Trivia: Irish-born actress Greer Garson graduated with honors from the University of London and finished her post-grad work at the University of Grenoble in France. For many years, she worked efficiently as supervisor of an advertising firm, spending her spare time working in community theater. By age 24, Garson decided to take a risk and try a full-time acting career. She was accepted by the Birmingham Repertory, making her first stage appearance as an American Jewish tenement girl in Street Scene. Her London debut came in 1934 in The Tempest, after which she headlined several stage plays and musicals. While vacationing in London, MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer happened to see Garson in Old Music; entranced by her elegant manner and flaming red hair, Mayer signed the actress to an MGM contract, showcasing her in the Anglo-American film production Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939).Garson became MGM's resident aristocrat, appearing most often as co-star of fellow contractee Walter Pidgeon. It was with Pidgeon that she appeared in Mrs. Miniver (1942), a profitable wartime morale-booster which won Oscars for Garson, for supporting actress Teresa Wright, and for the picture itself. Legend has it that Garson's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony rambled on for 45 minutes; in fact, it wasn't any more than five or six minutes, but the speech compelled the Academy to limit the time any actor could spend in accepting the award. Though not overly fond of being so insufferably ladylike in her films, Garson stayed at MGM until her contract expired in 1954; it was surprising but at the same time refreshing to see her let her hair down in the 1956 Western Strange Lady in Town. In 1960, Garson received her seventh Oscar nomination for her astonishingly accurate portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. After that, Garson was given precious few opportunities to shine in films, though she was permitted to exhibit her still-vibrant singing voice in her last picture, 1967's The Happiest Millionaire. Following her marriage to Texas oil baron Colonel EE. "Buddy" Fogelson, Garson retired to a ranch in Santa Fe, NM, where she involved herself with various charities. Occasionally Garson returned to make guest appearances on television in ventures ranging from Hollywood Squares, to The Crown Matrimonial, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production. She had to give up even these performances in the early '80s due to chronic heart problems. In 1988, Garson underwent quadruple-bypass surgery. She died of heart failure in Dallas on April 6, 1996.

Trivia: A former accountant for the Gulf Oil Company, Dana Andrews made his stage debut with the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse in 1935. Signed to a joint film contract by Sam Goldwyn and 20th Century Fox in 1940, Andrews bided his time in supporting roles until the wartime shortage of leading men promoted him to stardom. His matter-of-fact, dead pan acting style was perfectly suited to such roles as the innocent lynching victim in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and laconic city detective Mark McPherson in Laura (1944). For reasons unknown, Andrews often found himself cast as aviators: he was the downed bomber pilot in The Purple Heart (1944), the ex-flyboy who has trouble adjusting to civilian life in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and the foredoomed airliner skipper in Zero Hour (1957), The Crowded Sky (1960), and Airport 1975 (1974). His limited acting range proved a drawback in the 1950s, and by the next decade he was largely confined to character roles, albeit good ones. From 1963 to 1965, Andrews was president of the Screen Actors Guild, where among other things he bemoaned Hollywood's obsession with nudity and sordidness (little suspecting that the worst was yet to come!). An ongoing drinking problem seriously curtailed his capability to perform, and on a couple of occasions nearly cost him his life on the highway; in 1972, he went public with his alcoholism in a series of well-distributed public service announcements, designed to encourage other chronic drinkers to seek professional help. In addition to his film work, Andrews also starred or co-starred in several TV series (Bright Promise, American Girls, and Falcon Crest) and essayed such TV-movie roles as General George C. Marshall in Ike (1979). Dana Andrews made his final screen appearance in Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack.

