Trivia: It was his failure as a playwright that led Robert Ryan to a three-decade career as an actor. He was a unique presence on both the stage and screen, and in the Hollywood community, where he was that rarity: a two-fisted liberal. In many ways, at the end of the 1940s, Ryan was the liberals' answer to John Wayne, and he even managed to work alongside the right-wing icon in Flying Leathernecks (1951). The son of a successful building contractor, Ryan was born in Chicago in 1909 and attended Dartmouth College, where one of his fraternity brothers was Nelson Rockefeller. He was a top athlete at the school and held its heavyweight boxing title for four straight years. Ryan graduated in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, and intended to write plays. Finding no opportunities available in this field, he became a day laborer; he stoked coal on a ship bound for Africa, worked as a sandhog, and herded horses in Montana, among other jobs. Ryan finally had his chance to write as a member of a theater company in Chicago, but proved unsuccessful and turned to acting. He arrived in Hollywood at the end of the '30s and studied at the Max Reinhardt Workshop, making his professional stage debut in 1940. He appeared in small roles for Paramount Pictures, but Ryan's real film career didn't begin until several years later. He returned east to appear in stock, and landed a part in Clifford Odets' Clash by Night, in which he worked opposite Tallulah Bankhead and got excellent reviews. Ryan came to regard that production and his work with Bankhead as the pivotal point in his career. The reviews of the play brought him to the attention of studio casting offices, and he was signed by RKO. The actor made his debut at the studio in the wartime action thriller Bombardier. It was a good beginning, although his early films were fairly lackluster and his career was interrupted by World War II -- he joined the Marines in 1944 and spent the next three years in uniform. Ryan's screen career took off when he returned to civilian life in 1947. He starred in two of the studio's best releases that year: Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach and Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, the latter an extraordinary film for its time dealing with troubled veterans and virulent anti-Semitism, with Ryan giving an Oscar-nominated performance as an unrepentant murderer of an innocent Jewish man. He continued to do good work in difficult movies, including the Joseph Losey symbolic drama The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and with Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949). The latter film (which Ryan regarded as his favorite of all of his movies) was practically dumped onto the market by RKO, though the studio soon found itself with an unexpected success when the film received good reviews, it was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, and it won the Best Picture award in the British Academy Award competition. Ryan also distinguished himself that year in Dmytryk's Act of Violence and Max Ophüls' Caught, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground in 1951, and then repeated his stage success a decade out in Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952). Along with Robert Mitchum, Ryan practically kept the studio afloat during those years, providing solid leading performances in dozens of movies. In the late '50s, he moved into work at other studios and proved to be one of the most versatile leading actors in Hollywood, playing heroes and villains with equal conviction and success in such diverse productions as John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958), Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (1962). Even in films that were less-than-good overall, he was often their saving grace, nowhere more so than in Ray's King of Kings (1961), in which he portrayed John the Baptist. Even during the late '40s, Ryan was never bashful about his belief in liberal causes, and was a highly vocal supporter of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" at a time when most other movie professionals -- fearful for their livelihoods -- had abandoned them. He was also a founder of SANE, an anti-nuclear proliferation group, and served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union. During the early '50s, he'd fully expected to be named in investigations and called by the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities or Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, but somehow Ryan was never cited, despite his public positions. In later years, he attributed it to his Irish last name, his Catholic faith, and the fact that he'd been a marine. Considering his career's focus on movies from the outset, Ryan also fared amazingly well as a stage actor. In addition to Clash by Night, he distinguished himself in theatrical productions of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in 1954 at Broadway's Phoenix Theater and a 1960 production of Antony and Cleopatra opposite Katharine Hepburn at the American Shakespeare Festival. (Hepburn later proposed him for the lead in the Irving Berlin musical Mr. President in 1962.) Ryan's other theatrical credits included his portrayal of the title role in the Nottingham (England) Repertory Theater's production of Othello, Walter Burns in a 1969 revival of The Front Page, and James Tyrone in a 1971 revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Not all of Ryan's later films were that good. His parts as the American field commander in Battle of the Bulge and Lee Marvin's army antagonist in The Dirty Dozen were written very unevenly, though he was good in them. He was also a strange choice (though very funny) for black comedy in William Castle's The Busy Body, and he wasn't onscreen long enough (though he was excellent in his scenes) in Robert Siodmak's Custer of the West. But for every poor fit like these, there were such movies as John Sturges' Hour of the Gun and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in which he excelled. His success in Long Day's Journey Into Night was as prelude to his last critical success, as Larry in John Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh (1973). Ironically, at the time he was playing a terminally ill character in front of the camera, Ryan knew that he was dying from lung cancer. During this time he also filmed a hard-hitting anti-smoking public service announcement that directly attributed his condition to his long-time heavy use of cigarettes.

