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: Earthy and at times exuberant, Anthony Quinn was one of Hollywood's more colorful personalities. Though he played many important roles over the course of his 60-year career, Quinn's signature character was Zorba, a zesty Greek peasant who teaches a stuffy British writer to find joy in the subtle intricacies of everyday life in Zorba the Greek (1964), which Quinn also produced. The role won him an Oscar nomination and he reprised variations of Zorba in several subsequent roles. Although he made a convincing Greek, Quinn was actually of Irish-Mexican extraction. He was born Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca Quinn in Chihuahua, Mexico, on April 21, 1915, but raised in the U.S. Before becoming an actor, Quinn had been a prizefighter and a painter. He launched his film career playing character roles in several 1936 films, including Parole (his debut) and The Milky Way, after a brief stint in the theater. In 1937, he married director Cecil B. DeMille's daughter Katherine De Mille, but this did nothing to further his career and Quinn remained relegated to playing "ethnic" villains in Paramount films through the 1940s. By 1947, he was a veteran of over 50 films and had played everything from Indians, Mafia dons, Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerrillas, and comical Arab sheiks, but he was still not a major star. So he returned to the theater, where for three years he found success on Broadway in such roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Upon his return to the screen in the early '50s, Quinn was cast in a series of B-adventures like Mask of the Avenger (1951). He got one of his big breaks playing opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). His supporting role as Zapata's brother won Quinn his first Oscar and after that, Quinn was given larger roles in a variety of features. He went to Italy in 1953 and appeared in several films, turning in one of his best performances as a dim-witted, thuggish, and volatile strongman in Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954). Quinn won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar portraying the painter Gaugin in Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life (1956). The following year, he received another Oscar nomination for George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind. During the '50s, Quinn specialized in tough, macho roles, but as the decade ended, he allowed his age to show. His formerly trim physique filled out, his hair grayed, and his once smooth, swarthy face weathered into an appealing series of crags and crinkles. His careworn demeanor made him an ideal ex-boxer in Requiem for a Heavyweight and a natural for the villainous Bedouin he played in Lawrence of Arabia (both 1962). The success of Zorba the Greek in 1964 was the highwater mark of Quinn's career during the '60s -- it offered him another Oscar nomination -- and as the decade progressed, the quality of his film work noticeably diminished. The 1970s offered little change and Quinn became known as a ham, albeit a well-respected one. In 1971, he starred in the short-lived television drama Man in the City. His subsequent television appearances were sporadic, though in 1994, he became a semi-regular guest (playing Zeus) on the syndicated Hercules series. Though his film career slowed considerably during the 1990s, Quinn continued to work steadily, appearing in films as diverse as Jungle Fever (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), and A Walk in the Clouds (1995). In his personal life, Quinn proved as volatile and passionate as his screen persona. He divorced his wife Katherine, with whom he had three children, in 1956. The following year he embarked on a tempestuous 31-year marriage to costume designer Iolanda Quinn. The union crumbled in 1993 when Quinn had an affair with his secretary that resulted in a baby; the two shared a second child in 1996. In total, Quinn has fathered 13 children and has had three known mistresses. He and Iolanda engaged in a public and very bitter divorce in 1997 in which she and one of Quinn's sons, Danny Quinn, alleged that the actor had severely beaten and abused Iolanda for many years. Quinn denied the allegations, claiming that his ex-wife was lying in order to win a larger settlement and part of Quinn's priceless art collection. When not acting or engaging in well-publicized court battles, Quinn continued to paint and became a well-known artist. He also wrote and co-wrote two memoirs, The Original Sin (1972) and One Man Tango (1997). In the latter, Quinn is candid and apologetic about some of his past's darker moments. Shortly after completing his final film role in Avenging Angelo (2001), Anthony Quinn died of respiratory failure in Boston, MA. He was 86.