Trivia: The son of a Pennsylvania minister, actor Cameron Mitchell first appeared on Broadway in 1934, in the Lunts' modern-dress version of Taming of the Shrew. He served as a bombardier during World War II, and for a brief period entertained thoughts of becoming a professional baseball player (he allegedly held an unsigned contract with the Detroit Tigers until the day he died). Mitchell was signed to an MGM contract in 1945, but stardom would elude him until he appeared as Happy in the original 1949 Broadway production of Death of the Salesman. He re-created this role for the 1951 film version, just before signing a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. Throughout the 1950s, Mitchell alternated between likeable characters (the unpretentious business executive in How to Marry a Millionaire [1952]) and hissable ones (Jigger Craigin in Carousel [1956]); his best performance, in the opinion of fans and critics alike, was as drug-addicted boxer Barney Ross in the 1957 biopic Monkey on My Back. Beginning in the 1960s, Mitchell adroitly sidestepped the IRS by appearing in dozens of Spanish and Italian films, only a few of which were released in the U.S. He also starred in three TV series: The Beachcomber (1961), The High Chapparal (1969-1971), and Swiss Family Robinson (1976). Mitchell spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s squandering his talents in such howlers as The Toolbox Murders, though there were occasional bright moments, notably his performance as a neurotic mob boss in 1982's My Favorite Year. A note for trivia buffs: Cameron Mitchell also appeared in the first CinemaScope film, The Robe (1953). Mitchell was the voice of Jesus in the Crucifixion scene.

Trivia: Supporting actress, onscreen from 1955.

Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor Walter Hampden launched his acting career in England, starting with the Frank Benson Stock Company. In 1907, Hampden returned to the US, where his classical training and orotund voice enabled him to tour with the famed Russian actress Nazimova. Hampden's greatest American triumph was as Cyrano de Bergerac in the Edmond Rostand play of the same name; the actor first interpreted Cyrano in 1923, reviving the play periodically throughout his career. In 1925, Hampden established his own acting company at New York City's Colonial Theatre, where he acted and directed until 1930. Later on, Hampden was on hand for the opening of the American Repertory Theatre, playing Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Hollywood, in its typical pigeonholing fashion, regarded Hampden as a caricature of the string-tied declamatory "grrreat ac-tor" usually treated contemptuously by more "realistic" performers. Such was not truly the case, but Hampden found himself often as not cast in films as distinguished old blowhards, notably in the opening scenes of All About Eve (1950), wherein Hampden's on-screen pomposity is the target of George Sanders' first insulting remark. The actor was better treated in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as the kindly archbishop who offers Maureen O'Hara sanctuary, and in Five Fingers (1952) as the unwitting British ambassador whose valet (James Mason) is a spy for the Nazis. For reasons that defy comprehension, Cecil B. DeMille cast both Hampden and Boris Karloff as American Indians in Unconquered (1947)! While his movie roles weren't terribly compelling, Walter Hampden rounded out his stage career with distinction in Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

Trivia: Prolific American character actor Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez has been involved in films since the 1950s. Of Mexican heritage, he frequently played comical, highly stereotyped Latinos, but every once in a while he was given meatier roles in films such as Six Pack Annie (1975) and Down the Drain (1989). Gonzalez-Gonzalez also appears in television films.

Trivia: While many of Earl Holliman's bucolic screen characters tended to shy away from "book learnin," Holliman himself is a graduate of UCLA. Making his film debut with a one-line bit as a bellboy in Martin and Lewis' Scared Stiff (1953), Holliman went on to featured and co-starring roles in westerns and military dramas, usually cast as a hot-headed rustic with a streak of manic unpredictability. His larger film roles include the comic-relief cook in Forbidden Planet (1956), Katharine Hepburn's girl-happy brother in The Rainmaker (1956)--a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination--and Matt Elder in the John Wayne starrer Sons of Katie Elder (1965). A nearly inescapable presence on television, Holliman turned in some impressive work on the many live TV anthologies of the 1950s. His portrayal of a shipwrecked marine in the 1958 Kraft Theatre production "The Sea is Boiling Hot," in which he carried on a one-sided debate with monolingual Japanese officer Sessue Hayakawa, led to his being cast in a similar solo turn in the 1959 Twilight Zone pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" His series-TV credits include the roles of gunslinger-turned-hotelier Sundance in Hotel de Paree (1959), bronco buster Mitch Guthrie in Wide Country (1962), Palm Springs private eye Matthew Durning in PS I Luv U (1991) and barkeep Darden Towe in Delta (1992). Undoubtedly his most famous TV assignment was as Angie Dickinson's superior officer Lt. Bill Crowley in the weekly Police Woman (1974-78). Most recently Earl Holliman made a most welcome guest appearance as Lea Thompson's Wisconsinite dad in the TV sitcom Caroline in the City.

