Trivia: One of the postwar era's most successful actors, Gregory Peck was long the moral conscience of the silver screen; almost without exception, his performances embodied the virtues of strength, conviction, and intelligence so highly valued by American audiences. As the studios' iron grip on Hollywood began to loosen, he also emerged among the very first stars to declare his creative independence, working almost solely in movies of his own choosing. Born April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, CA, Peck worked as a truck driver before attending Berkeley, where he first began acting. He later relocated to New York City and was a barker at the 1939 World's Fair. He soon won a two-year contract with the Neighborhood Playhouse. His first professional work was in association with a 1942 Katherine Cornell/Guthrie McClintic ensemble Broadway production of The Morning Star. There Peck was spotted by David O. Selznick, for whom he screen-tested, only to be turned down. Over the next year, he played a double role in The Willow and I, fielding and rejecting the occasional film offer. Finally, in 1943, he accepted a role in Days of Glory, appearing opposite then-fiancée Tamara Toumanova. While the picture itself was largely dismissed, Peck found himself at the center of a studio bidding war. He finally signed with 20th Century Fox, who cast him in 1944's The Keys of the Kingdom - a turn for which he snagged his first of many Oscar nods. From the outset, he enjoyed unique leverage as a performer; he refused to sign a long-term contract with any one studio, and selected all of his scripts himself. For MGM, he starred in 1945's The Valley of Decision, a major hit. Even more impressive was the follow-up, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which co-starred Ingrid Bergman. Peck scored a rousing success with 1946's The Yearling (which brought him his second Academy Award nomination) and followed this up with another smash, King Vidor's Duel in the Sun. His third Oscar nomination arrived via Elia Kazan's 1947 social drama Gentleman's Agreement, a meditation on anti-Semitism which won Best Picture honors. For the follow-up, Peck reunited with Hitchcock for The Paradine Case, one of the few flops on either's resumé. He returned in 1948 with a William Wellman Western, Yellow Sky, before signing for a pair of films with director Henry King, Twelve O'Clock High (earning Best Actor laurels from the New York critics and his fourth Oscar nod) and The Gunfighter. After Captain Horatio Hornblower, Peck appeared in the Biblical epic David and Bathsheba, one of 1951's biggest box-office hits. Upon turning down High Noon, he starred in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. To earn a tax exemption, he spent the next 18 months in Europe, there shooting 1953's Roman Holiday for William Wyler. After filming 1954's Night People, Peck traveled to Britain, where he starred in a pair of features for Rank -- The Million Pound Note and The Purple Plain -- neither of which performed well at the box office; however, upon returning stateside he starred in the smash The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The 1958 Western The Big Country was his next major hit, and he quickly followed it with another, The Bravados. Few enjoyed Peck's portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1959's Beloved Infidel, but the other two films he made that year, the Korean War drama Pork Chop Hill and Stanley Kramer's post-apocalyptic nightmare On the Beach, were both much more successful. Still, 1961's World War II adventure The Guns of Navarone topped them all -- indeed, it was among the highest-grossing pictures in film history. A vicious film noir, Cape Fear, followed in 1962, as did Robert Mulligan's classic adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird; as Atticus Finch, an idealistic Southern attorney defending a black man charged with rape, Peck finally won an Academy Award. Also that year he co-starred in the Cinerama epic How the West Was Won, yet another massive success. However, it was to be Peck's last for many years. For Fred Zinneman, he starred in 1964's Behold a Pale Horse, miscast as a Spanish loyalist, followed by Captain Newman, M.D., a comedy with Tony Curtis which performed only moderately well. When 1966's Mirage and Arabesque disappeared from theaters almost unnoticed, Peck spent the next three years absent from the screen. When he returned in 1969, however, it was with no less than four new films -- The Stalking Moon, MacKenna's Gold, The Chairman, and Marooned -- all of them poorly received.The early '70s proved no better: First up was I Walk the Line, with Tuesday Weld, followed the next year by Henry Hathaway's Shootout. After the failure of the 1973 Western Billy Two Hats, he again vanished from cinemas for three years, producing (but not appearing in) The Dove. However, in 1976, Peck starred in the horror film The Omen, an unexpected smash. Studio interest was rekindled, and in 1977 he portrayed MacArthur. The Boys From Brazil followed, with Peck essaying a villainous role for the first time in his screen career. After 1981's The Sea Wolves, he turned for the first time to television, headlining the telefilm The Scarlet and the Black. Remaining on the small screen, he portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the 1985 miniseries The Blue and the Grey, returning to theater for 1987's little-seen anti-nuclear fable Amazing Grace and Chuck. Old Gringo followed two years later, and in 1991 he co-starred in a pair of high-profile projects, the Norman Jewison comedy Other People's Money and Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear. Fairly active through the remainder of the decade, Peck appeared in The Portrait (1993) and the made-for-television Moby Dick (1998) while frequently narrating such documentaries as Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1995) and American Prophet: The Story of Joseph Smith (2000).On June 12, 2003, just days after the AFI named him as the screen's greatest hero for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck died peacefully in his Los Angeles home with his wife Veronique by his side. He was 87.

