Trivia: Educated at the University of Dresden, actress Lillia Skala launched her stage career in her native Vienna, where she briefly worked with the legendary Max Reinhardt. The advent of Hitler compelled Skala to relocate to the U.S. in 1939; two years later, she made her Broadway bow in Letters to Lucerne. In 1951, she was cast as Duchess Sophie in the Irving Berlin musical Call Me Madam, the role that brought her to Hollywood for the 1953 filming of the same property. During the 1950s, she supplemented her theatre income by playing regular roles on such soap operas as The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow. In 1963, Skala was nominated for an Oscar for her finely etched portrayal of the tenacious Mother Maria in Lillies of the Field. She went on to contribute strong performances in such films as Roseland (1977) and Testament (1983). Couch potatoes of the 1960s will immediately recognize Lillia Skala for her occasional appearances as Eva Gabor's mother on the popular sitcom Green Acres.

Trivia: Kathryn Hays is best known for her work as an actress on television -- ironically, her most notable credits in that medium reside in two vastly different genres and professional engagements: as a longtime member of the cast of the daytime drama As The World Turns, portraying Kim Sullivan Hughes for more than 30 years; and for her performance in a single 1968 episode of the science fiction series Star Trek, entitled "The Empath." Hays was born in Princeton, IL, and raised in Joliet. She did theatrical work from the outset of her career, but from the early '60s also distinguished herself on television -- starting with a 1962 episode of the police drama Naked City up through a regular role on The Guiding Light, and on to her multi-decade work on As the World Turns. The Star Trek episode "The Empath" cast Hays in a mute role as "Gem," an alien who is trapped beneath the surface of a dying planet with the captain (William Shatner), first officer (Leonard Nimoy), and senior medical officer (DeForest Kelley) of the starship Enterprise. Her wonderfully expressive features (especially her eyes) and her portrayal -- which was almost balletic at times -- allowed Hays to totally dominate the screen and the episode without uttering a word of dialogue; many fans of the series regard her work as the finest guest-starring portrayal in the entire run of the show, and she helped to turn "The Empath" into the best single episode of the series' third season. Around this same time, Hays also starred in one theatrical film, Ralph Nelson's music-and-war drama Counterpoint (1967), playing opposite Charlton Heston. During this period, from 1966 through 1969, she was also married to Glenn Ford, who was then part of the shrinking ranks of genuine big-screen legends in the movie business. As a New York-based actress, Hays' career has mostly been centered on the small screen, as well as the stage. She is virtually an acting institution among daytime drama aficionados, and her work on As the World Turns hasn't stopped her from doing occasional guest-star turns in such New York-filmed dramas as Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU in more recent years.

Trivia: One of the more talented "barrel-chested surfer boys" of the early '60s to follow in the wake of Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue, Jeremy Slate gained instant notoriety as a playboy hunk who set many a female heart aflutter. Born February 17, 1926, in Atlantic City, NJ, Slate first fell into the public spotlight at age 34, when cast as second-string fiddle to Keith Larsen in the CBS prime-time series The Aquanauts. Larsen and Slate played Drake Andrews and Larry Lahr, professional deep-sea divers who spent their days salvaging for treasure off the Southern California coast. The adventure drama debuted on CBS Wednesday evening, September 14, 1960. Unfortunately, The Aquanauts (unlike its syndicated competitor, Sea Hunt) ran headfirst into awful ratings. After several attempts by the network to save it from oblivion (including a new lead actor replacing Larsen, a new location in Malibu Beach, and a new title, Malibu Run) it quickly plummeted out of sight before wrapping in September 1961. Slate's early film roles were almost all of the vacuous-hunk variety, and thus mirrored his Aquanauts turn. He appeared in a brace of Elvis flicks, G.I. Blues (1960) and Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), and as Scandinavian beefcake Eric Carlson in Bob Hope's musical comedy farce I'll Take Sweden (1965). The Henry Hathaway-directed Westerns The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969) provided the actor with slightly more substantial roles. Meanwhile, Slate guest starred on an estimated 100 television programs, from Bewitched to Gunsmoke to Police Story to Mission: Impossible.Slate maintained a higher profile as a writer and star of the motorcycle cult film Hell's Angels '69 (1969), directed by Lee Madden. This fell in the middle of a spate of grade-Z motorcycle flicks with Slate in the cast, from 1968's The Mini-Skirt Mob to 1967's Born Losers (the first of the Billy Jack cycle) to 1969's Hell's Belles. The "tough guy" role in these films was not anomalous for Slate, for as the '60s rolled on (and the actor entered his forties), his onscreen type shifted from that of a lusty Southern Californian sex symbol to a wizened street tough. The films in which he sustained this image varied somewhat in quality, but Slate scraped bottom (and then some) in William Grefe's nasty exploitationer The Hooked Generation (1969) as the head of a gang of drug pushers.In 1979, Slate hit a second wind of his career as Chuck Wilson on the ABC daytime soap One Life to Live. The role lasted eight years. During the '80s and '90s, he also appeared as a character actor in such low-profile cinematic features as Deadlock (1988), Maddalena Z (1989), and The Lawnmower Man (1992, playing Father McKeen).Jeremy Slate died at age 80, of complications following surgery for esophageal cancer, on November 19, 2006. His last film, Terry Leonard's Buttermilk Sky (2007), was released posthumously.

Trivia: Olive Deering was a very busy actress in theater, radio, and television from the early '30s until the 1970s. The sister of actor/director Alfred Ryder, she was born in New York and educated at the Professional Children's School, and made her stage debut in 1933, at the age of 15, with a mute walk-on role in a production of Girls in Uniform. She played a key role in Moss Hart's wartime stage piece Winged Victory (though not in the film version in which, ironically, her brother had a part). Her notable stage performances included working opposite Paul Muni in a revival of Elmer Rice's play Counselor-at-Law, with Maurice Evans in Richard II, and in Marc Blitzstein's No for an Answer. She also received excellent notices for her work in a Los Angeles production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer. Deering's movie work was sporadic, starting with an uncredited role in Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement; she appeared in John Cromwell's Caged, but her most visible work was in a pair of Cecil B. DeMille epics, Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments, and was in movies as late as 1972. Much of Deering's career off the stage, however, was focused on radio -- she played hundreds of roles in that medium -- and on television, on which she was playing dramatic roles as early as 1948, on anthology series such as Philco Television Playhouse, Goodyear Television Playhouse, and Alcoa Presents. She also did episodes of Perry Mason, Sam Benedict, and Ben Casey, though her most memorable and visible work (thanks to home video) was as the hysterical runaway wife in The Outer Limits episode "The Zanti Misfits." Deering died of cancer in 1986.