Trivia: American actor Sterling Hayden was a Hollywood leading man of the '40s and '50s who went on to become a character actor in later years. At age 16 he dropped out of school to become a mate on a schooner, beginning a life-long love affair with the sea; by age 22 he was a ship's captain. Extremely good looking, he modeled professionally to earn enough money to buy his own vessel; this led to a movie contract with Paramount in 1940. Within a year he was famous, having starred in two technicolor movies, Virginia (1941) and Bahama Passage (1942); both featured the somewhat older actress Madeleine Carroll, to whom he was married from 1942-46. With these films, Paramount began trumpeting him as "The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies" and "The Beautiful Blond Viking God." Shortly after making these two films he joined the Marines to serve in World War II. After the war he landed inconsequential roles until a part as a hoodlum in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) demonstrated his skill as an actor. After this his career was spotty, marked for the most part by inferior films (with some notable exceptions, such as Dr. Strangelove [1964]) and frequent abandonment of the screen in favor of the sea. It was said that Hayden was never particularly interested in his work as an actor, vastly preferring the life of a sailor. His obsession with the sea and his various voyages are described in his 1963 autobiography, Wanderer, in which he also expresses regret for having cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Commission during the early '50s McCarthy-Era "witch trials." He published a novel in 1976, Voyage: A Novel of 1896; it was named as a selection of the Book of the Month Club.

Trivia: Forrest Tucker occupied an odd niche in movies -- though not an "A" movie lead, he was, nonetheless, a prominent "B" picture star and even a marquee name, who could pull audiences into theaters for certain kinds of pictures. From the early/mid-1950s on, he was a solid presence in westerns and other genre pictures. Born Forrest Meredith Tucker in Plainfield, Indiana in 1919, he was bitten by the performing bug early in life -- he made his debut in burlesque while he was still under-age. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1937, he enlisted in the United States Army, joining a cavalry unit. Tucker next headed for Hollywood, where his powerful build and six-foot-four frame and his enthusiasm were sufficient to get him a big-screen debut in The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Signed to Columbia Pictures, he mostly played anonymous tough-guy roles over the next two years, primarily in B pictures, before entering the army in 1943. Resuming his career in 1946, he started getting bigger roles on a steady basis in better pictures, and in 1948 signed with Republic Pictures. He became a mainstay of that studio's star roster, moving up to a co-starring role in Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), which also brought him into the professional orbit of John Wayne, the movie's star. Across the early/middle 1950s, Tucker starred in a brace of action/adventure films and westerns, alternating between heroes and villains, building up a significant fan base. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the company's top box-office draws. As it also turned out, Tucker's appeal was international, and he went to England in the second half of the decade to play starring roles in a handful of movies. At that time, British studios such as Hammer Films needed visiting American actors to boost the international appeal of their best productions, and Tucker fulfilled the role admirably in a trio of sci-fi/horror films: The Crawling Eye, The Cosmic Monsters, and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Part of Tucker's motivation for taking these roles, beyond the money, he later admitted, was his desire to sample the offerings of England's pubs -- Tucker was a two-fisted drinker and, in those days, was well able to handle the effects of that activity so that it never showed up on-screen. And he ran with the opportunity afforded by those three science fiction movies -- each of those films, he played a distinctly different role, in a different way, but always with a certain fundamental honesty that resonated with audiences. When he returned to Hollywood, he was cast as Beauregard Burnside in Auntie Mame (1958), which was the top-grossing movie of the year. Then stage director Morton De Costa, seeing a joyful, playful romantic huckster in Tucker (where others had mostly seen an earnest tough-guy), picked him to star as Professor Harold Hill in the touring production of The Music Man -- Tucker played that role more than 2000 times over the years that followed. He was also the star of the 1964 Broadway show Fair Game For Lovers (in a cast that included Leo Genn, Maggie Hayes, and a young Alan Alda), which closed after eight performances. The Music Man opened a new phase for Tucker's career. The wily huckster became his image, one that was picked up by Warner Bros.' television division, which cast him in the role of Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, the charmingly larcenous post-Civil War cavalry soldier at the center of the western/spoof series F-Troop. That series only ran for two seasons, but was in syndicated reruns for decades afterward, and though Tucker kept his hand in other media -- returning to The Music Man and also starring in an unsold pilot based on the movie The Flim-Flam Man (taking over the George C. Scott part), it was the part of O'Rourke with which he would be most closely identified for the rest of his life. He did occasionally take tougher roles that moved him away from the comedy in that series -- in one of the better episodes of the series Hondo, entitled "Hondo And The Judas", he played Colonel William Clark Quantrill very effectively. At the end of the decade, he returned to straight dramatic acting, most notably in the John Wayne western Chisum, in which he played primary villain Lawrence Murphy. That same year, he appeared in a challenging episode of the series Bracken's World entitled "Love It Or Leave It, Change It Or Lose It", playing "Jim Grange," a sort of film-a-clef version of John Wayne -- a World War II-era film star known for his patriotism, Grange is determined to express his political views while working alongside a young film star (portrayed by Tony Bill) who is closely associated with the anti-war movement. Tucker continued getting television work and occasional film roles, in addition to returning to the straw-hat circuit, mostly as Professor Harold Hill. None of his subsequent series lasted very long, but he was seldom out of work, despite a drinking problem that did worsen significantly during his final decade. In his final years, he had brought that under control, and was in the process of making a comeback -- there was even talk of an F-Troop revival in film form -- when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. He died in the fall of 1986 at age 67.

