Trivia: Handsome leading man Rory Calhoun's successful film and television career spanned well over 50 years. In the mid-1940s,after a difficult childhood and adolescence, Calhoun found work as a lumberjack in Santa Cruz, California. It was while there employed that Calhoun was discovered by actor Alan Ladd, who suggested that the rugged young man give movies a try. Billed as "Frank McCown," Calhoun was signed to a brief contract at 20th Century-Fox, but most of his earliest movie scenes (including a sizeable supporting role in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Bullfighters) ended up on the cutting room floor. Free-lancing in the late 1940s, Calhoun first attracted a fan-following with his supporting role as a high-school lothario in 1948's The Red House. He returned to Fox in 1950, enjoying major roles in such films as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and River of No Return (1955). Established as a western player by the late 1950s, Calhoun starred on the popular TV western The Texan from 1958 through 1960. He spent his spare time writing, publishing at least one novel, The Man From Padeira. From 1949 through 1970, Calhoun was married to actress Lita Baron. Perpetuating his career into the 1980s and '90s, a more weather-beaten Rory Calhoun was seen in the lead of the satirical horror film Motel Hell (1980), was quite funny as a washed-up macho movie star in Avenging Angel (1985), and stole the show from ostensible leading-man George Strait in Pure Country (1992).

Trivia: Had the Fates smiled upon her, the versatile Beverly Garland would have been one of the biggest female stars in films. She started out well, with a plum part in the noir classic DOA (1949), in which she was billed as Beverly Campbell. Alas, Garland was never one to keep her opinions to herself, and her pointed comments about some of her DOA colleagues turned her into a Hollywood pariah before her career had even begun. She eventually worked her way back up the ladder with supporting roles in theatrical features and guest-star assignments on television. Garland rapidly earned a reputation as a "good luck charm" for TV-pilot producers, who could usually count on a sale if Garland was featured in their product. She guested on the first episode of Medic as an expectant leukemia victim, and was co-starred in the pilots of no fewer than three Rod Cameron TV vehicles: City Detective, State Trooper and Coronado 9, all of which sold. In the mid-1950s, Garland was briefly the inamorata of quickie producer/director Roger Corman, who prominently cast her in such cheapies as It Conquered the World (1955) and Not of This Earth (1956). She starred in the 1957 syndicated TV series Policewoman Decoy, which permitted her to adopt a variety of convincing guises in the line of duty. From the 1960s on, Garland was everyone's favorite TV wife or mother: she played Bing Crosby's wife in The Bing Crosby Show (1964), Fred MacMurray's wife on the last three seasons (1969-72) of My Three Sons, Stephanie Zimbalist's mother in Remington Steele (1982-86) and Kate Jackson's mother on Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-87). Active into the 1990s, Beverly Garland supplemented her acting income with her job as spokesperson for a major Midwestern travel agency. She died in 2008 at age

Trivia: Open-faced, bulb-nosed character actor John Larch entered films in 1954, appearing mostly in westerns and outdoor adventures. During the "crime exposé" film cycle, Larch alternated between playing honest cops and dirty-palmed politicos. An old crony of actor/director Clint Eastwood, Larch appeared in such Eastwood efforts as Dirty Harry (1971) and Play Misty For Me (1972). His TV work has included weekly roles on two briefies of the 1960s, Arrest and Trial (1963) and Convoy (1965). Twilight Zone fans will instantly recognize John Larch as the walking-on-eggs father of malevolent telekinetic youngster Anthony Fremont (Billy Mumy) in the 1961 Zone chiller "It's a Good Life."