Trivia: Trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, Texas-born Carolyn Jones supported herself as a radio disk jockey when acting jobs were scarce. She entered films as a bit player in 1952, attaining prominence for a role in which (for the most part) she neither moved nor spoke: the waxwork Joan of Arc -- actually one of mad sculptor Vincent Price's many murder victims -- in 1953's House of Wax. In 1957, Jones was Oscar-nominated for her five-minute role as a pathetic "good time girl" in The Bachelor Party; two years later, she stole the show in Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head as Frank Sinatra's bongo-playing girlfriend. During the early 1960s, Jones was married to producer Aaron Spelling, who frequently cast her on such TV series as The Dick Powell Show and Burke's Law. In 1964, Jones achieved TV sitcom immortality as the ghoulishly sexy Morticia Addams on the popular series The Addams Family. Though her TV and movie activities were curtailed by illness in her last decade (she died of cancer in 1983), Carolyn Jones continued making occasional appearances, notably a return engagement as Morticia in a 1978 Addams Family reunion special.

Trivia: While many of Earl Holliman's bucolic screen characters tended to shy away from "book learnin," Holliman himself is a graduate of UCLA. Making his film debut with a one-line bit as a bellboy in Martin and Lewis' Scared Stiff (1953), Holliman went on to featured and co-starring roles in westerns and military dramas, usually cast as a hot-headed rustic with a streak of manic unpredictability. His larger film roles include the comic-relief cook in Forbidden Planet (1956), Katharine Hepburn's girl-happy brother in The Rainmaker (1956)--a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination--and Matt Elder in the John Wayne starrer Sons of Katie Elder (1965). A nearly inescapable presence on television, Holliman turned in some impressive work on the many live TV anthologies of the 1950s. His portrayal of a shipwrecked marine in the 1958 Kraft Theatre production "The Sea is Boiling Hot," in which he carried on a one-sided debate with monolingual Japanese officer Sessue Hayakawa, led to his being cast in a similar solo turn in the 1959 Twilight Zone pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" His series-TV credits include the roles of gunslinger-turned-hotelier Sundance in Hotel de Paree (1959), bronco buster Mitch Guthrie in Wide Country (1962), Palm Springs private eye Matthew Durning in PS I Luv U (1991) and barkeep Darden Towe in Delta (1992). Undoubtedly his most famous TV assignment was as Angie Dickinson's superior officer Lt. Bill Crowley in the weekly Police Woman (1974-78). Most recently Earl Holliman made a most welcome guest appearance as Lea Thompson's Wisconsinite dad in the TV sitcom Caroline in the City.

Trivia: Born Boris Milanovich, Dexter was a square-jawed supporting player and former lead, often cast in tough character roles. As early as his first film, 1950's The Asphalt Jungle, the talented Dexter found himself overshadowed by the star power of Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern and Marilyn Monroe. Occasionally, Dexter was cast in a role that stuck in the memory banks, such as Bugsy Siegel in 1960's The George Raft Story. He also gained a degree of fame as the producer of such worthwhile films as The Naked Runner (1967) and The Lawyer (1970) and Little Fauss and big Halsy(1970); reportedly, he was able to gain a foothold as a producer thanks to Frank Sinatra, whom Dexter once saved from drowning. Brad Dexter married and divorced singer Peggy Lee.

Trivia: A former pro baseball player, Bing Russell eased into acting in the 1950s, appearing mostly in westerns. Russell could be seen in such bonafide classics as The Horse Soldiers (1959) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), and not a few bow-wows like Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966). From 1961 through 1973, Russell played the semiregular role of Deputy Clem on the marathon TV western series Bonanza. When time permitted, he also dabbled in screenwriting. The father of film star Kurt Russell, Bing Russell has acted with his son on several occasions, most memorably in the role of Vernon Presley in the 1979 TV-movie hit Elvis.

Trivia: Avery was a versatile American character actor onscreen from 1956, beginning with The Harder They Fall.

