Trivia: The epitome of the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" mentality and "Que Sera Sera" mantra, Doris Day has weathered the numerous storms of both career and personal life, using these carefree and easygoing sentiments as a testament to the endearing endurance and eternal optimism that defines her infectiously positive outlook on life.Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Evanston, OH, Day's optimistic philosophies would be tested from her earliest experiences. With childhood dreams of becoming a ballerina dashed after being involved in a near-fatal car crash, Day took to heart her mother's suggestion of refining her skills as a vocalist. Possessing a voice of distinct beauty at the youthful age of 14, Day was soon discovered by a vocal coach who arranged an appearance on a local radio station WLW. The rest, as they say, is history.Soon after her radio appearance, Day was approached by local bandleader Barney Rapp, leading the young songstress to adopt the moniker that would soon become a household name. Revealing her birth name to Rapp after auditioning with the song "Day By Day," Rapp jokingly suggested that her name was nice, though a little long for the theater's marquee. With her auditioning ballad becoming the inspiration for her stage persona, 14-year-old Day now had all the makings of a starlet ripe with potential. Discovered shortly after by big-band maestro Les Brown in 1940, Day toured briefly with his band, soon departing to accept the marriage proposal of sweetheart Al Jorden and pursue dreams of starting a family. Day's matrimonial happiness was short-lived, however, when Jorden's violent and jealous tendencies proved to be too much to take. Soon after the birth of their son in 1942, the couple divorced and Day rejoined Les Brown and his band, leading to the collaboration that would project the young singer into the heart of millions -- "Sentimental Journey."Day's contribution to film began with her appearance in Warner Bros.' romantic musical Romance on the High Seas (1948). The film, in which she co-starred with Jack Carson, was recognized with an Oscar nomination for the song "It's Magic," providing young Day with her first success as a pop singer. Throughout the 1950s, Day's wholesome image sustained her film career with successful turns in musicals (Calamity Jane [1953]) and romantic comedies (Teacher's Pet [1958]). Day's successful film career continued well into the 1960s with highlights including Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Pajama Game (1957), and Pillow Talk (1959). The latter is considered among the best of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies, with her image as the innocently alluring virgin breathing new life into her previously wholesome persona.In April of 1968, just as she was beginning five-year contract with CBS for The Doris Day Show, Day's film career came to an abrupt end with the death of her husband/manager/producer Marty Melcher. Left penniless and deep in debt through a series of Melcher's sordid investments, Day soon bounced back. Awarded a 22-million-dollar settlement, Day found success in television with The Doris Day Show. Her future television ventures, including Doris Day Today (1975) and Doris Day's Best Friends (1985) (which included one of the last appearances of a gravely ill Rock Hudson) were just a few examples of Day's enthusiastic and enduring nature. In 1975 Doris Day authored her biography, Doris Day: Her Own Story, which became a number one best-seller. Day went on to become an active and vocal supporter of animal rights, focusing the majority of her attentions on her Animal League and Animal Foundation organizations, as well as owning the pet-friendly Cypress Inn in Carmel, CA.

Trivia: Born Louis Gendre in Marseille, France in 1921, Louis Jourdan (his mother's maiden name) was Hollywood's go-to Frenchman for the majority of his career, which spanned over five decades. He trained as an actor with Rene Simon at the Ecole Dramatique and made his onscreen debut in 1939, going on to play cultivated, polished, dashing lead roles in a number of French romantic comedies and dramas. After his father was arrested by the Gestapo, Louis and his two brothers joined the French underground; his film career came to a halt when he refused to act in Nazi propaganda films. In 1948 David O. Selznick invited him to Hollywood to appear in The Paradine Case (1948); he remained in the U.S. and went on to star in a number of Hollywood films. Jourdan quickly followed The Paradine Case with Letter From an Unknown Woman, opposite Joan Fontaine and a supporting role in Madame Bovary, directed by Vincente Minnelli. He continued to work in both France and Hollywood, often playing the French playboys. In 1958, he reteamed with Minnelli to play Gaston in the musical Gigi, opposite Leslie Caron, and got to showcase his singing voice in the film.He spent a significant part of his career filming adaptations of Alexandre Dumas works. He played the title character in The Count of Monte Cristo (1961) and later played the villain, De Villefort, in a TV movie of the same story, followed by a turn as D'Artagnan in The Man in the Iron Mask (1977). In 1983, he played a Bond villain, Kamal Khan, in Octopussy. Jourdan slowed his film output by the late 1980s, and made his last film, Year of the Comet, in 1992. He died in 2015, at age 93.

