Trivia: Very early in his stage career, Richard Deacon was advised by Helen Hayes to abandon all hopes of becoming a leading man: instead, she encouraged him to aggressively pursue a career as a character actor. Tall, bald, bespectacled and bass-voiced since high school, Deacon heeded Ms. Hayes' advice, and managed to survive in show business far longer than many of the "perfect" leading men who were his contemporaries. Usually cast as a glaring sourpuss or humorless bureaucrat, Deacon was a valuable and highly regarded supporting-cast commodity in such films as Desiree (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Kiss Them For Me (1957), The Young Philadelphians (1959) and The King's Pirate (1967), among many others. Virtually every major star who worked with Deacon took time out to compliment him on his skills: among his biggest admirers were Lou Costello, Jack Benny and Cary Grant. Even busier on television than in films, Richard Deacon had the distinction of appearing regularly on two concurrently produced sitcoms of the early 1960s: he was pompous suburbanite Fred Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the long-suffering Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Deacon also co-starred as Kaye Ballard's husband on the weekly TV comedy The Mothers-in-Law (1968), and enjoyed a rare leading role on the 1964 Twilight Zone installment "The Brain Center at Whipples." In his last decade, Richard Deacon hosted a TV program on microwave cookery, and published a companion book on the subject.

Trivia: African-American actor Joel Fluellen was a respected stage performer in both all-black and integrated productions throughout the '40s. He was tentative about entering films due to the limited range of roles available for actors of his race. Certainly Fluellen had nothing to be ashamed of in such assignments as the title character's brother in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), but such parts were the exception rather than the rule. For the most part Fluellen found himself cast as noble natives in jungle-oriented films and TV programs, with the occasional worthwhile roles in films like Friendly Persuasion (1956). Not one to hide his opinions, especially in the '40s when non-white performers were expected to keep quiet and accept whatever was given them, Fluellen lobbied loud and long for better parts and working conditions for his fellow African-American performers, and was gratified to see the picture improving in the early '70s. Still, his own roles ranged from adequate to tiny, though he invariably made an indelible impression in such black-oriented films as A Raisin in the Sun (1962), The Learning Tree (1969) and The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1975). After a long illness, Joel Fluellen died at age 81, of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.