Trivia: The son of show business people, he studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He worked in stock, then in 1951 he debuted on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo. In 1952 he was drafted to fight in the Korean War, but he was exempted as a conscientious objector; instead, he worked with refugees. Not until 1955 did he return to acting, appearing in Broadway's The Skin of Our Teeth; Joshua Logan spotted him in the play, and signed him to appear in Bus Stop (1956), his screen debut; for his portrayal of a cowboy who romances Marilyn Monroe he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. While making the film he met actress Hope Lange, and the two of them were married that same year; they divorced in 1961. With a few exceptions, his later screen roles were unrewarding, though he remained fairly busy through the mid '60s; he has continued appearing on screen intermittently. He has occasionally produced, directed, and/or co-written films. He starred in the late '60s TV series The Outcasts, and later costarred in the series Knots Landing. He is known as a highly principled man of strong social and political convictions.

Trivia: Lee Remick began her career as a dancer, then after acting onstage and TV she debuted onscreen in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Remick went on to a series of strong screen performances which established her as a major leading lady; for her work in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She sustained a fairly busy screen career into the late '70s, meanwhile also working often on the stage and TV. From 1957-68 Remick was married to TV director-producer William Colleran. In 1970 she married director William Rory "Kip" Gowens, with whom she moved to England. In the '80s she rarely appeared onscreen but increased her work in TV movies and mini-series. In 1988 she formed a production company in partnership with James Garner and Peter Duchow. Remick died from cancer at age 55.

Trivia: A holder of a BA degree from the University of San Francisco, Richard Egan was an Army judo instructor during WorldWar II. While working towards his MA in theatre at Stanford University, the rugged Egan was discovered by a Warner Bros. talent scout. After his apprenticeship in supporting roles, Egan was signed as a leading man by 20th Century-Fox, where he was touted as "another Gable." Most comfortable in brawling adventure films, Egan proved a capable dramatic actor in such films as A View from Pompey's Head (1955). Many of his starring appearances in the 1960s were in such esoterica as Esther and the King (1960) and The 300 Spartans (1962) and in foreign-filmed westerns. In 1962, Egan starred as Jim Redigo, foreman of a sprawling New Mexico ranch, in the contemporary western TV series Empire; for its second season, the series was shortened from one hour to thirty minutes per week, and retitled Redigo. During his last decade, Richard Egan was a prolific dinner-theatre star throughout the U.S., and also appeared as Samuel Clegg II on the TV daytime drama Capitol.

Trivia: Stuart Whitman, with a rugged build and sensitive face, rose from bit player to competent lead actor, but never did make it as a popular star in film. The San Francisco-born Whitman served three years with the Army Corps of Engineers where he was a light heavyweight boxer in his spare time. He next went on to study drama at the Los Angeles City College where he joined a Chekhov stage group. He began his film career in the early '50s as a bit player. Although never a star, he did manage to quietly accumulate $100 million dollars through shrewd investments in securities, real estate, cattle, and Thoroughbreds. For his role as a sex offender attempting to change in the 1961 British film The Mark, Whitman was nominated for an Oscar. In addition to features, Whitman has also appeared extensively on television.

Trivia: A graduate of Bowdoin college, Albert Dekker made his professional acting bow with a Cincinnati stock company in 1927. Within a few months he was featured in the Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions. After a decade's worth of impressive theatrical appearance, Dekker made his first film, 1937's The Great Garrick. Usually cast as villains, Dekker was starred in the Technicolor horror film Dr. Cyclops (1940) and played a fascinating dual role in the 1941 suspenser Among the Living. Dekker's offscreen preoccupation with politics led to his winning a California State Assembly seat in 1944; during the McCarthy era, Dekker became an outspoken critic of the Wisconsin senator's tactics, and as a result the actor found it hard to get work in Hollywood. He returned to Broadway, then made a movie comeback in 1959. During his last decade, Dekker alternated between film, stage and TV assignments; he also embarked on several college-campus lecture tours. In May of 1968, Dekker was found strangled to death in his Hollywood home. His naked body was bound hand and foot, a hypodermic needle was jammed into each arm, and obscenities were scrawled all over the corpse. At first, it seemed that Dekker was a closet homosexual who had committed suicide (early reports suggested that the writings on his body were his bad movie reviews) or had died while having rough sex. While the kinky particulars of the case were never officially explained, it was finally ruled that Albert Dekker had died of accidental asphyxiation.

Trivia: A third-generation actor, Harold J. Stone made his stage debut at age six with his father, Jacob Hochstein, in the Yiddish-language play White Slaves. Stone had one line--"Mama!"--which he managed to forget on opening night. He didn't act again until after his graduation from New York University. After gleaning valuable experience in radio, he returned to the stage in George Jessel's production of Little Old New York at the 1939 World's Fair. Stone made his Broadway bow shortly afterward in Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make, and thereafter was seldom unemployed. In 1952, he began the first of many TV-series gigs when he replaced Philip Loeb as Jake on The Goldbergs; within a decade, he was averaging 20 TV appearances per year. In films from 1956, the harsh-voiced, authoritative Stone was most often seen as big-city detective (as in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man), generals, and gangsters (he was Frank Nitti in 1967's St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually billed at the top of the supporting cast, Stone enjoyed a rare above-the-title starring assignment when he played investigator John Kennedy in the 1959 syndicated TV series Grand Jury. His other weekly-series roles included Hamilton Greeley (a character based on New Yorker maven Harold Ross) in My World and Welcome to It (1969) and Sam Steinberg in Bridget Loves Bernie (1972). In the latter stages of his career, Harold J. Stone unexpectedly found himself a favorite of Jerry Lewis, co-starring in Lewis' The Big Mouth (1967), Which Way to the Front? (1970) and Hardly Working (1980).

