Trivia: Once quoted as saying "I've made a career of playing sons of bitches," Kirk Douglas is considered by many to be the epitome of the Hollywood hard man. In addition to acting in countless films over the course of his long career, Douglas has served as a director and producer, and will forever be associated with his role in helping to put an end to the infamous Hollywood black list.Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch) was the son Russian Jewish immigrant parents in Amsterdam, NY, on December 9, 1916. He waited tables to finance his education at St. Lawrence University, where he was a top-notch wrestler. While there, he also did a little work in the theater, something that soon gave way to his desire to pursue acting as a career. After some work as a professional wrestler, Douglas held various odd jobs, including a stint as a bellhop, to put himself through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1941, he debuted on Broadway, but had only two small roles before he enlisting in the Navy and serving in World War II. Following his discharge, Douglas returned to Broadway in 1945, where he began getting more substantial roles; he also did some work on radio. After being spotted and invited to Hollywood by producer Hal Wallis, Douglas debuted onscreen in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), but he did not emerge as a full-fledged star until he portrayed an unscrupulously ambitious boxer in Champion (1949); with this role (for which he earned his first Oscar nomination), he defined one of his principle character types: a cocky, selfish, intense, and powerful man. Douglas fully established his screen persona during the '50s thanks to strong roles in such classics as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), William Wyler's Detective Story (1951), and John Sturges' Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). He earned Oscar nominations for his work in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Lust for Life (1956), both of which were directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1955, the actor formed his own company, Bryna Productions, through which he produced both his own films and those of others, including Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960); both of these movies would prove to be two of the most popular and acclaimed of Douglas' career. In 1963, he appeared on Broadway in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, but was never able to interest Hollywood in a film version of the work; he passed it along to his son Michael Douglas (a popular actor/filmmaker in his own right), who eventually brought it to the screen to great success.During the '60s, Douglas continued to star in such films as John Huston's The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) and John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964), both of which he also produced. He began directing some of his films in the early '70s, scoring his greatest success as the director, star, and producer for Posse (1975), a Western in which he played a U.S. marshal eager for political gain. Though he continued to appear in films, by the '80s Douglas began volunteering much of his time to civic duties. Since 1963, he had worked as a Goodwill Ambassador for the State Department and the USIA, and, in 1981, his many contributions earned him the highest civilian award given in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For his public service, Douglas was also given the Jefferson Award in 1983. Two years later, the French government dubbed him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his artistic contributions. Other awards included the American Cinema Award (1987), the German Golden Kamera Award (1988), and the National Board of Review's Career Achievement Award (1989). In 1995, the same year he suffered a debilitating stroke, Douglas was presented with an honorary Oscar by the Academy; four years later, he was the recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor that was accompanied by a screening of 16 of his films. In addition to his film work, Douglas has also written two novels: Dance with the Devil (1990) and The Secret (1992). He published his autobiography, The Ragman's Son, in 1988.In March of 2009, Douglas starred Before I Forget, a one man show that took place at the Center Theater Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California. All four performances of the show were filmed and later made into a documentary that eventually screened in 2010. The following year, Douglas presented the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Trivia: Specializing in playing shambling, cantankerous cynics, Walter Matthau, with his jowly features, slightly stooped posture, and seedy, rumpled demeanor, looked as if he would be more at home as a laborer or small-time insurance salesman than as a popular movie star equally adept at drama and comedy. An actor who virtually put a trademark on cantankerous behavior, Matthau was a staple of the American cinema for almost four decades.The son of poor Jewish-Russian immigrants, Matthau was born on October 1, 1920, in New York City and raised in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. His introduction to acting came during his occasional employment at the Second Avenue Yiddish Theater, where he sold soda pops during intermission for 50 cents per show. Following WWII service as an Air Force radioman and gunner, Matthau studied acting at the New School for Social Research Dramatic Workshop. Experience with summer stock led to his first Broadway appearances in the 1940s, and at the age of 28 he got his first break serving as the understudy to Rex Harrison's character in the Broadway drama Anne of a Thousand Days. After having his first major Broadway success with A Shot in the Dark, Matthau began working on the screen, usually in small supporting roles that cast him as thugs, villains, and louts in such films as The Kentuckian (1955) and King Creole (1958). Only occasionally did he get to play more sympathetic roles in films such as Lonely Are the Brave (1962). In 1959, he tried his hand at directing with Gangster Story. In addition to his stage and feature-film work, Matthau appeared in a number of television shows. Just when it seemed that he was to be permanently relegated to playing supporting and dark character roles on stage and screen, Matthau won the part of irretrievably slavish sportswriter Oscar Madison in the first Broadway production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple (1965). Simon wrote the role especially for Matthau, and the show made both the playwright and the actor major stars. In film, Matthau played his first comic role (for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966). The film also marked the first of many times that Matthau would be paired with Jack Lemmon. The unmistakable chemistry at play between the well-mannered, erudite Lemmon and the sharp-tongued, earthy Matthau exploded when they were paired onscreen, and was on particularly brilliant display in the hit film version of The Odd Couple (1967). Good friends with Lemmon both onscreen and off, Matthau starred in his directorial debut, Kotch (1971), and starred alongside him in The Front Page (1974) and Buddy Buddy, both of which did little for Matthau and Lemmon's careers. As a duo, the two again found success when they played two coots who were too busy feuding to realize that they were best friends in Grumpy Old Men (1993). They reprised their roles in a 1995 sequel and also appeared together in The Grass Harp (1995), Out to Sea (1997), and 1998's The Odd Couple II. On his own, Matthau continued developing his comically cynical persona in such worthy ventures as Plaza Suite (1971), California Suite (1978), and especially The Sunshine Boys (1975), in which he was paired with George Burns. He proved ridiculously endearing as a grizzled, broken-down, beer-swilling little league coach with a marshmallow heart in The Bad News Bears (1976), and further expressed his comic persona in such comedies as 1993's Dennis the Menace, in which he played the cantankerous Mr. Wilson, and the romantic comedy I.Q. (1994), which cast him as Albert Einstein.Though many of his roles were of the comic variety, Matthau occasionally returned to his dramatic roots with ventures such as the crime thriller Charley Varrick (1973) and The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (1974). In addition to his work in feature films, Matthau also continued to make occasional appearances in made-for-television movies, one of which, Mrs. Lambert Remembers Love (1991), was directed by his son Charles Matthau. Matthau, who had been plagued with health problems throughout much of his adult life, died of a heart attack at the age of 79 on July 1, 2000. The last film of his long and prolific career was Diane Keaton's Hanging Up (2000), a family comedy-drama that cast the actor as the ailing father of three bickering daughters (Lisa Kudrow, Meg Ryan, and Keaton). Coincidentally, when Matthau was hospitalized for an undisclosed condition in April of the same year, he shared a hospital room with none other than longtime friend and director Billy Wilder.