Trivia: Actor Barry Sullivan was a theater usher and department store employee at the time he made his first Broadway appearance in 1936. His "official" film debut was in the 1943 Western Woman of the Town, though in fact Sullivan had previously appeared in a handful of two-reel comedies produced by the Manhattan-based Educational Studios in the late '30s. A bit too raffish to be a standard leading man, Sullivan was better served in tough, aggressive roles, notably the title character in 1947's The Gangster and the boorish Tom Buchanan in the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby. One of his better film assignments of the 1950s was as the Howard Hawks-style movie director in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Sullivan continued appearing in movie roles of varying importance until 1978. A frequent visitor to television, Barry Sullivan starred as Sheriff Pat Garrett in the 1960s Western series The Tall Man, and was seen as the hateful patriarch Marcus Hubbard in a 1972 PBS production of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.

Trivia: Actor Frank Lovejoy was linked to show business before he was even born; his father was a salesman for the Pathe Film studio. After working as a Wall Street page, Lovejoy attended NYU, then acted in stock companies. He made his first Broadway appearance in 1934's Judgment Day. One of the busiest "Golden Age" radio actors, Lovejoy was heard in hundreds of soap operas, mystery programs and dramatic anthologies: from 1950 through 1952, he starred in the weekly radio crime drama Nightbeat. After his 1948 film debut in Black Bart, Lovejoy specialized in tough, cynical roles, such as the leading character in I Was a Communist For the FBI. From 1957 through 1959, he starred in the TV private eye series Meet McGraw. Frank Lovejoy died of a heart attack while appearing in a New Jersey production of The Best Man with his actress wife Joan Banks.

Trivia: The son of an Episcopal priest, John Gallaudet commenced his professional acting career after graduating from Williams College. He appeared on both Broadway and in stock opposite actors ranging from Fred Astaire to Helen Hayes. The slight, thinnish-haired Gallaudet spent several years in the 1930s as the resident character star of Columbia Pictures' "B" unit, playing everything from kindhearted doctors to serpentlike crooks. He owns the distinction of being one the few actors to ever "murder" Rita Hayworth, dispatching the lovely young actress with a poisoned baseball glove in the 1937 potboiler Girls Can Play. Active in films until the 1950s, John Gallaudet was well known and highly regarded throughout the film community for his off-camera vocation as a champion golfer.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Harlan Warde came to films in 1941 and remained before the cameras until the mid-'60s. During WWII, Warde played many a young man in uniform. Afterwards, he showed up in supporting roles as detectives, doctors, and ministers. One of Harlan Warde's last assignments was the recurring part of Sheriff Brannon on the TV Western series The Virginian (1962-1971).

Trivia: Husky, bushy-mustached, frequently unkempt Canadian actor Jack Kruschen appeared steadily on radio from 1938 onward. He began playing small film roles in 1949, often cast as minor villains and braying bullies. He became a cult favorite after playing one of the three earliest victims (the Hispanic one) of the Martian death ray in George Pal's War of the Worlds (1953). His larger film roles included MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer in the Carol Lynley version of Harlow (1965), and the remonstrative physician neighbor of Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960); the latter assignment copped a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar nomination for Kruschen. A tireless TV performer, Kruschen has guested in a variety of roles on most of the top video offerings, and was a regular in the 1977 sitcom Busting Loose, playing the father of Adam Arkin. Relatively inactive after 1980, Jack Kruschen made a welcome return in PBS' 1993 adaptation of Arthur Miller's The American Clock.

Trivia: One of the last of the serial queens, Canadian-born Aline Towne (born Bouchard) played the female lead in no less than five chapter plays between 1950 and 1953, all for Republic Pictures. By the 1950s, however, the once so thriving genre was threatened by television, which basically offered the same kind of juvenile excitement for free; in addition, Towne was less memorable than such earlier Republic cliffhanger stars as Jungle Girl's Frances Gifford and The Leopard Woman's Linda Stirling. To compound matters, Towne's leading men were far from top caliber: Richard Webb (Invisible Monster, 1950), Ken Curtis (Don Daredevil Rides Again, 1951), George Wallace (Radar Men From the Moon, 1952), Judd Holdren (Zombies From the Stratosphere, 1952), and Harry Lauter (Trader Tom of the China Seas, 1953). In 1952, she filmed Republic's 12-episode television sci-fi Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe, also starring Judd Holdren and created by serial veterans Fred C. Brannon and Franklin Afreon. A series rather than a cliffhanging serial, the project proved a distinct failure and was dumped on the unsuspecting viewing audience as a mid-summer replacement. Undeterred, Towne continued to appear in supporting roles on television and the occasional A-movie until 1970.