Trivia: British actress Joan Collins, daughter of a London theatrical booking agent, made her showbiz bow in a production of The Doll's House -- in a male role. She was 9 years old then, and it would be the last time there would be any doubt as to her gender. With the sort of glamorous countenance that prompted people to ask "why aren't you in movies?", Collins first appeared before the cameras in a small role as a beauty contestant in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1953). She made an auspicious American debut as an Egyptian temptress in Land of the Pharoahs (1955). This assignment led to a contract with 20th Century-Fox, where despite a few good dramatic parts (Girl on the Red Velvet Swing [1955] in particular) and an adroit comic characterization in Rally Round the Flag, Boys (1958), she was written off by critics as decorative but nothing more. She was perilously close to "perennial starlet" status in the 1960s, and by the 1970s was the uncrowned queen of "B" pictures. Offscreen she cut quite a swath through the tabloid headlines; if her autobiography, Past Imperfect is to be believed, she dallied with virtually every male actor in Hollywood except Wile E. Coyote. Her maturation from mere personality to superstar came about when she was cast in 1981 as glamorous and predatory Alexis Carrington on Dynasty, the role giving her arguably the greatest exposure of his career. Though she continued to work steadily up until 2003, she never landed in a project as embraced as Dynasty but highlights include 1995's comedy In the Bleak Midwinter and 2000's The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. In 2015, she was cast as a modern Grand Duchess in E! first scripted series, The Royals, playing Elizabeth Hurley's mother.Despite professional and personal setbacks, Collins has managed to survive in an industry that swallows up lesser starlets on an average of ten per hour. Nor is Joan the only Collins with talent and charisma; her sister Jackie Collins is a highly successful romance novelist, whose books The Bitch and The Stud were turned into films, both starring sibling Joan.

Trivia: Irish-born Stephen Boyd was performing on stage since his preteen years. Migrating to Canada in the 1940s, Boyd acted in stock and on radio on both sides of the U.S./Canada border. After several lean years, Boyd got his movie break in the 1955 British comedy An Alligator Named Daisy. His powerful portrayal of the treacherous Messala in 1959's Ben-Hur proved to be Boyd's career peak. Few of his subsequent movie assignments came within shouting distance of Messala. Cast as Marc Antony in 1963's Cleopatra, Boyd was forced by prior commitments to defer the role to Richard Burton; and though top-billed in 1966's Fantastic Voyage, Boyd was compelled to play second fiddle to the film's remarkable special effects. In 1977, Stephen Boyd suffered a fatal heart attack while playing golf.

