Trivia: Born Thelma Ford, Shirley Booth began appearing in amateur plays at age 12, then made her professional stage debut four years later; her Broadway debut, in 1925, was opposite Humphrey Bogart in Hells' Bells. Booth toiled on Broadway for a decade before being cast in her first significant role. Ultimately, her work on stage and radio led to a lead role in Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), for which she won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award; she made her screen debut in the film version of that play (1952) and won the Best Actress Oscar for her efforts. Booth did a number of other films, but in her later years she was best-known as the maid Hazel in the TV series Hazel (1961-66). She retired after appearing in the TV series A Touch of Grace (1973).

Trivia: Character actor Don Defore was the son of an Iowa-based locomotive engineer. His first taste of acting came while appearing in church plays directed by his mother. Defore briefly thought of becoming an attorney, but gave up a scholarship to the University of Iowa to study at the Pasadena Playhouse. He began appearing in films in 1937 and in professional theatre in 1938, billed under his given name of Deforest. Defore's career turning point was the Broadway play The Male Animal, in which he played a thickheaded college football player; he repeated the role in the 1942 film version, and later played a larger part in the 1952 remake She's Working Her Way Through College. In most of his film assignments, Defore was cast as the good-natured urbanized "rube" who didn't get the girl. For several years in the 1950s, Defore played "Thorny" Thornberry, the Nelson family's well-meaning next door neighbor, on TV's Ozzie and Harriet. Don Defore's best-known TV role was George Baxter on the Shirley Booth sitcom Hazel (1961-65).

Trivia: Dark-haired, diminutive Susan Silo -- 5' 3" and 105 pounds -- has had a multifaceted career. She began as a teenage recording artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the decades that followed, she grew into a stage, screen and television actress, eventually establishing herself as a voice artist in movies and television. Born in New York City in 1942 to a family of theatrical performers, she made her professional debut at age 4 and worked steadily on radio, television and the stage during her pre-teen years. She attended Performing Arts High School of Music And Art (now the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School) in NYC. At age 15, she took over the role of Rosalita in the Broadway production of West Side Story. At the end of the 1950s, she moved to California to pursue opportunities on the small screen. Silo's television career began with appearances in episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Sea Hunt, The Ann Sothern Show, Ripcord, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Her short stature and youth made her an ideal portrayer of wholesome American teenagers, while her dark good looks allowed her to take on more exotic roles as well. She also revealed a natural flair for comedy that manifested itself on series such as Burke's Law and McHale's Navy. The latter show paired her with Tim Conway in an extended physical comedy sequence involving a runaway PT boat that was almost worthy of Buster Keaton and Marion Mack in The General (1927). And it led to her big-screen debut, also paired with Conway, in McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force (1965). Silo continued to work in series television for the rest of the decade, appearing on shows such as Dr. Kildare, Bonanza, Batman, Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. After the late 1970s, Silo began specializing in voice work, in animated series such as The Smurfs, and later moved into feature films in the same capacity. Her sole credited on-screen acting appearance of the 1980s was in an episode of L.A. Law. Since then, apart from the occasional on-camera role in vehicles such as Kiss Toledo Goodbye, Silo has remained an extremely busy voice artist.

Trivia: The daughter of a retired sea captain, British actress Norma Varden was a piano prodigy. After study in Paris, she played concerts into her teens, but at last decided that this was be an uncertain method of making a living--so she went to the "security" of acting. In her first stage appearance in Peter Pan, Varden, not yet twenty, portrayed the adult role of Mrs. Darling, setting the standard for her subsequent stage and film work; too tall and mature-looking for ingenues, she would enjoy a long career in character roles. Bored with dramatic assignments, Varden gave comedy a try at the famous Aldwych Theatre, where from 1929 through 1933 she was resident character comedienne in the theatre's well-received marital farces. After her talkie debut in the Aldwych comedy A Night Like This (1930), she remained busy on the British film scene for over a decade. Moving to Hollywood in 1941, she found that the typecasting system frequently precluded large roles: Though she was well served as Robert Benchley's wife in The Major and the Minor (1942), for example, her next assignment was the unbilled role of a pickpocket victim's wife in Casablanca (1942). Her work encompassed radio as well as films for the rest of the decade; in nearly all her assignments Norma played a haughty British or New York aristocrat who looked down with disdain at the "commoners." By the '50s, she was enjoying such sizeable parts as the society lady who is nearly strangled by Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train (1951), the bejeweled wife of "sugar daddy" Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and George Sanders' dragonlike mother in Jupiter's Darling (1955). Norma Varden's greatest film role might have been as the mother superior in The Sound of Music (1965), but the producers decided to go with Peggy Wood, consigning Varden to the small but showy part of Frau Schmidt, the Von Trapps' housekeeper. After countless television and film assignments, Norma Varden retired in 1972, spending most of her time thereafter as a spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild, battling for better medical benefits for older actors.

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from 1963.

Trivia: An imposing presence in films of the late '40s, as well as early television shows such as The Aldrich Family (1949), New York stage actor Howard I. Smith actually made his screen debut as far back as 1918, in Young America. Relocating to Hollywood in 1946, Smith usually played overbearing politicos or other figures of authority, but is perhaps best remembered today as Uncle Charley in the 1951 screen version Death of a Salesman.