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: A literature and philosophy student in his native Moscow, Vladimir Sokoloff trained for an acting career under Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Leaving Russia in 1923, Sokoloff resettled in Germany, where he made his first film, Uneasy Money, in 1926. Dividing his time between Paris and Berlin throughout the 1930s, Sokoloff came to Hollywood in 1937, where his craggy face and colorful accent enabled him to secure choice character roles. Despite his name and ethnic derivation, Sokoloff successfully portrayed nearly 35 different nationalities during his American career: He was Frenchman Paul Cezanne in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a Middle Easterner in Road to Morocco (1942), Spanish freedom fighter Anselmo in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), an elderly Mexican in The Magnificent Seven (1960), and so it went. Vladimir Sokoloff was active in films (Taras Bulba) and TV programs (The Twilight Zone) right up to his death in 1962.

Trivia: The son of a wholesale grocer who later became one of the founders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Robert Shayne studied business administration at Boston University. Intending to study for the ministry, Shayne opted instead to work as field secretary for the Unitarian Layman's League. He went on to sell real estate during the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s before heading northward to launch an acting career. After Broadway experience, Shayne was signed to a film contract at RKO radio in 1934. When this led nowhere, Shayne returned to the stage. While appearing with Katharine Hepburn in the Philip Barry play Without Love, Shayne was again beckoned to Hollywood, this time by Warner Bros. Most of his feature film roles under the Warner banner were of the sort that any competent actor could have played; he was better served by the studio's short subjects department, which starred him in a series of 2-reel "pocket westerns" built around stock footage from earlier outdoor epics. He began free-lancing in 1946, playing roles of varying size and importance at every major and minor outfit in Hollywood. In 1951, Shayne was cast in his best-known role: Inspector Henderson on the long-running TV adventure series Superman. He quit acting in the mid-1970s to become an investment banker with the Boston Stock Exchange. The resurgence of the old Superman series on television during this decade thrust Shayne back into the limelight, encouraging him to go back before the cameras. He was last seen in a recurring role on the 1990 Superman-like weekly series The Flash. Reflecting on his busy but only fitfully successful acting career, Robert Shayne commented in 1975 that "It was work, hard and long; a terrible business when things go wrong, a rewarding career when things go right."