Trivia: After serving in World War Two he began acting, training at the Dramatic Workshop of the American Theater Wing and at the Actors Studio. He performed off-Broadway and in live TV drama; in 1955 he appeared to much acclaim in Broadway's Bus Stop. He began appearing in films in 1958, going on to a sporadic but intermittently busy screen career; he often played cowpokes and "good ol' boys." Meanwhile, most of his work was done on TV. From 1956-63 he was married to actress Peggy Ann Garner. In 1990 he was found dead next to the body of his estranged wife; a police investigation suggested that he had killed his wife and then himself.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parentage, Henry Silva supported himself with delivery jobs as he trained for an acting career with the Group Theater and the Actors Studio. Though definitely an "ethnic type," Silva's actual heritage was nebulous enough to permit him to play a wide variety of nationalities. He has successfully portrayed Mexicans, Native Americans, Italians, Japanese, and even extraterrestrials. Among Henry Silva's best-known film roles were the treacherous North Korean "houseboy" to Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the vengeful eponymous gangster in Johnny Cool (1963), and the shrewd Oriental title character in The Return of Mr. Moto (1965).

Trivia: Lead actor Barry Coe has appeared in film since 1956.

Trivia: Actor George Voskovec made his first stage appearance in his native Czechoslovakia, where he also made his first film, Powder and Gas (1930). Emigrating to America after Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler's armies, Voskovec quickly gained a Broadway reputation as an actor, playwright, and musical composer. Though he spoke with very little accent, Voskovec was frequently cast as foreigners, usually Teutonic or Slavic in nature. George Voskovec maintained a busy schedule to the end of his life, appearing in films (1980's Somewhere in Time was his last), plays, and a lot of television; in the latter medium, Voskovec was seen on a regular basis as Fritz the butler (his last role) on the 1981 TV series Nero Wolfe.

Trivia: Herbert Rudley had barely left his teens when he won a scholarship to Eva Le Galleine's Repertory Theater in the early '30s. The experienced gleaned with this organization led to Rudley's being cast in his first Broadway play, Elmer Rice's We, the People. In films since 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Rudley's best movie role was as Ira Gershwin in the 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue. He matured into character parts in the 1950s, usually playing suave villains or bristly military types. Herbert Rudley was a regular on several TV series, most prominently as Eve Arden's husband on the 1967 sitcom The Mothers-in-Law.

Trivia: Following a wartime tour with the Navy, New Jersey-born Lee Van Cleef supported himself as an accountant. Like fellow accountant-turned-actor Jack Elam, Van Cleef was advised by his clients that he had just the right satanic facial features to thrive as a movie villain. With such rare exceptions as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1954), Van Cleef spent most of his early screen career on the wrong side of the law, menacing everyone from Gary Cooper (High Noon) to the Bowery Boys (Private Eyes) with his cold, shark-eyed stare. Van Cleef left Hollywood in the '60s to appear in European spaghetti Westerns, initially as a secondary actor; he was, for example, the "Bad" in Clint Eastwood's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Within a few years, Van Cleef was starring in blood-spattered action films with such titles as Day of Anger (1967), El Condor (1970), and Mean Frank and Crazy Tony (1975). The actor was, for many years, one of the international film scene's biggest box-office draws. Returning to Hollywood in the late '70s, He starred in a very short-lived martial arts TV series The Master (1984), the pilot episodes of which were pieced together into an ersatz feature film for video rental. Van Cleef died of a heart attack in 1989.

Trivia: Born in Indiana and raised in Texas, Andrew Duggan attended Indiana University on a speech and drama scholarship. He was starred there in Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark, which was being given a nonprofessional pre-Broadway tryout; on the basis of this performance, Duggan was cast in the professional Chicago company of the Anderson play. Before rehearsals could start, however, Duggan was drafted into the army. After wartime service, Duggan began his acting career all over again, working at his uncle's Indiana farm in-between Broadway and stock engagements. In Hollywood in the late 1950s, Duggan was co-starred in the Warner Bros. TV series Bourbon Street Beat and was featured in such films as The Bravados (1958), Seven Days in May (1964) and In Like Flint (1967). He also was starred on the 1962 TV sitcom Room for One More and the 1968 video western Lancer. Because of his marked resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duggan was frequently cast as generals and U.S. presidents. Andrew Duggan's last screen appearance was in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.

