Trivia: Lean, effete, and sinister, Vincent Price was among the movies' greatest villains as well as one of the horror genre's most beloved and enduring stars. Born May 27, 1911, in St. Louis, MO, Price graduated from Yale University, and later studied fine arts at the University of London. He made his theatrical debut in the Gate Theatre's 1935 production of Chicago, followed by work on Broadway, in stock and with Orson Welles' famed Mercury Theater. Under contract to Universal, Price traveled to Hollywood, making his screen debut in 1938's Service de Luxe, before returning to Broadway for a revival of Outward Bound. His tenure at Universal was largely unsuccessful, and the studio kept him confined to supporting roles. Upon completing his contract, Price jumped to 20th Century Fox, starring in a pair of 1940 historical tales, Brigham Young -- Frontiersman and Hudson Bay. Still, fame eluded him, and in 1941 he began a long Broadway run (in Angel Street) that kept him out of films for three years. Price returned to the West Coast to co-star in 1943's The Song of Bernadette and became a prominent supporting player in a series of acclaimed films, including 1944's Wilson and Laura, and 1946's Leave Her to Heaven. His first starring role was in the low-budget Shock!, portraying a murderous psychiatrist. He next played a sadistic husband opposite Gene Tierney in Dragonwyck. Clearly, Price's niche was as a villain -- everything about him suggested malice, with each line reading dripping with condescension and loathing; he relished these roles, and excelled in them. Still, he was not the star Fox wanted; after 1947's The Web, his contract expired and was not renewed. Price spent the next several years freelancing with a variety of studios and by 1952 had grown so disenchanted with Hollywood that he returned to the stage, performing in a San Francisco production of The Cocktail Party before replacing Charles Laughton in the touring company of Don Juan in Hell.Price then signed on to star in 1953's House of Wax, Warners' 3-D update of their Mystery of the Wax Museum. The picture was one of the year's biggest hits, and one of the most successful horror films ever produced. Price's crazed performance as a vengeful sculptor brought him offers for any number of similar projects, and he next appeared in another 3-D feature, Dangerous Mission. He also made a triumphant return to the stage to appear in Richard III, followed by Black-Eyed Susan. The latter was Price's last theatrical performance for 14 years, however, as he began a very busy and eclectic motion picture schedule. Though he essayed many different types of characters, his forays into horror remained by far his most popular, and in 1958 he co-starred in the hit The Fly as well as William Castle's House on Haunted Hill. By the 1960s, Price was working almost exclusively in the horror genre. For producer Roger Corman, he starred in a series of cult classic adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories including 1960's The Fall of the House of Usher, 1963's The Raven, 1964's The Masque of the Red Death, and 1968's The Conqueror Worm. He also appeared in a number of teen movies like 1963's Beach Party, 1965's Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, and the 1969 Elvis Presley vehicle The Trouble With Girls. Price began to cut back on his film activities during the 1970s despite hits like 1971's The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its follow-up Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Instead he frequently lectured on art, and even published several books. For disciple Tim Burton, Price co-starred in the 1990 fantasy Edward Scissorhands; apart from voice-over work, it was his last screen appearance. He died in Los Angeles on October 25, 1993.

Trivia: Trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, Texas-born Carolyn Jones supported herself as a radio disk jockey when acting jobs were scarce. She entered films as a bit player in 1952, attaining prominence for a role in which (for the most part) she neither moved nor spoke: the waxwork Joan of Arc -- actually one of mad sculptor Vincent Price's many murder victims -- in 1953's House of Wax. In 1957, Jones was Oscar-nominated for her five-minute role as a pathetic "good time girl" in The Bachelor Party; two years later, she stole the show in Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head as Frank Sinatra's bongo-playing girlfriend. During the early 1960s, Jones was married to producer Aaron Spelling, who frequently cast her on such TV series as The Dick Powell Show and Burke's Law. In 1964, Jones achieved TV sitcom immortality as the ghoulishly sexy Morticia Addams on the popular series The Addams Family. Though her TV and movie activities were curtailed by illness in her last decade (she died of cancer in 1983), Carolyn Jones continued making occasional appearances, notably a return engagement as Morticia in a 1978 Addams Family reunion special.

