Trivia: Ex-prizefighter Dale Robertson was brought to films by virtue of his vocal and physical resemblance to Clark Gable. After a year of bit parts at Warner Bros., Robertson graduated to leading-man gigs at 20th Century Fox. In 1957, Robertson was cast on the popular TV Western Tales of Wells Fargo which ran until 1962. Since that time, Robertson has starred or co-starred in a number of television weeklies, nearly always Western (both period and contemporary) in nature: The Iron Horse (1966-1968), Dynasty (1980-1982), and J.J. Starbuck (1989). In addition, Dale Robertson has headlined two TV-movie pilots based on the exploits of famed G-Man Melvin Purvis. Robertson made his final screen appearance in Martha Coolidge's 1991 period piece Rambling Rose, passing away from lung cancer over twenty years later at the age of 89.

Trivia: Practiced law in the 1930s before pursuing acting. Perfomed on stage in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1942 to act in dozens of films during the 1940s and 1950s. Started his stage career using his real name Horace McNally, then changed his stage name to Stephen McNally (name of his son). Was a one-time president of the Catholic Actors Guild. Known for playing hard-hearted characters or villains.

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: One of the youngest "old codgers" in show business, Arthur Hunnicutt left college when funds ran out and joined an acting troupe in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. His first important New York engagement was in the Theatre Guild's production of Love's Old Sweet Song. Hunnicutt entered films in 1942, specializing in grizzled western sidekicks even though he was only in his early 30s. When Percy Kilbride retired from the "Ma and Pa Kettle" series in 1955, Hunnicutt, still a youngster in comparison to Kilbride's sixtysomething co-star Marjorie Main, filled the gap in The Kettles in the Ozarks (1955). And when director Howard Hawks needed someone to play a Walter Brennan-type role when Brennan wasn't available for The Big Sky (1952) and El Dorado (1967), Hunnicutt was the man of the hour (his work in Big Sky won him an Oscar nomination). Arthur Hunnicutt was last seen in 1975's The Moonrunners, at long playing someone closer to his own age.

Trivia: Discovered by famed African-American comedian Bert Williams, actor Jay C. Flippen attained his first Broadway stage role in 1920's Broadway Brevities. Entertainers of the period were expected to sing, dance, act and clown with equal expertise, and the young Flippen was no slouch in any of these categories. He not only shared billing with such stage luminaries as Jack Benny and Texas Guinan, but he boned up on his ad-lib skills as a radio announcer for the New York Yankees games. At one time president of the American Guild of Variety Artists, Flippen did as many benefits for worthy causes as he did paid performances and worked tirelessly in all showbiz branches: movies, stage (including the touring version of Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin), radio (he was one of the first game show emcees) and even early experimental television broadcasts. After several years of alternating between raspy-voiced villains and lovable "Pop"- type characters in films, Flippen increased his fan following with a supporting role as C.P.O. Nelson on the 1962 sitcom Ensign O'Toole, which, though it lasted only one network season, was a particular favorite in syndicated reruns. In 1964, Flippen suffered a setback when a gangrenous leg had to be amputated. Choosing not to be what he described as "a turnip," Jay C. Flippen continued his acting career from a wheelchair, performing with vim and vinegar in films and on television until his death.