Trivia: Blonde, Brooklyn-born model and chorus girl Adele Jergens gained national fame when she was elected "Miss World's Fairest" at the 1939 World's Fair; if one chose to believe her "official" birth date, she was 13 years old at the time. Signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1944, Jergens showed up in that studio's "A" and "B" product in a succession of hard-boiled and "loose" roles. Her most curious assignment at Columbia was 1949's Ladies of The Chorus, wherein 27-year-old Jergens played the mother of 23-year-old Marilyn Monroe. Evidently, Jergens was possessed of a good nature, else she wouldn't have seemed so comfortable playing the foil to such comedians as Red Skelton, Abbott & Costello, Alan Young and even the Bowery Boys. Mostly consigned to programmers in the 1950s, Jergens enjoyed a rare "A" part in MGM's psychological melodrama The Cobweb. Adele Jergens was the widow of actor Glenn Langan, whom she married in 1949.

Trivia: A former Miami Beach lifeguard, strapping Ohio-born Bob Wilke performed stunt work in Hollywood films from 1936, often working for low-budget studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram. He began earning better roles in the mid- to late '40s, mostly villainous, and went on to become one of the busiest supporting players on television in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in small-screen Western fare ranging from Gene Autry to Lancer.

Trivia: Of Latin extraction, actor Frank DeKova possessed the indeterminate but sharply chiselled facial features that allowed him to play a wide range of ethnic types, from East Indian to American Indian. His first film appearance was as a gravel-voiced gangster in 1951's The Mob. He was busiest in westerns, closing out his film career with 1975's Johnny Firecloud. Frank DeKova has endeared himself to two generations of TV fans with his performance as peace-loving Hekawi Indian chief Wild Eagle on the 1960s TV sitcom F Troop.

Trivia: Having served as a bombardier in World War II, Russell Johnson used the GI Bill to finance his studies at the Actor's Lab. Between performing assignments, Johnson supported himself by driving a cab and working the assembly line at a ballpoint pen factory. His first movie break (indeed, his first movie) was in director Paul Henreid's For Men Only (1952), an exposé of barbaric college-fraternity initiation ceremonies; Johnson was suitably loathsome as the sadistic frat leader who is exposed as a snivelling coward in the climax. The balance of the 1950s found Johnson appearing in several fondly remembered science fiction efforts like It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1956) and The Space Children (1958). He carried over this relationship with the Unreal into his classic performance as an anguished time-traveller desperately attempting to prevent Lincoln's assassination in the 1961 Twilight Zone installment Back There. In 1964, Russell Johnson took his first steps into TV sitcom immortality when he assumed the role of "The Professor" (aka Roy Hinkley) in Gilligan's Island, a role that he'd continued to essay on and off for the next two decades in Gilligan cartoons and TV-movie spin-offs. Johnson worked in television through the 1980s and early '90s before retiring from acting; he died in 2014 at age 89.

