Trivia: After briefly attending the College of the Pacific, Barbara Baxley headed to New York to pursue an acting career. Barbara studied at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse, then went on to become a charter member of the Actor's Studio. After making her New York stage bow in the 1948 revival of Private Lives, she spent the next several years taking over for a number of "big-name" actresses in long-running Broadway plays. She also starred in the original productions of Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Period of Adjustment, and worked extensively off-Broadway in projects like Brecht on Brecht. In the company of several of her Actor's Studios colleagues, Barbara made her film debut in East of Eden (1955), playing the nurse in the closing scenes. Other roles in her feature-film manifest included country-western matriarch Lady Pearl in Nashville (1975) and Leona in Norma Rae (1979). On television, Barbara was one of the stars of Norman Lear's satirical gender-switch soap opera All That Glitters (1977). In June of 1990, 62-year-old Barbara Baxley was found dead in her New York apartment, apparently the victim of heart failure.

Trivia: Frank Overton was a New York theater actor who enjoyed a limited but productive career in feature films and a much busier one on the small screen. Although he often played thoughtful, compassionate, introspective characters, he could also exude an earthy side, or portray rule-bound authority figures, though one of his most memorable portrayals -- as General Bogan, the head of the Strategic Air Command, in Fail-Safe -- combined two of those sides. Born Frank Emmons Overton in Babylon, NY, in 1918, he gravitated to theater in the 1930s and participated in some experimental stage work -- including designing the sets for A Democratic Body, a production of Geoff and Mary Lamb at The New School in New York City -- at the outset of the 1940s. Overton's earliest screen work came not on camera, but as one of the voice actors (alongside Harry Bellaver and future producer Ilya Lopert) in the dubbing of the 1943 Soviet-made propaganda film Ona Zashchishchayet Rodinu (aka, No Greater Love). His on-camera screen career started in 1947 with an uncredited bit part in Elia Kazan's fact-based drama Boomerang! He appeared in two more feature films, John Sturges' Mystery Street and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (both 1950), but as an East Coast-based actor, he ended up a lot busier on television over the next few years, in between appearing in theater pieces such as the original stage version of The Desperate Hours, replacing James Gregory in the role of the deputy. Overton also worked with Lillian Gish in the original television presentation of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful in 1953, and in the Broadway production that followed that same year. He also did a great deal of work in anthology drama series, such as The Elgin Hour, Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Alcoa Hour, and The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse. In the latter, he portrayed Sheriff Pat Garrett to Paul Newman's Billy The Kid in The Death of Billy The Kid, scripted by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn, which was later remade in Hollywood as The Left-Handed Gun (with John Dehner replacing Overton in the role of Garrett).By the end of the 1950s, however, more television was being done on film from the West Coast and Overton made the move to California. Most baby-boom viewers will remember him best for his performance in one of the finest installments of The Twilight Zone ever produced, "Walking Distance," as the father of the character portrayed by Gig Young. He returned to feature films around this same time in Desire Under the Elms (1958), The Last Mile (1959), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), in between appearances on episodes of Peter Gunn, Riverboat, The Rebel, The Asphalt Jungle, Lawman, Checkmate, Perry Mason, Route 66, The Fugitive, Wagon Train, The Defenders, and others. He also periodically returned to New York to work on series such as Naked City. His biggest movie roles came in the early '60s, in Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) as Sheriff Tate, and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) as General Bogan.In 1964, he also took his first and only regular series costarring role, on the Quinn Martin-produced 12 O'Clock High, portraying Major Harvey Stovall, the adjutant for the 918th Heavy Bombardment Group commanded by Brig. Gen. Frank Savage (Robert Lansing). It was not an enviable assignment, as Dean Jagger had won the Oscar in the same role in the original 1949 feature film, which was still relatively fresh in people's minds as one of the best World War II aerial dramas; but Overton, with his rich, quietly expressive voice, succeeded in putting his own stamp on the part and got several episodes written around his character. He was also with the series for its entire three seasons, amid several major casting changes and was one of the key points of continuity on the show. When 12 O'Clock High went out of production in late 1966, Overton showed up in episodes of Bonanza and The Virginian in 1967. But his most widely rerun appearance, other than his Twilight Zone episode, was one of his last, as colonist leader Elias Sandoval in the first-season Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise," which is regarded by many as one of the best shows in the run of the series. Overton died of a heart attack in April 1967, a month after the show first aired.