Trivia: Fresh out of the University of California, sprightly Colorado-born actress Barbara Rush attended the Pasadena Playhouse, walking several miles to and from her classes to save up enough money for her tuition. Before launching her film career, she married actor Jeffrey Hunter, the first of two desultory unions. She became a favorite of little boys of all ages due to her leading-lady stints in two of the most influential science fiction films of the 1950s, When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953). After biding her time in idiotic programmers like Prince of Pirates (1953), she emerged as an A-list leading lady at the major studios, adept at both comedy (Oh Men! Oh Women! [1957]) and drama (The Young Lions [1958]). Easing into character parts in the 1960s, Rush was often cast as viper-tongued shrews, cheating wives, and abrasive alcoholics. She also surprised many of her fans by appearing as "special guest villain" Nora Clavicle on an outrageous 1968 episode of Batman, which proposed that the miniskirted policewomen of Gotham City could be cowed into submission simply by releasing mice into the community. Though she hasn't been seen in many films in later years, Barbara Rush has continued to flourish as a stage actress and TV guest star.

Trivia: Intending to become a dentist like his father, American actor Edgar Buchanan wound up with grades so bad in college that he was compelled to take an "easy" course to improve his average. Buchanan chose a course in play interpretation, and after listening to a few recitations of Shakespeare he was stagestruck. After completing dental school, Buchanan plied his oral surgery skills in the summertime, devoting the fall, winter and spring months to acting in stock companies and at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was given a screen test by Warner Bros. studios in 1940, received several bit roles, then worked himself up to supporting parts upon transferring to Columbia Pictures. Though still comparatively youthful, Buchanan specialized in grizzled old westerners, with a propensity towards villainy or at least larceny. The actor worked at every major studio (and not a few minor ones) over the next few years, still holding onto his dentist's license just in case he needed something to fall back on. Though he preferred movie work to the hurried pace of TV filming, Buchanan was quite busy in television's first decade, costarring with William Boyd on the immensely popular Hopalong Cassidy series, then receiving a starring series of his own, Judge Roy Bean, in 1954. Buchanan became an international success in 1963 thanks to his regular role as the lovably lazy Uncle Joe Carson on the classic sitcom Petticoat Junction, which ran until 1970. After that, the actor experienced a considerably shorter run on the adventure series Cade's County, which starred Buchanan's close friend Glenn Ford. Buchanan's last movie role was in Benji (1974), which reunited him with the titular doggie star, who had first appeared as the family mutt on Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: A former manicurist, Arleen Whelan had been playing movie bits for nearly a year when she was signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1938. Largely confined to programmers and "B"-pictures, Whelan managed to cop the plum role of pioneer wife Hannah Clay in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Her career peaked in the mid-1940s; by the 1950s, she had to make do with Republic westerns, though Young Mr. Lincoln director John Ford did secure her a good part in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Married three times, Arleen Whelan's first husband was Egyptian leading man Alex D'Arcy.