Trivia: A top-flight character actor and sometime leading man, Gregory Walcott managed to bridge the tail-end of the studio system, the heyday of series television, and the boom years of the post-studio 1970s, and carve a notable career in the process. He was born Bernard Mattox in 1928 (some sources say 1932) in Wendell, NC, a small town about 10 miles east of the state capitol of Raleigh. After serving in the Army following the end of the Second World War, he decided to try for an acting career and hitchhiked his way to California. He managed to get work in amateur and semi-professional theatrical productions and was lucky enough to be spotted in a small role in one of these by an agent. That resulted in his big-screen debut, in an uncredited role in the 20th Century-Fox drama Red Skies of Montana (1952). With his 6'-plus height, impressive build, and deep voice, Walcott would seem to have a major career in front of him, but the movie business of the 1950s was in a state of constant retrenchment, battling the intrusion of television and the eroding of its audience. For the next three years, he had little but bit parts in films, some of them major productions. His performance as the drill instructor in the opening section of Raoul Walsh's Battle Cry (1955) was good enough to get him a contract with Warner Bros. He subsequently played supporting roles in Mister Roberts (1955) and in independent productions such as Badman's Country (1958), and also started showing up on television with some regularity. And with each new role, he seemed to gather momentum in his career.As luck would have it, however, Walcott's most prominent role of the 1950s ended up being the one he received the lowest fee for doing, and that he also thought the least of, and also one that, for decades, he was loathe to discuss, on or off the record: as Jeff Trent, the hero of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Walcott's work on the magnum opus of writer/producer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr. amounted to less than a week's work, and he was so busy in those days that one can easily imagine him forgetting about it as soon as his end of the shoot was over. And the movie was scarcely even seen on its initial release in the summer of 1959 and went to television in the early '60s in a package that usually had it relegated to "shock theater" showcases and the late-night graveyard (no pun intended). But the ultra-low-budget production, renowned for its eerily, interlocking values of ineptitude and entertainment, has become one of the most widely viewed (and deeply analyzed) low-budget movies of any era in the decades since.As this oddity in his career was starting to gather its fans (some would say fester), Walcott had long since moved on to co-starring in the series 87th Precinct and guest-starring roles in series television. Across the 1960s, he remained busy and had a chance to do especially good work on the series Bonanza, which gave him major guest-starring roles in seven episodes between 1960 and 1972. In one of these, "Song in the Dark" (1962), Walcott even had a chance to show off his singing voice, a talent of his that was otherwise scarcely recognized in a three-decade career. By the late '60s, he had also moved into production work, producing and starring in Bill Wallace of China (1967), the story of a Christian missionary. During the 1970s, Walcott finally started to get movie roles that were matched in prominence to his talent, most especially in the films of Clint Eastwood. He remained busy as a prominent character actor and supporting player -- part of that category of performers that includes the likes of Richard Herd and James Cromwell -- into the 1980s. He had retired by the start of the 1990s, but was called before the cameras once more for an appearance in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood. Walcott died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: American general-purpose actor Douglas Kennedy attended Deerfield Academy before trying his luck in Hollywood, using both his own name and his studio-imposed name Keith Douglas. He was able to secure contract-player status, first at Paramount and later at Warner Bros. Kennedy's Paramount years weren't what one could call distinguished, consisting mainly of unbilled bits (The Ghost Breakers [1940]) and supporting roles way down the cast list (Northwest Mounted Police [1940]); possibly he was handicapped by his close resemblance to Paramount leading man Fred MacMurray. Warner Bros., which picked up Kennedy after his war service with the OSS and Army Intelligence, gave the actor some better breaks with secondary roles in such A pictures as Nora Prentiss (1947), Dark Passage (1948), and The Adventures of Don Juan (1949). Still, Kennedy did not fill a role as much as he filled the room in the company of bigger stars. Chances are film buffs would have forgotten Kennedy altogether had it not been for his frequent appearances in such horror/fantasy features as Invaders from Mars (1953), The Alligator People (1959) and The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), playing the title role in the latter. Douglas Kennedy gain a modicum of fame and a fan following for his starring role in the well-circulated TV western series Steve Donovan, Western Marshal, which was filmed in 1952 and still posting a profit into the '60s.

