Trivia: Child actor Skip Homeier began acting on radio in his native Chicago, which in the early 1930s was a major network center. Billed as "Skippy," he was one of the kiddie regulars on Let's Pretend, and for a while played the son of the heroine on the long-running soap opera Portia Faces Life. He was also frequently tapped for stage work in both the Midwest and New York. It was Homeier's chilling portrayal of a preteen Nazi in the Broadway production Tomorrow the World that led to his film debut in the 1944 movie version of that play. Typecast as a troublesome teenager thereafter, Homeier was finally permitted a comparatively mature role in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1950). He worked steadily in westerns and crime films thereafter, occasionally billed as G. V. Homeier. It was back to "Skip" for his 1960 TV series Dan Raven. Alternating between Skip and G. V. Homeier for the rest of his career, the actor went on to co-star as Dr. Hugh Jacoby in the weekly TVer The Interns (1970-71) and to play supporting roles in such films as The Greatest (1977) and the made-for-TV The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979). Homeier died in 2017, at age 86.

Trivia: American actress Kristine Miller was placed under contract to Paramount in 1948. Miller appeared briefly in such Hal Wallis productions as I Walk Alone (1947), Desert Fury (1948) and Paid in Full (1948) before her contract was sold to Columbia. After a series of secondary roles, notably as one of the New Congress Club "hostesses" in From Here to Eternity (1953) she was "at liberty" again. On TV, Kristine Miller co-starred with Jim Davis on the syndicated western series Stories of the Century (1954).

Trivia: Once there was a film historian who opined that Wallace Ford was in more movies than any other character actor of his prominence. This is unlikely, but Ford was certainly kept busy in roles of all shapes and sizes during his 35-year movie career. Orphaned in infancy, Ford grew up in various British orphanages and foster homes (his search in the mid-1930s for his natural parents drew worldwide headlines). He first set foot on stage at age 11, playing in vaudeville and music halls before working his way up to Broadway. His inauspicious feature-film debut was in Swellhead (1931), a baseball melodrama which lay on the shelf for nearly five years before its release. He went on to play wisecracking leading roles in such "B"s as Night of Terror (1933), The Nut Farm (1935) and The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1935); the critics paid no heed to these minor efforts, though they always showered Ford with praise for his supporting roles in films like John Ford's The Informer (1935) and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). He occasionally took a leave of absence from films to accept a stage role; in 1937, he created the part of George in the original Broadway production of Of Mice and Men (1937). As he grew balder and stockier, he remained in demand for middle-aged character roles, often portraying wistful drunks or philosophical ne'er-do-wells. Wallace Ford ended his film career with his powerful portrayal of Elizabeth Hartman's vacillating father in A Patch of Blue (1965).

Trivia: A graduate of Santa Monica Junior College, Jack Elam spent the immediate post-World War II years as an accountant, numbering several important Hollywood stars among his clients. Already blind in one eye from a childhood fight, Elam was in danger of losing the sight in his other eye as a result of his demanding profession. Several of his show business friends suggested that Elam give acting a try; Elam would be a natural as a villain. A natural he was, and throughout the 1950s Elam cemented his reputation as one of the meanest-looking and most reliable "heavies" in the movies. Few of his screen roles gave him the opportunity to display his natural wit and sense of comic timing, but inklings of these skills were evident in his first regular TV series assignments: The Dakotas and Temple Houston, both 1963. In 1967, Elam was given his first all-out comedy role in Support Your Local Sheriff, after which he found his villainous assignments dwindling and his comic jobs increasing. Elam starred as the patriarch of an itinerant Southwestern family in the 1974 TV series The Texas Wheelers (his sons were played by Gary Busey and Mark Hamill), and in 1979 he played a benign Frankenstein-monster type in the weekly horror spoof Struck By Lightning. Later TV series in the Elam manifest included Detective in the House (1985) and Easy Street (1987). Of course Elam would also crack up audiences in the 1980s with his roles in Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II. Though well established as a comic actor, Elam would never completely abandon the western genre that had sustained him in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1993, a proud Elam was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Two short years later the longitme star would essay his final screen role in the made for television western Bonanza: Under Attack.

