spent a decade as producer and director of Happy Days, as well as directing the pilot episode of Laverne and Shirley. Paris created the character of Mork, played by Robin Williams, who was later spun off into the series Mork and Mindy. Paris returned to feature filmmaking in the late '80s with Police Academy 2 and Police Academy 3. He died in 1993 after a long struggle with cancer.

Trivia: "I'm not a comic," insisted Mary Wickes. "I'm an actress who plays comedy." True enough; still Wickes was often heaps funnier than the so-called comics she supported. The daughter of a well-to-do St. Louis banker, Wickes was an excellent student, completing a political science degree at the University of Washington at the age of 18. She intended to become a lawyer, but she was deflected into theatre. During her stock company apprenticeship, Wickes befriended Broadway star Ina Claire, who wrote the young actress a letter of introduction to powerful New York producer Sam Harris. She made her Broadway debut in 1934, spending the next five seasons in a variety of characterizations (never the ingenue). In 1939, she found time to make her film bow in the Red Skelton 2-reeler Seein' Red. After a string of Broadway flops, Wickes scored a hit as long-suffering Nurse Preen (aka "Nurse Bedpan") in the Kaufman-Hart comedy classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was brought to Hollywood to repeat her role in the 1941 film version of Dinner. After a brief flurry of movie activity, Wickes went back to the stage, returning to Hollywood in 1948 in a role specifically written for her in The Decision of Christopher Blake. Thereafter, she remained in great demand in films, playing an exhausting variety of nosy neighbors, acerbic housekeepers and imperious maiden aunts. Though her characters were often snide and sarcastic, Wickes was careful to inject what she called "heart" into her portrayals; indeed, it is very hard to find an out-and-out villainess in her manifest. Even when she served as the model for Cruella DeVil in the 1961 animated feature 101 Dalmations, Cruella's voice was dubbed by the far more malevolent-sounding Betty Lou Gerson. Far busier on TV than in films, Wickes was a regular on ten weekly series between 1953 and 1985, earning an Emmy nomination for her work on 1961's The Gertrude Berg Show. She also has the distinction of being the first actress to essay the role of Mary Poppins in a 1949 Studio One presentation. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Wickes did a great deal of guest-artist work in colleges and universities; during this period she herself went back to school, earning a master's degree from UCLA. Maintaining her professional pace into the 1990s, Wickes scored a hit with modern moviegoers as Sister Mary Lazarus in the two Sister Act comedies. Mary Wickes' final performance was a voiceover stint as one of the gargoyles in Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame; she died a few days before finishing this assignment, whereupon Jane Withers dubbed in the leftover dialogue.

Trivia: Very early in his stage career, Richard Deacon was advised by Helen Hayes to abandon all hopes of becoming a leading man: instead, she encouraged him to aggressively pursue a career as a character actor. Tall, bald, bespectacled and bass-voiced since high school, Deacon heeded Ms. Hayes' advice, and managed to survive in show business far longer than many of the "perfect" leading men who were his contemporaries. Usually cast as a glaring sourpuss or humorless bureaucrat, Deacon was a valuable and highly regarded supporting-cast commodity in such films as Desiree (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Kiss Them For Me (1957), The Young Philadelphians (1959) and The King's Pirate (1967), among many others. Virtually every major star who worked with Deacon took time out to compliment him on his skills: among his biggest admirers were Lou Costello, Jack Benny and Cary Grant. Even busier on television than in films, Richard Deacon had the distinction of appearing regularly on two concurrently produced sitcoms of the early 1960s: he was pompous suburbanite Fred Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the long-suffering Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Deacon also co-starred as Kaye Ballard's husband on the weekly TV comedy The Mothers-in-Law (1968), and enjoyed a rare leading role on the 1964 Twilight Zone installment "The Brain Center at Whipples." In his last decade, Richard Deacon hosted a TV program on microwave cookery, and published a companion book on the subject.

Trivia: In recalling his courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck recalled the vital contribution of African American actor Bill Walker, who was cast as the Reverend Sikes. "All the black people in the balcony stood," Peck noted. "My two kids didn't. When Bill said to them 'Stand up, children, your father is passing,' he wrapped up the Academy Award for me." The son of a freed slave, Walker began his stage career at a time when black actors were largely confined to shuffling, eye-rolling "Yowzah boss" bit parts. While the harsh economic realities of show business dictated that Walker would occasionally have to take less than prestigious roles as butlers, cooks, valets, and African tribal chieftains, he lobbied long and hard to assure that other actors of his race would be permitted to portray characters with more than a modicum of dignity. He also was a tireless worker in the field of Civil Rights, frequently laying both his career and his life on the line. Walker's Broadway credits included Harlem, The Solid South and Golden Dawn; his film credits were legion. Bill Walker was married to actress Peggy Cartwright, who as a child was one of the stars of the Our Gang silent comedies.