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 wide eyes and cool smile of actress/model Phyllis Kirk graced many a magazine cover before she made her film debut in 1950. While her deep, sultry voice precluded most of the typical ingénue roles, Kirk nonetheless achieved film fame as a woman in peril, in André De Toth's 1953 3-D horror classic House of Wax. Born Phyllis Kirkegaard in Plainfield, NJ, on September 18, 1926, Kirk shortened her name after moving to the Big Apple during her teens to formally train as a thespian. She officially launched her career with a series of supporting turns on Broadway, then migrated to Hollywood in the early '50s, where she landed parts in such films as Johnny Concho (1956, opposite Frank Sinatra) and The Sad Sack (1957, opposite Jerry Lewis). During the '50s, Kirk appeared on television semi-frequently as well, guest-starring in dozens of live and prerecorded anthology series, and briefly appearing as Red Buttons' wife on the comedian's weekly variety series, The Red Buttons Show. From 1957 through 1959, Kirk starred as the inquisitive Nora Charles on the TV version of The Thin Man (Peter Lawford played her detective hubby Nick Charles). After 1960, Kirk concentrated on stage acting, but devoted the preponderance of her time to various social causes, such as establishing two inner-city preschools in south Los Angeles after the Watts riots. Kirk continued to crop up on television, however, as a celebrity contestant on such quiz shows as To Tell the Truth and Password. In 1965, she hosted an erudite ABC daytime talk show, The Young Set. A hip injury obliged Phyllis Kirk to curtail her acting career; she married a former CBS news executive and turned to the production end of the business, as a public-relations liaison for several TV specials of the 1970s.Following two decades of big- and small-screen inactivity, 79-year-old Phyllis Kirk died of a post-cerebral aneurysm at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, on October 19, 2006.

Trivia: Loyola University grad Paul Picerni became an actor at a time when Arrow-collar leading men were giving way to blue-collar realistic types. Picerni never seemed too comfortable with his leading assignments in such films as House of Wax (1953); he appeared more at ease in down-to-earth supporting roles. His latter-day reputation rests on his four-year run as a federal agent on the slam-bang TV series The Untouchables. Paul Picerni is the brother of stunt man and stunt coordinator Charles Picerni.

Trivia: Tall, silver-maned character actor Roy Roberts began his film career as a 20th Century-Fox contractee in 1943. Nearly always cast in roles of well-tailored authority, Roberts was most effective when conveying smug villainy. As a hotel desk clerk in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), he suavely but smarmily refused to allow Jews to check into his establishment; nineteen years later, Roberts was back behind the desk and up to his old tricks, patronizingly barring a black couple from signing the register in Hotel (1966). As the forties drew to a close, Roberts figured into two of the key film noirs of the era; he was the carnival owner who opined that down-at-heels Tyrone Power had sunk so low because "he reached too high" at the end of Nightmare Alley (1947), while in 1948's He Walked By Night, Roberts enjoyed one of his few sympathetic roles as a psycho-hunting plainclothesman. And in the 3-D classic House of Wax, Roberts played the crooked business partner of Vincent Price, whose impulsive decision to burn down Price's wax museum has horrible consequences. With the role of bombastic Captain Huxley on the popular Gale Storm TV series Oh, Susanna (1956-1960), Gordon inaugurated his dignified-foil period. He later played long-suffering executive types on The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and The Lucy Show. Roy Roberts last appeared on screen as the mayor in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974).

Trivia: British actor Paul Cavanagh came to films in 1928 after extensive stage experience. In Hollywood from 1930, the elegant, trimly mustached Cavanagh occasionally played leads, notably as Maureen O'Sullivan's suitor in Tarzan and His Mate (1934). For the most part he was seen in stiff-upper-lip supporting roles, often cast as a society villain, noble cuckolded husband or military official. As much in demand at the big studios as he was at the poverty-row independents, Paul Cavanagh remained active until 1959, when he appeared in his last picture, the low-budget horror film Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake.

Trivia: American stage actress Angela Clarke entered films in 1949. Though only in her early 40s, Angela cornered the market in grey-haired matriarch roles, usually with accompanying ethnic accent. One of her best-remembered parts in this capacity was Harry Houdini's Jewish mama Mrs. Weiss in Houdini (1953). Clark also made a strong impression as Bob Hope's disapproving Italian aunt-in-law in the 1955 biopic The Seven Little Foys. Angela Clarke was busy in films and TV until the early 1980s, essaying supporting roles in such movies as Blindfold (1966) and Harrad Summer (1974).