Trivia: A top-flight character actor and sometime leading man, Gregory Walcott managed to bridge the tail-end of the studio system, the heyday of series television, and the boom years of the post-studio 1970s, and carve a notable career in the process. He was born Bernard Mattox in 1928 (some sources say 1932) in Wendell, NC, a small town about 10 miles east of the state capitol of Raleigh. After serving in the Army following the end of the Second World War, he decided to try for an acting career and hitchhiked his way to California. He managed to get work in amateur and semi-professional theatrical productions and was lucky enough to be spotted in a small role in one of these by an agent. That resulted in his big-screen debut, in an uncredited role in the 20th Century-Fox drama Red Skies of Montana (1952). With his 6'-plus height, impressive build, and deep voice, Walcott would seem to have a major career in front of him, but the movie business of the 1950s was in a state of constant retrenchment, battling the intrusion of television and the eroding of its audience. For the next three years, he had little but bit parts in films, some of them major productions. His performance as the drill instructor in the opening section of Raoul Walsh's Battle Cry (1955) was good enough to get him a contract with Warner Bros. He subsequently played supporting roles in Mister Roberts (1955) and in independent productions such as Badman's Country (1958), and also started showing up on television with some regularity. And with each new role, he seemed to gather momentum in his career.As luck would have it, however, Walcott's most prominent role of the 1950s ended up being the one he received the lowest fee for doing, and that he also thought the least of, and also one that, for decades, he was loathe to discuss, on or off the record: as Jeff Trent, the hero of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Walcott's work on the magnum opus of writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. amounted to less than a week's work, and he was so busy in those days that one can easily imagine him forgetting about it as soon as his end of the shoot was over. And the movie was scarcely even seen on its initial release in the summer of 1959 and went to television in the early '60s in a package that usually had it relegated to "shock theater" showcases and the late-night graveyard (no pun intended). But the ultra-low-budget production, renowned for its eerily, interlocking values of ineptitude and entertainment, has become one of the most widely viewed (and deeply analyzed) low-budget movies of any era in the decades since.As this oddity in his career was starting to gather its fans (some would say fester), Walcott had long since moved on to co-starring in the series 87th Precinct and guest-starring roles in series television. Across the 1960s, he remained busy and had a chance to do especially good work on the series Bonanza, which gave him major guest-starring roles in seven episodes between 1960 and 1972. In one of these, "Song in the Dark" (1962), Walcott even had a chance to show off his singing voice, a talent of his that was otherwise scarcely recognized in a three-decade career. By the late '60s, he had also moved into production work, producing and starring in Bill Wallace of China (1967), the story of a Christian missionary. During the 1970s, Walcott finally started to get movie roles that were matched in prominence to his talent, most especially in the films of Clint Eastwood. He remained busy as a prominent character actor and supporting player -- part of that category of performers that includes the likes of Richard Herd and James Cromwell -- into the 1980s. He had retired by the start of the 1990s, but was called before the cameras once more for an appearance in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood. Walcott died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: Whenever actor Ed Platt blew one of his lines in his role of "The Chief" in the TV comedy series Get Smart, star Don Adams would cry out "Is John Doucette available?" Adams was kidding, of course, but he was not alone in his high regard for the skill and versatility of the deep-voiced, granite-featured Doucette. In films on a regular basis since 1947 (he'd made his official movie debut in 1943's Two Tickets to London), Doucette was usually cast in roles calling for bad-tempered menace, but was also adept at dispensing dignity and authority. He was equally at home with the archaic dialogue of Julius Caesar (1953) and Cleopatra (1963) as he was with the 20th-century military patois of 1970's Patton, in which he played General Truscott. John Doucette's many TV credits include a season on the syndicated MacDonald Carey vehicle Lock-Up (1959), and the role of Captain Andrews on The Partners (1971), starring Doucette's old friend and admirer Don Adams.

Trivia: Though he claimed to be a born-and-bred Californian, Julian Rivero was actually born in Texas. Rivero started out as a Shakespearean actor under the tutelage of Robert B. Mantell. He made his film debut in the New York-filmed The Bright Shawl (1923), then relocated in Hollywood, where he remained active until 1973. Most often cast in Westerns, he played opposite such horse-opera heroes as Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, and Harry Carey. His parts ranged from such bits as the barber in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947) to the major role of ruthless Mexican General Santa Anna (which he played sympathetically) in Heroes of the Alamo (1937). The addition of a well-groomed, snow-white beard enabled Rivero to play dozens of aristocratic Latin American patriarchs in the 1950s and 1960s. Julian Rivero was the husband of former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Isabelle Thomas.

Trivia: Blessed with matinee idol looks, an athletic physique, and a generous supply of talent, Francis J. McDonald entered films in 1912 after brief stage experience. A popular leading man of the teen years, McDonald segued into villainous characterizations in the 1920s, notably as the title character in Buster Keaton's Battling Butler (1926). He remained busy during the talkie era, primarily as a mustachioed heavy in "B" westerns and a featured player in the films of Cecil B. DeMille. Francis J. McDonald was at one time the husband of the "ever popular" Mae Busch.