Trivia: Angela Lansbury received an Oscar nomination for her first film, Gaslight, in 1944, and has been winning acting awards and audience favor ever since. Born in London to a family that included both politicians and performers, Lansbury came to the U.S. during World War II. She made notable early film appearances as the snooty sister in National Velvet (1944); the pathetic singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which garnered her another Academy nomination; and the madam-with-a-heart-of-gold saloon singer in The Harvey Girls (1946). She turned evil as the manipulative publisher in State of the Union (1948), but was just as convincing as the good queen in The Three Musketeers (1948) and the petulant daughter in The Court Jester (1956). She received another Oscar nomination for her chilling performance as Laurence Harvey's scheming mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and appeared as the addled witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), among other later films. On Broadway, she won Tony awards for the musicals Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), the revival of Gypsy (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979) and, at age 82, for the play Blithe Spirit (2009). Despite a season in the '50s on the game show Pantomime Quiz, she came to series television late, starring in 1984-1996 as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote; she took over as producer of the show in the '90s. She returned to the Disney studios to record the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and to sing the title song and later reprised the role in the direct-to-video sequel, The Enchanted Christmas (1997). Lansbury is the sister of TV producer Bruce Lansbury.

Trivia: Fresh out of the University of California, sprightly Colorado-born actress Barbara Rush attended the Pasadena Playhouse, walking several miles to and from her classes to save up enough money for her tuition. Before launching her film career, she married actor Jeffrey Hunter, the first of two desultory unions. She became a favorite of little boys of all ages due to her leading-lady stints in two of the most influential science fiction films of the 1950s, When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953). After biding her time in idiotic programmers like Prince of Pirates (1953), she emerged as an A-list leading lady at the major studios, adept at both comedy (Oh Men! Oh Women! [1957]) and drama (The Young Lions [1958]). Easing into character parts in the 1960s, Rush was often cast as viper-tongued shrews, cheating wives, and abrasive alcoholics. She also surprised many of her fans by appearing as "special guest villain" Nora Clavicle on an outrageous 1968 episode of Batman, which proposed that the miniskirted policewomen of Gotham City could be cowed into submission simply by releasing mice into the community. Though she hasn't been seen in many films in later years, Barbara Rush has continued to flourish as a stage actress and TV guest star.

Trivia: Upon earning his BA degree from the University of Chicago, Fritz Weaver began his formal acting training at the H-B studios. Paying his dues with such regional stock companies as Virginia's Barter Theatre and Massachussett's Group 20 Players, Weaver made his first off-Broadway appearance in a 1954 production of The Way of the World. His inaugural Broadway effort was 1955's The Chalk Circle. Weaver went on to appear in such classic stage roles as Hamlet and Peer Gynt, and also amassed a remarkable list of film credits, including two Twilight Zone appearances. In 1964, he made his film debut as the unstable Colonel Caserio in the doomsday thriller Fail Safe. The following year, he starred on Broadway in Baker Street, a musicalization of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1970, he won the Tony award for his work as Jerome Malley in Child's Play. Most often cast as aristocratic villains in films (his resemblance to William F. Buckley has not gone unnoticed by producers), Fritz Weaver made his biggest international impact in the sympathetic role of Josef Weiss in the TV miniseries Holocaust (1978). Weaver worked mostly in television for the rest of his career (save for a supporting role in 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair), with guest spots in shows like The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, The X-Files, Frasier and Law & Order. Weaver died in 2016, at age 90.

