Trivia: Actor Stanley Andrews moved from the stage to the movies in the mid 1930s, where at first he was typed in steadfast, authoritative roles. The tall, mustachioed Adrews became familiar to regular moviegoers in a string of performances as ship's captains, doctors, executives, military officials and construction supervisors. By the early 1950s, Andrews had broadened his range to include grizzled old western prospectors and ageing sheriffs. This led to his most lasting contribution to the entertainment world: the role of the Old Ranger on the long-running syndicated TV series Death Valley Days. Beginning in 1952, Andrews introduced each DVD episode, doing double duty as commercial pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax; he also became a goodwill ambassador for the program and its sponsor, showing up at county fairs, supermarket openings and charity telethons. Stanley Andrews continued to portray the Old Ranger until 1963, when the US Borax company decided to alter its corporate image with a younger spokesperson -- a 51-year-old "sprout" named Ronald Reagan.

Trivia: It is a fairly safe assumption that if not for a career change which, ironically enough, took him out of the motion picture industry, Ronald Reagan would not rank among Hollywood's best-known stars; a genial if not highly skilled actor, he made few memorable films, and even then he rarely left much of a lasting impression. Of course, in 1980 Reagan became the President of the United States, and with his political ascendancy came a flurry of new interest in his film career. His acting work -- especially the infamous Bedtime for Bonzo -- became the subject of much discussion, the majority of it highly satirical. Still, there is no denying that he enjoyed a long and prolific movie career. Moreover, he remains among the first and most famous actors to make the move into politics, a trend which grew more and more prevalent in the wake of his rise to power.Born February 6, 1911, in Tampico, IL, Ronald Wilson Reagan began his acting career while studying economics at Eureka College. He broke into show business as a sportscaster at a Des Moines, IA, radio station, and from there assumed the position of play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. By the mid-'30s, he relocated to Hollywood, signing with Warner Bros. in 1937 and making his screen debut later that year in Love Is on the Air. Reagan made over a dozen more films over the course of the next two years, almost all of them B-movies. In 1939, however, he won a prominent role in the Bette Davis tearjerker Dark Victory, a performance which greatly increased his visibility throughout the Hollywood community. It helped him win his most famous role, as the ill-fated Notre Dame football hero George Gipp in the 1940 film biography Knute Rockne: All American. At the film's climax he delivered the immortal line "Win one for the Gipper!," an oft-quoted catchphrase throughout his White House tenure.In 1940, Reagan married actress Jane Wyman, with whom he had two children. The following year, he co-starred in Sam Wood's acclaimed Kings Row, arguably his most accomplished picture. During World War II, he served as a non-combative captain in the Army Air Corps, producing a number of training films. Upon returning to Hollywood in 1947, he began a five-year term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position he again assumed in 1959. It was during this period that Reagan, long a prominent liberal voice in Hollywood politics, became embroiled in McCarthy-era battles over communism in the film industry, and gradually his views shifted from the left to the right. He also continued appearing in films and in 1950 co-starred in the well-received melodrama The Hasty Heart. A year later, Reagan accepted perhaps his most notorious role, in Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he portrayed a college professor who befriends his test subject, a chimpanzee; throughout his political career, the picture was the butt of a never-ending series of jokes. During the 1950s, Reagan freelanced among a variety of studios. Still, his film career began to wane, and in 1954 he began an eight-year stint as the host of the television series General Electric Theater. Among Reagan's final film appearances was 1957's Hellcats of the Navy, where he appeared with actress Nancy Davis, his second wife. He did not make another film prior to narrating 1961's The Young Doctors, and with 1964's remake of The Killers, he effectively ended his performing career. That same year he entered politics, actively campaigning for Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In 1966, Reagan was elected Governor of California, and over the course of his eight-year gubernatorial stint emerged as one of the Republican party's most powerful and well-recognized voices. In 1976, Reagan ran against Gerald Ford in the Republican Presidential primary, but was unsuccessful; four years later, however, he defeated Jimmy Carter to become the nation's 40th President. The rest, as they say, is history.

