Trivia: Brassy blonde leading lady Shirley Eaton could be labelled the British equivalent of such American "blonde bombshells" as Barbara Nichols, Joyce Jameson and Joi Lansing. From her first film appearance in 1954 onward, Eaton excelled in roles calling for equal parts comic know-how and feminine pulchritude. Later in her career, Eaton essayed a number of straight dramatic roles. Shirley Eaton is best known for her brief assignment as the unfortunate gold-painted girl in the 1964 James Bond caper Goldfinger, though it was necessary to hire a voice actress to dub over Shirley's provincial speech patterns.

Trivia: The son of a San Francisco shoe factory owner, American actor Lloyd Nolan made it clear early on that he had no intention of entering the family business. Nolan developed an interest in acting while in college, at the expense of his education -- it took him five years to get through Santa Clara College, and he flunked out of Stanford, all because of time spent in amateur theatricals. Attempting a "joe job" on a freighter, Nolan gave it up when the freighter burned to the waterline. In 1927, he began studying at the Pasadena Playhouse, living on the inheritance left him by his father. Stock company work followed, and in 1933 Nolan scored a Broadway hit as vengeful small-town dentist Biff Grimes in One Sunday Afternoon (a role played in three film versions by Gary Cooper, James Cagney, and Dennis Morgan, respectively -- but never by Nolan). Nolan's first film was Stolen Harmony (1935); his breezy urban manner and Gaelic charm saved the actor from being confined to the bad guy parts he played so well, and by 1940 Nolan was, if not a star, certainly one of Hollywood's most versatile second-echelon leading men. As film historian William K. Everson has pointed out, the secret to Nolan's success was his integrity -- the audience respected his characters, even when he was the most cold-blooded of villains. The closest Nolan got to film stardom was a series of B detective films made at 20th Century-Fox from 1940 to 1942, in which he played private eye Michael Shayne -- a "hard-boiled dick" character long before Humphrey Bogart popularized this type as Sam Spade. Nolan was willing to tackle any sort of acting, from movies to stage to radio, and ultimately television, where he starred as detective Martin Kane in 1951; later TV stints would include a season as an IRS investigator in the syndicated Special Agent 7 (1958), and three years as grumpy-growley Dr. Chegley on the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia (1969-1971). In 1953, Nolan originated the role of the paranoid Captain Queeg in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, wherein he'd emerge from a pleasant backstage nap to play some of the most gut-wrenching "character deterioration" scenes ever written. Never your typical Hollywood celebrity, Nolan publicly acknowledged that he and his wife had an autistic son, proudly proclaiming each bit of intellectual or social progress the boy would make -- this at a time when many image-conscious movie star-parents barely admitted even having children, normal or otherwise. Well liked by his peers, Nolan was famous (in an affectionate manner) for having a photographic memory for lines but an appallingly bad attention span in real life; at times he was unable to give directions to his own home, and when he did so the directions might be three different things to three different people. A thorough professional to the last, Nolan continued acting in sizeable roles into the 1980s; he was terrific as Maureen O'Sullivan's irascible stage-star husband in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Lloyd Nolan's last performance was as an aging soap opera star on an episode of the TV series Murder She Wrote; star Angela Lansbury, fiercely protective of an old friend and grand trouper, saw to it that Nolan's twilight-years reliance upon cue cards was cleverly written into the plot line of the episode.

Trivia: Broadway columnist Hy Gardner worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1951 to 1966. Following the paper's demise, he hosted a television show Glad You Asked That, and appeared as a panelist on To Tell the Truth. In 1963, Gardner made his first and last foray into films playing a reporter in The Girl Hunters.

Trivia: Throughout most of his career Scott Peters appeared in low-budget horror movies and actioners. Though primarily a supporting actor, Peters occasionally won leading roles in features like Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and The Girl Hunters (1963). In the mid-'70s, Peters played Detective Valencia in the television drama Get Christie Love (1974).

Trivia: Having studied for a business career at Boston University, Charles Farrell switched professional gears by breaking into films as an extra. After a brief apprenticeship in Mack Sennett 2-reelers, Farrell rose to stardom at Fox Studios, where he was teamed with Janet Gaynor in such romantic dramas as Seventh Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928). The popularity of the Gaynor/Farrell team survived the switch-over to talkies, especially when both Gaynor and Farrell proved to have pleasant singing voices in 1929's Sunny Side Up. Farrell's odd New England accent led many to believe he was British, an assumption that he did little to discourage. As the 1930s progressed, Farrell's stardom diminished, and by 1938 he was playing second fiddle to Fox's newest attraction, Shirley Temple, in Just Around the Corner. Harking back to his collegiate business acumen, Farrell opened up the prosperous Hollywood Racquet Club in Palm Springs, in partnership with Ralph Bellamy. A major factor in the prosperity of Palm Springs in the 1950s, Farrell was elected mayor of the community, a position he held for seven years. Also during this decade, Farrell co-starred with Gale Storm on the popular TV sitcom My Little Margie; he also headlined the 1956 Charlie Farrell Show, the latter sitcom virtually a 39-week commercial for the Racquet Club. Not to be confused with the Irish character actor of same name, Charles Farrell was long-married to former film actress Virginia Valli.

Trivia: Born in Canada, actor Bill Nagy spent the bulk of his career in England...playing Americans. He was particularly adept at gangsters and thugs, as witness such films as Joe MacBeth (1956) and Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters (1963) and his TV guest-star stints on The Avengers, The Saint, and Secret Agent. Nagy had a varied choice of roles in British/American productions like Road to Hong Kong (1962), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) and The Adding Machine in Hong Kong...er, The Adding Machine (1968). In First Man into Space (1957), Nagy convincingly played a New Mexico police chief, although the film's British countryside was decidedly more forrested than the real American Southwest. In a later sci-fi assignment, Nagy played the President of a quasi-American nation where reproduction is a capital crime in the futuristic Z P G (1972). Perhaps the biggest moneymaking film with which Bill Nagy was associated was Goldfinger; as Midnight, Nagy was a member of a powerful gangster cartel which was inhospitably rubbed out by the villainous Mr. Goldfinger (Gert Frobe).