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.

Trivia: Actress Jean Willes spent the first ten years of her life shuttling up and down the West Coast; born in Los Angeles, she was raised in Salt Lake City, then moved with her family to Seattle. In 1943, she made her film debut in So Proudly We Hail. Shortly afterward, she was signed by Columbia Pictures, billed under her given name, Jean Donahue. She was busiest in Columbia's B-pictures, Westerns, and two-reel comedies, playing a statuesque brunette foil for such comedians as the Three Stooges, Sterling Holloway, Hugh Herbert, and Bert Wheeler. In 1947, she changed her billing to her married name, Jean Willes. Some of her most memorable feature-film roles included the hostess at the New Congress Club who delivers a bored, by-rote recitation of the club's rules in From Here to Eternity (1953); Kevin McCarthy's "zombie-fied" nurse in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); one of Clark Gable's quartet of leading ladies in A King and Four Queens (1956); the lady lieutenant who chews out Andy Griffith in No Time for Sergeants (1958); and Ernest Borgnine's would-be-sweetheart in McHale's Navy (1964). Jean Willes also made some 400 TV appearances (often as a sharp-tongued, down-to-earth blonde) in such series as The Jack Benny Show, The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Born and raised in the Greenwich Village section of New York, Douglas Fowley did his first acting while attending St. Francis Xavier Military Academy. A stage actor and night club singer/dancer during the regular theatrical seasons, Fowley took such jobs as athletic coach and shipping clerk during summer layoff. He made his first film, The Mad Game, in 1933. Thanks to his somewhat foreboding facial features, Fowley was usually cast as a gangster, especially in the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Laurel and Hardy "B" films churned out by 20th Century-Fox in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of his few romantic leading roles could be found in the 1942 Hal Roach "streamliner" The Devil with Hitler. While at MGM in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fowley essayed many roles both large and small, the best of which was the terminally neurotic movie director in Singin' in the Rain (1952). Fowley actually did sit in the director's chair for one best-forgotten programmer, 1960's Macumba Love, which he also produced. On television, Fowley made sporadic appearances as Doc Holliday in the weekly series Wyatt Earp (1955-61). In the mid-1960s, Fowley grew his whiskers long and switched to portraying Gabby Hayes-style old codgers in TV shows like Pistols and Petticoats and Detective School: One Flight Up, and movies like Homebodies (1974) and North Avenue Irregulars (1979); during this period, the actor changed his on-screen billing to Douglas V. Fowley.

Trivia: To western fans, the nickname "Fuzzy" invokes fond memories of two first-rate comedy sidekicks: Al "Fuzzy" St. John and John Forest "Fuzzy" Knight. Knight inaugurated his career at age 15 with a tent minstrel troupe. His skill as a musician enabled him to work his way through West Virginia University, after which he headed his own band. Among Knight's theatrical credits in the '20s was the 1927 edition of Earl Carroll's Vanities and the 1928 "book" musical Here's How. Mae West caught Knight's act on the Keith vaudeville circuit and cast the bucolic entertainer in her 1933 film vehicle She Done Him Wrong; he would later show up playing West's country cousin in the actress' last important film, My Little Chickadee (1940). Usually essaying comedy roles, Knight was effective in the his dramatic scenes in Paramount's Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), wherein he tearfully sings a mountain ballad at the funeral of little Spanky McFarland. Knight's B-western comedy sidekick activity peaked in the mid '40s (he appeared most often with Johnny Mack Brown), after which his film roles diminished as his fondness for the bottle increased. Promising to behave himself (at least during filming), Fuzzy Knight signed on in 1955 for Buster Crabbe's popular TV adventure series Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion; for the next two years, Knight played a semi-serious legionnaire -- named Private Fuzzy Knight.

Trivia: Veteran B-Western player Steven Darrell (aka J. Stevan Darrell) got the acting bug early, playing Abraham Lincoln in a grade-school tableau. He made his professional debut with the Galloway Players of Pittsfield, MA, and his West Coast bow with the famed Pasadena Playhouse in 1937. Darrell, who told an interviewer that he "enjoyed all kind of character roles, the more villainous the better," went on to menace nearly every cowboy hero around, from Roy Rogers to Whip Wilson, appearing in more than 100 films and over 200 television segments. Retiring after a 1967 episode of television's Daniel Boone, the veteran actor died from a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 63.

Trivia: American actor Tom Greenway appeared in numerous films between the late '40s and early '60s. He got his start on Broadway where he appeared in a number of productions before serving in the U.S. Air Force during WW II. While flying a mission he was shot down, and he spent over a year in Italian and German POW camps. Following his release, Greenway launched his film career.

Trivia: More familiar for his radio work than his film appearances, American actor Ben Wright was active professionally from the early '40s. Dialects were a specialty with Wright, as witness his two-year hitch as Chinese bellhop Hey Boy on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel. Most of Wright's film roles were supporting or bit appearances in such productions as A Man Called Peter (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Fortune Cookie (1964). On TV, Wright was one of Jack Webb's stock company (including fellow radio veterans Virginia Gregg, Stacy Harris, and Vic Perrin) on the '60s version of Dragnet. Ben Wright's most frequently seen film appearance was as the humorless Nazi functionary Herr Zeller in the 1965 megahit The Sound of Music.