Trivia: Radiantly beautiful blonde actress Virginia Mayo was a chorus dancer when she began her film career as a bit player in 1942. She rose to face as Danny Kaye's leading lady in a series of splashy Technicolor musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Though never regarded as a great actress, she was disturbingly convincing as Dana Andrews' faithless wife in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and as James Cagney's sluttish gun moll in White Heat (1949). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mayo was one of the most popular female stars at Warner Bros., appearing in musicals, melodramas and westerns. Many of her characters were so outre that one wonders whether Mayo was having some sport with us: her turn as Jack Palance's paramour in The Silver Chalice (1955) and as Cleopatra in the guilty pleasure The Story of Mankind (1957) immediately come to mind. And it is Mayo who, in Warners' King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), utters the immortal high-camp line "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever do, Dick Plantagenet!" When her film career faltered in the 1960s, Mayo turned to stage work on the touring-company and dinner-theatre circuit; more recently, she has been a frequent interview subject on TV documentaries dealing with the old Hollywood studio system. Virginia Mayo is the widow of actor Michael O'Shea.

Trivia: The son of a sales engineer and born in New Orleans, Jeffrey Hunter was raised in Milwaukee, WI. While still in high school, Hunter acted on Milwaukee radio station WTMJ; this led to summer stock work. After serving in the Navy, Hunter attended Northwestern University, where he continued his stage appearances and was featured in the 1950 film version of Julius Caesar, which starred Charlton Heston. Attending U.C.L.A. on a scholarship, Hunter was spotted by a Hollywood agent while starring in a school production of All My Sons. He made his first "mainstream" film appearance in 20th Century Fox's Fourteen Hours, a film which also served as the debut for Grace Kelly. His movie career gained momentum after he co-starred with John Wayne in the Western classic The Searchers (1956). In 1961, Jeffrey Hunter was cast as Jesus Christ in The King of Kings; the actor's youthful appearance prompted industry wags to dub the picture "I Was a Teenaged Jesus," though in fact Hunter was 33 at the time. Few of his post-King of King roles amounted to much, and by 1967 he was one of several former Hollywood luminaries knocking about in European films. From 1950 through 1955, Hunter was married to actress Barbara Rush, who years after the divorce would remember Hunter fondly as the handsomest man she ever met. Jeffrey Hunter died of a concussion at 42, after an accidental fall in his home.