Trivia: Former radio actress Martha Wentworth played the Duchess, Allan Lane's robust-looking aunt, in seven of Republic Pictures' popular Red Ryder Westerns from 1946-1947. The original Duchess, Alice Fleming, had left the series along with William Elliott, who was being groomed for Grade-A Westerns. As the new Duchess, Wentworth joined Lane, Elliott's replacement, and little Bobby Blake (later Robert Blake), the former Our Gang star, who played Indian sidekick Little Beaver in all the Republic Red Ryder films. For a great majority of the series' fans, the Lane-Wentworth-Blake combination turned out the quintessential Red Ryder films, the trio becoming one of the most successful combinations in B-Western history. Republic sold the Red Ryder franchise to low-budget Eagle-Lion in 1948 and four additional films were produced, but Wentworth was replaced with former silent-action heroine Marin Sais. In her later years, Wentworth did quite a bit of voice-over work for Walt Disney.

Trivia: Of Swedish-American heritage, Virginia Christine (born Virginia Kraft) grew up in largely Scandinavian communities in Iowa and Minnesota. As a high schooler, Christine won a National Forensic League award, which led to her first professional engagement on a Chicago radio station. When her family moved to Los Angeles, Christine sought out radio work while attending college. She was trained for a theatrical career by actor/director Fritz Feld, who later became her husband. In 1942, she signed a contract with Warner Bros., appearing in bits in such films as Edge of Darkness (1943) and Mission to Moscow (1944). As a free-lance actress, Christine played the female lead in The Mummy's Curse (1945), a picture she later described as "ghastly." Maturing into a much-in-demand character actress, Christine appeared in four Stanley Kramer productions: The Men (1950), Not as a Stranger (1955), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Other movie assignments ranged from the heights of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to the depths of Billy the Kid Meets Dracula (1978). To a generation of Americans who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Christine will forever be Mrs. Olson, the helpful Swedish neighbor in scores of Folger's Coffee commercials.

Trivia: Veteran B-Western player Steven Darrell (aka J. Stevan Darrell) got the acting bug early, playing Abraham Lincoln in a grade-school tableau. He made his professional debut with the Galloway Players of Pittsfield, MA, and his West Coast bow with the famed Pasadena Playhouse in 1937. Darrell, who told an interviewer that he "enjoyed all kind of character roles, the more villainous the better," went on to menace nearly every cowboy hero around, from Roy Rogers to Whip Wilson, appearing in more than 100 films and over 200 television segments. Retiring after a 1967 episode of television's Daniel Boone, the veteran actor died from a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 63.

Trivia: Character actress Sarah Selby came to films by way of radio. In fact, her first screen assignment was a voice-over as one of the gossiping elephants in Disney's animated feature Dumbo (1941). She continued to play minor roles as nurses, housekeepers, and town gossips until her retirement in 1977; one of her last roles was Aunt Polly in a 1975 TV-movie adaptation of Huckleberry Finn. On television, Sarah Selby was seen on a semi-regular basis as storekeeper Ma Smalley on Gunsmoke (1955-1975).

Trivia: Cruelly but accurately described by one film historian as "that female mountain of flesh," actress/singer Jody Gilbert was one of moviedom's busiest "large" ladies. The major difference between Gilbert and other "sizeable" character actresses is that she could give back as good as she got in the insult department. As the surly waitress in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Gilbert was more than a match for her troublesome customer W. C. Fields. She went on to trade quips with Shemp Howard in Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin' (1941) and to aggressively pursue the hapless Lou Costello in Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942). On television, Gilbert was seen as J. Carroll Naish's plump would-be sweetheart Rosa in Life with Luigi (1952), a role she'd previously essayed on radio. One of Gilbert's last screen appearances was the belligerent railroad passenger whom holdup man Paul Newman imitates in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Jody Gilbert died at the age of 63 as the result of injuries sustained in an auto accident.

Trivia: Supporting actor Ken Osmond is best remembered for playing Wally Cleaver's oily, conniving best friend Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), a role he has periodically capitalized on in films and subsequent incarnations of the ever-popular series. Prior to getting that role, Osmond -- usually billed as Kenneth Osmond -- was already a busy child actor, playing supporting parts in such big-budget Warner Bros. films as So Big (his big-screen debut) at age eight. He made the rounds of the studios, appearing in Fox's tear-jerker Good Morning, Miss Dove in 1955, as well as the comedy Everything But the Truth at Universal in 1956. It was a year later that he took on the part of Eddie Haskell in Leave It to Beaver, which was produced by Universal's television unit. Osmond's work as Eddie earned him a Youth In Films Lifetime Achievement Award. Following the show's cancellation, Osmond did occasional television work, turning up in one episode of The Munsters (playing -- surprise! -- a troublemaking student) and elsewhere on the small screen, as well as in Paramount's 1967 college campus exploitation drama C'mon, Let's Live a Little, before he left acting. Osmond and his brother founded a charter helicopter company, and he later spent 18 years as a Los Angeles police officer. After sustaining multiple gunshot wounds during an attempted arrest, Osmond had to retire. In 1983, he returned to acting and Eddie Haskell, in The New Leave It to Beaver. The show ran until 1989 and featured his real sons, Eric and Christian Osmond, playing Eddie's sons Freddie and Boomer. In 1997, Osmond again showed up as Eddie in a cameo role in the feature-film version of Leave It to Beaver.