Trivia: Wide-eyed little Bobby Blake began his acting career as an Our Gang kid and eventually matured into one of Hollywood's finest actors. Born Michael Gubitosi, the boy was two years old when he joined his family vaudeville act, "The Three Little Hillbillies." The act was doomed to failure, as were most of the pipe dreams of the Gubitosi family. Relocating from New Jersey to California, Michael's mom found work for her kids as extras at the MGM studios. The young Gubitosi impressed the producers of the Our Gang series, and as a result the six-year-old was elevated to star status in the short subjects series. Little Mickey Gubitosi whined and whimpered his way through 40 Our Gang shorts, reaching an artistic low point with the execrable All About Hash (1940). During his five-year tenure with the series, the boy anglicized his professional name to Bobby Blake. Freelancing after 1944, Blake's performing skills improved immeasurably, especially when he was cast as Indian sidekick Little Beaver in Republic's Red Ryder series. He also registered well in his appearances in Warner Bros. films, playing such roles as the younger John Garfield in Humoresque (1946) and the Mexican kid who sells Bogart the crucial lottery ticket in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Though sporadically happy in his work (one of his most pleasurable assignments was the otherwise forgettable Laurel and Hardy feature The Big Noise, 1944), Bobby Blake was an unhappy child, weighed down by a miserable home life. At 16, Blake dropped out of sight for a few years, a reportedly difficult period in his life. Upon claiming a 16,000-dollar nest egg at age 21, however, Blake began turning his life around, both personally and professionally. He matriculated into a genuine actor rather than a mere "cute" personality, essaying choice dramatic roles in both films and TV. He starred in the Allied Artists gangster flick The Purple Gang (1960), played featured roles in such films as PT 109 (1963), Ensign Pulver (1964), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and guest starred on dozens of TV shows. In 1963, he was one of 12 character actors amalgamated into the "repertory company" on the weekly anthology series The Richard Boone Show; he spent the next 26 weeks playing everything from agreeable office boys to fevered dope addicts. His true breakthrough role came in 1967, when he was cast as real-life multiple murderer Perry Smith in Richard Brooks' filmization of In Cold Blood. Even after this career boost, Blake often found the going rough in Hollywood, due as much to his own pugnacious behavior as to typecasting. He did, however, star in such worthwhile efforts as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Electra Glide in Blue (1973). Blake achieved full-fledged stardom at last with his three-year (1975-1978) starring stint on the TV cop series Baretta, adding to his already sizeable fan following via several lively, tell-all guest appearances on The Tonight Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and several other video chat fests. Despite his never-ending battles with the ABC executives during the Baretta run, Blake stuck out the series long enough to win an Emmy, and even got to direct an episode or two.Forming his own production company, Blake made several subsequent tries at TV-series success: Hell Town (1985), in which he starred as a barrio priest, lasted 13 weeks, while the private-eye endeavor Jake Dancer never got past its three pilot films. He has been more successful with such one-shots as the TV miniseries Hoffa (1983), in which he played the title character with chilling accuracy, and the 1993 TV biopic Judgment Day: The John List Story, which earned him another Emmy. His later film appearances were in hard-nosed character parts, such as 1995's The Money Train, and he landed a plum (albeit terminally odd) lead role in David Lynch's postmodern thriller Lost Highway (1997), as a clown-faced psychopath who plays bizarre mind games with a suburban couple. Though he's managed to purge some of his personal demons over the years, Robert Blake remains as feisty, outspoken, and unpredictable as ever, especially when given an open forum by talk show hosts. In 2001, Blake generated headlines once again, though this time off-camera and in an extremely negative vein. The mysterious murder of wife Bonnie Lee Bakely sent the tabloids into a furious frenzy of speculation and accusation. Arrested for the murder of Bakely in April 2002, Blake's future looked increasingly grim as evidence continued to mount against him. Nevertheless, in March 2005 the actor was completely exonerated of all accusations surrounding Bakely's death and narrowly escaped a life sentence in prison. His on-camera activity remained extremely infrequent, however. Late in 2005, the press reported the outcome of a civil trial involving Bakely's homicide, in which Blake was required to pay an estimated $30 million to her children.

