Trivia: Often cited as the man who "defined" rock and roll, African American singer/musician Chuck Berry was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in St. Louis in 1926. Berry was guitarist for several Rhythm & Blues groups in the 1950s, notably Johnny Johnson's. In 1955, Berry recorded his first hit, "Maybelline." While many of his songs were "covered" by white artists in the race-conscious 1950s, Berry himself could still be heard on some emboldened radio stations who weren't concerned about offending the bigots. In movies almost from the moment he hit the charts, Berry was given guest spots in Rock Rock Rock (56) Mr. Rock and Roll (57) and Go, Johnny Go (58). Having appeared with disc jockey Alan Freed in the last two films, Berry was a logical choice to appear in the 1978 Freed biopic American Hot Wax, which starred Gary Busey. Chuck Berry was the whole show in the 1987 "rockumentary" Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll!. Berry died in 2017, at age 90.

Trivia: "I am what I am! Shut up!" So went the catchphrase shrieked by flamboyantly pompadoured R&B legend Little Richard whenever he made one of his frequent 1970s talk-show appearances. One of the earliest African American singers to cross over into the "white" charts, Little Richard was also among the first black pop artists of the 1950s to show up in a mainstream film. That production was 1956's The Girl Can't Help It, wherein Little Richard belted forth the title tune and a second number, "She's Got It." Most of Little Richard's subsequent film appearances have been guest shots, though he did have an extended supporting role -- playing a thinly disguised version of himself named "Orvis Goodnight" -- in the 1986 comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

Trivia: Known to one and all as "The Killer," mercurial rock & roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis was a child piano prodigy. Lewis was barely out of high school when he was signed by Nashville's Sun Records. Rising rapidly to the top of the charts with such hits as "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," Lewis was for many years regarded as the chief rival to Elvis Presley. His fortunes declined spectacularly in 1958 when his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Brown earned him widespread condemnation. After 12 years of performing in seedy night clubs and saloons, he made a spectacular comeback in 1970, only to suffer another setback when one of his later wives died under mysterious circumstances. He managed to survive this and many other scandals, continuing to chart his own professional course in his own way well into the 1980s. He appeared in a handful of films, notably High School Confidential (1958), and in 1988 was impersonated by Dennis Quaid in a flamboyant biopic, Great Balls of Fire. Jerry Lee Lewis is the cousin of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and night club entrepreneur Mickey Gilley.

Trivia: Rock 'n' roll and R&B singer and musician Bo Diddley first appeared onscreen in 1966.

Trivia: There are few details of the short life of musical genius John Lennon that haven't been virtually memorized by his disciples. A bare-bones precis of his existence would include his Liverpool childhood, his formation of the Quarrymen, aka the Silver Beatles aka the Beatles in 1961, the world-wide fame, the drug-and-religion experimentation, the controversial alignment with Yoko Ono, the 1970 Beatles breakup, the five-year retirement (1975-80) to raise son Sean, and his senseless murder outside New York's Hotel Dakota in December of 1980. Lennon's film career, though but one small aspect of his creative energies, is worth a brief recap. First there were the films with his fellow Beatles: A Hard Day's Night (64), Help (65) (in which for two delicious seconds Lennon shamelessly plugs his recently published book of doggerel In His Own Write), Yellow Submarine (67) (that's Lance Percival doing his speaking voice, but that's Lennon in the vocals), Magical Mystery Tour (69) and Let It Be (70). There was Lennon's one-and-only solo acting assignment as a bespectacled British Tommy in How I Won The War (68) -- in which, as he watches his guts spill out of his body, he turns to the camera and says ominously "I knew this would happen. Didn't you?" There were the oddball, home-movielike projects, made with his friends and with Yoko Ono, of which Bottoms (an engaging if pointless study of the human derriere) is the most entertaining. And, best of all, there was the posthumous, lovingly assembled Imagine: John Lennon (88), including the famous 1969 anti-war "Bed-In," the TV confrontation with ultraconservative cartoonist Al Capp, never before seen footage of Lennon at home and at work, and of course several plaintive renditions of the title song.