Trivia: Over the course of his extraordinary life, Audie Murphy went from being a poor Texas sharecropper's son to America's most decorated WWII hero to a popular Western and action movie star. Though he died in 1971, his accomplishments are still commemorated in a variety of ways that range from his native Hunt County's annual Audie Murphy Day celebration to his induction into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Country Music Association of Texas. His name also appears on a VA hospital, a library room, a stretch of U.S. Highway 69 in Texas, and a San Antonio division of the Army. Murphy was born to a family of cotton growers near Kingston, TX. Boyish-looking and slender, he appeared an unlikely war hero, but while stationed in Europe with his infantry unit, Murphy was credited with killing 240 Germans, was promoted to lieutenant, and earned at least 24 medals, including a Purple Heart for a gunshot wound that shattered his hip and the coveted Congressional Medal of Honor. Following the war, Murphy worked as a clerk and a garage attendant before James Cagney invited him to his Hollywood home. Murphy stayed for 18 months and made his screen debut in Beyond Glory (1948), playing a guilt-ridden soldier. He had his first starring role in Bad Boy (1949) and was praised for his naturalistic acting style. Some critics chided him for only playing himself, but Murphy never claimed any acting ability. For audiences impressed with his war record and charmed by his charisma, Murphy playing himself was enough to sustain his busy film career for two decades. By the early '50s, Murphy was appearing in second-string Westerns. In 1953, distinguished director John Huston, whom Murphy regarded as a friend and mentor, starred him as the young soldier in his adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1953). He would again work with Huston in 1960s' The Unforgiven. In 1955, Murphy appeared in his signature film, To Hell and Back, a chronicle of his war experiences based on his published autobiography. This film's box-office success allowed Murphy to appear in larger-budget films through the early '60s when he once again returned to B-movies. All told, during his heyday, Murphy worked with some of the era's most prominent stars including Jimmy Stewart, Broderick Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn. But while Murphy's professional life flourished, he had to grapple with some tough situations in his personal life. In the late '60s, an Algerian oil field he'd purchased was blown up during the Seven Day War. Murphy lost around 250,000 dollars. In 1970, he was tried and acquitted for beating up and threatening to kill a man during a heated fight, the precise circumstances of which remain muddled. Despite this courtroom victory, rumors circulated that Murphy was suffering personal problems resulting from his war experiences. Murphy was once briefly married to actress Wanda Hendrix with whom he had appeared in Sierra (1950). In 1951, Murphy married Pamela Archer and they remained happily wed until he accidentally crashed his plane into a Virginia mountainside on Memorial Day 1971. Murphy was given a full military burial and was interred in Arlington Cemetery.

Trivia: Broderick Crawford was the typical example of "overnight" success in Hollywood -- the 1949 release of All the King's Men turned him into one of the most popular "character" leads in Hollywood, a successor to Wallace Beery and a model for such unconventional leading men to come as Ernest Borgnine. His "overnight" success, however, involved more than a decade of work in routine supporting roles in more than 20 movies, before he was ever considered as much more than a supporting player. Crawford was born into a performing family -- both of his maternal grandparents, William Broderick and Emma Kraus, were opera singers, and his mother, Helen Broderick, was a Broadway and screen actress, while his father, Lester Crawford, was a vaudeville performer. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he accompanied his parents on tour as a boy and later joined them on-stage. He attended the Dean Academy in Franklin, MA, and excelled in athletics, including football, baseball, and swimming. Crawford entered show business by way of vaudeville, joining his parents in working for producer Max Gordon. With vaudeville's decline in the later 1920s, he tried attending college but dropped out of Harvard after just three months, preferring to make a living as a stevedore on the New York docks, and he also later served as a seaman on a tanker. Crawford returned to acting through radio, including a stint working as a second banana to the Marx Brothers. He entered the legitimate theater in 1934 when playwright Howard Lindsay selected him for a role in the play She Loves Me Not, portraying a football player in the work's London run -- although the play only ran three weeks, that was enough time for Crawford to meet Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (then theater's leading "power couple" on either side of the Atlantic) and come to the attention of Noel Coward, who selected him for a role in his production of Point Valaine, in which the acting couple was starring. After a string of unsuccessful plays, Crawford went to Hollywood and got a part as the butler in the comedy Woman Chases Man, produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Crawford's theatrical breakthrough came in 1937 when he won the role of the half-witted Lennie in the theatrical adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. His performance won critical accolades from all of the major newspapers, and Crawford was on his way, at least as far as the stage was concerned -- when it came time to do the movie, however, the part went to Lon Chaney Jr.. In movies, Crawford made the rounds of the studios in one-off roles, usually in relatively minor films such as Submarine D-1, Undercover Doctor, and Eternally Yours. The murder mystery Slightly Honorable gave him a slight boost in both billing and the size of his role, but before he could begin to develop any career momentum the Second World War intervened. Crawford served in the U.S. Army Air Force and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned to civilian life, he immediately resumed his screen career with a series of fascinating films, including The Black Angel and James Cagney's production20of The Time of Your Life. True stardom however, still eluded him. That all changed when director-producer Robert Rossen selected Crawford to portray Willie Stark in All the King's Men. In a flash, Crawford became a box-office draw, his performance attracting raves from the critics and delighting audiences with its subtle, earthy, rough-hewn charm. His portrayal of the megalomaniac political boss of a small state, based on the life and career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, won Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor. He signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures in 1949, which resulted in his starring in the comedy hit Born Yesterday (1950). That was to be his last major hit as a star, though Crawford continued to give solid and successful lead performances for much of the next five years, portraying a tough undercover cop in the crime drama T he Mob, and a villainous antagonist to Clark Gable in Vincent Sherman's Lone Star. During the early '50s, Crawford was Hollywood's favorite tough-guy lead or star antagonist, his persona combining something of the tough charm of Spencer Tracy and the rough-hewn physicality of Wallace Beery -- he could be a charming lunkhead, in the manner of Keenan Wynn, or dark and threatening, calling up echoes of his portrayal of Willie Stark. In the mid-'50s at 20th Century Fox, he added vast energy and excitement to such films as Night People and Between Heaven and Hell -- indeed, his performance in the latter added a whole extra layer of depth and meaning to the film, moving it from wartime melodrama into territory much closer to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with his character Waco serving as the dramatic stand-in for Kurtz. In 1955, after working on the melodrama Not As a Stranger and Fellini's Il Bidone (his portrayal of the swindler Augusto being one of his best performances), Crawford became one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the era to make the jump to television. He signed to do the series Highway Patrol for Ziv TV, which was a hit for three seasons. In its wake, however, Crawford was never able to get movies or roles of the same quality that he'd been offered in the early '50s. He did two more series, King of Diamonds and The Interns, and did play the title role in Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), which attracted some offbeat notice; otherwise, Crawford's work during his final 30 years of acting involved roles as routine as the ones he'd muddled through while trying for his break at the other end of his career. One of his most visible screen appearances took place on television, in a 1977 episode of CHiPS that played off of his work in Highway Patrol, with Crawford making a gag appearance as himself, a motorist pulled over and cited for a moving violation by the series' motorcycle police officers.

