Trivia: Richard Basehart was too much of an actor (and almost too good an actor) to ever be a movie star -- his range was sufficient to allow him to play murderers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and would-be suicides in 20 years' worth of theatrical films in totally convincing fashion, but also to portray a hero in the longest-running science fiction/adventure series on network television. Without ever achieving stardom, he became one of the most respected performers of his generation in theater, film, and television. Born John Richard Basehart in Zanesville, OH, in 1914, he spent a part of his childhood in an orphanage after the death of his mother, when his father, Harry Basehart, found himself unable to look after the four children left in his care. The younger Basehart considered a career in journalism like his father, but when he was 13, he began acting in small roles in a local theater company and came to enjoy performing. In the mid-'30s, he joined Jasper Deeter's famed Hedgerow Theater company in Rose Valley, PA. By the end of the 1930s, he'd set his sights on a Broadway career and moved to New York. During the 1939 season, while working in stock, Basehart met an actress named Stephanie Klein, and the two were married in early 1940. He continued trying to establish a foothold in New York and in 1942, joined Margaret Webster's theater company. Basehart's breakthrough role came during 1945 in the play The Hasty Heart, in which director Bretaigne Windust cast him in the central role of the proud, dying young Scottish soldier. Basehart won the 1945 New York Drama Critics Award for his performance and was named the most promising newcomer of the season. Not only did Broadway producers take notice of Basehart but so did Hollywood, and he was soon signed to a movie contract. Thus began a screen career that lasted nearly 40 years, starting with Repeat Performance (1947), a thriller starring Joan Leslie. He followed this with Cry Wolf (1947), an adventure yarn also starring Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn, and Geraldine Brooks. Basehart was unusually careful as a new Hollywood performer to vary his roles and avoid getting typecast. His first of what proved a string of memorable portrayals was in He Walked By Night (1948), a fact-based thriller in which the actor played a brilliant but sociopathic electronics expert, responsible for a string of burglaries and for killing a police officer. Viewers who grew up knowing Basehart as the heroic figure on the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in the 1960s are often startled to see him 20 years earlier in He Walked By Night as an almost feral presence, quietly fierce, threatening and stealthy in his efforts to escape detection and capture. Over the next two years, Basehart essayed a multitude of roles, in contemporary dramatic subjects and period dramas, the most interesting of which was Anthony Mann's Reign of Terror (1949), in which he portrayed Maximilien Robespierre, one of the chief architects of the bloodbath that followed in the wake of the French Revolution. In 1950, Basehart played one of the most difficult film roles of his career when he was cast in the fact-based movie Fourteen Hours, playing a young man who spends 14 hours on the ledge of an office building, threatening to jump. It was during the shooting of this movie that Basehart's wife, Stephanie, was taken ill with what proved to be a brain tumor, and died very suddenly. He finished work on the film and then left the United States, going to Italy where he began putting his life back together. This began when he met the actress Valentina Cortese, whom he married in 1951. The two worked together in one movie, The House on Telegraph Hill, directed by Robert Wise at 20th Century Fox, in which Basehart played the villain trying to murder Cortese for her estate. Basehart returned to Hollywood only intermittently for the next nine years, and his next appearance in an American movie wasn't until 1953, when he worked in Titanic, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb. It was during the decade that Basehart made his home in Europe that the actor became multilingual, and developed a serious following over there as a leading man; while other, older American performers were entering the final legs of their careers making pictures in France, Italy, or England, he was making important pictures and playing great roles, as the doomed, gentle clown in Federico Fellini's La Strada; a basically honest man driven into crime in The Good Die Young; the movie director threatened by a blackmailer in Joseph Losey's Finger of Guilt, and even an action-adventure hero in an Italian-made version of Cartouche (1957). John Huston specifically chose Basehart for the central role of Ishmael in his superb 1956 film version of Moby Dick. In 1957, Basehart tried reestablishing his Hollywood acting credentials with his portrayal of a conscience-stricken American officer in the movie Time Limit, which got good notices but proved to be a one-off American screen credit. In 1960, the actor divorced his second wife and left Italy behind. He returned to live permanently in America and restart his career, and began a new life, marrying again in 1962. He found that film roles weren't easily forthcoming, however -- the only part that came his way was the title role in Stuart Heisler's 1962 drama Hitler, in which Basehart gave an unusually complex, cerebral portrayal of the Nazi leader. He made numerous appearances in dramatic series such as Combat and Naked City, and television anthology shows including Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame. In 1964, Basehart accepted the offer of a starring role on a television series, beginning a four-year run on the Irwin Allen-produced Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, portraying Admiral Harriman Nelson. Thus began the steadiest work of his career, more than 100 episodes made Basehart a television star. He appeared in one movie during this period, John Sturges' thriller The Satan Bug (1965), in which he played the villain. Following the cancellation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Basehart returned to acting on-stage, interspersed with work in made-for-television movies and occasional feature films, such as Rage (1972), directed by George C. Scott. He won critical acclaim for his work in the drama The Andersonville Trial, directed by George C. Scott, portraying Lt. Col. Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Confederate prisoner of war camp, and made the rounds of guest star roles in television shows, perhaps most memorably the "Dagger of the Mind" episode of Columbo. Basehart and his third wife, Diana, also became known for their dedication to the cause of animal rights, founding the organization Actors and Others for Animals. During the final years of his life, he did some acting on television series such as Knight Rider and appeared in movies such as the hit Being There, but he was also very much in demand as a narrator, working on Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (1980), among other projects. It was as a narrator that he made his final public appearance, at the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Basehart suffered a series of strokes, and passed away soon after.