Trivia: Ann Robinson was one of the few movie actresses who could lay claim to being a true "child of Hollywood;" she was born in the heart of Tinseltown, at Hollywood Hospital. After some experience in school plays, Robinson turned professional in the early 1950s. She was signed by Paramount, where she was second-billed in her very first film, the sci-fi classic War of the Worlds. Upon completing this assignment in mid-1952, Robinson left for Warner Bros., where she co-starred with Jack Webb in the 1953 film version of Webb's popular Dragnet TV series. Towards the end of 1953, Paramount finally released War of the Worlds; hiring Robinson to make a promotional tour for the film, the studio was compelled to pay her a far higher salary than she'd received as an actress. She then inked a contract with independent producer Eddie Small, who featured her in a brace of westerns and loaned her services to television producers. Her small-screen credits include a recurring role on the Saturday-morning adventure series Fury and a guest stint as "Suzerain of Planet Herculon" in Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Robinson retired from films in 1959 when she married a bullfighter and moved to Mexico. After raising her family, Ann Robinson returned to acting, co-starring in Midnight Movie Massacre (1988) and reprising her War of the Worlds role of Sylvia van Buren in the spoofish direct-to-video Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: The son of actress Nan Kelly Yorke, Jack Kelly was the younger brother of stage and film star Nancy Kelly. Like Nancy, Jack was a professional from an early age, acting in radio and on stage before the age of 10, and in films from 1937 (he is quite prominent in a brace of 1939 20th Century-Fox films, Young Mr. Lincoln and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell). He reemerged as a leading man in the early 1950s, appearing in such films as Forbidden Planet (1956, as the ill-fated Lieutenant Farnam). Signed by Warner Bros. in 1955, Kelly starred as Dr. Paris Mitchell in the weekly TV version of the 1942 film King's Row. He went on to play gamblin' man Bart Maverick on the longer-running Warners western series Maverick. Though his popularity never matched that of his co-star James Garner, Kelly still developed a fan following as Bart; he remained with the series from 1957 until its cancellation in 1962, appearing opposite such Garner successors as Roger Moore and Robert Colbert. Kelly dabbled in a little bit of everything after that: hosting the anthology series NBC Comedy Playhouse (1973), emceeing the game show Sale of the Century (1969-71), and playing hard-nosed Lt. Ryan on the Teresa Graves series Get Christie Love (1974) and Harry Hammond on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977-79). He revived the Bart Maverick character on 1978's The New Maverick and the 1990 TV movie The Gambler Returns: Luck of the Draw. Chances are that, had he lived, Jack Kelly would have been invited to co-star again with Garner in the 1994 Mel Gibson theatrical-feature version of Maverick.

Trivia: There was always something slightly sinister about American actor Carleton G. Young that prevented him from traditional leading man roles. Young always seemed to be hiding something, to be looking over his shoulder, or to be poised to head for the border; as such, he was perfectly cast in such roles as the youthful dope peddler in the 1936 camp classic Reefer Madness. Even when playing a relatively sympathetic role, Young appeared capable of going off the deep end at any minute, vide his performance in the 1937 serial Dick Tracy as Tracy's brainwashed younger brother. During the 1940s and 1950s, Young was quite active in radio, where he was allowed to play such heroic leading roles as Ellery Queen and the Count of Monte Cristo without his furtive facial expressions working against him. As he matured into a greying character actor, Young became a special favorite of director John Ford, appearing in several of Ford's films of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it is Young, in the small role of a reporter, who utters the unforgettable valediction "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact...print the legend." Carleton G. Young was the father of actor Tony Young, who starred in the short-lived 1961 TV Western Gunslinger.