Trivia: After a rough-and-tumble adolescence, Victor Jory attended high school in California, studying acting with Gilmor Brown at the Pasadena Playhouse. Jory's subsequent tenure at the University of California lasted all of one year before he was bitten by wanderlust; he joined the coast guard, where he distinguished himself as a champion in several contact sports. Sharp-featured, muscular, and possessed of a rich theatrical voice, Jory made his New York stage bow in 1929, and one year later co-starred in the original Broadway production of Berkeley Square. Inaugurating his film career with Renegades (1930), Jory spent the next five decades in roles ranging from romantic leads to black-hearted villains. Highlights in his screen career include a sinister but strangely beautiful performance as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935); the vicious Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938); white-trash carpetbagger Jonas Wilkerson in Gone With the Wind (1939); Texas patriot William Travis in Man of Conquest (1939); the hissable, crippled patriarch in The Fugitive Kind (1960); the taciturn father of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962); and the ancient South American Indian chief in Papillon (1973). In 1940, Jory starred in the Columbia serial The Shadow (1940), essaying the dual role of the mind-clouding Shadow and his alter ego Lamont Cranston (with several disguise sequences along the way). The outspoken Jory was supremely confident of his talents, remarking on several occasions that he was "damn good" -- though he was tougher than any movie critic in assessing his lesser performances. He was also more than generous with young up-and-coming actors (except for self-involved "method" performers), and was a veritable fountain of Broadway and Hollywood anecdotes, some of which were actually true. An occasional theatrical director and playwright, Jory wrote the Broadway production Five Who Were Mad. On TV, Jory starred in the popular syndicated detective series Manhunt (1959-1960) and guested on dozens of other programs. Long married to actress Jean Innes, Victor Jory was the father of Jon Jory, who for many years was artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Trivia: American actor Richard Arlen was working as a messenger boy at Paramount studios in the early 1920s when he was injured in a slight accident; the story goes that Arlen went to the studio heads to thank them for their prompt medical care, whereupon the executives, impressed by Arlen's good looks, hired him as an actor. Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact that Arlen soon became one of Paramount's most popular leading men, earning a measure of screen immortality by costarring with Buddy Rogers and Clara Bow in the first-ever Oscar winning picture, Wings (1927). Arlen was memorably cast as a World War I flying ace, a part in which he felt uniquely at home because he'd been a member of the Royal Canadian Flying Corps during the "real" war (though he never saw any combat!) The actor retained his popularity throughout the 1930s, and when roles became harder to come by in the 1940s, he wisely invested his savings in numerous successful businesses. Keeping in character, Arlen was also part-owner of a civilian flying service, and worked as an air safety expert for the government during World War II. Still acting in TV and commercials into the 1960s, Richard Arlen was reunited with his Wings costar Buddy Rogers in an amusing episode of the TV sitcom Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: Flint-eyed American character actor Ian MacDonald began appearing in films in 1941. The war interrupted MacDonald's screen career, but he was back at his post in 1947. Nearly always a villain on-screen, his most celebrated role was Frank Miller, the vindictive gunman who motivates the plot of High Noon (1952). Likewise memorable were his portrayals of Bo Creel in White Heat (1949) and Geronimo in Taza, Son of Cochise (1954). In films until 1959, Ian MacDonald also occasionally dabbled in screenwriting.

