Trivia: Born Thelma Ford, Shirley Booth began appearing in amateur plays at age 12, then made her professional stage debut four years later; her Broadway debut, in 1925, was opposite Humphrey Bogart in Hells' Bells. Booth toiled on Broadway for a decade before being cast in her first significant role. Ultimately, her work on stage and radio led to a lead role in Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), for which she won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award; she made her screen debut in the film version of that play (1952) and won the Best Actress Oscar for her efforts. Booth did a number of other films, but in her later years she was best-known as the maid Hazel in the TV series Hazel (1961-66). She retired after appearing in the TV series A Touch of Grace (1973).

Trivia: Character actor Don Defore was the son of an Iowa-based locomotive engineer. His first taste of acting came while appearing in church plays directed by his mother. Defore briefly thought of becoming an attorney, but gave up a scholarship to the University of Iowa to study at the Pasadena Playhouse. He began appearing in films in 1937 and in professional theatre in 1938, billed under his given name of Deforest. Defore's career turning point was the Broadway play The Male Animal, in which he played a thickheaded college football player; he repeated the role in the 1942 film version, and later played a larger part in the 1952 remake She's Working Her Way Through College. In most of his film assignments, Defore was cast as the good-natured urbanized "rube" who didn't get the girl. For several years in the 1950s, Defore played "Thorny" Thornberry, the Nelson family's well-meaning next door neighbor, on TV's Ozzie and Harriet. Don Defore's best-known TV role was George Baxter on the Shirley Booth sitcom Hazel (1961-65).

Trivia: The son of an insurance man who'd aspired to appear onstage but never had the chance, British-born actor Reginald Gardiner more than made up for his dad's unrealized dreams with a career lasting 50 years. Graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Gardiner started as a straight actor but drifted into musical revues, frequently working in the company of such favorite British entertainers as Bea Lillie. His Broadway bow occurred in the 1935 play At Home Abroad, and though he'd made his film debut nearly ten years earlier in Hitchcock's silent The Lodger (1926), he suddenly became a "new" Hollywood find. Handsome enough to play romantic leads had he so chosen (he gets away with it in the 1939 Laurel and Hardy comedy Flying Deuces), Gardiner preferred the sort of kidding-on-the-square comedy he'd done in his revue days. His turn as a traffic cop who imagines himself a symphony conductor in his first American film Born to Dance (1936) was so well received that he virtually repeated the bit--this time as a butler who harbors operatic aspirations--in Damsel in Distress (1937). For most of his film career, Gardiner played suave but slightly untrustworthy British gentlemen; a break from this pattern occurred in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), in which Gardiner played a fascist military man who turns his back on dictator "Adenoid Hinkel" to cast his lot with a community of Jews. Devoting his private life to the enjoyment of classical music, rare books, painting, and monitoring the ghost that supposedly haunted his Beverly Hills home, Reginald Gardiner flourished as a stage, film and television actor into the 1960s; one of his latter-day assignments was his weekly dual role in the 1966 Phyllis Diller sitcom, Pruitts of Southampton.

Trivia: An imposing presence in films of the late '40s, as well as early television shows such as The Aldrich Family (1949), New York stage actor Howard I. Smith actually made his screen debut as far back as 1918, in Young America. Relocating to Hollywood in 1946, Smith usually played overbearing politicos or other figures of authority, but is perhaps best remembered today as Uncle Charley in the 1951 screen version Death of a Salesman.