Trivia: Whit Bissell was a familiar face to younger baby boomers as an actor mostly associated with fussy official roles -- but those parts merely scratched the surface of a much larger and longer career. Born Whitner Nutting Bissell in New York City in 1909, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an alumnus of that institution's Carolina Playmakers company. He made his movie debut with an uncredited role in the 1940 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk and then wasn't seen on screen again for three years. Starting in 1943, Bissell appeared in small roles in a short string of mostly war-related Warner Bros. productions, including Destination Tokyo. It wasn't until after the war, however, that he began getting more visible in slightly bigger parts. He had a tiny role in the opening third of Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Cluny Brown (1946), but starting in 1947, Bissell became much more closely associated with film noir and related dark, psychologically-focused crime films. Directors picked up on his ability to portray neurotic instability and weaselly dishonesty -- anticipating the kinds of roles in which Ray Walston would specialize for a time -- and used him in pictures such as Brute Force, He Walked by Night, and The Killer That Stalked New York. His oddest and most visible portrayal during this period was in The Crime Doctor's Diary (1949), in which he had a scene-stealing turn as a mentally unhinged would-be composer at the center of a murder case. By the early 1950s, however, in addition to playing fidgety clerks, nervous henchmen, and neurotic suspects (and friends and relatives of suspects), he added significantly to his range of portrayals with his deeply resonant voice, which could convincingly convey authority. Bissell began turning up as doctors, scientists, and other figures whose outward demeanor commanded respect -- mainstream adult audiences probably remember him best for his portrayal of the navy psychiatrist in The Caine Mutiny, while teenagers in the mid-1950s may have known him best for the scientists and psychiatrists that he played in Target Earth and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it was in two low-budget films that all of Bissell's attributes were drawn together in a pair of decidedly villainous roles, as the mad scientists at the center of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. The latter, in particular, gave him a chance to read some very "ripe" lines with a straight face, most memorably, "Answer me! I know you have a civil tongue in your mouth -- I sewed it there myself!" But Bissell was never a one-note actor. During this same period, he was showing off far more range in as many as a dozen movies and television shows each year. Among the more notable were Shack Out on 101, in which he gave a sensitive portrayal of a shell-shocked veteran trying to deal with his problems in the midst of a nest of Soviet spies; "The Man With Many Faces" on the series Code 3, in which he was superb as a meek accountant who is pushed into the life of a felon by an ongoing family tragedy; and, finally, in "The Great Guy" on Father Knows Best, where he successfully played a gruff, taciturn employer who never broke his tough demeanor for a moment, yet still convincingly delivered a final line that could bring tears to the eyes of an audience. By the end of the 1950s, Bissell was working far more in television than in movies. During the early 1960s, he was kept busy in every genre, most notably Westerns -- he showed up on The Rifleman and other oaters with amazing frequency. During the mid-1960s, however, he was snatched up by producer Irwin Allen, who cast Bissell in his one costarring role: as General Kirk, the head of the government time-travel program Project Tic-Toc on the science-fiction/adventure series Time Tunnel. He also showed up on Star Trek and in other science-fiction series of the period and continued working in dozens of small roles well into the mid-1980s. Bissell died in 1996.

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Character actor James Bell has appeared in many films during his 40-year film career. He was usually cast as a sympathetic character. The Virginia-born Bell first attended the Virginia Polytechnic Institute before making his theatrical debut in 1921. Eleven years later he made his film debut in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Most of the films he appeared in were made during the '40s and '50s.

Trivia: Muscular actor William "Bill" Phillips attended George Washington University, where he distinguished himself in such contact sports as football and boxing. After cutting his acting teeth with Eva Le Galienne's Civic Repertory group, Phillips made his film debut in 1940. He landed a long-term MGM contract after registering well in a small role in See Here Private Hargrove (1944). By the 1950s, Phillips was typed as a Western actor, usually in such secondary roles as the barber in High Noon (1952). William "Bill" Phillips made his last appearance in the Ronald Reagan-Nancy Davis starrer Hellcats of the Navy (1957).

Trivia: While many of Earl Holliman's bucolic screen characters tended to shy away from "book learnin," Holliman himself is a graduate of UCLA. Making his film debut with a one-line bit as a bellboy in Martin and Lewis' Scared Stiff (1953), Holliman went on to featured and co-starring roles in westerns and military dramas, usually cast as a hot-headed rustic with a streak of manic unpredictability. His larger film roles include the comic-relief cook in Forbidden Planet (1956), Katharine Hepburn's girl-happy brother in The Rainmaker (1956)--a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination--and Matt Elder in the John Wayne starrer Sons of Katie Elder (1965). A nearly inescapable presence on television, Holliman turned in some impressive work on the many live TV anthologies of the 1950s. His portrayal of a shipwrecked marine in the 1958 Kraft Theatre production "The Sea is Boiling Hot," in which he carried on a one-sided debate with monolingual Japanese officer Sessue Hayakawa, led to his being cast in a similar solo turn in the 1959 Twilight Zone pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" His series-TV credits include the roles of gunslinger-turned-hotelier Sundance in Hotel de Paree (1959), bronco buster Mitch Guthrie in Wide Country (1962), Palm Springs private eye Matthew Durning in PS I Luv U (1991) and barkeep Darden Towe in Delta (1992). Undoubtedly his most famous TV assignment was as Angie Dickinson's superior officer Lt. Bill Crowley in the weekly Police Woman (1974-78). Most recently Earl Holliman made a most welcome guest appearance as Lea Thompson's Wisconsinite dad in the TV sitcom Caroline in the City.

Trivia: Irving Bacon entered films at the Keystone Studios in 1913, where his athletic prowess and Ichabod Crane-like features came in handy for the Keystone brand of broad slapstick. He appeared in over 200 films during the silent and sound era, often playing mailmen, soda jerks and rustics. In The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) it is Irving, as a flustered jury foreman, who delivers the film's punchline. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irving played the recurring role of Mr. Crumb in Columbia's Blondie series; he's the poor postman who is forever being knocked down by the late-for-work Dagwood Bumstead, each collision accompanied by a cascade of mail flying through the air. Irving Bacon kept his hand in throughout the 1950s, appearing in a sizeable number of TV situation comedies.