Trivia: A master at abrasive and intrusive old-codger roles, George Cleveland enjoyed a 58-year career in vaudeville, stage, movies and television. Spending his earliest professional days in his native Canada, Cleveland barnstormed around the U.S. with his own stock company until settling in New York. He came to Hollywood in 1934 for an assignment in the Noah Beery Sr. programmer Mystery Liner and remained in Tinseltown for the next two decades. At first appearing in small roles in serials and westerns, Cleveland's screen time increased when he signed with RKO in the early 1940s. In the Fibber McGee and Molly feature Here We Go Again, Cleveland essayed the "Old Timer" role played on radio by Bill Thompson (who also showed up in Here We Go Again in another of his radio characterizations, Wallace Wimple). Other choice '40s assignments for Cleveland included the role of Paul Muni's faithful butler in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), and featured parts in two Abbott and Costello comedies, 1946's Little Giant (as Costello's uncle) and 1947's Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (as a corrupt western judge). George Cleveland appeared on TV as a befuddled postman on the forgettable 1952 sitcom The Hank McCune Show; a far more memorable assignment was his three-year gig as Gramps on the Lassie series, which kept Cleveland busy until his sudden death in the spring of 1957.

Trivia: In films after 1915, hatchet-faced Robert Kortman claimed to have served in the U.S. Cavalry prior to going on-stage. With producer Thomas H. Ince in the mid-1910s, the menacing actor often supported the era's great Western icon William S. Hart (he was one of the rowdy townsmen in 1916's Hell's Hinges) and was equally busy in the '20s. Kortman, however, came into his own in sound serials, especially at Mascot and its successor Republic Pictures, where his menacing visage turned up everywhere, from playing Magua in Last of the Mohicans (1932) to portraying One-Eye Chapin in Adventures of Red Ryder (1940). His roles grew increasingly smaller, and Kortman continued to play mostly villains until at least 1951. He died of cancer.

Trivia: An outdoorsman from an early age, gangling Montana-born actor Ethan Laidlaw began showing up in westerns during the silent era. Too menacing for lead roles, Laidlaw was best suited for villains, usually as the crooked ranch hand in the employ of the rival cattle baron, sent to spy on the hero or heroine. During the talkie era, Laidlaw began alternating his western work with roles as sailors and stevedores; he is quite visible chasing the Marx Brothers around in Monkey Business (1931). Though usually toiling in anonymity, Ethan Laidlaw was given prominent billing for his "heavy" role in the 1936 Wheeler and Woolsey sagebrush spoof Silly Billies.

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: 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: Of Russian heritage, actor Frank Lackteen was born in the area of the world now known as Lebanon. In American films from 1916, the slight, hollow-cheeked, scar-faced Lackteen trafficked in a uniquely maleficent brand of screen villainy. When talkies arrived, his indeterminately foreign accent enhanced his disreputable image. For four decades, he played assassins, smugglers, cult leaders, poisoners, insurrectionists, kidnappers and two-bit hoodlums. He was seen as sinister Arabs, sinister East Indians, sinister Native Americans and sinister South Sea Islanders. A fixture of weekly movie serials since 1916's The Yellow Menace, he played parts of all variety in such chapter plays as Tarzan the Fearless (1933), Wild Bill Hickock (1938), Don Winslow of the Navy (1941), Jungle Girl (1941), Black Widow (1947), Superman (1948). On a lighter note, Frank Lackteen was a regular in Columbia's comedy 2-reelers, menacing everyone from Charley Chase to the Three Stooges.

Trivia: A longtime stage actor, producer and playwright, Gene Lewis came to films as an actor in 1931's Honeymoon Lane. It would be twenty more years before Lewis would appear on-screen again. In the interim, he established himself as one of Hollywood's best dialogue directors, first for the 1933 Frank Capra production The Bitter Tea of General Yen, then at Warner Bros. and Universal. He segued into screenwriting with Universal's Cobra Woman, a lavish bit featuring Jon Hall and Maria Montez; he followed this with another Hall-Montez opus, Gypsy Wildcat (1945), working in collaboration with no less than James M. Cain. Gene Lewis' final screenwriting credit was RKO's Trail Street (1947).

Trivia: Character actor Donald Kerr showed up whenever a gumchewing Runyonesque type (often a reporter or process server) was called for. A bit actor even in two-reelers and "B" pictures, Kerr was one of those vaguely familiar faces whom audiences would immediately recognize, ask each other "Who is that?", then return to the film, by which time Kerr had scooted the scene. The actor's first recorded film appearance was in 1933's Carnival Lady. Twenty-two years later, Donald Kerr concluded his career in the same anonymity with which he began it in 1956's Yaqui Drums.