Trivia: A graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, American actor Walter Abel began his stage career in 1919, and made his first film in 1920. Tall and quietly dignified, Abel was well cast in several of the plays of Eugene O'Neill. His first talking picture role was as the industrious young bridegroom Wolf in Liliom (1930). Abel had a go at a romantic lead when he replaced Francis Lederer as D'Artagnan in the 1935 version of The Three Musketeers; but the film was dull and Abel's performance mannered, so, thereafter, he was more effectively cast in top supporting roles. With his performance as the prosecuting attorney in Fury, Abel established his standard screen image: the well-groomed, mustachioed professional man, within whom lurked a streak of barely controlled hysteria. In this guise, Abel was excellent as the dyspeptic newspaper editor in Arise My Love (1940) and as Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire's long-suffering agent in Holiday Inn (1942). Busier on stage and television than in films during the 1950s, Abel received extensive critical and public attention for his role as a doomed industrialist in the 1966 melodrama Mirage. Sent out by Universal to promote the film, Abel regaled talk-show hosts with the story of how his fatal plunge from a skyscraper was actually filmed. Also during this period, Abel was appointed president of the American National Theatre and Academy. His last screen performance was opposite Katharine Hepburn in The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley (1984).

Trivia: The daughter of the Attorney General of Bermuda, Diana Dill came to New York in the late '30s to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She left a burgeoning stage career behind when signed to a Hollywood contract in 1942, but before long she was back in New York, thoroughly disillusioned with movies. In 1943 she married one of her fellow AADA student, aspiring actor Kirk Douglas. For the next several years, she divided her time between her stage career and raising her sons, and was also persuaded to make a handful of film appearances, notably as Elaine Monetti in House of Strangers (1949). Though divorced from Douglas by the early '50s, she remained on good terms with her ex-husband, even appearing in his first film directorial effort, The Indian Fighter. Extremely active in television, Diana Douglas was a regular on the 1974 series The Cowboys, and made dozens of guest appearances in such programs as Streets of San Francisco (1972-1978), which co-starred her actor/producer son Michael Douglas.

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: Erudite, distinguished-looking American actor Eduard Franz started his stage career with the Provincetown Players. He was a leading Broadway actor for nearly 20 years before making his film bow in 1947's The Wake of the Red Witch. Franz was at his best when playing such worldly intellectuals as Justice Louis Brandeis in The Magnificent Yankee (1950). In 1963, Eduard Franz was cast in the tailor-made role of psychiatric clinic director Edward Raymer on the weekly TV drama Breaking Point.

Trivia: The son of a patent medicine manufacturer, American actor Alan Hale chose a theatrical career at a time when, according to his son Alan Hale Jr., boarding houses would post signs reading "No Dogs or Actors Allowed." Undaunted, Hale spent several years on stage after graduating from Philadelphia University, entering films as a slapstick comedian for Philly's Lubin Co. in 1911. Bolstering his acting income with odd jobs as a newspaperman and itinerant inventor (at one point he considered becoming an osteopath!), Hale finally enjoyed a measure of security as a much-in-demand character actor in the 1920s, usually as hard-hearted villains. One of his more benign roles was as Little John in Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood (1922), a role he would repeat opposite Errol Flynn in 1938 and John Derek in 1950. Talkies made Hale more popular than ever, especially in his many roles as Irishmen, blusterers and "best pals" for Warner Bros. Throughout his career, Hale never lost his love for inventing things, and reportedly patented or financed items as commonplace as auto brakes and as esoteric as greaseless potato chips. Alan Hale contracted pneumonia and died while working on the Warner Bros. western Montana (1950), which starred Hale's perennial screen cohort Errol Flynn.

Trivia: American actor Elisha Cook Jr. was the son of an influential theatrical actor/writer/producer who died early in the 20th Century. The younger Cook was in vaudeville and stock by the time he was fourteen-years old. In 1928, Cook enjoyed critical praise for his performance in the play Her Unborn Child, a performance he would repeat for his film debut in the 1930 film version of the play. The first ten years of Cook's Hollywood career found the slight, baby-faced actor playing innumerable college intellectuals and hapless freshmen (he's given plenty of screen time in 1936's Pigskin Parade). In 1940, Cook was cast as a man wrongly convicted of murder in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and so was launched the second phase of Cook's career as Helpless Victim. The actor's ability to play beyond this stereotype was first tapped by director John Huston, who cast Cook as Wilmer, the hair-trigger homicidal "gunsel" of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941). So far down on the Hollywood totem pole that he wasn't billed in the Falcon opening credits, Cook suddenly found his services much in demand. Sometimes he'd be shot full of holes (as in the closing gag of 1941's Hellzapoppin'), sometimes he'd fall victim to some other grisly demise (poison in The Big Sleep [1946]), and sometimes he'd be the squirrelly little guy who turned out to be the last-reel murderer (I Wake Up Screaming [1941]; The Falcon's Alibi [1946]). At no time, however, was Cook ever again required to play the antiseptic "nerd" characters that had been his lot in the 1930s. Seemingly born to play "film noir" characters, Cook had one of his best extended moments in Phantom Lady (1944), wherein he plays a set of drums with ever-increasing orgiastic fervor. Another career high point was his death scene in Shane (1953); Cook is shot down by hired gun Jack Palance and plummets to the ground like a dead rabbit. A near-hermit in real life who lived in a remote mountain home and had to receive his studio calls by courier, Cook nonetheless never wanted for work, even late in life. Fans of the 1980s series Magnum PI will remember Cook in a recurring role as a the snarling elderly mobster Ice Pick. Having appeared in so many "cult" films, Elisha Cook Jr. has always been one of the most eagerly sought out interview subjects by film historians.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1949.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: Balding, long-necked character actor Frank Cady was a stage actor of long standing when he moved into films in 1947. He was usually cast as a quiet, unassuming small town professional man, most memorably as the long-suffering husband of the grief-stricken alcoholic Mrs. Daigle (Eileen Heckart) in The Bad Seed (1957). A busy television actor, he spent much of the 1950s on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as Ozzie Nelson's neighbor Doc Willard. The "TV Generation" of the 1960s knows Cady best as philosophical storekeeper Sam Drucker on the bucolic sitcoms Petticoat Junction (1963-1970) and Green Acres (1965-1971). Whenever he wanted to briefly escape series television and recharge his theatrical batteries, Frank Cady appeared with the repertory company at the prestigious Mark Taper's Forum.