Trivia: A striking beauty, famed for her long, slender and well-formed legs, dancer/actress Juliet Prowse was at the peak of her popularity as a film and television actress during the 1960s. After that, she made her name on stage and in Las Vegas. Born in Bombay, and raised in South Africa, she studied to be a dancer from the age of 4. Prowse was accepted for the Festival Ballet of Johannesburg at age 14, but at a height of 6 feet she was much too large for the rather strict requirements of the ballet world. A less prestigious but likely more lucrative engagement followed when Juliet signed on as a chorus dancer for the London Palladium. She went to dance at a Parisian nightclub, then toured Europe as a member of a modern dance troupe. Hollywood choreographer Hermes Pan spotted one of Prowse's performances and cast her as the Snake in the "Adam and Eve" number for the 1959 film musical Can Can. While visiting the set of this film, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev took a long look at Juliet and denounced the production for its depravity. Whatever shortcoming Khrushchev might have had as a dance critic, as a press agent he was tops -- within weeks after his denunciation, Prowse was appearing on virtually every magazine cover in the U.S. As an added fillip to her newfound fame, Prowse fell in love with the star of Can Can, Frank Sinatra. Prowse next co-starred opposite Elvis Presley in G.I. Blues and before production finished, rumors flew that she and the King were romantically entangled. Still she and Sinatra announced their engagement in 1962. The marriage never took place, but the publicity value to Prowse was invaluable, resulting in a high-playing Las Vegas nightclub engagement. The show was panned by the papers (again for supposed bad taste) but still raked in a fortune. At the behest of her agent, Prowse next attempted to become the "new Lucille Ball" in the 1965 NBC sitcom Mona McCluskey. The premise: Prowse was a movie star who willingly lived on her military-officer husband's meager monthly wages. Despite the hype surrounding the show, Mona McCluskey was off the air in 13 weeks. As her first blush of notoriety faded, Juliet Prowse maintained her nightclub career with success, supplementing her income with innumerable TV commercial endorsements for cosmetics and panty hose - and experiencing a few heart-stopping moments when an 80-pound leopard mauled her during a rehearsal for a Circus of the Stars TV special in 1989. A real trooper, Prowse recovered enough to complete her part of the show. A few months later she was getting ready to make a promotional appearance with the leopard on The Tonight Show. Unfortunately, the big cat's temper had not significantly improved and it attacked her again just before they were to go on. From 1986 through the mid '90s, Prowse hosted the "Championship Ballroom Dance Competition" on PBS. Throughout her career she has earned several awards including the Professional Dancer's Society "Gypsy" award, a Best Actress of the Year from the London Evening Standard and the Las Vegas Performer of the Year award for a stage version of Sweet Charity. In 1994, Prowse was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She made her final public appearance in a 10-week summer run of Sugar Babies opposite Mickey Rooney in Las Vegas in 1995. Prowse passed away on September 14, 1996.

Trivia: While growing up in Chicago, Tom Bosley dreamed of becoming the star left-fielder for the Cubs. As it turned out, the closest Bosley got to organized athletics was a sportscasting class at DePauw University. After additional training at the Radio Institute of Chicago and two years' practical experience in various dramatic radio programs and stock companies, he left for New York in 1950. Five years of odd jobs and summer-theater stints later, he landed his first off-Broadway role, playing Dupont-Dufort in Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival. Steadier work followed at the Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C.; then in 1959, Bosley landed the starring role in the Broadway musical Fiorello!, picking up a Tony Award, an ANTA Award, and the New York Drama Critics Award in the bargain. In 1963, he made his film bow as Natalie Wood's "safe and secure" suitor Anthony Colombo in Love With the Proper Stranger. Occasionally cast as two-bit criminals or pathetic losers (he sold his eyes to blind millionairess Joan Crawford in the Spielberg-directed Night Gallery TV movie), Bosley was most often seen as a harried suburban father. After recurring roles on such TV series as That Was the Week That Was, The Debbie Reynolds Show, and The Sandy Duncan Show, Bosley was hired by Hanna-Barbera to provide the voice of flustered patriarch Howard Boyle on the animated sitcom Wait Til Your Father Gets Home (1972-1973). This served as a dry run of sorts for his most famous series-TV assignment: Howard Cunningham, aka "Mr. C," on the immensely popular Happy Days (1974-1983). The warm, familial ambience of the Happy Days set enabled Bosley to weather the tragic death of his first wife, former dancer Jean Elliot, in 1978. In addition to his Happy Days duties, Bosley was narrator of the syndicated documentary That's Hollywood (1977-1981). From 1989 to 1991, he starred on the weekly series The Father Dowling Mysteries, and thereafter was seen on an occasional basis as down-to-earth Cabot Cove sheriff Amos Tupper on Murder, She Wrote. Reportedly as kind, generous, and giving as his Happy Days character, Tom Bosley has over the last 20 years received numerous honors for his many civic and charitable activities.

Trivia: Finnish actress Taina Elg's earliest professional engagements were as a dancer with the Sadler's Wells and Marquis de Cuevas troupes. She was brought to Hollywood in the wake of the success of fellow Scandinavia Anita Ekberg. Elg's first film role was in MGM's The Prodigal (1955) and she went on to play worthwhile roles in such MGM efforts as Les Girls (1957), which gave her an opportunity to display her dancing skills, and Imitation General (1959). More recently, Taina Elg was seen as "Nemesis" in the 1970 muscleman spoof Hercules in New York, which starred the inimitable Arnold Strong (aka Schwarzenegger).