Trivia: Given that Fred MacMurray built a successful film career as the quintessential nice guy, it's rather ironic that some of his strongest and best-remembered performances cast him against type. While remaining known as a fixture of light comedies and live-action Disney productions, his definitive roles nonetheless were those which found him contemplating murder, adultery, and other villainous pursuits. Born August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, IL, MacMurray, the son of a concert violinist, was educated at a military academy and later studied at the Chicago Art Institute. His original goal was to become a professional saxophonist, and toward that aim he worked with a variety of bands and even recorded with Gus Arnheim. MacMurray's musical aspirations eventually led him to Hollywood, where he frequently worked as an extra. He later joined the California Collegians and with them played Broadway in the 1930 revue Three's a Crowd, where he joined Libby Holman on a duet of "Something to Remember Me By." He subsequently appeared in productions of The Third Little Show and Roberta. The story behind MacMurray's return to Hollywood remains uncertain -- either a Paramount casting scout saw him on-stage, or he simply signed up with Central Casting -- but either way, he was under contract by 1934. At Paramount, he rose to fame in 1935's The Gilded Lily, a romantic comedy which pit him against Claudette Colbert. Seemingly overnight he was among the hottest young actors in town, and he quickly emerged as a favorite romantic sparring partner with many of Hollywood's leading actresses. After Katherine Hepburn requested his services for Alice Adams, MacMurray joined Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table before reuniting with Colbert in The Bride Comes Home, his seventh film in 12 months. He kept up the frenetic pace, appearing in 1936's The Trail of the Lonesome Pine alongside Henry Fonda, reteaming with Lombard in The Princess Comes Across. After settling a contract dispute with Paramount, MacMurray again starred with Colbert in the 1937 swashbuckler Maid of Salem, one of the first films to move him away from the laid-back, genial performances on which he'd risen to success.Along with Colbert, Lombard remained the actress with whom MacMurray was most frequently paired. They reunited in 1937's Swing High, Swing Low and again that same year in True Confession. After starring with Bing Crosby in Sing You Sinners, he also began another onscreen partnership with Madeleine Carroll in 1939's Cafe Society, quickly followed by a reunion in Invitation to Bali. While not the superstar that many predicted he would become, by the 1940s MacMurray had settled comfortably into his leading man duties, developing an amiable comic style perfectly suited to his pictures' sunny tone. While occasionally appearing in a more dramatic capacity, as in the Barbara Stanwyck drama Remember the Night, the majority of his pictures remained light, breezy affairs. However, in 1944 he and Stanwyck reunited in Billy Wilder's superb Double Indemnity, which cast MacMurray as a murderous insurance salesman. The result was perhaps the most acclaimed performance of his career, earning him new respect as a serious actor.However, MacMurray soon returned to more comedic fare, appearing with Colbert in 1944's Practically Yours. After the following year's farcical Murder He Says, his contract with Paramount ended and he moved to 20th Century Fox, where he starred in the historical musical Where Do We Go From Here? His co-star, June Haver, became his wife in 1954. MacMurray then produced and starred in Pardon My Past, but after announcing his displeasure with Fox he jumped to Universal to star in the 1947 hit The Egg and I. During the 1940s and early '50s, he settled into a string of easygoing comedies, few of them successful either financially or artistically. His star began to wane, a situation not helped by a number of poor career choices; in 1950, he even turned down Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard. In 1954, however, MacMurray returned to form in The Caine Mutiny, where he appeared as a duplicitous naval officer. As before, cast against type he garnered some of the best notices of his career, but this time he continued the trend by starring as a dirty cop in The Pushover. Despite recent critical acclaim, MacMurray's box-office clout remained diminished, and throughout the mid-'50s he appeared primarily in low-budget action pictures, most of them Westerns. In 1959, however, he was tapped by Walt Disney to star in the live-action comedy The Shaggy Dog, which became one of the year's biggest hits. MacMurray appeared as a callous adulterer in Wilder's Oscar-winning 1960 smash The Apartment before moving to television to star in the family sitcom My Three Sons; a tremendous success, it ran until 1972. He then returned to the Disney stable to essay the title role in 1961's The Absent-Minded Professor and remained there for the following year's Bon Voyage and 1963's Son of Flubber. However, after two more Disney features -- 1966's Follow Me Boys and 1967's The Happiest Millionaire -- both flopped, MacMurray remained absent from the big screen for the rest of the decade, and only resurfaced in 1973 in Disney's Charley and the Angel. After a pair of TV movies, MacMurray made one last feature, 1978's The Swarm, before retiring. He died in Santa Monica, CA, on November 5, 1991.

Trivia: American actor William Frawley had hopes of becoming a newspaperman but was sidetracked by a series of meat-and-potatoes jobs. At 21, he found himself in the chorus of a musical comedy in Chicago; his mother forced him to quit, but Frawley had already gotten greasepaint in his veins. Forming a vaudeville act with his brother Paul, Frawley hit the show-business trail; several partners later (including his wife Louise), Frawley was a headliner and in later years laid claim to having introduced the beer-hall chestnut "Melancholy Baby." Entering films in the early 1930s (he'd made a few desultory silent-movie appearances), Frawley became typecast as irascible, pugnacious Irishmen, not much of a stretch from his off-camera personality. Though he worked steadily into the late 1940s, Frawley's drinking got the better of him, and by 1951 most producers found him virtually unemployable. Not so Desi Arnaz, who cast Frawley as neighbor Fred Mertz on the I Love Lucy TV series when Gale Gordon proved unavailable. Frawley promised to stay away from the booze during filming, and in turn Arnaz promised to give Frawley time off whenever the New York Yankees were in the World Series (a rabid baseball fan, Frawley not only appeared in a half dozen baseball films, but also was one of the investors of the minor-league Hollywood Stars ball team). Frawley played Fred Mertz until the last I Love Lucy episode was filmed in 1960, then moved on to a five-year assignment as Bub, chief cook and bottle-washer to son-in-law Fred MacMurray's all male household on My Three Sons.