Trivia: It had originally been the hope of Walter Brennan (and his family) that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, an engineer; but while still a student, he was bitten by the acting bug and was already at a crossroads when he graduated in 1915. Brennan had already worked in vaudeville when he enlisted at age 22 to serve in World War I. He served in an artillery unit and although he got through the war without being wounded, his exposure to poison gas ruined his vocal chords, leaving him with the high-pitched voice texture that made him a natural for old man roles while still in his thirties. His health all but broken by the experience, Brennan moved to California in the hope that the warm climate would help him and he lost most of what money he had when land values in the state collapsed in 1925. It was the need for cash that drove him to the gates of the studios that year, for which he worked as an extra and bit player. The advent of the talkies served Brennan well, as he had been mimicking accents in childhood and could imitate a variety of different ethnicities on request. It was also during this period that, in an accident during a shoot, another actor (some stories claimed it was a mule) kicked him in the mouth and cost him his front teeth. Brennan was fitted for a set of false teeth that worked fine, and wearing them allowed him to play lean, lanky, virile supporting roles; but when he took them out, and the reedy, leathery voice kicked in with the altered look, Brennan became the old codger with which he would be identified in a significant number of his parts in the coming decades. He can be spotted in tiny, anonymous roles in a multitude of early-'30s movies, including King Kong (1933) (as a reporter) and one Three Stooges short. In 1935, however, he was fortunate enough to be cast in the supporting role of Jenkins in The Wedding Night. Directed by King Vidor and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, it was supposed to launch Anna Sten (its female lead) to stardom; but instead, it was Brennan who got noticed by the critics. He was put under contract with Goldwyn, and was back the same year as Old Atrocity in Barbary Coast. He continued doing bit parts, but after 1935, his films grew fewer in number and the parts much bigger. It was in the rustic drama Come and Get It (1936) that Brennan won his first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. Two years later, he won a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Kentucky (1938). That same year, he played major supporting roles in The Texans and The Buccaneer, and delighted younger audiences with his moving portrayal of Muff Potter, the man wrongfully accused of murder in Norman Taurog's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Brennan worked only in high-profile movies from then on, including The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Stanley and Livingston, and Goldwyn's They Shall Have Music, all in 1939. In 1940, he rejoined Gary Cooper in The Westerner, playing the part of a notoriously corrupt judge. Giving a beautifully understated performance that made the character seem sympathetic and tragic as much as dangerous and reprehensible, he won his third Best Supporting Actor award. There was no looking back now, as Brennan joined the front rank of leading character actors. His ethnic portrayals gradually tapered off as Brennan took on parts geared specifically for him. In Frank Capra's Meet John Doe and Howard Hawks' Sergeant York (both 1941), he played clear-thinking, key supporting players to leading men, while in Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (released that same year), he played another virtual leading role as a haunted man driven by demons that almost push him to murder. He played only in major movies from that point on, and always in important roles. Sam Wood used him in Goldwyn's The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Lewis Milestone cast him as a Russian villager in The North Star (1943), and he was in Goldwyn's production of The Princess and the Pirate (1944) as a comical half-wit who managed to hold his own working alongside Bob Hope. Brennan played the choice role of Ike Clanton in Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and reprised his portrayal of an outlaw clan leader in more comic fashion in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff some 23 years later. He worked with Cooper again on Delmer Daves' Task Force (1949) and played prominent roles in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock and Anthony Mann's The Far Country (both 1955). In 1959, the 64-year-old Brennan got one of the biggest roles of his career in Hawks' Rio Bravo, playing Stumpy, the game-legged jailhouse keeper who is backing up the besieged sheriff. By that time, Brennan had moved to television, starring in the CBS series The Real McCoys, which became a six-season hit built around his portrayal of the cantankerous family patriarch Amos McCoy. The series was such a hit that John Wayne's production company was persuaded to release a previously shelved film, William Wellman's Goodbye, My Lady (1956), about a boy, an old man (played by Brennan), and a dog, during the show's run. Although he had disputes with the network and stayed a season longer than he had wanted, Brennan also liked the spotlight. He even enjoyed a brief, successful career as a recording artist on the Columbia Records label during the 1960s. Following the cancellation of The Real McCoys, Brennan starred in the short-lived series The Tycoon, playing a cantankerous, independent-minded multimillionaire who refuses to behave the way his family or his company's board of directors think a 70-year-old should. By this time, Brennan had become one of the more successful actors in Hollywood, with a 12,000-acre ranch in Northern California that was run by his sons, among other property. He'd invested wisely and also owned a share of his first series. Always an ideological conservative, it was during this period that his political views began taking a sharp turn to the right in response to the strife he saw around him. During the '60s, he was convinced that the anti-war and civil rights movements were being run by overseas communists -- and said as much in interviews. He told reporters that he believed the civil rights movement, in particular, and the riots in places like Watts and Newark, and demonstrations in Birmingham, AL, were the result of perfectly content "Negroes" being stirred up by a handful of trouble-makers with an anti-American agenda. Those on the set of his last series, The Guns of Will Sonnett -- in which he played the surprisingly complex role of an ex-army scout trying to undo the damage caused by his being a mostly absentee father -- say that he cackled with delight upon learning of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. Brennan later worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of reactionary right-wing California Congressman John Schmitz, a nominee of the American Party, whose campaign was predicated on the notion that the Republican Party under Richard Nixon had become too moderate. Mostly, though, Brennan was known to the public for his lovable, sometimes comical screen persona, and was still working as the '60s drew to a close, on made-for-TV movies such as The Over-the-Hill Gang, which reunited him with one of his favorite directors, Jean Yarbrough, and his old stablemate Chill Wills. Brennan died of emphysema in 1974 at the age of 80.

