Trivia: A former accountant for the Gulf Oil Company, Dana Andrews made his stage debut with the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse in 1935. Signed to a joint film contract by Sam Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox in 1940, Andrews bided his time in supporting roles until the wartime shortage of leading men promoted him to stardom. His matter-of-fact, dead pan acting style was perfectly suited to such roles as the innocent lynching victim in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and laconic city detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944). For reasons unknown, Andrews often found himself cast as aviators: he was the downed bomber pilot in The Purple Heart (1944), the ex-flyboy who has trouble adjusting to civilian life in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and the foredoomed airliner skipper in Zero Hour (1957), The Crowded Sky (1960), and Airport 1975 (1974). His limited acting range proved a drawback in the 1950s, and by the next decade he was largely confined to character roles, albeit good ones. From 1963 to 1965, Andrews was president of the Screen Actors Guild, where among other things he bemoaned Hollywood's obsession with nudity and sordidness (little suspecting that the worst was yet to come!). An ongoing drinking problem seriously curtailed his capability to perform, and on a couple of occasions nearly cost him his life on the highway; in 1972, he went public with his alcoholism in a series of well-distributed public service announcements, designed to encourage other chronic drinkers to seek professional help. In addition to his film work, Andrews also starred or co-starred in several TV series (Bright Promise, American Girls, and Falcon Crest) and essayed such TV-movie roles as General George C. Marshall in Ike (1979). Dana Andrews made his final screen appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack.

Trivia: Inaugurating his career at the Cleveland Playhouse, American character actor Robert F. Simon made his first Broadway appearance in Clifford Odets' Clash By Night. In 1949, Simon succeeded Lee J. Cobb in the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He made his film debut in 1954, spending the next two decades playing a steady stream of generals, doctors, executives and journalists. One of Simon's most prominent film roles was the father of the title character in 1956's The Benny Goodman Story. On television, Simon played bombastic newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in the weekly adventure series The Amazing Spider-Man (1977-78), and could also be seen in recurring roles on Saints and Sinners (1961), Bewitched (1964), Custer (1967), Nancy (1970) and MASH (1972-73 season, as General Mitchell).

Trivia: American actor Malcolm Atterbury may have been allowed more versatility on stage, but so far as TV was concerned he was the quintessential grouchy grandfather and/or frontier snake-oil peddler. Atterbury was in fact cast in the latter capacity twice by that haven of middle-aged character players The Twilight Zone. He was the purveyor of an elixir which induced invulnerability in 1959's "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" and a 19th century huckster who nearly sets a town on fire in "No Time Like the Past" (1963). Atterbury enjoyed steadier work as the supposedly dying owner of a pickle factory in the 1973 sitcom Thicker Than Water, and as Ronny Cox's grandfather on the 1974 Waltons clone Apple's Way. Malcolm Atterbury's best-known film role was one for which he received no screen credit: he was the friendly stranger who pointed out the crop-duster to Cary Grant in North By Northwest (1959), observing ominously that the plane was "dustin' where they're aren't any crops."

Trivia: Already a character player in his 30s, American actor Robert Cornwaithe was frequently called upon to play scientific and learned types in such films as War of the Worlds (1953) and The Forbin Project (1971). He was also busy on TV, portraying lawyers, officials and the like on such series as The Andy Griffith Show, Batman (in the "Archer" episode with Art Carney), Gidget, Laverne and Shirley and The Munsters. Cornwaithe earned his niche in the Science Fiction Film Hall of Fame for his performance in The Thing (1951); grayed up, bearded, and looking suspiciously Russian, the actor played the foolhardy Professor Carrington, whose insipidly idealistic efforts to communicate with the extraterrestrial "Thing" nearly gets him killed. In honor of this performance, Robert Cornwaithe was cast as a similar well-meaning scientist in "Mant," the giant-insect film within a film in Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), wherein Cornwaithe shared screen time with two equally uncredited horror-film icons, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy.

Trivia: Australian actress Marjorie Bennett made her first film appearances in the pre-World War I years at the suggestion of her sister, silent film star Enid Bennett. Marjorie wasn't yet under the spell of the acting bug, so she abandoned performing for several years, re-emerging as a stage rather than screen actress. She returned to films in the late 1940s as a character player, notably in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). A prolific film and TV performer of the 1950s and 1960s, Marjorie Bennett was usually cast as huffy society matrons and haughty domestics; her massive bulk and easily outraged demeanor made her a perfect straight woman for such iconoclastic comedians as Red Skelton and the Three Stooges.