Trivia: Reed was elected beauty queen of her high school and Campus Queen of her college. The latter honor resulted in her photo making the L.A. papers, and as a result she was invited to take a screen test with MGM, which signed her in 1941. She played supporting roles in a number of minor films (at first being billed as "Donna Adams"), then in the mid '40s she began getting leads; with rare exceptions, she portrayed sincere, wholesome types and loving wives and girlfriends. She went against type playing a prostitute in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Rarely getting rewarding roles, she retired from the screen in 1958 to star in the TV series "The Donna Reed Show," which was a great success and remained on the air through 1966. After 1960 she appeared in only one more film. In the mid '80s she emerged from retirement to star in "Dallas;" Barbara Bel Geddes returned to the show in 1985, and Reed won a $1 million settlement for a breach of contract suit against the show's producers. She died of cancer several months later.

Trivia: The niece of musical comedy luminary Nanette Fabray, American actress Shelley Fabares was in show business almost as soon as she could walk. She was a model for children's fashions at age 3, a bit actress in the film The Bandit Queen at age 7, a peripheral character on the Annie Oakley TV series at 8, and Frank Sinatra's dance partner on a 1953 TV special. After doing the TV-anthology route from ages 10 through 13, Fabares was cast at age 14 as Donna Reed's daughter on The Donna Reed Show, a part she would virtually grow up in. Before the series' cancellation in 1966, Fabares had become a top recording artist, selling a million copies of "Johnny Angel" before quitting singing cold because she felt she had no talent in that endeavor. Except for co-starring stints in three Elvis Presley musicals, Fabares' employment outside Donna Reed was virtually nil, and from 1968 through 1970 she barely worked at all. She filmed six TV pilots before 1971, but none sold. Things began picking up in 1972 when she was signed for a Brian Keith series set in Hawaii, The Little People. This led to guest TV spots until the next sitcom hitch in 1977's The Practice, in which Fabares played Danny Thomas' daughter-in-law. Highcliffe Manor, a muddled TV satire of Gothic melodramas, followed in 1979, but lasted a scant four weeks. By this time, Fabares' characterizations were of the "snooty shrew" category, and in this capacity she was shown to good advantage as Bonnie Franklin's business partner on One Day at a Time in 1981. Off-camera, Fabares was very active in the prosocial and ecological activities of her new husband, former MASH star Mike Farrell--a far cry from her on-camera haughtiness and self-involvement. More recently, Shelley Fabares' acting career is alive and prospering via her continuing role as Craig T. Nelson's lady love, sportscaster Christine Armstrong, on the Emmy-winning sitcom Coach.

Trivia: American actor Paul Petersen was a child actor who appeared on television and in a couple of feature films during the '50s; he is best remembered for playing teenager Jeff Stone on The Donna Reed Show where he literally grew up. While there, Petersen had a brief side-career as a popular singer, making his recording debut in early 1962 with the novelty song "She Can't Find Her Keys," which originally aired as a dream sequence on the show. Other hits followed, including his Top Ten single "My Dad," which he also sang on the television show. Eventually Petersen left the show and began playing leads in a few '60s feature films. Since then, Petersen has become a writer of spy novels and has made only infrequent forays into film.

Trivia: Lori Martin was a child actress who went from commercials to a career in film and television drama. Born Dawn Catherine Menzer in 1947, she was one of four children of Russell and Dora May Menzer (her father was a set designer at Warner Bros.) and wanted to be an actress from early childhood. She made her professional debut in a commercial under her own name in 1954 and was busy for the remainder of the decade, later appearing on such television series as Medic, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Wagon Train, Leave It to Beaver, and Trackdown. She also played small roles in two movies, The FBI Story and Machine Gun Kelly (all billed as Dawn Menzer), before getting a series of her own, as Velvet Brown in the NBC's version of National Velvet, for which producer Robert Maxwell gave her the name Lori Martin. The series ended up running for two seasons (until 1962). Martin made the transition to teenage ingénue roles, including a good performance in J. Lee Thompson's original version of Cape Fear (1962) as Gregory Peck's daughter. That should have been enough to get her more movie work, but somehow the films and roles were there. She did lots of one-shots on TV in series like Sam Benedict, The Donna Reed Show, Mickey, Slattery's People, and Breaking Point, and two separate stints four years apart on My Three Sons, before eventually fading out of the business in 1970. Martin's performance in a 1967 episode of Please Don't Eat the Daisies as a predatory drama student with romantic designs on Mark Miller's married college professor was a change of pace, and she closed out her movie career in 1968 with David Commons' The Angry Breed. Her work as the virginal daughter of decadent agent William Windom and his dissolute wife (Jan Sterling) was notable for its provocative nature -- the scene of the bikini-clad Martin being rescued from a gang of would-be rapists on the beach by laconic veteran Murray MacLeod was a highlight of Commons' deliriously bizarre account of new and old Hollywood and a long, long way from her pony-tailed horseback riding days on National Velvet.