Trivia: Spanish supporting and occasional leading actor Aldo Sambrell is primarily associated with spaghetti Westerns of the '60s. In those films, he generally played a gunslinger. He was born Alfredo Sanchez Brell but over the course of his career he used the following names: Aldo Brell, Alfred S. Brell, Aldo San Brell, Aldo Sanbrel, and Aldo Sanbrell. He made his directorial debut as Alfred S. Brell with La Ultima Jugada (1974). Sambrell produced his first film, Hammam, in 1997.

Trivia: A studio lab technician in his teens, California native Lesley Selander worked his way up to cameraman and then assistant director in the '20s. Until 1936, his solo directing credits consisted of modest 2-reel comedies. Selander received his first feature film directorial break through the kindness of western star Buck Jones; not surprisingly, the bulk of Selander's subsequent film assigments were westerns. Possessed of an unerring eye for visual excellence, an inborn sense of pacing and timing, and an overall easygoing expertise, Selander had what it took to gain "maestro" status, but by devoting himself almost exclusively to series westerns (the Hopalong Cassidys, the Tim Holts), his accomplishments went unnoticed by the film-critic cognoscenti. Selander's most accomplished work can be found in a group of medium-budget sagebrushers made for Allied Artists in the late '40s: Panhandle, Stampede, Shotgun, Short Grass and Cow Country. The films made by Selander outside the western field range from fascinating (1946's The Catman from Paris) to surprisingly spiritless (1951's Flight to Mars). With the 1952 series Cowboy G-Men, Selander launched his TV-western phase, which lasted until the cowboy craze died out in the early '60s. Selander's final films, the second-feature A.C. Lyles westerns of the Arizona Bushwackers (1968) variety, found him plugging away perfunctorally but professionally at the movie style he knew best. Before his death in 1979, Lesley Selander was gratified by the adoration and devotion of his now grown-up fans, who retained fond memories of the "something special" which distinguished his dozens of '40s B-films.

Trivia: Gerard Tichy was a Spanish actor of French descent who was cast in several internationally financed productions filmed in Spain. He played Joseph in The King of Kings (1961), with Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus and Siobhan McKenna as the Virgin Mary. In El Cid (1961), bankrolled by King of Kings producer Samuel Bronston, Tichy was seen as King Ramiro. And in Doctor Zhivago (1965), ostensibly set in Russia, Tichy played Liberius. Other melting-pot films featuring Tichy include That Man from Rio (1964) (a French adventure romp), The Texican (1966) (a Spanish-filmed American western) and The Sea Pirate (1967) (an Italian swashbuckler). A prolific horror/fantasy film participant, Gerard Tichy showed up in such European thrillers as The Blancheville Monster (1959), Face of Terror (1959), and The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo (1973).