Trivia: Steve McQueen was the prototypical example of a new sort of movie star which emerged in the 1950s and would come to dominate the screen in the 1960s and '70s -- a cool, remote loner who knew how to use his fists without seeming like a run-of-the-mill tough guy, a thoughtful man in no way an effete intellectual, a rebel who played by his own rules and lived by his own moral code, while often succeeding on his own terms. While McQueen was one of the first notable examples of this new breed of antihero (along with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman), he was also among the most successful, and was able to succeed as an iconoclast and one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws at the same time.Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Indianapolis, IN, on March 24, 1930. In many ways, McQueen's childhood was not a happy one; his father and mother split up before his first birthday, and he was sent to live with his great uncle on a farm in Missouri. After he turned nine, McQueen's mother had married again, and he was sent to California to join her. By his teens, McQueen had developed a rebellious streak, and he began spending time with a group of juvenile delinquents; McQueen's misdeeds led his mother to send him to Boys' Republic, a California reform school. After ninth grade, McQueen left formal education behind, and after a spell wandering the country, he joined the Marine Corps in 1947. McQueen's hitch with the Leathernecks did little to change his anti-authoritarian attitude; he spent 41 days in the brig after going Absent With Out Leave for two weeks.After leaving the Marines in 1950, McQueen moved to New York City, where he held down a number of short-term jobs while trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At the suggestion of a friend, McQueen began to look into acting, and developed an enthusiasm for the theater. In 1952, he began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. After making an impression in a number of small off-Broadway productions, McQueen was accepted into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actor's Studio, where he further honed his skills. In 1956, McQueen made his Broadway debut and won rave reviews when he replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead of the acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain. The same year, McQueen made his film debut, playing a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me alongside Paul Newman, and he married dancer Neile Adams. In 1958, after two years of stage work and television appearances, McQueen scored his first leading role in a film as Steve, a noble and rather intense teenager in the sci-fi cult item The Blob, while later that same year he scored another lead, in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's moody performances as bounty hunter Josh Randall elevated him to stardom, and in 1960, he appeared in the big-budget Western The Magnificent Seven (an Americanized remake of The Seven Samurai), confirming that his new stardom shone just as brightly on the big screen. In 1961, McQueen completed his run on Wanted: Dead or Alive and concentrated on film roles, appearing in comedies (The Honeymoon Machine, Love With a Proper Stranger) as well as action roles (Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover). In 1963, McQueen starred in The Great Escape, an action-packed World War II drama whose blockbuster success confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men; McQueen also did his own daredevil motorcycle stunts in the film, reflecting his offscreen passion for motorcycle and auto racing. (McQueen would also display his enthusiasm for bikes as narrator of a documentary on dirt-bike racing, On Any Sunday).Through the end of the 1960s, McQueen starred in a long string of box-office successes, but in the early '70s, he appeared in two unexpected disappointments -- 1971's Le Mans, a racing film that failed to capture the excitement of the famed 24-hour race, and 1972's Junior Bonner, an atypically good-natured Sam Peckinpah movie that earned enthusiastic reviews but failed at the box office. Later that year, McQueen would team up again with Peckinpah for a more typical (and much more successful) action film, The Getaway, which co-starred Ali MacGraw. McQueen had divorced Neile Adams in 1971, and while shooting The Getaway, he and MacGraw (who was then married to producer Robert Evans) became romantically involved. In 1973, after MacGraw divorced Evans, she married McQueen; the marriage would last until 1977.After two more big-budget blockbusters, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, McQueen disappeared from screens for several years. In 1977, he served as both leading man and executive producer for a screen adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which fared poorly with both critics and audiences when it was finally released a year and a half after it was completed. In 1980, it seemed that McQueen was poised for a comeback when he appeared in two films -- an ambitious Western drama, Tom Horn, which McQueen co-directed without credit, and The Hunter, an action picture in which he played a modern-day bounty hunter -- and he wed for a third time, marrying model Barbara Minty in January of that year. However, McQueen's burst of activity hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a highly virulent form of lung cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. After conventional treatment failed to stem the spread of the disease, McQueen traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he underwent therapy at an experimental cancer clinic. Despite the efforts of McQueen and his doctors, the actor died on November 7, 1980. He left behind two children, Chad McQueen, who went on to his own career as an actor, and daughter Terry McQueen, who died of cancer in 1998.