Trivia: American actor William Lundigan launched his show business career working as an adolescent announcer for a Syracuse radio station, which was housed in a building owned by his father. Abandoning a planned law career, Lundigan spent thirteen years as an announcer before being discovered by a Universal film executive in 1937. Appearing as a lightweight leading man in such films as Armored Car (1937) and Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1938), and in featured roles in the bigger-budgeted Dodge City and The Old Maid (both 1939), Lundigan worked steadily in the major studios before being drafted into the Marines for World War II service in 1942. Like many other second-echelon Hollywood actors, Lundigan found the going rough after the war, though as a Fox contractee he managed to land occasional good parts in such pictures as Pinky (1949) and I'll Get By (1950). When prospects dried up for Lundigan in the mid-1950s, he returned to announcing as the host of the popular CBS dramatic anthology Climax. Science fiction fans will remember Lundigan for his role in Riders to the Stars (1954), and for his portrayal of TV's first true astronaut, Col. MacCauley, in the 1959 weekly adventure series Men Into Space.

Trivia: Czech character actor Steven Geray was for many years a member in good standing of the Hungarian National Theater. He launched his English-speaking film career in Britain in 1935, then moved to the U.S. in 1941. His roles ranged from sinister to sympathetic, from "A" productions like Gilda (1946) to potboilers like El Paso (1949). He flourished during the war years, enjoying top billing in the moody little romantic melodrama So Dark the Night (1946), and also attracting critical praise for his portrayal of Dirk Stroeve in The Moon and Sixpence (1942). Many of Geray's film appearances in the 1950s were unbilled; when he was given screen credit, it was usually as "Steve Geray." Geray's busy career in film and television continued into the 1960s. Steven Geray worked until he had obviously depleted his physical strength; it was somewhat sad to watch the ailing Geray struggle through the western horror pic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1965).

Trivia: A debonair British-born supporting player in Hollywood films from 1936, John Burton usually played men of wealth and prestige, such as Lord Nelson in Lloyds of London, Lafayette in Marie Antoinette (1938), and a Scotland Yard inspector in Phantom Raiders (1940), the latter an entry in MGM's brief "Nick Carter" series. During World War II, he was often cast as RAF officers and also did quite a bit of narration work for wartime short subjects. Burton's final film seems to have been Attack of the Mayan Mummy (1963), a Jerry Warren atrocity filmed in Mexico.

Trivia: Diminutive, frequently mustached character actor Charles Wagenheim made the transition from stage to screen in or around 1940. Wagenheim's most memorable role was that of "The Runt" in Meet Boston Blackie (1941), a part taken over by George E. Stone in the subsequent "Boston Blackie" B-films. Generally cast in unsavory bit parts, Wagenheim's on-screen perfidy extended from Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) to George Stevens' Diary of Anne Frank (1959), in which, uncredited, he played the sneak thief who nearly gave away the hiding place of the Frank family. Wagenheim kept his hand in the business into the 1970s in films like The Missouri Breaks (1976). In 1979, 83-year-old Charles Wagenheim was bludgeoned to death by an intruder in his Hollywood apartment, five days before another veteran actor, Victor Kilian, met the same grisly fate.

Trivia: A Broadway actor who also found marked success in celluloid with roles in such film noir classics as The Set-Up and The Narrow Margin, David Clarke embarked on an enduring screen career following his debut in the 1941 boxing drama Knockout. The Chicago native found a powerful ally in the business when he made fast friends with star Will Geer while pounding the boards in his hometown early on, and after being abandoned in Seattle following a failed touring play, the talented duo set their sights on Broadway. Both actors were hired to appear in the 1936 Broadway play 200 Were Chosen, and in the years that followed, both Geer and Clarke went on to achieve notable success on both stage and screen. Clarke also found frequent work on television on such popular series as Kojak and Wonder Woman as well as a recurring role in the small-screen drama Ryan's Hope. Clarke and Geer remained lifelong friends, appearing together in both the 1949 film Intruder in the Dust and the enduring television drama The Waltons -- in which Clarke made several guest appearances. David Clarke married actress Nora Dunfee in 1946; the couple would frequently appear together on-stage and remained wed until Dunfee's death in 1994. On April 18, 2004, David Clarke died of natural causes in Arlington, VA. He was 95.

Trivia: Though born in the American Midwest, Henry Rowland had heavily Teutonic facial features, making him an invaluable commodity in wartime films. Rowland "heiled" and "achtunged" his way through films ranging from 1942's Casablanca to 1975's Russ Meyer's Supervixens, in which he played a suspicious old coot named Martin Borman! Conversely, he showed up as an American flight surgeon in 1944's Winged Victory, billed under his military ranking as Corporal Henry Rowland. In his last years, Rowland continued playing such Germanic characters as the Amish farmer in 1975's The Frisco Kid.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the later 20th Century-Fox contract player of the same name, silent screen actor Harry Carter had appeared in repertory with Mrs. Fiske and directed The Red Mill for Broadway impresario Charles Frohman prior to entering films with Universal in 1914. Often cast as a smooth villain, the dark-haired Carter made serials something of a specialty, menacing future director Robert Z. Leonard in The Master Key (1914); playing the title menace in The Gray Ghost (1917); and acting supercilious towards Big Top performers Eddie Polo and Eileen Sedgwick in Lure of the Circus (1918). In addition to his serial work, Carter played General Von Kluck in the infamous propaganda piece The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918). It was back to chapterplays in the 1920s, where he menaced Claire Anderson and Grace Darmond in two very low-budget examples of the genre: The Fatal Sign (1920) and The Hope Diamond Mystery (1921).