Trivia: Arriving in America from his native Australia at the turn of the century, Frank S. Hagney eked out a living in vaudeville. He entered films during the silent era as a stunt man, gradually working his way up to featured roles. While most of Hagney's film work is forgettable, he had the honor of contributing to a bonafide classic in 1946. Director Frank Capra hand-picked Frank S. Hagney to portray the faithful bodyguard of wheelchair-bound villain Lionel Barrymore in the enduring Yuletide attraction It's A Wonderful Life (1946).

Trivia: Born and trained in New York City, Brian G. Hutton spent several frustrating years as a movie and TV bit player and as a stand-in for more famous screen personalities. With the help of an industry friend, writer/director Douglas M. Heyes, Hutton began securing TV-series directing assignments in the early 1960s. His first theatrical feature as a director was Wild Seed (1965), an outgrowth of Universal's "young talent" department. Hutton directed the outsized action films Where Eagles Dare (1969) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), and two Elizabeth Taylor vehicles, X, Y and Zee (1971) and Night Watch (1975). His last directing effort was High Road to China in 1983; Hutton died in 2014.

Trivia: Born in Colorado and raised in Oregon, actor Walter Sande was a music student from age six. He dropped out of college to organize his own band, then for many years served as musical director for the West Coast Fox Theater chain. In 1937, Sande entered films with a small role in Goldwyn Follies (1938). He fluctuated thereafter between bits in films like Citizen Kane (1941), in which he played one of the many reporters, and supporting roles in films like To Have and Have Not (1944), in which he portrayed the defaulting customer who is punched out by a boat-renting Humphrey Bogart. On television, Walter Sande played Horatio Bullwinkle on Tugboat Annie (1958) and Papa Holstrum on The Farmer's Daughter (1963-1966).

Trivia: American comedian Hank Mann was a product of the turbulent tenement district of New York in the 1880s, where a kid had better learn to be handy with his fists or lose all his teeth by the age of 12. Putting his physical prowess to practical use, Mann became a circus acrobat, then headed westward for a job at Mack Sennett's Keystone studios. His junkyard-dog face was softened a bit by a huge paintbrush mustache, which emphasized his expressive, almost wistful eyes. Seldom a star comedian at Sennett, Mann quickly learned how to "catch flies" -- steal scenes, that is. In the most famous example of this, Mann played the foreman of a jury where Chester Conklin was on trial for his life; as Conklin energetically pleaded his case, Mann grabbed the audience's attention by silently yanking up his necktie in a hanging motion. Mann left Keystone for his own starring series at Fox, thence to a career as a character comic in feature films. He had the potential to be one of the top comedy stars of the era, but bad management and worse judgment left him broke by the late '20s. Mann was given a good break as Charlie Chaplin's contemptuous boxing opponent in City Lights (1931), and was provided with a meaty role as a house detective in the 1935 two-reeler Keystone Hotel, which reunited such former Sennett headliners as Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin and Marie Prevost. But Mann's talkie career consisted primarily of bit parts. He worked steadily in the films of Frank Capra, a friend from the silent days, and appeared prominently in two Three Stooge comedies, 1934's Men in Black (as a long-suffering janitor) and 1937's Goofs and Saddles (performing some bone-crushing pratfalls as a confused cattle rustler). Mann also showed up briefly in the two-reelers of such Columbia contractees as Andy Clyde, Buster Keaton and El Brendel. When jobs were scarce, Mann farmed out his services as a makeup artist, and also ran a small California malt shop. During the '50s, Hank Mann could always be relied upon for newspaper interviews about the good old days, and he was cast along with other silent comedy vets in such nostalgic feature films as Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955) and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).