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: The son of a Lithuanian coal miner, American actor Charles Bronson claimed to have spoken no English at home during his childhood in Pennsylvania. Though he managed to complete high school, it was expected that Bronson would go into the mines like his father and many brothers. Experiencing the world outside Pennsylvania during World War II service, however, Bronson came back to America determined to pursue an art career. While working as a set designer for a Philadelphia theater troupe, Bronson played a few small roles and almost immediately switched his allegiance from the production end of theater to acting. After a few scattered acting jobs in New York, Bronson enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse in 1949. By 1951, he was in films, playing uncredited bits in such pictures as The People Against O'Hara (1951); You're in the Navy Now (1952), which also featured a young bit actor named Lee Marvin; Diplomatic Courier (1952); Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952), as a waiter(!); and The Clown (1953). When he finally achieved billing, it was under his own name, Charles Buchinsky (sometimes spelled Buchinski). His first role of importance was as Igor, the mute granite-faced henchman of deranged sculptor Vincent Price in House of Wax (1953). The actor was billed as Charles Bronson for the first time in Drum Beat (1954), although he was still consigned to character roles as Slavs, American Indians, hoodlums, and convicts. Most sources claim that Bronson's first starring role was in Machine Gun Kelly (1958), but, in fact, he had the lead in 1958's Gang War, playing an embryonic version of his later Death Wish persona as a mild-mannered man who turned vengeful after the death of his wife. Bronson achieved his first fan following with the TV series Man With a Camera (1959), in which he played adventurous photojournalist Mike Kovac (and did double duty promoting the sponsor's camera products in the commercials). His best film role up until 1960 was as one of The Magnificent Seven (1960), dominating several scenes despite the co-star competition of Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, and others. Most of Bronson's film roles after Seven remained in the "supporting-villainy category," however, so, in 1968, the actor packed himself off to Europe, where American action players like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef were given bigger and better opportunities. Multiplying his international box-office appeal tenfold with such films as Guns for San Sebastian (1967), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Cold Sweat (1970), and The Valachi Papers (1971), Bronson returned to Hollywood a full-fledged star at last. His most successful films of the 1970s were Death Wish (1974) and its sequels, a series of brutal "vigilante" pictures which suggested not so subliminally that honest people would ultimately have to dole out their own terminal justice to criminals. In many of his '70s films, Bronson co-starred with second wife Jill Ireland, with whom he remained married until she lost her fight against cancer in 1990. Bronson's bankability subsequently fell off, due in part to younger action stars doing what he used to do twice as vigorously, and because of his truculent attitude toward fans. He did little but television work after 1991's The Indian Runner (Sean Penn's directorial debut), with Death Wish 5: The Face of Death (1994) his only feature since. Bronson's onscreen career would soon draw to a close with his role as law enforcing family patriarch Paul Fein in the made-for-cable Family of Cops series.On August 30, 2003 Charles Bronson died of pneumonia in Los Angeles. He was 81.

Trivia: "Maybe he's only a little crazy, like painters or artists, or those men in Washington," Philip Tonge's apprehensive toy-department head, Mr. Shellhammer, pleaded in defense of Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) in the holiday perennial Miracle on 34th St. (1947), perhaps the veteran stage actor's most memorable screen assignment. Tonge was a former child performer and lifelong friend and associate of Noël Coward (who publicly claimed to have had his initial sexual encounter with him at the age of 13). The British-born actor had originated the part of Dr. Bradman in the initial Broadway production of Blithe Spirit in 1941, a role he would re-create for an early television presentation five years later. Noticeable by his prominent proboscis and a receding chin, Tonge also added memorable moments to such diverse films as Witness for the Prosecution (1957) as the inspector, and the sci-fi thriller Invisible Invaders (1959). He ended his long career playing the recurring role of General Amherst on television's Northwest Passage (1958-1959).

Trivia: From 1930 to 1934, American actress Ruth Warren was a contractee at Fox Studios. A slight woman with wide eyes and pursed lips, Warren essayed sizeable character roles in such Fox films as Lightnin' (1930), Six Cylinder Love (1931), and Zoo in Budapest (1933). She played bit roles from 1935 until her retirement in 1958. Laurel and Hardy buffs will remember Ruth Warren as the gossip-dispensing Mrs. Addlequist in Our Relations (1936).

Trivia: A discovery of D.W. Griffith, dark-haired Riza Royce never actually appeared in a Griffith film but was fiercely loyal to the great man who by the late '20s was sorely in need of boosters. Royce, meanwhile, married another legendary filmmaker, the stylish Josef Von Sternberg, and didn't appear with any regularity on screen until the 1950s. She was very visible on television until the mid-'70s, appearing regularly on such shows as Maverick, Bewitched, and even Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Her death was attributed to a heart attack.

Trivia: Actor Grandon Rhodes worked steadily on stage, television, and in over 40 films during his four-decade career. On television, he had recurring roles on Bonanza (as a doctor) and Perry Mason.

Trivia: Busy character actor Frank Ferguson was able to parlay his pinched facial features, his fussy little moustache, and his bellows-like voice for a vast array of characterizations. Ferguson was equally effective as a hen-pecked husband, stern military leader, irascible neighbor, merciless employer, crooked sheriff, and barbershop hanger-on. He made his inaugural film appearance in Father is a Prince (1940) and was last seen on the big screen in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). Ferguson proved himself an above-average actor by successfully pulling off the treacly scene in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) in which Babe (William Bendix) says "Hi, kid" to Ferguson's crippled son--whereupon the boy suddenly stands up and walks! Among Franklin Ferguson's hundreds of TV appearances were regular stints on the children's series My Friend Flicka (1956) and the nighttime soap opera Peyton Place (1964-68).