Trivia: Heavyweight American actor Robert Middleton trained for a musical career at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Carnegie Tech. His deep, booming voice enabled Middleton to secure steady work as a radio actor and announcer. After appearing on Broadway in Ondine and in several live TV dramas, Middleton entered films in 1954. He was most effectively cast as burly, bullying villains, notably the sadistic prison escapee Dobish in The Desperate Hours (1955) and "grim and grisly Griswold" in Danny Kaye's The Court Jester (1956). That he could leaven his skullduggery with humor was proven in his many appearances on the Jackie Gleason shows of the mid-'50s as Ralph Kramden's boss, Mr. Marshall. Television continued to make good use of Middleton's talents into the 1960s; there was hardly a Western series in existence which didn't at least once feature the massive actor as a brutish mountain patriarch, smirking town boss, or grim-faced lynch mob leader. Shortly before his death in 1977, Robert Middleton was featured as inordinately sinister Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in the speculative feature The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977).

Trivia: A veteran vaudevillian, American actor Arthur O'Connell made his legitimate stage debut in the mid '30s, at which time he fell within the orbit of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Welles cast O'Connell in the tiny role of a reporter in the closing scenes of Citizen Kane (1941), a film often referred to as O'Connell's film debut, though in fact he had already appeared in Freshman Year (1939) and had costarred in two Leon Errol short subjects as Leon's conniving brother-in-law. After numerous small movie parts, O'Connell returned to Broadway, where he appeared as the erstwhile middle-aged swain of a spinsterish schoolteacher in Picnic -- a role he'd recreate in the 1956 film version, earning an Oscar nomination in the process. The somewhat downtrodden-looking O'Connell was frequently cast as fortyish losers and alcoholics; in the latter capacity he appeared as Jimmy Stewart's boozy attorney mentor in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and the result was another Oscar nomination. O'Connell continued appearing in choice character parts on both TV and films during the '60s (he'd graduated to villainy in a few of these roles), but avoided a regular television series, holding out until he could be assured top billing. The actor accepted the part of a man who discovers that his 99-year-old father has been frozen in an iceberg on the 1967 sitcom The Second Hundred Years, assuming he'd be billed first per the producers' agreement. Instead, top billing went to newcomer Monty Markham in the dual role of O'Connell's father (the ice had preserved his youthfulness) and his son. O'Connell accepted the demotion to second billing as well as could be expected, but he never again trusted the word of any Hollywood executive. Illness forced O'Connell to cut down on his appearances in the mid '70s, but the actor stayed busy as a commercial spokesman for a popular toothpaste. At the time of his death, O'Connell was appearing solely in these commercials -- by his own choice. For a mere few hours' work each year, Arthur O'Connell remained financially solvent 'til the end of his days.

Trivia: A former physical culture model, handsome, blond Ken Clark (born Kenneth Donovan Clark) gave Richard Egan a run for his money in the beefcake sweepstakes at 20th Century Fox in the mid-'50s. But Clark, who also appeared on such television shows as The Jack Benny Program and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, was dropped by Fox after Love Me Tender (1956, with Egan and, in his screen debut, Elvis Presley). He then drifted into low-budget fare, including what proved to be his most memorable film, the Roger Corman thriller Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). After the failure of a proposed TV series -- Brock Callahan, based upon a character in William Campbell Gault's detective novels -- Clark went Europe, where he starred in such fare as Arizona Bill (1964) and as Agent 077 in two 1965 Italian spy movies. He resumed his Hollywood career in the '80s with such productions as Twice in a Lifetime (1985) and the mini-series Invasion (aka Robin Cook's Invasion) in 1997.