Trivia: In films from 1935 to 1964, American character actor William "Billy" Newell was nearly always seen with his hat tilted backward and with a spent cigarette or wad of gum in his mouth. This is because Newell was usually cast as a wise-lipped reporter or news photographer. One of his largest assignments in this vein was as news-hound Speed Martin in the 1940 Republic serial Mysterious Dr. Satan. William Newell also essayed countless functional bit roles, such as the liquor-store proprietor in the 1945 Oscar-winner The Lost Weekend. Hal Erickson, Rovi

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: A grandson of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo, Charles Stevens (often billed as Charles "Injun" Stevens because of his ethnic background) made his film bow as an extra in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The close friend and "mascot" of cinema idol Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Stevens appeared in all but one of Fairbanks' starring films, beginning with 1915's The Lamb. He was often seen in multiple roles, never more obviously than in Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926). His largest role during his Fairbanks years was Planchet in The Three Musketeers (1921) and its sequel The Iron Mask (1929). In talkies, Stevens was generally cast as a villain, usually an Indian, Mexican, or Arab. Outside of major roles in early sound efforts like The Big Trail and Tom Sawyer (both 1930), he could be found playing menacing tribal chiefs and bandits in serials and B-pictures, and seedy, drunken "redskin" stereotypes (invariably named Injun Joe or Injun Charlie or some such) in big-budget films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). He was also much in demand as a technical adviser on Native American lore and customs. Charles Stevens remained active until 1956, 17 years after the death of his pal and mentor Doug Fairbanks.

Trivia: A New Mexican of Native American extraction, actor Glenn Strange held down several rough-and-tumble jobs, from deputy sheriff to rodeo rider, before settling on a singing career. He made his radio bow on Los Angeles station KNX (the CBS-owned affiliate) as a member of the Arizona Wranglers singing group. Thanks to his husky physique and plug-ugly features, Strange had no trouble finding work as a stuntman/villain in western films and serials. He also displayed a flair for comedy as the sidekick to singing cowboy Dick Foran in a series of B-sagebrushers of the late '30s. During the war years, Strange became something of a bargain-basement Lon Chaney Jr., playing homicidal halfwits in a handful of horror pictures made at PRC and other low-budget studios. These appearances led to his being cast as the Frankenstein monster in the 1944 Universal programmer House of Frankenstein; he was coached in this role by the "creature" from the original 1931 Frankenstein, Boris Karloff. Given very little to do in House of Frankenstein and the 1945 sequel House of Dracula other than stalk around with arms outstretched at fadeout time, Strange brought none of the depth and pathos to the role that distinguished Karloff's appearances. Strange was shown to better advantage in his last appearance as The Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) where he convincingly menaced the eternally frightened Lou Costello and even indulged in a couple of time-honored "scare" routines, while still remaining in character (Some scenes had to be reshot because Strange couldn't stop laughing at Costello's antics; towards the end of shooting, Strange broke his ankle and had to be replaced in a few shots by Lon Chaney Jr., who was costarring in the film as the Wolf Man). Though typecast as heavies in both movies and television -- he played the hissable Butch Cavendish in the Lone Ranger TV pilot -- Strange was well known throughout Hollywood as a genuine nice guy and solid family man. Glenn Strange's last engagement of note was his 11-year run (1962-73) as Sam, the Long Branch bartender on TV's Gunsmoke.