Trivia: American actress Mae Marsh was the daughter of an auditor for the Santa Fe railroad - and as such, she and her family moved around quite a bit during Marsh's childhood. After her father died and her stepfather was killed in the San Francisco earthquake, she was taken to Los Angeles by her great aunt, a one-time chorus girl who'd become a New York actress. Marsh followed her aunt's footsteps by securing film work with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith; it was Griffith, the foremost film director of the early silent period, who first spotted potential in young Miss Marsh. The actress got her first big break appearing as a stone-age maiden in Man's Genesis (1911), after Mary Pickford refused to play the part because it called for bare legs. Specializing in dramatic and tragic roles, Marsh appeared in innumerable Griffith-directed short films, reaching a career high point as the Little Sister in the director's Civil War epic, The Birth of A Nation (1915). She made such an impression in this demanding role that famed American poet Vachel Lindsay was moved to write a long, elaborate poem in the actress' honor. Marsh's career went on a downhill slide in the '20s due to poor management and second-rate films, but she managed to score a personal triumph as the long-suffering heroine of the 1931 talkie tear-jerker Over the Hill. She retired to married life, returning sporadically to films - out of boredom - as a bit actress, notably in the big-budget westerns of director John Ford (a longtime Marsh fan). When asked in the '60s why she didn't lobby for larger roles, Mae Marsh replied simply that "I didn't care to get up every morning at five o'clock to be at the studio by seven."

Trivia: A B-Western starlet, Virginia Carroll (née Broberg) sometimes played the heroine -- Oklahoma Terror (1939), opposite Jack Randall, and Johnny Mack Brown's Triggerman (1948) -- but more often than not appeared further down the cast list as the leading lady's sister or a saloon belle. Carroll did her fair share of serials, including G-Men vs. the Black Dragon (1943) and The Crimson Ghost (1946) but, again, never played the heroine. In fact, she was Martha Kent in the 15-chapter Superman (1948). Carroll continued to appear in small roles through 1959. She was married to actor Ralph Byrd, the screen's original Dick Tracy.

Trivia: An alumnus of the Indiana University Law School, Herbert Vigran gave up the legal world to become an actor. Making his 1935 film debut in Vagabond Lady, Vigran had a few lean months after his first flurry of Hollywood activity, but began getting stage work in New York on the basis of a portfolio of photos showing him sharing scenes with several well-known movie actors (never mentioning that most of his film roles were bit parts). After his first Broadway success in Having Wonderful Time, Vigran returned to L.A., accepting small parts in movies while keeping busy with plenty of lucrative radio work; among his hundreds of radio assignments was the title character on the wartime sitcom "The Sad Sack." In films, the harsh-voiced, heavily eyebrowed Vigran could usually be seen as brash reporters and Runyon-esque hoodlums; his favorite role was the rumpled private eye in the 1954 Dick Powell/Debbie Reynolds comedy Susan Slept Here. During the 1950s, Vigran was most active in TV, essaying half a dozen bad guy roles on the Superman series and appearing regularly as Monte the Bartender on the Dante's Inferno episodes of the anthology series Four Star Playhouse. In the early '70s, Herb Vigran found time during his hectic movie and voice-over schedule to play the recurring role of Judge Brooker on Gunsmoke.

Trivia: The older brother of actresses Etta and Hattie McDaniel, Sam McDaniel began his stage career as a clog dancer with a Denver minstrel show. Later on, he co-starred with his brother Otis in another minstrel troupe, this one managed by his father Henry. Sam and his sister Etta moved to Hollywood during the talkie revolution, securing the sort of bit roles usually reserved for black actors at that time. He earned his professional nickname "Deacon" when he appeared as the "Doleful Deacon" on The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, a Los Angeles radio program. During this period, Sam encouraged his sister Hattie to come westward and give Hollywood a try; he even arranged Hattie's first radio and nightclub singing jobs. McDaniel continued playing minor movie roles doormen, porters, butlers, janitors while Hattie ascended to stardom, and an Academy Award, as "Mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939). During the 1950s, McDaniel played a recurring role on TV's Amos 'N' Andy Show.