Trivia: Phillip Pine was a character actor whose chameleon-like presence graced the entertainment world for more than 50 years as an actor, in addition to work as a screenwriter and director. Pine was born in Hanford, CA, 1920, and made his stage debut in a play written in Portugeuse. He later worked on showboats along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and made the jump to small roles in movies in the mid-'40s, when he was in his twenties. His dark features frequently got him cast as gangsters and thugs in the early part of his career, and he moved in more prominent roles -- usually of a villainous nature -- in the 1950s.In 1954, Pine worked on-stage in See the Jaguar and The Immoralist and crossed paths with James Dean at the outset of the latter's career in New York. He played the title role in the stage version of A Stone for Danny Fisher, in a production that also featured Zero Mostel, Joe de Santis, and Susan Cabot. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the play in The New York Times, wrote that Pine turned in "a good performance. He makes the character shifty and shallow, but likable, also, like a heel who means well weakly." With very expressive eyes and a minimum of words, Pine could melt into a role and make the most of only a few seconds' screen time. His feature films included William Keighley's crime thriller The Street with No Name (1948), Robert Wise's The Set Up, Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart, and William Wellman's Battleground, all released in 1949. He was also a veteran of hundreds of television shows, from Superman ("The Case of the Talkative Dummy," "The Mystery of the Broken Statues") to The Twilight Zone to Star Trek ("The Savage Curtain"), all of them as villains of a crafty and devious nature. Pine's biggest feature film role was in Irving Lerner's 1958 thriller Murder By Contract, in which he portrayed one of a pair of hoods working with hired assassin Vince Edwards. Pine passed away in 2006 at the age of 86.

Trivia: Joy Harmon may not be too well remembered by name, with only ten feature films to her credit and not that many more television appearances, but in 1967 she managed to make her mark on screen history, in a single scene that is still regarded as one of the most sexually suggestive in the history of mainstream movies. Born Patricia Joy Harmon in St. Louis, MO, in 1943, she moved with her family to Connecticut in 1946. Her father was connected to the exhibition end of the movie business and became an employee of the Roxy in Manhattan, one of the most prestigious theaters in New York. During her childhood, Harmon appeared in newsreels made by Fox Movietone News, and was taken with the idea of a movie career. At 13, she was hired as an extra in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, an experience that only reinforced her determination to become an actress. Deciding to take advantage of her natural attributes, she entered beauty contests and began seeking out roles on-stage -- she wasa runner-up for Miss Connecticut and later was cast in the Broadway show Make a Million. Harmon also posed in the pin-up magazines of the pre-Playboy era, and it was as a pin-up that she was best known for many years. Additionally, Harmon got a small role in Harry Foster's jukebox movie Let's Rock (1958). Her breakthrough came after she was invited to appear on Groucho Marx's quiz/comedy show You Bet Your Life. Marx was so taken with the cheerful, outgoing, and well-endowed Harmon, that he hired her to appear as one of his two assistants on his 1962 mid-season replacement show Tell it to Groucho, billed as Patty Harmon. Around this same period, she also played a small role in Burt Balaban's period crime thriller Mad Dog Coll (1961). From there she moved to performances in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, Burke's Law, My Three Sons, Batman, The Rounders, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., and Bewitched, through 1966, and a memorable pre-credit appearance in an episode of That Girl ("Pass The Potatoes, Ethel Merman"). With her blonde hair, eager smile, and ample bosom, she was mostly used as eye-candy. As with many actresses known for their physiques, her film appearances were in projects of widely varying quality, from high profile, big budget productions such as David Swift's frothy sex comedy, Under the Yum-Yum Tree (1963), to Terry O. Morse's Young Dillinger (1965), and Bert I. Gordon's Village of the Giants (1965). The latter, in particular, took advantage of Harmon's physical attributes as her bikini-clad character is one of a group of anti-social teenagers enlarged to 50 feet tall. In 1965, she got the only starring screen role of her career, in the low-budget comedy-caper movie One Way Wahini, which co-starred Anthony Eisley (Hawaiian Eye) and Edgar Bergen; however, that movie (which was shot in widescreen, no less, making any close-ups of Harmon that much more impressive) barely got any distribution and soon disappeared. Her most lasting screen contribution came in 1967 when Harmon was cast in Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke. In a scene almost legendary for its suggestiveness, she portrayed a girl seen washing a car in the hot sun within a few feet of the working, straining prison work-camp inmates. Wearing a short, tight-fitting dress, she slid a soapy sponge over the car, reaching ever further and straining the fabric, front and back, her cleavage easily visible, sweating and getting ever wetter as she slid the sponge around while the men watching her got ever more distracted. It was to be her best moment onscreen -- a year later, Harmon married Jeff Gourson, a producer, and she retired from movies after one more big-screen appearance, in Angel in my Pocket (1969), though she appeared on television through 1972 in episodes of Love American Style and The Odd Couple. Today, she is mostly remembered for Cool Hand Luke; among her three children, her son Jason is a film editor, and her older daughter Jamie is an actress.