Trivia: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Having served as a bombardier in World War II, Russell Johnson used the GI Bill to finance his studies at the Actor's Lab. Between performing assignments, Johnson supported himself by driving a cab and working the assembly line at a ballpoint pen factory. His first movie break (indeed, his first movie) was in director Paul Henreid's For Men Only (1952), an exposé of barbaric college-fraternity initiation ceremonies; Johnson was suitably loathsome as the sadistic frat leader who is exposed as a snivelling coward in the climax. The balance of the 1950s found Johnson appearing in several fondly remembered science fiction efforts like It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1956) and The Space Children (1958). He carried over this relationship with the Unreal into his classic performance as an anguished time-traveller desperately attempting to prevent Lincoln's assassination in the 1961 Twilight Zone installment Back There. In 1964, Russell Johnson took his first steps into TV sitcom immortality when he assumed the role of "The Professor" (aka Roy Hinkley) in Gilligan's Island, a role that he'd continued to essay on and off for the next two decades in Gilligan cartoons and TV-movie spin-offs. Johnson worked in television through the 1980s and early '90s before retiring from acting; he died in 2014 at age 89.

Trivia: A law student at the University of Madrid, Fortunio Bonanova switched his major to music at Madrid's Real Conservatory and the Paris Conservatory. Bonanova inaugurated his operatic career as a baritone at the age of 17. By age 21 he was in films, producing, directing and starring in a silent production of Don Juan (1921). He spent most of the 1920s singing at the Paris opera and writing books, plays and short stories; he arrived in America in 1930 to co-star with Katherine Cornell on Broadway. At the invitation of his friend Orson Welles, Bononova portrayed the feverish singing teacher Signor Matisti in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Fortunio Bonanova remained gainfully employed in Hollywood as a character actor into the early 1960s.

Trivia: Born Harold Albershart, he played football and modeled before working as a stage actor in the late '20s. He debuted onscreen in Not Quite Decent (1929), playing the romantic lead; he had similar roles in 25 films made during the '30s at various studios. He began starring in serials in 1940. In 1944 he made his first starring Western, and for almost a decade he was a Western star, twice appearing (1951 and 1953) on the Top Ten Western Money-makers list and appearing in over 100 features and serials, often with his "wonder" horse Blackjack; he portrayed Red Ryder in eight films, then adopted the name "Rocky" Lane in 1947. After B-movie Westerns fizzled out in 1953 his career came to a virtual halt, and he had supporting roles in just three more films. In the '60s he was the dubbed voice of the talking horse on the TV sitcom Mr. Ed.

Trivia: American actor Trevor Bardette could truly say that he died for a living. In the course of a film career spanning three decades, the mustachioed, granite-featured Bardette was "killed off" over 40 times as a screen villain. Entering movies in 1936 after abandoning a planned mechanical engineering career for the Broadway stage, Bardette was most often seen as a rustler, gangster, wartime collaborator and murderous backwoodsman. His screen skullduggery carried over into TV; one of Bardette's best remembered video performances was as a "human bomb" on an early episode of Superman. Perhaps being something of a reprobate came naturally to Trevor Bardette -- or so he himself would claim in later years when relating a story of how, as a child, he'd won ten dollars writing an essay on "the evils of tobacco," only to be caught smoking behind the barn shortly afterward.

Trivia: An alumnus of both Washington State University and Pomona College, Addison Richards began acting on an amateur basis in California's Pilgrimage Play, then became associate director of the Pasadena Playhouse. In films from 1933, Richards was one of those dependable, distinguished types, a character player of the Samuel S. Hinds/Charles Trowbridge/John Litel school. Like those other gentlemen, Richards was perfectly capable of alternating between respectable authority figures and dark-purposed villains. He was busiest at such major studios as MGM, Warners, and Fox, though he was willing to show up at Monogram and PRC if the part was worth playing. During the TV era, Addison Richards was a regular on four series: He was narrator/star of 1953's Pentagon USA, wealthy Westerner Martin Kingsley on 1958's Cimarron City, Doc Gamble in the 1959 video version of radio's Fibber McGee and Molly, and elderly attorney John Abbott on the short-lived 1963 soap opera Ben Jerrod.

