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: Following studies at the Theatre Guild, Linda Watkins made her Broadway debut when she was only 16 years old. She subsequently became a major theatrical star and played both leading ladies and ingénues. During the early '30s, she appeared in a few films, but she did not achieve the same popularity and so returned to the stage until the late '50s when she became a screen character actress.

Trivia: Chunky Boston-born actor Roland Winters was 19 when he played his first character role in the New York theatrical production The Firebrand. In the 1930s, he entered radio, serving as an announcer and foil for such performers as Kate Smith and Kay Kyser. In 1947, Winters became the fifth actor to essay the role of aphorism-spouting Oriental detective Charlie Chan. While Winters' six low-budget Chan entries are generally disliked by movie buffs, it can now be seen that the genially hammy actor brought a much needed breath of fresh air to the flagging film series with his self-mocking, semi-satirical interpretation of Charlie. A good friend of actor James Cagney, Winters showed up in several Cagney vehicles of the 1950s, notably A Lion Is in the Streets (1953) and Never Steal Anything Small (1959). Roland Winters continued to flourish in colorful supporting roles into the 1960s, and was also seen as a regular on the TV sitcoms Meet Millie (1952), The New Phil Silvers Show (1963), and The Smothers Brothers Show (1965).

Trivia: American character actor Lou Krugman appeared in a few feature films from the late '50s through the early '60s including I Want to Live! (1958) but may be best known for his work on radio. He is said to have appeared on over 10,000 broadcasts and did over 700 voiceovers for television commercials.

Trivia: In movies -- a career path that he didn't begin until he was 71 years old -- Edgar Stehli was known as a gifted character actor, capable of making small parts memorable and transforming larger supporting roles into parts rivaling the stars' prominence in whatever work he was in. He naturally played old-man parts, in everything from Westerns (No Name on the Bullet) to science fiction and fantasy (4D Man, the Twilight Zone episode "Long Live Walter Jameson"), and was in numerous major movies, including Robert Wise's Executive Suite and John Frankenheimer's Seconds. But for 40 years before that, he was a successful stage actor and, later, a busy radio actor as well. Born in Paris, France in 1884, Stehli came to America at age three and was raised in Montclair, NJ, where he resided his entire adult life. He attended Cornell University and earned a master's degree in Teutonic languages. He was planning on a career as a linguist when fate -- in the form of a touring company doing the play Raffles -- came through town and enlisted Stehli for a small role as a butler. From that point on, there was no looking back for Stehli, who abandoned linguistics in favor of the theater. Every few years after that, some critic or other, either in New York's Greenwich Village or some venue to the west, north, or south, would "discover" a great "new" talent in Edgar Stehli, as Bunthorne in a Village production of Patience or playing Osric on-stage with John Barrymore in Hamlet. He was never without work and ultimately cast in great roles in major plays, including portraying Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace to Boris Karloff's Jonathan Brewster. As a New York-based actor, film work eluded Stehli for the first 50 years of his career, and didn't seem to interest him. Instead, he turned to radio, most visibly as the voice of the sagely Dr. Huer in Buck Rogers, although by his own account he played hundreds of judges and other characters routinely defined as older authority figures. He turned to television -- which was also mostly produced in New York in those days -- in the late '40s, and it wasn't until 1954, when Stehli was 71, that he made his movie debut. With his wrinkled features, slightly raspy yet gentle voice, and wizened yet troubled eyes, he often was called upon to play crafty or tormented old men (who were sometimes both, witnessed by his work as Dr. Carson, the aging head of the research lab in Irvin S. Yeaworth's 4D Man, concerned about his advancing age and fading reputation, and not above stealing or being complicit in the theft of an idea or invention). One of his best screen roles, oddly enough, was in a Western, Jack Arnold's No Name on the Bullet (1958), as an ex-judge who is hiding a secret that may kill him before his terminal illness does. And in the Twilight Zone episode "Long Live Walter Jameson," he is fascinating to watch as an aging academic who learns, to his horror, what beating the aging process has done to a "younger" colleague of his. Stehli worked all through the '60s, in every genre from drama (Parrish) to sci-fi and fantasy (Seconds, Atlantis, the Lost Continent). He retired in 1970 and passed away three years later, at age 90.

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.