Trivia: American actress Mae Marsh was the daughter of an auditor for the Santa Fe railroad - and as such, she and her family moved around quite a bit during Marsh's childhood. After her father died and her stepfather was killed in the San Francisco earthquake, she was taken to Los Angeles by her great aunt, a one-time chorus girl who'd become a New York actress. Marsh followed her aunt's footsteps by securing film work with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith; it was Griffith, the foremost film director of the early silent period, who first spotted potential in young Miss Marsh. The actress got her first big break appearing as a stone-age maiden in Man's Genesis (1911), after Mary Pickford refused to play the part because it called for bare legs. Specializing in dramatic and tragic roles, Marsh appeared in innumerable Griffith-directed short films, reaching a career high point as the Little Sister in the director's Civil War epic, The Birth of A Nation (1915). She made such an impression in this demanding role that famed American poet Vachel Lindsay was moved to write a long, elaborate poem in the actress' honor. Marsh's career went on a downhill slide in the '20s due to poor management and second-rate films, but she managed to score a personal triumph as the long-suffering heroine of the 1931 talkie tear-jerker Over the Hill. She retired to married life, returning sporadically to films - out of boredom - as a bit actress, notably in the big-budget westerns of director John Ford (a longtime Marsh fan). When asked in the '60s why she didn't lobby for larger roles, Mae Marsh replied simply that "I didn't care to get up every morning at five o'clock to be at the studio by seven."

Trivia: In any given circus picture made between 1938 to 1964, chances were that Eddie Marr was in the cast. Possessed of leather lungs and a slightly larcenous demeanor, Marr was the archetypal sideshow barker, as exemplified by his weekly appearance on the 1956 TVer Circus Boy. One of his rare appearances outside the big top was as composer Buddy DeSylva in the 1945 George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. Eddie Marr also appeared frequently on radio, playing a variety of gamblers, gangsters, race track touts, city detectives, travelling salesmen and, yes, carnival barkers in such series as The Damon Runyon Theatre, The Lux Radio Theatre, The Jack Carson Show and Murder Will Out.

Trivia: Hank Patterson is best known to audiences for his portrayal of farmer Fred Ziffel on Green Acres -- for five seasons, his laconic character and the antics of his pig Arnold helped make life hopelessly confusing for series protagonist Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert). Patterson, along with his younger contemporary Arthur Hunnicutt, was one of a handful of character actors who cornered the market on portraying cantankerous old coots, usually in a rural setting, in movies and on television during the middle of the 20th century. With his deep, resonant voice, which could project even when he spoke in the softest tones, Patterson could also evoke menace and doom, an attribute that producers and directors sometimes utilized to great effect on programs like Twilight Zone. He was born Elmer Calvin Patterson in Springville, AL, in 1888, but by the 1890s his family had moved to Texas, and Patterson spent most of his boyhood in the town of Taylor. His main interest was music, and he studied in hope of a serious performing career, but was forced to enter showbusiness as a vaudeville pianist, playing with traveling shows. By the end of the 1920s, he'd made his way to California, and he entered the movie business as an actor -- despite his lack of formal training -- during the 1930s. Patterson's earliest identified screen work was an uncredited appearance in the Roy Rogers Western The Arizona Kid (1939). His first credited screen role was in the drama I Ring Doorbells, made at Producers Releasing Corporation. Patterson spent the next nine years working exclusively in Westerns, starting with Thomas Carr's The El Paso Kid, starring Sunset Carson. Among the best of the oaters that Patterson worked in were Edwin L. Marin's Abilene Town and Henry King's The Gunfighter, but most of the pictures that he did were on the low-budget side, and far less prestigious. He played a succession of blacksmiths, hotel clerks, farmers, shopkeepers, and other townsmen, usually bit roles and character parts. Beginning with Jack Arnold's Tarantula, Patterson moved into occasional modern character portrayals as well. Patterson also appeared on dozens of television series, ranging from The Abbott & Costello Show (where he played a very creepy mugger in "Lou Falls for Ruby") to Perry Mason. He was nearly as ubiquitous a figure on Twilight Zone as he was in any Western series, appearing in at least three installments, most notably as an old man in a modern setting in "Kick the Can," and as an ominous general store proprietor in "Come Wander With Me." It was the 19th century and rural settings, however, that provided his bread and butter -- he had appeared in several episodes of Gunsmoke, and in 1963 became a continuing character on the series in the role of Hank Miller, the Dodge City stableman. That same year, Patterson took on the semi-regular role of farmer Fred Ziffel in the rural comedy Petticoat Junction; and in 1965, that role was expanded into the series Green Acres -- eventually, he even portrayed Fred Ziffel in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies as well. The association of his character with the utterly surreal (and extremely popular) porcine character of Arnold the Pig (also known as Arnold Ziffel) ensured that Patterson was one of the most visible supporting players on the series. Ironically, by the time he was doing Green Acres, Patterson was almost completely deaf, but the producers loved his portrayal so much, that they worked around this by having the dialogue coach lying on the floor out-of-shot, tapping at his leg with a yardstick when it was his cue to speak a line. Patterson passed away in 1975 of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 86. He was the great-uncle of actress Tea Leoni.