Trivia: Lead and second lead actor, onscreen from 1955.

Trivia: A professional actor since his teens, Gene Evans made his first film appearance in 1947's Under Colorado Skies. Evans' gritty, no-nonsense approach to his craft attracted the attention of like-minded director Sam Fuller, who cast the actor in several of his 1950s film projects. Many consider Evans' portrayal as the grim, born-survivor sergeant in Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951) to be not only the actor's best performance, but also one of the best-ever characterizations in any war film. Active in films until 1984, Gene Evans also co-starred in the TV series My Friend Flicka (1956), Matt Helm (1975) and Spencer's Pilots (1976).

Trivia: For over 30 years, Jacqueline Evans was a popular actress in Mexican comedies and daytime serials. She was born in England and in 1948 came to Mexico to run in the PanAmerican Races. She never left. In film, she frequently appeared with Tin-Tan, another popular actor. Evans also played in a few American and British films.

Trivia: Joe DeRita, sometimes known as "Curly Joe DeRita," was the last of the six members of the Three Stooges to join that august comedic trio. Born Joseph Wardell in Philadelphia in 1909, he came from a show business family, his mother a dancer and his father a stage hand. DeRita accompanied his parents on tour from the age of seven, and he soon had a dancing act with his sister. He continued working as a single after she married and their parents had retired, and his comedic specialty involved lots of dancing, which would serve him in good stead when he later joined the Three Stooges. He worked in burlesque comedian from the early '20s until 1942, when he went out to California to headline a show. He got a film contract out of the trip, and in 1944 made his screen debut at Warner Bros. in The Doughgirls starring Ann Sheridan. In 1946, following appearances in two more comedy features, DeRita jumped to Columbia Pictures for a series of comedy shorts. He also entertained the troops during World War II, touring with Randolph Scott, a good friend with whom he did a comedy act. After World War II, DeRita returned to the stage and also began working on radio. In 1958, he made his return to movies in his only non-comedic acting role, playing the phony, murderous hangman in Henry King's Western chase-drama The Bravados. He also began showing up on television occasionally in comedy roles on series such as Bachelor Father. That same year, fate would take a hand in his career with the crisis affecting the Three Stooges -- the 30-year-old comedy team had reached an impasse with the decision by Joe Besser, the fat "third" stooge who'd come in to succeed Shemp Howard following the latter's death in 1955, to leave the act. Partners Moe Howard and Larry Fine needed a new partner with none in sight, and that was when Fine happened to go to Las Vegas and caught DeRita's act in a revue called Minsky's Follies of 1958. He was impressed and duly informed Moe Howard, who was similarly enthusiastic after meeting DeRita and testing him in performances at different nightclubs. In October of 1958, Joe DeRita -- christened "Curly Joe" because of his resemblance to the group's most famous member, Curly Howard -- made his debut as a member of the trio. DeRita may have missed the trio's busiest years, but he got in on their most profitable era, appearing as the comically goofy member of the trio in six full-length feature film in which they starred, as well as two more movies, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Four for Texas, in which the group had bit parts. Beyond that, however, were innumerable personal appearances, lots of merchandising, and television work by the trio, all of which was enough to keep DeRita busy and solvent for the rest of his life. With his goofy physiognomy and dancer's agility, DeRita was the sparkplug for much of the trio's physical comedy during this period, as well as some of its zaniest moments; he had an acrobat's grace, reminiscent of Curly Howard, but also a childlike innocence and good-nature that made younger audience members love him as well as laugh at him -- this was especially true in Have Rocket, Will Travel, the all-important 1959 feature that established the trio in full-length movies. He remained with the Three Stooges until Moe Howard's retirement in the mid-'70s. Such was his relationship with Howard that the oldest surviving Stooge, who controlled the group's name, broke precedent and gave DeRita permission to put together a new, very short-lived group of Three Stooges. That project didn't last, however, and DeRita retired in the 1970s. The youngest of the Three Stooges, he passed away after all of the others, in 1993.