Trivia: Forrest Tucker occupied an odd niche in movies -- though not an "A" movie lead, he was, nonetheless, a prominent "B" picture star and even a marquee name, who could pull audiences into theaters for certain kinds of pictures. From the early/mid-1950s on, he was a solid presence in westerns and other genre pictures. Born Forrest Meredith Tucker in Plainfield, Indiana in 1919, he was bitten by the performing bug early in life -- he made his debut in burlesque while he was still under-age. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1937, he enlisted in the United States Army, joining a cavalry unit. Tucker next headed for Hollywood, where his powerful build and six-foot-four frame and his enthusiasm were sufficient to get him a big-screen debut in The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Signed to Columbia Pictures, he mostly played anonymous tough-guy roles over the next two years, primarily in B pictures, before entering the army in 1943. Resuming his career in 1946, he started getting bigger roles on a steady basis in better pictures, and in 1948 signed with Republic Pictures. He became a mainstay of that studio's star roster, moving up to a co-starring role in Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), which also brought him into the professional orbit of John Wayne, the movie's star. Across the early/middle 1950s, Tucker starred in a brace of action/adventure films and westerns, alternating between heroes and villains, building up a significant fan base. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the company's top box-office draws. As it also turned out, Tucker's appeal was international, and he went to England in the second half of the decade to play starring roles in a handful of movies. At that time, British studios such as Hammer Films needed visiting American actors to boost the international appeal of their best productions, and Tucker fulfilled the role admirably in a trio of sci-fi/horror films: The Crawling Eye, The Cosmic Monsters, and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Part of Tucker's motivation for taking these roles, beyond the money, he later admitted, was his desire to sample the offerings of England's pubs -- Tucker was a two-fisted drinker and, in those days, was well able to handle the effects of that activity so that it never showed up on-screen. And he ran with the opportunity afforded by those three science fiction movies -- each of those films, he played a distinctly different role, in a different way, but always with a certain fundamental honesty that resonated with audiences. When he returned to Hollywood, he was cast as Beauregard Burnside in Auntie Mame (1958), which was the top-grossing movie of the year. Then stage director Morton De Costa, seeing a joyful, playful romantic huckster in Tucker (where others had mostly seen an earnest tough-guy), picked him to star as Professor Harold Hill in the touring production of The Music Man -- Tucker played that role more than 2000 times over the years that followed. He was also the star of the 1964 Broadway show Fair Game For Lovers (in a cast that included Leo Genn, Maggie Hayes, and a young Alan Alda), which closed after eight performances. The Music Man opened a new phase for Tucker's career. The wily huckster became his image, one that was picked up by Warner Bros.' television division, which cast him in the role of Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, the charmingly larcenous post-Civil War cavalry soldier at the center of the western/spoof series F-Troop. That series only ran for two seasons, but was in syndicated reruns for decades afterward, and though Tucker kept his hand in other media -- returning to The Music Man and also starring in an unsold pilot based on the movie The Flim-Flam Man (taking over the George C. Scott part), it was the part of O'Rourke with which he would be most closely identified for the rest of his life. He did occasionally take tougher roles that moved him away from the comedy in that series -- in one of the better episodes of the series Hondo, entitled "Hondo And The Judas", he played Colonel William Clark Quantrill very effectively. At the end of the decade, he returned to straight dramatic acting, most notably in the John Wayne western Chisum, in which he played primary villain Lawrence Murphy. That same year, he appeared in a challenging episode of the series Bracken's World entitled "Love It Or Leave It, Change It Or Lose It", playing "Jim Grange," a sort of film-a-clef version of John Wayne -- a World War II-era film star known for his patriotism, Grange is determined to express his political views while working alongside a young film star (portrayed by Tony Bill) who is closely associated with the anti-war movement. Tucker continued getting television work and occasional film roles, in addition to returning to the straw-hat circuit, mostly as Professor Harold Hill. None of his subsequent series lasted very long, but he was seldom out of work, despite a drinking problem that did worsen significantly during his final decade. In his final years, he had brought that under control, and was in the process of making a comeback -- there was even talk of an F-Troop revival in film form -- when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. He died in the fall of 1986 at age 67.