Trivia: A favorite of producer/director Jack Webb, character actor Ralph Moody was a familiar face to viewers of Dragnet in both its 1950s and 1960s incarnations -- but that would be an unfair (as well as inaccurate) way to describe an actor who amassed hundreds of film and television appearances in barely 20 years of movie and television work. Born in St. Louis, MO, in 1886, Moody didn't make his screen debut until 1948, with a small role in Man Eaters of Kumaon. Already in his sixties, he always looked older than he was, and his craggy features could also impart a fierceness that made him threatening. Although Moody was known for playing kindly or crotchety old men, he occasionally brought that fierceness to bear, as in the Adventures of Superman episode "Test of a Warrior", in which he played the sinister medicine man Okatee. But in between that and dozens of other one-off television assignments, Moody also managed to work in scenes as the coffin-boat skipper in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street and one of the rescue workers in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Moody was one of those actors who could work quickly and milk a line or a scene for all its emotional worth. What's more, he could do it without over-emoting. He was the kind of character player that directors and producers in budget-conscious television of the 1950s needed. In an episode of Circus Boy, he played a touching scene with a young Micky Dolenz, as an aging railroad engineer introducing the boy to the world of locomotives and trains. After that, Moody got called back to do three more episodes. But it was Jack Webb who really put him to work in Dragnet and many of his other productions, in radio and feature films as well as television. His more memorable appearances on Dragnet included "The Big Producer", as a once-famous movie producer who is reduced to selling pornographic pictures to high-school students, and "The Hammer", from the 1967 revival of the series, in which he portrayed the neighbor of a murder victim. Moody continued working regularly in television until a year before his death in 1971, at age 84. His final appearance was in the Night Gallery episode "The Little Black Bag".

Trivia: A graduate of St. Peter's College, Nick Adams made his screen-acting bow at age 20 with a bit in Somebody Loves Me (1952). Signed at Warner Bros. in 1955, Adams appeared with James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. An inveterate offscreen prankster, Adams enjoyed making Dean laugh by doing on-target impersonations of his co-stars; this talent came in handy when Adams was called upon to dub in several of James Dean's lines in Giant after Dean's fatal car accident. The best of Adams' 1950s movie assignments included the role of Andy Griffith's nerdish air force buddy in No Time for Sergeants (1957) and the would-be seducer of Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959). In 1959, Adams was cast as ex-Confederate soldier Johnny Yuma on the popular TV western The Rebel; less successful was his 1962 starring series Saints and Sinners. After an Oscar nomination for his performance as a surly murder suspect in Twilight of Honor (1963), Adams' career went into an eclipse. Nick Adams died in 1968, the result of an overdose of prescription drugs.

Trivia: Starting his Hollywood career in or around 1951, American actor Robert Foulk was alternately passive and authoritative in such westerns as Last of the Badmen (1957), The Tall Stranger (1957), The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Cast a Long Shadow (1958). He remained a frontiersmen for his year-long stint as bartender Joe Kingston on the Joel McCrea TV shoot-em-up Wichita Town (1959) (though he reverted to modern garb as the Anderson family's next-door neighbor in the '50s sitcom Father Knows Best). In non-westerns, Foulk usually played professional men, often uniformed. Some of his parts were fleeting enough not to have any designation but "character bit" (vide The Love Bug [1968]), but otherwise there was no question Foulk was in charge: as a doctor in Tammy and the Doctor (1963), a police official in Bunny O'Hare (1971) or a railroad conductor in Emperor of the North (1973). Robert Foulk was given extensive screen time in the Bowery Boys' Hold That Hypnotist (1957), as the title character; and in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), playing straight as Sheriff Glick opposite such "Merrie Men" as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin Sammy Davis Jr. and Bing Crosby.

Trivia: For over six decades, Louise Lorimer played character roles on stage, screen and television. She launched her career on Broadway, appearing in I Remember Mama opposite Marlon Brando. Lorimer later worked on My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison. Lorimer made her feature-film debut in Gangster's Boy (1938). She subsequently appeared steadily in feature films through the late 1970s. Her television work includes appearances on Profiles in Courage and Marnie. She also frequently appeared on the Alfred Hitchcock anthology series Hitchcock Presents and on the sitcom Dennis the Menace. On Hopalong Cassidy, Lorimer occasionally played "Stagecoach Sal." Lorimer graduated from the Leland Powers School of Drama in Boston. She served in the USO during WW II. Later in her career, Lorimer became a teacher at the Martha's Vineyard branch of the Leland Powers School of Drama.

Trivia: Actor Joe Hamilton staffed a few films of the '50s and '60s.

Trivia: Supporting actor in Australian comedies of the '30.