Trivia: American character actor Edward Platt is best remembered as the eternally exasperated Chief on the Get Smart series. Before making his screen debut in the mid-'50s, he worked as a singer for a band. In feature films, he was typically cast as generals and bosses.

Trivia: Whit Bissell was a familiar face to younger baby boomers as an actor mostly associated with fussy official roles -- but those parts merely scratched the surface of a much larger and longer career. Born Whitner Nutting Bissell in New York City in 1909, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an alumnus of that institution's Carolina Playmakers company. He made his movie debut with an uncredited role in the 1940 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk and then wasn't seen on screen again for three years. Starting in 1943, Bissell appeared in small roles in a short string of mostly war-related Warner Bros. productions, including Destination Tokyo. It wasn't until after the war, however, that he began getting more visible in slightly bigger parts. He had a tiny role in the opening third of Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Cluny Brown (1946), but starting in 1947, Bissell became much more closely associated with film noir and related dark, psychologically-focused crime films. Directors picked up on his ability to portray neurotic instability and weaselly dishonesty -- anticipating the kinds of roles in which Ray Walston would specialize for a time -- and used him in pictures such as Brute Force, He Walked by Night, and The Killer That Stalked New York. His oddest and most visible portrayal during this period was in The Crime Doctor's Diary (1949), in which he had a scene-stealing turn as a mentally unhinged would-be composer at the center of a murder case. By the early 1950s, however, in addition to playing fidgety clerks, nervous henchmen, and neurotic suspects (and friends and relatives of suspects), he added significantly to his range of portrayals with his deeply resonant voice, which could convincingly convey authority. Bissell began turning up as doctors, scientists, and other figures whose outward demeanor commanded respect -- mainstream adult audiences probably remember him best for his portrayal of the navy psychiatrist in The Caine Mutiny, while teenagers in the mid-1950s may have known him best for the scientists and psychiatrists that he played in Target Earth and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it was in two low-budget films that all of Bissell's attributes were drawn together in a pair of decidedly villainous roles, as the mad scientists at the center of I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. The latter, in particular, gave him a chance to read some very "ripe" lines with a straight face, most memorably, "Answer me! I know you have a civil tongue in your mouth -- I sewed it there myself!" But Bissell was never a one-note actor. During this same period, he was showing off far more range in as many as a dozen movies and television shows each year. Among the more notable were Shack Out on 101, in which he gave a sensitive portrayal of a shell-shocked veteran trying to deal with his problems in the midst of a nest of Soviet spies; "The Man With Many Faces" on the series Code 3, in which he was superb as a meek accountant who is pushed into the life of a felon by an ongoing family tragedy; and, finally, in "The Great Guy" on Father Knows Best, where he successfully played a gruff, taciturn employer who never broke his tough demeanor for a moment, yet still convincingly delivered a final line that could bring tears to the eyes of an audience. By the end of the 1950s, Bissell was working far more in television than in movies. During the early 1960s, he was kept busy in every genre, most notably Westerns -- he showed up on The Rifleman and other oaters with amazing frequency. During the mid-1960s, however, he was snatched up by producer Irwin Allen, who cast Bissell in his one costarring role: as General Kirk, the head of the government time-travel program Project Tic-Toc on the science-fiction/adventure series Time Tunnel. He also showed up on Star Trek and in other science-fiction series of the period and continued working in dozens of small roles well into the mid-1980s. Bissell died in 1996.

Trivia: Wizened character actor Paul E. Burns tended to play mousey professional men in contemporary films and unshaven layabouts in period pictures. Bob Hope fans will recall Burns' con brio portrayal of boozy desert rat Ebeneezer Hawkins in Hope's Son of Paleface (1952), perhaps his best screen role. The general run of Burns' screen assignments can be summed up by two roles at both ends of his career spectrum: he played "Loafer" in D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and "Bum in Park" in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