Trivia: Lithe, dark-haired Fred Coby (born Frederick G. Beckner Jr.) turned into freakish Rondo Hatton in the 1946 horror melodrama The Brute Man, a chiller so tasteless and badly made that Universal sold it outright to Poverty Row company PRC. Coby stayed with PRC for Don Ricardo Returns (1946), a Zorro rip-off written by actor Duncan Renaldo and based on Johnston McCulley, the creator of the original. Although handsome -- Coby's slight resemblance to Tyrone Power may have won him the role in the first place -- Don Ricardo was too cheaply made to have any impact on the moviegoing audience. He spent the remainder of his career as a stunt performer and bit player.

Trivia: From a family of minstrel performers, tough-looking John Cliff (born Clifford) toured with carnivals prior to landing in Hollywood shortly after World War II. In scores of films from 1946, the dark-haired Cliff was almost always cast as a heavy, notably in Westerns, and would later become equally busy on television. He retired from performing in 1968 and went into real estate.

Trivia: A New Mexican of Native American extraction, actor Glenn Strange held down several rough-and-tumble jobs, from deputy sheriff to rodeo rider, before settling on a singing career. He made his radio bow on Los Angeles station KNX (the CBS-owned affiliate) as a member of the Arizona Wranglers singing group. Thanks to his husky physique and plug-ugly features, Strange had no trouble finding work as a stuntman/villain in western films and serials. He also displayed a flair for comedy as the sidekick to singing cowboy Dick Foran in a series of B-sagebrushers of the late '30s. During the war years, Strange became something of a bargain-basement Lon Chaney Jr., playing homicidal halfwits in a handful of horror pictures made at PRC and other low-budget studios. These appearances led to his being cast as the Frankenstein monster in the 1944 Universal programmer House of Frankenstein; he was coached in this role by the "creature" from the original 1931 Frankenstein, Boris Karloff. Given very little to do in House of Frankenstein and the 1945 sequel House of Dracula other than stalk around with arms outstretched at fadeout time, Strange brought none of the depth and pathos to the role that distinguished Karloff's appearances. Strange was shown to better advantage in his last appearance as The Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) where he convincingly menaced the eternally frightened Lou Costello and even indulged in a couple of time-honored "scare" routines, while still remaining in character (Some scenes had to be reshot because Strange couldn't stop laughing at Costello's antics; towards the end of shooting, Strange broke his ankle and had to be replaced in a few shots by Lon Chaney Jr., who was costarring in the film as the Wolf Man). Though typecast as heavies in both movies and television -- he played the hissable Butch Cavendish in the Lone Ranger TV pilot -- Strange was well known throughout Hollywood as a genuine nice guy and solid family man. Glenn Strange's last engagement of note was his 11-year run (1962-73) as Sam, the Long Branch bartender on TV's Gunsmoke.

Trivia: Supporting actor Murray Alper's earliest screen credit was 1930's The Royal Family of Broadway. For the next 35 years, Alper was an inescapable movie presence, playing dozens of cab drivers, bookies, cops and GIs. One of his few credited appearances in an "A" picture was in The Maltese Falcon; he plays the friendly cabbie who drives Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) on a mid-film wild goose chase. Frequently seen in comedies, Alper showed up in eight Bowery Boys farces of the 1940s and 1950s, and was prominently featured in the Three Stooges' Trick Dicks (1953) and The Outlaws is Coming (1965, as Chief Crazy Horse!). One of Murray Alper's least characteristic roles was the judo instructor in Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor (1963).

Trivia: A champion swimmer from Hawaii, Harold Kruger (aka Stubby Kruger) was the featured comedian in Billy Rose's Aquacade in the early '30s and, as such, appeared as himself opposite Olympic gold medal winner Johnny Weissmuller (the future "Tarzan") in The Human Fish, a two-reel comedy directed by Clyde Bruckman. The following year, he was credited as "technical advisor" for You Said a Mouthful, a Joe E. Brown comedy with a distinct aquatic theme, but Kruger's own screen career didn't begin until 1941, when old friends Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson cast him in their anarchic Hellzapoppin' (1941). He continued to pop up in bit roles well into the 1950s, but Kruger never became a featured screen comedian in his own right.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: General-purpose actor Larry Blake made his screen debut playing a young Adolf Hitler in James Whale's troubled The Road Back (1937), only to see his scenes end up on the cutting room floor. A difficult actor to pigeonhole, Blake went on to play everything from cops to robbers in a long career that lasted through the late '70s and included such television shows as The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Superman, Yancy Derringer, Perry Mason, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, Ironside, Little House on the Prairie, and Kojak. His son is Michael F. Blake, a well-known makeup artist and the biographer of silent screen star Lon Chaney.

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.