Trivia: The son of celebrated Hungarian stage and screen actor Oscar Beregi Sr., Oscar Beregi Jr. made his American film bow in 1953's Call Me Madam. During the next two decades, the younger Beregi excelled as a movie and TV villain, often playing sadistic Nazis. He could be seen in virtually every major network TV program, making three memorable appearances on The Twilight Zone alone. Though Oscar Beregi's big-screen roles were often small, he made the most of such broadly drawn characters as the scowling U-boat commandant in The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964) and the taunting prison guard in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974).

Trivia: The son of actors, Percy Helton began his own career at age two in a Tony Pastor revue in which his parents were performing. The undersized Helton was a valuable juvenile player for producer David Belasco, making his film debut in a 1915 Belasco production, The Fairy and the Waif. Helton matured into adult roles under the stern guidance of George M. Cohan. After serving in the Army during World War I, Helton established himself on Broadway, appearing in such productions as Young America, One Sunday Afternoon and The Fabulous Invalid. He made his talkie debut in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, playing the inebriated Macy's Santa Claus whom Edmund Gwenn replaces. Perhaps the quintessential "who is that?" actor, Helton popped up, often uncredited, in over one hundred succinct screen characterizations. Forever hunched over and eternally short of breath, he played many an obnoxious clerk, nosey mailman, irascible bartender, officious train conductor and tremulous stool pigeon. His credits include Fancy Pants (1950), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Rally Round the Flag Boys (1959), The Music Man (1962) and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965), as well as two appearances as sweetshop proprietor Mike Clancy in the Bowery Boys series. Thanks to his trademarked squeaky voice, and because he showed up in so many "cult" films (Wicked Woman, Kiss Me Deadly, Sons of Katie Elder), Helton became something of a high-camp icon in his last years. In this vein, Percy Helton was cast as the "Heraldic Messenger" in the bizarre Monkees vehicle Head (he showed up at the Monkees' doorstep with a beautiful blonde manacled to his wrist!), the treacherous Sweetieface in the satirical western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and the bedraggled bank clerk Cratchit on the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Blonde, round-faced actress Ann Jillian was the daughter of Lithuanian war refugees. Her mother, for whom the phrase "stage-struck" might well have been coined, determined that the family would settle in Los Angeles so that her children would grow up in the heart of showbiz. In 1961, 11-year-old Ann made her film debut as Bo Peep in Disney's Babes in Toyland (1961). Two years later, she was cast as young Dainty June in Gypsy (1963); her talent and dedication prompted producer Mervyn LeRoy to forecast a "most rewarding future in show business" for the young actress. But after essaying her first semi-adult role as secretary Millie Ballard in the TV sitcom Hazel, Jillian dropped out of acting for three years to study psychology in college; during this period, she paid her tuition by working in a department store. She returned to performing as one half of a singing act (Debra Shulman was the other half) which opened for such Las Vegas headliners as Robert Goulet. In the late 1970s, Jillian scored a personal triumph in the Broadway musical Sugar Babies, holding her own on stage despite the howitzer-shell competition of stars Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller (her role was later reduced in size, reportedly because Miller felt she was being upstaged). Under the guidance of her manager-husband, ex-policeman Andy Murcia, Jillian went onward and upward in 1980 as star of the long-running sitcom It's a Living; later television projects included the short-lived series Jennifer Slept Here and the title role in the TV biopic Mae West, which earned her the first of two Emmy nominations (the second was for 1984's Ellis Island). After undergoing a double mastectomy in 1985, Ann Jillian celebrated her survival by starring in another made-for-TV biography, The Ann Jillian Story (1988)