Trivia: Very early in his stage career, Richard Deacon was advised by Helen Hayes to abandon all hopes of becoming a leading man: instead, she encouraged him to aggressively pursue a career as a character actor. Tall, bald, bespectacled and bass-voiced since high school, Deacon heeded Ms. Hayes' advice, and managed to survive in show business far longer than many of the "perfect" leading men who were his contemporaries. Usually cast as a glaring sourpuss or humorless bureaucrat, Deacon was a valuable and highly regarded supporting-cast commodity in such films as Desiree (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Kiss Them For Me (1957), The Young Philadelphians (1959) and The King's Pirate (1967), among many others. Virtually every major star who worked with Deacon took time out to compliment him on his skills: among his biggest admirers were Lou Costello, Jack Benny and Cary Grant. Even busier on television than in films, Richard Deacon had the distinction of appearing regularly on two concurrently produced sitcoms of the early 1960s: he was pompous suburbanite Fred Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the long-suffering Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Deacon also co-starred as Kaye Ballard's husband on the weekly TV comedy The Mothers-in-Law (1968), and enjoyed a rare leading role on the 1964 Twilight Zone installment "The Brain Center at Whipples." In his last decade, Richard Deacon hosted a TV program on microwave cookery, and published a companion book on the subject.

Trivia: Tall, stony-faced, white-maned Frank Gerstle is most familiar to the baby-boomer generation for his many TV commercial appearances. In films from 1949 through 1967, Gerstle was generally cast as military officers, no-nonsense doctors and plainclothes detectives. His screen roles include Dr. MacDonald in DOA (1949), "machine" politician Dave Dietz in Slightly Scarlet (1954) and the district attorney in I Mobster (1959). Some of his more sizeable film assignments could be found in the realm of science fiction, e.g. Killers From Space (1953), The Magnetic Monster (1953) and Wasp Woman (1960). A prolific voiceover artist, Frank Gerstle pitched dozens of products in hundreds of TV and radio ads, and was a semi-regular on the 1961 prime-time cartoon series Calvin and the Colonel.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.

Trivia: Ken Terrell (who was sometimes billed as Kenneth Terrell) was one of the longer working veterans of Republic Pictures, with a career that lasted from the end of the 1930s into the 1960s. After breaking into the movies at RKO in a pair of comedy features, A Damsel in Distress and Living on Love, Terrell moved to Republic, where he worked in a string of serials in supporting roles, including the renowned Perils of Nyoka (aka Nyoka and the Tigermen), playing the assistant to the Charles Middleton character. The other major serials in which he appeared included Jungle Girl, Drums of Fu Manchu, The Masked Marvel, Secret Service in Darkest Africa, Captain America, and Spy Smasher, sometimes in multiple roles in the course of 12 or 15 chapters. He did occasional outside work, such as an appearance in The Mummy's Hand at Universal, and appeared in B-westerns such as the Jimmy Wakely vehicle Song of the Range; during the 1940s, Terrell's one appearance in a major movie was in a small role in George Cukor's Winged Victory, based on the play by Moss Hart. Terrell didn't get acting roles with decent screen time until the mid-'50s, after leaving Republic, when he was cast in a succession of roles in several low-budget science fiction/horror films. His rough-hewn features and dark eyes allowed him to convey fear, villainy, or concern in equal measures, and to play anything from thugs to army officers, just as his bit roles had him cast as everything from Arab assassins to town drunks. In Jack Pollexfen's The Indestructible Man, he played Joe Marcella, the nervous one of the three hoods being hunted down by a super-strong resurrected murderer Lon Chaney Jr.; in Nathan Juran's The Brain From Planet Arous, he played the army colonel who gets burned to a cinder by alien-possessed John Agar and, in his best and longest part in a feature, in Juran's Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, he plays Jess, the loyal valet to victim Allison Hayes. Terrell had a small role, mostly involving stunt work, in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, and made his last screen appearance in the Vincent Price vehicle The Master of the World. He died of arteriosclerosis in 1966.

Trivia: This callow, mustachioed American actor showed up in utility roles in films beginning in the early 1930s. Usually playing bits in features, Brodie was given a wider range in short subjects, notably as gentleman thief "Baffles" in the 1941 El Brendel 2-reeler Yumpin' Yiminy. Some of his more notable credits include his voiceover work in the Disney cartoon feature Dumbo and his subtly sleazy portrayal of the used car salesman in the noir classic Detour (1946). He also worked off and on as a dialogue director.

