Trivia: Handsome, blond, and suave entertainer Jack Cassidy was the star of many Broadway musicals during the '50s and '60s. He also played supporting roles in films and on television. He first appeared as a dancer on the Great White Way at age 15 in Something for the Boys. In television, he guest starred on many shows and was a co-star on the short-lived sitcom He & She in 1967. In film he is best remembered for his portrayal of John Barrymore in W.C. Fields and Me (1976). Sadly, it was his final film role -- that year he was burned to death when his Los Angeles apartment caught fire. He had apparently fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette in bed. At the time, he was married to actress Shirley Jones. Cassidy is the father (by first marriage to actress Evelyn Ward) of singer/actor David Cassidy -- who became a teen idol appearing on the sitcom The Partridge Family in the '70s and went on to have a successful stage career -- actor/singer Shaun Cassidy and, by his second wife, Jones, actor Patrick Cassidy.

Trivia: American actress Yvonne Craig trained for a ballet career from age 10 onward. While in high school, Yvonne was accepted by George Balanchine for the School of American Ballet, but she chose instead to tour with the Ballet Russe. Stopping over in Los Angeles, Ms. Craig was approached by a producer asking if she'd like to be in movies. She turned him down, but was more responsive to Hollywood after she later broke her contract with the Ballet Russe. Yvonne's first film was The Young Land (1957), but it remained on the shelf for two years, thus Eighteen and Anxious (1957) was the moviegoers' first introduction to the actress. The Young Land earned Yvonne a contract with Columbia pictures, where because of her exotic looks and flowing black hair she was cast in teen-aged "femme fatale" roles, such as the seductress in The Gene Krupa Story (1960) (though quite thin, she was actually larger than her frail Krupa co-star Sal Mineo, which caused a minor crisis when the script called for Mineo to hold Yvonne in his arms). Amidst movie assignments of off-and-on quality, Yvonne tested for West Side Story, but lost out to Natalie Wood. She did, however, hold the distinction of appearing with Elvis Presley twice in It Happened at the World's Fair (1962) and Kissin' Cousins (1964). In 1967, Yvonne was called upon to replace an incapacitated Mary Ann Mobley as Batgirl (aka Barbara Gordon) on the once-popular TV series Batman. Ms. Craig did her best in a sketchily written part, and was proud of the fact that she handled her motorcycle-riding scenes without a double, but Batman was on its last legs, and was cancelled in early 1968. When acting roles became repetitive--and few and far between--Yvonne drifted out of show business, making her last film in 1971. She co-produced industrial shows for a time, then went into the real estate business, where she did quite well for herself. Though she did appear (at the producer's request) in a low-budget video film in 1991, Yvonne Craig elected not to play the Hollywood Game anymore, and was content to limit her public appearance to film-fan conventions and Batman retrospectives. In 2009, she returned to show business, voicing a character in the animated Olivia series. Craig died in 2015, at age 78.

Trivia: American actor Robert Cummings studied for an engineer's degree at several colleges before concentrating his energies at the American School of Dramatic Arts. After returning from a trip to England, he became possessed with the notion that he could best conquer Hollywood if he passed himself off as a British actor, so for a brief uncomfortable period he called himself Blade Stanhope Conway. The best he could get was an extra part in Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert (1933); after that, he renamed himself Brice Hutchens, under which name he played on Broadway with a magic act in Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. As plain old Robert Cummings, the actor made his film debut in Paramount's So Red the Rose (1935), in which he was killed off in the Civil War before the first reel was over. He finally got a meaty hysteria scene as a condemned prisoner in The Accusing Finger (1936) -- but thereafter played almost nothing but comedy at Paramount. Stronger dramatic roles came Cummings' way in Kings Row (1941) and Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). By the early 1950s, the formerly callow Cummings had matured enough to be convincing as the "other man" in the Hitchcock thriller Dial M for Murder (1954), and in the difficult role of the compassionate Juror Number 8 in the original 1955 TV production of Twelve Angry Men. He also gained valuable off-camera prestige as an officer in the Air Force Reserves (he'd been a licensed pilot since age 17). Still, Cummings' main reputation in this decade rested on two lighthearted TV situation comedies: My Hero, which lasted 39 episodes in 1952, and the more famous Bob Cummings Show, a.k.a. Love That Bob, which ran from 1955 through 1958. Playing glamour photographer Bob Collins in the latter series, Cummings perpetuated public TV reputation as an eternally youthful ladies' man (though the biggest laughs went to supporting actress Ann B. Davis (as Schultzy). Newspaper and magazine articles of the period made much of Cummings' seeming agelessness, which the actor chalked up to careful dieting, plenty of vitamins and exercise. That anyone would find it unusual that a 50-year-old man could retain his looks and sex appeal is astonishing in these days of such over-50 movie idols as Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, but such was the state of press agentry in the Love That Bob days. Two later TV series didn't do so well for Cummings, nor did his performances in such 1960s films as The Carpetbaggers (1963); still, critics would marvel at how well the now sixtyish actor was "holding up." Unfortunately, Cummings fell victim to Parkinson's disease in the 1980s, and the once-virile actor deteriorated rapidly both in mind and body before his death at age 82. In his prime, however, Cummings was one of those rare film actors who managed to retain his fame and popularity even though he made relatively few films of importance.

Trivia: On stage from his teens (as part of the "Dancing Verselle Sisters" troupe), Jack Albertson worked in almost any form of live entertainment you could name: vaudeville, burlesque, legitimate stage, even opera. For two years he was straight man to comedian Phil Silvers on the Minsky's Burlesque Circuit, carrying over this partnership in Silvers' hit Broadway musicals High Button Shoes (1947) and Top Banana (1953). Albertson began taking bit roles in films in 1938; among his many fleeting film parts was the postal worker who redirected all of Santa Claus' mail to the New York Courthouse in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). On television, Albertson was a frequent guest star on the Burns and Allen Show and had regular roles on The Thin Man (1957-59) and Ensign O'Toole (1963). He also co-starred with Sam Groom on the 1971 syndicated series Dr. Simon Locke--at least until angrily walking off the series due to its severe budget deficiencies. Albertson became an "overnight success" with his portrayal of Martin Sheen's taciturn father in the 1964 Broadway play The Subject Was Roses, which earned him a Tony Award; he repeated the role in the 1968 film version, winning an Oscar in the process. Albertson added a pair of Emmies to his shelf for his performance as crotchety garage owner Ed Brown on the TV sitcom Chico and the Man (1974-77), and for his guest appearance on a 1975 episode of the variety series Cher. Jack Albertson was the brother of character actress Mabel Albertson.

Trivia: The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.