Trivia: The son of professional ballplayer Walter Hart, William Sterling Hart attended the University of Pittsburgh, then worked as a clothing salesman before entering show business. He was signed by Columbia in 1939, where his name was changed to Robert Sterling so as to avoid confusion with silent western star William S. Hart. At Columbia, Sterling played bits in such features as Golden Boy and Blondie Brings Up Baby, and was also seen in the studio's short subjects product, notably as star of a 2-reel dramatization of the life of rubber magnate Charles Goodyear. In 1941, Sterling moved to MGM, where he was groomed as a potential Robert Taylor replacement. During his MGM tenure, he married actress Ann Sothern, with whom he appeared in Ringside Maisie. The union, which lasted until 1949, produced a daughter, future actress Tisha Sterling. Following war service, Sterling's career fell into a rut of colorless second leads. He finally achieved stardom on the delightful TV sitcom fantasy Topper, co-starring with his second wife Anne Jeffreys. After Topper completed its two-year run in 1955, the Sterlings took to the road in touring stage productions; they reteamed before the cameras in Love That Jill, a 1958 TV comedy which perished after 13 weeks. Sterling's additional TV work included the hosting chores on the 1956-57 season of The 20th Century-Fox Hour, and the starring role of small-town editor Robert Major on the 1961 sitcom Ichabod and Me. He was also one of several actors seriously considered for the role of Perry Mason before Raymond Burr won the part. Robert Sterling retired from acting in the 1970s to run a successful computer business; he has kept so low a public profile in the last two decades that many sources have referred to the still-active Anne Jeffreys as Sterling's widow!

Trivia: Born Gloria Grahame Hallward, American actress Gloria Grahame began performing onstage with the Pasadena Community Playhouse at age nine. She later acted in Hollywood High School plays and in stock. In 1943 Grahame debuted on Broadway (billed "Gloria Hallward)", and the following year, MGM signed her to a film contract. However, not until the early '50s did she come into her own as a sexy leading lady, often playing fallen women or cheating wives. For her portrayal of a somewhat classy tart in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Grahame won a "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar. Until the mid-'50s she landed a number of excellent roles, but her career gradually diminished and she retired from the screen in the late '50s. Years later she returned to play character roles, mostly in low-budget films. She married and divorced actor Stanley Clements, director Nicholas Ray, and writer Cy Howard; later she raised eyebrows by marrying Nicholas Ray's son (her former step-son), actor-producer Tony Ray. Gloria Grahame spent her last days working on the stage in England while battling cancer.

Trivia: Despite his being selected as a candidate for "The Most Obnoxious Child Performer of All Time" in one of those vitriolic "Worst of Hollywood" books of the 1970s, Claude Jarman Jr. was in fact one of the better and more tolerable juvenile performers of the 1940s. Jarman was a Nashville elementary school student when, in 1945, he was chosen from hundreds of candidates to play backwoods youth Jody Baxter in the film version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's The Yearling. His sensitive, believable performance in this film won him a special 1946 Oscar for "most outstanding child performer of the year." His later film performances weren't quite as impressive, with the notable exception of his work in Intruder in the Dust (1949), which, like Yearling, was directed by Clarence Brown. Retiring from acting at the age of 22 in 1956, Jarman later headed his own movie company, Tel-West Films, and was executive producer of the "rockumentary" Fillmore (1972). Claude Jarman Jr. has also served as director of Cultural Affairs for the city of San Francisco, where his executive responsibilities ranged from the San Francisco Opera House to the city's annual film festival.

Trivia: Born in Canada, he was brought up in New York City. For a while he was a professional swimmer in a water carnival. He became a stage actor, appearing in many productions in stock and on Broadway; he often appeared in Shakespeare. In the mid '40s he began working in films, at first in lead roles that tended to be introspective; as time went by, he was cast in secondary roles, often as a pessimistic bad guy. For his work in All the King's Men (1949) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In the '60s his career began to dry up, and he appeared in many low-budget Italian films; however, he stayed busy as a screen actor into the '80s, often appearing in action or horror films. He co-directed and co-produced the film Outlaw Territory (1953). From 1949-56 he was married to actress Joanne Dru.