Trivia: When he died in early 1965, Julius Tannen rated an obituary in Variety covering the better part of a page. That may surprise anyone who is wondering "Who was Julius Tannen?" -- viewers who have seen Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain, or the sophisticated comedies of Preston Sturges, however, have likely delighted in Tannen's work, even if they didn't know who he was. Born in Chicago and raised in a Jewish orphanage in Rochester, NY, Julius Tannen became one of the most celebrated and successful theatrical performers of his day, in a career that took him from the vaudeville stage into some of the most important movies ever made, and on to television before a return to the stage in his twilight years. Tannen didn't intend to become a performer -- he was making a living as a salesman, and his pitch to customers proved so engaging and funny, that he received offers to entertain at parties. He made his professional debut on the vaudeville stage in 1901, at age 21, and developed a particular comedic specialty as what was then called a "monologist" -- he would stand there and talk (today, it's called standup comedy). Among many techniques that he devised, one of his most popular was that of presenting a comic story and ending it before the payoff, leaving the audience to fill in the blank space. Tannen was the first successful modern practitioner of what is now known as the comedy monolog. He was also responsible for creating the exit phrase, "My father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you" -- certainly ironic in view of his background as an orphan, this phrase, heard by a young George M. Cohan (who was then performing with the Four Cohans), was adopted by him as his bow-off signature for the rest of his career, and immortalized in the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy. Tannen played the Palace Theater in New York more often than almost any other performer, and he subsequently made the jump to legitimate theater during the 1920s, performing in Earl Carroll's Vanities and the George White Scandals. He'd already been performing professionally for three decades when the advent of talking pictures created a need for actors who could handle spoken dialogue. His first film was Lady By Choice, starring Carole Lombard, in which he played a small role. Over the next 15 years, Tannen portrayed dozens of lawyers, clerks, journalists, and police detectives, usually (but not always) unnamed in the credits. He started getting bigger roles in the late '30s, in everything from light comedies to serious dramas such as Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (1940). He joined the stock company of director/writer Preston Sturges with the latter's second movie, Christmas in July, and was aboard for The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, and The Palm Beach Story, and he enjoyed still larger roles in the director's final Paramount films. He continued working with Sturges right up through Unfaithfully Yours. It was with director Stanley Donen, however, that Tannen scored what may have been his most prominent screen appearance, in the movie Singin' in the Rain. Tannen appears in the opening section of the movie, as the man in the short film shown at the Hollywood party, introducing sound movies ("This is a talking picture...") -- to anyone knowing the man and the history, the in joke was priceless, the world's best stage monologist debuting talking pictures. Tannen subsequently worked in the Elvis Presley film Loving You (1957) and was apparently a favorite of director John Sturges, who used him in The People Against O'Hara (1952) and The Last Train From Gun Hill (1959). Tannen retained his comic edge and melodious voice into his seventies -- on December 2, 1954, he appeared on The George Gobel Show (in a program available on video) in a sketch where he ran circles around the star, and he earned a special curtain call from Gobel. He continued performing until 1964 when he suffered a stroke at the age of 84; he died the following year. His son, Charles Tannen (1915-1980), who looked like an identical but younger version of Julius Tannen, was a very busy character actor in his own right, with film credits dating from the mid-'30s to the early '60s, before he joined CBS as an executive.

Trivia: Born Orson Whipple Hungerford, Jr., he was a virile, muscular, handsome leading man and supporting actor of Hollywood films of the '60s. He was billed "Ty Hungerford" in his first film, I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). He starred in the TV series Bronco (1958-61) and Riptide (1965), but in the mid '60s his Hollywood career dried up; he moved to Europe for a decade, appearing in European films sporadically until the early '70s. For some time he lived in Los Boliches, Spain, where he owned a bar and a chain of laundromats. In the summer of 1974 he was jailed for a month and fined $9200 for drug-trafficking, having allegedly been found with 25 kilos of hashish hidden in his car. In 1977, back in the U.S., he converted to Born-Again Christianity; for some time he was a minister, preaching in tents around the country and heading his own congregation in Prescott, Arizona. He also filmed a half-hour religious program, Going Home, that aired three times a week in 39 states on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. He has been married six times and divorced five; his wives included actress Andra Martin, former Miss Universe Marlene Schmidt, and model Jeanette Atkins.

Trivia: American stunt man Henry Wills made his first recorded film appearances around 1940. Wills has shown up in scores of westerns, often in utility roles as stagecoach drivers and villainous henchmen. He commandeered chariots in several Biblical epics, including Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Henry Wills also served as stunt coordinator for such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Beastmaster (1982).

Trivia: American actress/dancer Mara Lynn got her start on television working as a straight woman opposite such comedians as Groucho Marx, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle. From there, she worked for a time as Ray Bolger's dance partner on his last tour and then worked on Broadway. Lynn also occasionally appeared in films between the '50s and '70s.