Trivia: Bald, lanky, laconic American actor Hank Worden made his screen debut in The Plainsman (1936), and began playing simpleminded rustics at least as early as the 1941 El Brendel two-reel comedy Love at First Fright. A member in good standing of director John Ford's unofficial stock company, Worden appeared in such Ford classics as Fort Apache (1948) and Wagonmaster (1950). The quintessential Worden-Ford collaboration was The Searchers (1955) wherein Worden portrayed the near-moronic Mose Harper, who spoke in primitive, epigrammatic half-sentences and who seemed gleefully obsessed with the notion of unexpected death. Never a "normal" actor by any means, Worden continued playing characters who spoke as if they'd been kicked by a horse in childhood into the '80s; his last appearance was a recurring role in the quirky David Lynch TV serial Twin Peaks. In real life, Hank Worden was far from addled and had a razor-sharp memory, as proven in his many appearances at Western fan conventions and in an interview program about living in the modern desert, filmed just before Worden's death for cable TV's Discovery Channel.

Trivia: A genuine westerner, Lane Chandler, upon leaving Montana Wesleyan College, moved to LA and worked as a garage mechanic while seeking out film roles. After several years in bit parts, Chandler was signed by Paramount in 1927 as a potential western star. For a brief period, both Chandler and Gary Cooper vied for the best cowboy roles, but in the end Paramount went with Cooper. Chandler made several attempts to establish himself as a "B" western star in the 1930s, but his harsh voice and sneering demeanor made him a better candidate for villainous roles. He mostly played bits in the 1940s, often as a utility actor for director Cecil B. DeMille. The weather-beaten face and stubbly chin of Lane Chandler popped up in many a TV and movie western of the 1950s, his roles gradually increasing in size and substance towards the end of his career.

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.

Trivia: One look at Alan Hale Jr. and no one could ever assume he was adopted; Hale Jr. so closely resembled his father, veteran character actor Alan Hale Sr., that at times it appeared that the older fellow had returned to the land of the living. In films from 1933, Alan Jr. was originally cast in beefy, athletic good-guy roles (at 6'3", he could hardly play hen-pecked husbands). After the death of his father in 1950, Alan dropped the "Junior" from his professional name. He starred in a brace of TV action series, Biff Baker USA (1953) and Casey Jones (1957), before his he-man image melted into comedy parts. From 1964 through 1967, Hale played The Skipper (aka Jonas Grumby) on the low-brow but high-rated Gilligan's Island. Though he worked steadily after Gilligan's cancellation, he found that the blustery, slow-burning Skipper had typed him to the extent that he lost more roles than he won. In his last two decades, Alan Hale supplemented his acting income as the owner of a successful West Hollywood restaurant, the Lobster Barrel.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1947.