Trivia: Lanky, long-nosed supporting actor Oliver Blake acted on stage under his given name of Oliver Prickett. From the mid-1920s onward, Blake was a fixture at the Pasadena Playhouse, where his brother Charles was managing director and his sister Maudie was a resident character actress. At the Playhouse, he starred in such productions as Charley's Aunt and also taught classes for first-year students. He entered films in 1941, and for his first few years before the camera was confined to bit roles like the Blue Parrot waiter in Casablanca (1942). One of his more visible screen assignments was as dour-faced Indian neighbor Geoduck in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle series. An apparent favorite of comedian Bob Hope, Blake showed up in a variety of roles in several Hope farces, notably as the world's most emaciated Santa Claus in The Seven Little Foys (1955). On TV, Oliver Blake played the recurring role of Carl Dorf in the 1956 sitcom The Brothers.

Trivia: Open-faced, prominently chinned character actor Lyle Latell began surfacing in films in the late 1930s. Only occasionally did Latell rise above the status of bit player; he was most often seen as a wisecracking reporter, griping military man or cheerful cabbie. From 1945 through 1947, Latell was a regular in RKO's Dick Tracy "B"-picture series, playing Tracy's assistant Pat Patton. Lyle Latell was married to Mary Foy, one of the "Seven Little Foys" of vaudeville fame.

Trivia: Silent film leading man Jack Mower was at his most effective when cast in outgoing, athletic roles. Never a great actor, he was competent in displaying such qualities as dependability and honesty. His best known silent role was as the motorcycle cop who is spectacularly killed by reckless driver Leatrice Joy in Cecil B. DeMille's Manslaughter (1922). Talkies reduced Jack Mower to bit parts, but he was frequently given work by directors whom he'd befriended in his days of prominence; Mower's last film was John Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955).

Trivia: Throughout his film career, Richard Benjamin trafficked in neurotic, high-strung, self-involved upper-middle-class characterizations. While attending the New York High School of Performing Arts, Benjamin made his first professional stage appearances, and reportedly showed up in a handful of movie bit roles. He continued his theatrical training at Northwestern University, where he met actress Paula Prentiss, whom he married in 1961. At first, Hollywood was more interested in Paula than in Dick; thus, while Paula was co-starring with Jim Hutton at MGM, her husband was still performing on stage. In 1965, Benjamin directed the London production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park; the following year, he made his Broadway acting bow in Simon's The Star Spangled Girl, earning a Theatre World Award in the bargain. Co-starring with wife Paula, Benjamin appeared in the 1967 TV situation comedy He and She, which gained a loyal cult following but was considered too New Yawk-ish for the hinterlands. Even so, He and She made Benjamin a name-above-the-title star, and it was in this capacity that he made his film adult screen appearance as angst-driven collegiate Neil Klugman in Goodbye Columbus (1969). He went on to play Major Danby in the all-star Catch-22 (1969), monumentally insensitive husband Jonathan Balser in Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), the self-abusive (in every sense of the phrase) title character in Portnoy's Complaint (1972), the hero-by-default in Westworld (1973), ulcerated agent Ben Clark in The Sunshine Boys (1976) and erstwhile vampire hunter Dr. Jeff Rosenberg in Love at First Bite (1980). Benjamin participated in another cult-TV item in 1978, when he starred in the 6-episode sci-fi lampoon Quark. In 1982, he made his film directorial bow with My Favorite Year (1982), a rollicking nostalgiafest inspired by TV's Golden Age. Since that time, Benjamin has favored directing over performing.

Trivia: Mike Lally started in Hollywood as an assistant director in the early 1930s. Soon, however, Lally was steadily employed as a stunt man, doubling for such Warner Bros. stars as James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. He also played innumerable bit roles as reporters, court stenographers, cops and hangers-on. Active until 1982, Mike Lally was frequently seen in functionary roles on TV's Columbo.

Trivia: Actor Philo McCullough began his movie career at the Selig Company in 1912. At first, McCullough specialized in light comedy roles, often playing cads and bounders. After a brief stab at directing with 1921's Maid of the West, he found his true niche as a mustachioed, oily-haired, jack-booted heavy. During the 1920s he appeared in support of everyone from Fatty Arbuckle to Rin Tin Tin. Talkies reduced him to such bit parts as the "Assistant Exhausted Ruler" in Laurel & Hardy's Sons of the Desert (1933) and Senator Albert in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). One of his few roles of consequence in the 1930s was the principal villain in the 1933 serial Tarzan the Fearless. Philo McCullough remained active until 1969, when he appeared with several other silent-screen veterans in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.