Trivia: Educated at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn-born Bill Williams broke into performing as a professional swimmer. Williams went on to work as a singer/actor in regional stock and vaudeville before making his film bow in 1943. After World War II service, he was signed by RKO Radio Pictures, which gave him the star buildup with such 1946 releases as Till the End of Time and Deadline at Dawn. Also in 1946, he wed another RKO contractee, Barbara Hale, with whom he co-starred in A Likely Story (1948) and Clay Pigeon (1949). His film career on the wane in the early 1950s, Williams signed up to star in the weekly TV western The Adventures of Kit Carson, which ran from 1952 to 1955. After the cancellation of Kit Carson, he remained active in television starring opposite Betty White in the 1955 sitcom Date with the Angels and showing off his athletic and aquatic prowess in the 1960 Sea Hunt clone Assignment: Underwater. He stayed active into the 1980s, playing rugged character roles. Bill Williams was the father of actor William Katt, star of the 1980s adventure weekly The Greatest American Hero.

Trivia: Actress/singer Georgia Lee most frequently appeared in low-budget films of the '50s occasionally billing herself as Honey Dean. She later became an evangelist. Her son Robbie Lee also became an actor.

Trivia: American general-purpose actor Douglas Kennedy attended Deerfield Academy before trying his luck in Hollywood, using both his own name and his studio-imposed name Keith Douglas. He was able to secure contract-player status, first at Paramount and later at Warner Bros. Kennedy's Paramount years weren't what one could call distinguished, consisting mainly of unbilled bits (The Ghost Breakers [1940]) and supporting roles way down the cast list (Northwest Mounted Police [1940]); possibly he was handicapped by his close resemblance to Paramount leading man Fred MacMurray. Warner Bros., which picked up Kennedy after his war service with the OSS and Army Intelligence, gave the actor some better breaks with secondary roles in such A pictures as Nora Prentiss (1947), Dark Passage (1948), and The Adventures of Don Juan (1949). Still, Kennedy did not fill a role as much as he filled the room in the company of bigger stars. Chances are film buffs would have forgotten Kennedy altogether had it not been for his frequent appearances in such horror/fantasy features as Invaders from Mars (1953), The Alligator People (1959) and The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), playing the title role in the latter. Douglas Kennedy gain a modicum of fame and a fan following for his starring role in the well-circulated TV western series Steve Donovan, Western Marshal, which was filmed in 1952 and still posting a profit into the '60s.

Trivia: Alternately billed as Phil Tead and Philips Tead, this slight, jug-eared character actor could easily have been taken for a young Walter Brennan (indeed, he has been in some film histories). After playing newspaperman Wilson in the 1931 version of The Front Page, he was thereafter typecast as a nosy reporter. He also portrayed several fast-talking radio commentators, most memorably in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932) and Harold Lloyd's The Milky Way (1936). Adopting a doddering comic quaintness in the 1950s, Phil Tead was occasionally seen as the absent-minded Professor Pepperwinkle on TV's Superman series.

Trivia: American actor Stanley Clements pursued a showbiz career immediately upon graduation from Brooklyn's PS 49, appearing in vaudeville and in radio. After a lean year in which he supported himself as a panhandler, Clements was signed by 20th Century-Fox in 1941, earning choice juvenile roles from his first film (Accent on Love) onward. Stan's most memorable teenage role was as the tough kid "humanized" by Bing Crosby and encouraged to organize a boy's choir in the Oscar-winning Going My Way (1944). Due to his small stature, he was most often cast as jockeys, even as late as 1952's Boots Malone. In 1956, Clements was hired by Allied Artists to replace Leo Gorcey in the "Bowery Boys" B-picture series; though compelled to take second billing to comic patsy Huntz Hall, Stanley was ostensibly the group's leader, fast-talking wiseguy Duke Covaleske. Clements played Duke in six pictures, included the final Bowery Boys installment, In the Money (1958). After that, Stanley Clements concentrated on movie and TV supporting roles, including a characteristic appearance as a shifty shoe salesman on an early '60s installment of Leave It to Beaver.

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: Loyola University grad Paul Picerni became an actor at a time when Arrow-collar leading men were giving way to blue-collar realistic types. Picerni never seemed too comfortable with his leading assignments in such films as House of Wax (1953); he appeared more at ease in down-to-earth supporting roles. His latter-day reputation rests on his four-year run as a federal agent on the slam-bang TV series The Untouchables. Paul Picerni is the brother of stunt man and stunt coordinator Charles Picerni.

Trivia: Stoutly proportioned yet dignified character actor Howard Wendell was known for his skill and reliability in a screen career lasting three decades -- according to his grandson, he was referred to by those who knew his work as "one-take Wendell." Born Howard David Wendell in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1908, though he considered Elyria, Ohio, where he was raised, to be his home. His acting career began with work in a minstrel show, and he later appeared on a radio show broadcast out of Cleveland, Ohio. Wendell worked with the Elyria Playmakers, and was later an apprentice at the Cleveland Playhouse. Later, while traveling across the midwest as an actor, he also began directing plays and acting in summer stock, and subsequently moved on to road show productions in the northeast. By the end of the 1940s, he'd amassed some Broadway credits as well, and made his small-screen debut on Colgate Theatre. By 1952, he was in Hollywood and working in feature films, most notably Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953). Wendell proved adept at older character parts, including politicians, doctors, business executives, judges, and other authority figures -- in Lang's film, he was memorable as an incompetent and crooked police chief, who is seen harassing the honest members of his force and kowtowing to his city's worst gang elements. Perhaps Wendell's strangest appearance was in Edward L. Cahn's The Fourt Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1958), in which he portrayed a medical doctor whose skill at saving lives gets him killed -- his character appears, decidedly postmortem, in the guise of a severed head in the vault of the villain. Wendell could also do comedy, and appeared in his share of sitcoms, including The Dick Van Dyke Show. Although he officially retired in 1963, Wendell went on to do appearances in episodes of I Dream of Jeannie Batman in the later 1960s, and he gave his final screen performance on an episode of Adam-12 in 1971.