Trivia: Born in Illinois, actor John Lupton was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father was a writer with the Milwaukee Journal. Upon graduation from New York's American Acamedy of Dramatic Arts, Lupton secured immediate stage work, then was signed as a contract player with MGM in Hollywood. Few worthwhile parts came from this alliance; Lupton was lanky and handsome in a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda sort of way, but wasn't permitted to develop much of an on-screen persona of his own. His best opportunity came in 1956, when he was cast as Tom Jeffords on the two-season TV series Broken Arrow -- though most of the critical plaudits were directed at his costar Michael Ansara, who played the more colorful part of Cochise. A journeyman actor throughout the '60s, Lupton became one of the rotating "repertory" cast members of the TV series of Jack Webb (Dragnet, Adam 12, et al.) He is best known to latter-day viewers for his 14 year run as Tommy Horton on the daytime serial Days of Our Lives. John Lupton's offscreen pursuits included extensive volunteer work for the Multiple Sclerosis Association and the Special Olympics.

Trivia: A friendly, open-faced, "all-American" type of hero, usually cast as a not-too-bright nice guy, he was born Bert de Wayne Morris. He trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, then debuted onscreen in 1936. His popularity increased after he played the title role in Kid Galahad (1937), and he costarred in numerous films before his career was interrupted by World War Two; as a Navy aviator he shot down seven Japanese aircraft in dogfights and sank an enemy gunboat and two destroyers. He was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals. After returning to the screen he remained busy, appearing primarily in low-budget action films, but never regained his pre-war popularity. He died of a heart attack at 45.

Trivia: Like her contemporaries Lynn Bari and Veda Ann Borg, blonde actress Mary Beth Hughes seldom rose above "starlet" or "second-echelon star" status, even though she worked steadily and enjoyed a loyal fan following. Encouraged to pursue a theatrical career by her grandmother, a onetime actress, Hughes went from stage to films in 1938. From 1940 through 1943, Hughes was part of the "B" stable at 20th Century-Fox, playing both good and bad girls in the popular Michael Shayne series with Lloyd Nolan, and going through the usual "other woman" paces in films like Orchestra Wives (1942). She is billed second in the moody western The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), but her role is utterly expendable; in fact, she has fewer lines than George Meeker, the unbilled actor playing her husband. While her film career never really went anywhere, Hughes remained in the public eye through her many cheesecake photos in movie-oriented magazines of the era. In the mid-1950s, Hughes gave up films in favor of work as a nightclub singer/musician and television actress; she was often cast as nagging wife Clara Appleby on TV's The Red Skelton Show, possibly because she was one of the few actresses whom Skelton couldn't break up. Mary Beth Hughes briefly returned to filmmaking in the mid-1970s, playing character roles in such drive-in fare as The Working Girls (1974) and How's Your Love Life? (1977).

Trivia: An actress since her early teens, Bethel Leslie made her Broadway bow opposite Conrad Janis in 1944's Snafu. Leslie later appeared as Rachel in the original 1956 production of Inherit the Wind; she went on to gain near-legendary status among West Coast actors for her work in a 1959 staging of Career, aging 30 years in the third act simply by wearing a hat. Though she has been in films sporadically since 1958, she is most widely known for her television work. Her first series stint was as Cornelia Otis Skinner in The Girls (1950), a TV-sitcom adaptation of Ms. Skinner's autobiography Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Together with Vera Miles and Beverly Garland, she was one of the busiest and most-in-demand TV guest actresses of the 1950s and 1960s; she played everything from kidnap victims to cold-blooded murderesses, and was seen as three different defendants on three different Perry Mason episodes. Her versatility really got a workout on The Richard Boone Show (1963), a weekly TV anthology wherein a repertory company of eleven actors played parts in all the plays. More recently, Bethel Leslie has evinced a preference for the stage; one of her most formidable assignments was the killer part of Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.