Trivia: Chinese/American actor Victor Sen Yung would always be limited by stereotype in his selection of film roles, but it cannot be denied that he did rather well for himself within those limitations. Billed simply as Sen Yung in his earliest films, the actor was elevated to semi-stardom as Jimmy Chan, number two son of screen sleuth Charlie Chan. He first essayed Jimmy in 1938's Charlie Chan in Honolulu, replacing number one son Keye Luke (both Luke and Yung would co-star in the 1948 Chan adventure The Feathered Serpent). Not much of an actor at the outset, Yung received on-the-job training in the Chan films, and by 1941 was much in demand for solid character roles. With the absence of genuine Japanese actors during World War II (most were in relocation camps), Yung specialized in assimilated, sophisticated, but nearly always villainous Japanese in such films as Across the Pacific (1942). Remaining busy into the '50s, Yung co-starred in both the stage and screen versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. His longest-lasting assignment in the '60s was as temperamental cook Hop Sing on the TV series Bonanza. Victor Sen Yung died in his North Hollywood home of accidental asphyxiation at the age of 65.

Trivia: "Male ingénue" Theodore Newton was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1933, whereupon he spent the next year or so playing nominal romantic leads in films like the George Arliss vehicles The Working Man and Voltaire. Newton was given the chance to toughen up his callow screen image when he was loaned out to Monogram to play a fast-talking crime reporter in The Sphinx (1933), which remains his most memorable film performance. After playing a handful of secondary roles for RKO, he left Hollywood in 1935 to concentrate on stage work. Theodore Newton returned to the screen as a character actor in 1945, playing various authority figures (usually military officers) until his retirement in 1959.

Trivia: Blessed with matinee idol looks, an athletic physique, and a generous supply of talent, Francis J. McDonald entered films in 1912 after brief stage experience. A popular leading man of the teen years, McDonald segued into villainous characterizations in the 1920s, notably as the title character in Buster Keaton's Battling Butler (1926). He remained busy during the talkie era, primarily as a mustachioed heavy in "B" westerns and a featured player in the films of Cecil B. DeMille. Francis J. McDonald was at one time the husband of the "ever popular" Mae Busch.

Trivia: The daughter of musicians, this sultry femme fatale of late-'50s horror flicks had been the "White Rain" girl in television commercials before entering films in James Cagney's Short Cut to Hell (1957). (Prior to that she had reportedly been an extra in Sunset Blvd. (1950) while attending U.C.L.A.) Trained as a singer, Yvette Vickers (born Van Vedder) drifted into B-movies when the Cagney film flopped and is today best remembered for the horror movies she did for Roger Corman: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), as Allison Hayes's slatternly rival, and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). In the latter, playing Bruno Ve Sota's sluttish young wife, she is dragged into an underwater cage by the title creatures despite always professing a deep fear of drowning, her visible terror apparently quite real. Vickers, who did her fair share of television and stage appearances, was at the time better known for her extracurricular activities -- including a 15-year relationship with actor Jim Hutton and an on-again/off-again affair with Cary Grant -- and for a couple of important film roles that somehow slipped away: Lana Turner's daughter in Imitation of Life (1959) and the Carroll Baker part in The Carpetbaggers (1964). In later years, she concentrated on her singing career and made frequent personal appearances to discuss her work for Corman. On a bizarre note, Vickers was found deceased at her house in May 2011 in a condition which suggested that the body had been dead but lay undiscovered for nearly a year. No cause of death was immediately disclosed.

Trivia: A blonde leading lady of horror flicks and B-Westerns, Marjorie Stapp from Little Rock, AR, worked as a secretary for mobster Bugsy Siegel -- "but I didn't know it until he was murdered and I recognized his picture in the papers," she later stated. She also had a walk-on in Danny Kaye's The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), then returned to school until signing with 20th Century Fox in 1949. She didn't do much for Fox, however, but did pop up in two Durango Kid B-Western entries for Columbia -- Laramie and The Blazing Trail (1949) -- as well as playing Queen Guinevere in the serial Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949). Stapp's modicum of fame, however, rests with her sometimes rather brief appearances in low-budget horror and sci-fi movies of the 1950s, including The Indestructible Man (1956), The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), and Kronos (1957). Extremely busy on television as well, Stapp popped up in such diverse series as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Millionaire, Ann Sothern, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Brady Bunch, Jake and the Fatman, Quantum Leap, and a 1991 Columbo TV-movie Death Hits the Jackpot.