Trivia: From his first film appearance in 1946 until his retirement sometime in the late 1960s, the wizened, rusty-voiced actor William Fawcett specialized in cantankerous farmers, grizzled old prospectors and Scroogelike millionaires. He worked frequently at Columbia, appearing in that studio's quota of "B" westerns and Arabian Nights quickies, as well as such serials as The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), in which he played the juicy bad-guy role of Merlin the Magician. Though occasionally seen in sizeable parts in "A" pictures--he played Andy Griffith's septuagenarian father in No Time For Sergeants (1957)--Fawcett's appearances in big-budgeters frequently went unbilled, as witness The Music Man (1962) and What a Way to Go (1964). Baby boomers will fondly recall William Fawcett as ranch-hand Pete ("who cut his teeth on a brandin' iron") in the Saturday-morning TV series Fury (1956-60).

Trivia: American actor Jackie Coogan belonged to a family of vaudevillians. At age four Coogan was already a stage attraction performing with his father when he caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, who immediately hired him (and his father as well). After giving him a bit part in the short A Day's Pleasure (1919), he made Coogan his co-star in the masterpiece The Kid (1921). This launched Coogan's film career and he went on to become one of the highest paid film actors of the day. Movie audiences worldwide doted on him, but his career as a child star petered out when he was 13 and too old to be "cute." In 1935 when his mother and stepfather refused to let him have the $4 million that he had amassed during his child acting days, he filed suit against them. When the settlement finally came, he received a mere $126,000., but the legal fight brought attention to such abuses, and resulted in the "California Child Actor's Bill" also known as the "Coogan Act" which protected the earnings of child actors. He was married to Betty Grable for 3 years, and to three other showgirls in succession afterwards. During his adulthood, he occasionally appeared in films playing character roles and worked frequently in television, most notably as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series. He died on March 1, 1984.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the later 20th Century-Fox contract player of the same name, silent screen actor Harry Carter had appeared in repertory with Mrs. Fiske and directed The Red Mill for Broadway impresario Charles Frohman prior to entering films with Universal in 1914. Often cast as a smooth villain, the dark-haired Carter made serials something of a specialty, menacing future director Robert Z. Leonard in The Master Key (1914); playing the title menace in The Gray Ghost (1917); and acting supercilious towards Big Top performers Eddie Polo and Eileen Sedgwick in Lure of the Circus (1918). In addition to his serial work, Carter played General Von Kluck in the infamous propaganda piece The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918). It was back to chapterplays in the 1920s, where he menaced Claire Anderson and Grace Darmond in two very low-budget examples of the genre: The Fatal Sign (1920) and The Hope Diamond Mystery (1921).

Trivia: Veteran B-Western player Steven Darrell (aka J. Stevan Darrell) got the acting bug early, playing Abraham Lincoln in a grade-school tableau. He made his professional debut with the Galloway Players of Pittsfield, MA, and his West Coast bow with the famed Pasadena Playhouse in 1937. Darrell, who told an interviewer that he "enjoyed all kind of character roles, the more villainous the better," went on to menace nearly every cowboy hero around, from Roy Rogers to Whip Wilson, appearing in more than 100 films and over 200 television segments. Retiring after a 1967 episode of television's Daniel Boone, the veteran actor died from a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 63.

Trivia: Actress Jonni Paris began her career as a child playing bit parts in Our Gang comedies and worked for RKO in the 1940s. She's best remembered, however, for her later television work; she appeared on such series as Falcon Crest, Highway to Heaven, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In 1999, Paris died of cancer at the age of 66.

Trivia: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: Mexican actor Rodolpho Acosta first became known to North American audiences by way of his appearance in John Ford's The Fugitive (1948). Frequently typecast as a bandit or indigent peasant, Acosta held out for less stereotypical roles once he was established in Hollywood. In 1957, he was top-billed in The Tijuana Story, playing a courageous Mexican journalist who wages a one-man war against a vicious narcotics ring. Depending on the role, Rodolpho Acosta was sometimes billed as Rudy Acosta.