Trivia: Miss Jeff Donnell, as she was often billed, was signed by Columbia Pictures almost immediately after her graduation from Yale Drama School. Though likeable and talented enough for leading roles, the toothy, frizzy-haired Ms. Donnell was most often seen as the heroine's best friend or as kooky comedy relief. Columbia certainly kept her busy during her ten-year stay at that studio, casting her in such "A" pictures as My Sister Eileen (1942) and In a Lonely Place (1952) and "B"s like The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942) and Thief of Damascus (1952); she is particularly amusing in the latter film as Scheherezade, garrulously insisting upon telling her Arabian Nights stories to a villainous caliph whether he likes it or not. From 1954 through 1956, Jeff was married to another longtime Columbia contractee, Aldo Ray. On television, Jeff spent four years on The George Gobel Show as Gobel's wife, "Spooky Old Alice." Jeff Donnell's last regular TV work was the recurring role of Sheila Fields on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Trivia: American leading lady Myrna Dell came to Hollywood in 1944 by way of an RKO Radio contract. After serving her apprenticeship in westerns and 2-reel comedies, she was promoted to femme fatale roles in features like Step By Step. She later worked for Paramount (The Furies), Warner Bros. (several films, including Girl from Jones Beach) and even Monogram, where she played straight to the Bowery Boys in Here Come the Marines (1952). Active in the early days of television, Dell showed up periodically as "The Empress" on the Dan Duryea adventure series China Smith (1952-55). Long retired, Myrna Dell returned before the cameras for a small role in Billy Wilder's Buddy Buddy (1981).

Trivia: The daughter of a Texas judge, Martha Hyer majored in speech and drama at Northwestern University. Her work at the Pasadena Playhouse led to a 1946 contract with RKO. Free from her contract in 1951, Hyer free-lanced in films made both in the U.S. and abroad. In 1954, she played the role of William Holden's fiancée in Sabrina. She earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a prim small schoolteacher in Some Came Running (1958), but has also played "hot to trot" roles in films like Pyro (1966) and spoiled-little-rich-girl types in films such as The Happening (1967). She retired from acting in the '70s. The widow of producer Hal B. Wallis, Martha Hyer has set forth her life story in the 1990 autobiography Finding My Way. Hyer died in 2014 at age 89.

Trivia: American actor Jeff Corey forsook a job as sewing-machine salesman for the less stable world of New York theatre in the 1930s. The 26-year-old Corey was regarded as a valuable character-actor commodity when he arrived in Hollywood in 1940. Perhaps the best of his many early unbilled appearances was in the Kay Kyser film You'll Find Out (40), in which Corey, playing a game-show contestant (conveniently named Jeff Corey), was required to sing a song while stuffing his mouth full of crackers. The actor was busiest during the "film noir" mid-to-late 1940s, playing several weasely villain roles; it is hard to forget the image of Corey, in the role of a slimy stoolie in Burt Lancaster's Brute Force, being tied to the front of a truck and pushed directly into a hail of police bullets. Corey's film career ended abruptly in 1952 when he was unfairly blacklisted for his left-leaning political beliefs. To keep food on the table, Corey became an acting coach, eventually running one of the top training schools in the business (among his more famous pupils was Jack Nicholson). He was permitted to return to films in the 1960s, essaying such roles as a wild-eyed wino in Lady in a Cage (64), the louse who kills Kim Darby's father in True Grit (68), and a sympathetic sheriff in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (68). In addition to his film work, Jeff Corey has acted in and directed numerous TV series; he was seen as a regular on the 1985 Robert Blake series Hell Town and the 1986 Earl Hamner Jr. production Morningstar/Eveningstar. The following decade found Corey appearing in such films as Sinatra (1992), Beethoven's 2nd (1993) and the action thriller Surviving the Game (1994). Shortly after suffering a fall at his Malibu home in August of 2002, Corey died in Santa Monica due to complications resulting from the accident. He was 88.

Trivia: The daughter of stage and film actress Charlotte Walker, Sara Haden's own theatrical work included several seasons with Walter Hampden's Shakespearean Repertory Company. She entered films in 1934 with a character role in the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Spitfire. The majority of her screen characterizations were as stern schoolteachers, town gossips and harried secretaries. Sara Haden is most familiar to filmgoers for her portrayal of spinsterish, ever-disapproving Aunt Millie in MGM's Andy Hardy series of the 1930s and 1940s; indeed, her final screen appearance was in the 1958 "revival" picture Andy Hardy Comes Home.

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: Character actor, onscreen from 1937.

Trivia: Steely-eyed, mustachioed Edward Cassidy (or plain Ed Cassidy) bore a striking resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt, whom he played three times onscreen, including a brief appearance in the MGM musical Take Me out to the Ball Game (1949). But the McGill University graduate was more at home in B-Westerns and serials, of which he did an impressive total of 218. Cassidy could occasionally be found on the wrong side of the law, but more often than not, he would portray the heroine's (or hero's) beleaguered father, the stern sheriff, or a troubled rancher. Retiring after his 1957 appearance in the television series Circus Boy, the veteran supporting player died from undisclosed causes at the Motion Picture House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: Wizened character actor Paul E. Burns tended to play mousey professional men in contemporary films and unshaven layabouts in period pictures. Bob Hope fans will recall Burns' con brio portrayal of boozy desert rat Ebeneezer Hawkins in Hope's Son of Paleface (1952), perhaps his best screen role. The general run of Burns' screen assignments can be summed up by two roles at both ends of his career spectrum: he played "Loafer" in D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and "Bum in Park" in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

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.