Trivia: In his youth, George Reeves aspired to become a boxer, but gave up this pursuit because his mother was worried that he'd be seriously injured. Attracted to acting, Reeves attended the Pasadena Playhouse, where he starred in several productions. In 1939, Reeves was selected to play one of the Tarleton twins in the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind (1939). He made an excellent impression in the role, and spent the next few years playing roles of varying sizes at Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. He was praised by fans and reviewers alike for his performances in Lydia (1941) and So Proudly We Hail (1943); upon returning from WWII service, however, Reeves found it more difficult to get good roles. He starred in a few "B"'s and in the title role of the Columbia serial The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), but for the most part was shunted away in ordinary villain roles. In 1951, he starred in the Lippert programmer Superman vs. the Mole Men, playing both the Man of Steel and his bespectacled alter ego, Clark Kent. This led to the immensely popular Superman TV series, in which Reeves starred from 1953 through 1957. While Superman saved Reeves' career, it also permanently typecast him. He made an appearance as wagon train leader James Stephen in Disney's Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1956), though the producer felt it expeditious to hide Reeves behind a heavy beard. While it is now commonly believed that Reeves was unable to get work after the cancellation of Superman in 1957, he was in fact poised to embark on several lucrative projects, including directing assignments on two medium-budget adventure pictures and a worldwide personal appearance tour. On June 16, 1959, Reeves died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The official ruling was suicide -- and, since he left no note, it was assumed that Reeves was despondent over his flagging career. Since that time, however, there has been a mounting suspicion (engendered by the actor's friends and family) that George Reeves was murdered.

Trivia: Along with such colleagues as William Conrad, John Dehner, Vic Perrin, Sam Edwards, Barney Phillips, and Virginia Gregg, bald-pated American character actor Lawrence Dobkin was one of the mainstays of network radio in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Dobkin began popping up in films in 1949, playing any number of doctors, lawyers, attachés, military officials, and desk sergeants. Most of his parts were fleeting, many were unbilled: he can be seen as a soft-spoken rabbi in Angels in the Outfield (1951), one of the three psychiatrists baffled by alien visitor Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), an angered citizen of Rome in Julius Caesar (1953), and so on. Enjoying larger roles on TV, Dobkin was generally cast as a scheming villain (e.g., Dutch Schultz on The Untouchables). One of his showiest assignments was as the demented Gregory Praxas, horror film star turned mass murderer, in the 1972 pilot film for Streets of San Francisco. From the early '60s onward, Dobkin was busier as a writer and director than as an actor. He amassed a respectable list of TV directorial credits, as well as one theatrical feature, Sixteen (1972). Habitués of "speculation" docudramas of the 1970s and 1980s will recognize Lawrence Dobkin as the bearded, avuncular narrator of many of these efforts; he also appeared as Pontius Pilate in the speculative 1979 four-waller In Search of Historic Jesus.

Trivia: Born in L.A. and raised in Pasadena, Jack Larson's ingenuous, "golly gee" screen image served him well when in 1951 he was cast as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the TV series Superman. He remained with the program until 1957, by which time he had become so thoroughly identified with the role that he had considerable difficulty landing other film assignments. Eventually Larson gave up acting to concentrate on writing plays and musical librettos; one of his more prestigious assignments was a collaboration with noted composer Virgil Thompson. The longtime companion of filmmaker James Bridges, Jack Larson served as the co-producer of such Bridges films as The Paper Chase (1973), Urban Cowboy (1980), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). He made a guest appearance in a 1996 episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, playing an older version of Jimmy Olsen. Larson died in 2015, at age 87.

Trivia: Born and educated in Pennsylvania, John Hamilton headed to New York in his twenties to launch a 25-year stage career. Ideally cast as businessmen and officials, the silver-haired Hamilton worked opposite such luminaries as George M. Cohan and Ann Harding. He toured in the original company of the long-running Frank Bacon vehicle Lightnin', and also figured prominently in the original New York productions of Seventh Heaven and Broadway. He made his film bow in 1930, costarring with Donald Meek in a series of 2-reel S.S.Van Dyne whodunits (The Skull Mystery, The Wall St. Mystery) filmed at Vitaphone's Brooklyn studios. Vitaphone's parent company, Warner Bros., brought Hamilton to Hollywood in 1936, where he spent the next twenty years playing bits and supporting roles as police chiefs, judges, senators, generals and other authority figures. Humphrey Bogart fans will remember Hamilton as the clipped-speech DA in The Maltese Falcon (1941), while Jimmy Cagney devotees will recall Hamilton as the recruiting officer who inspires George M. Cohan (Cagney) to compose "Over There" in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Continuing to accept small roles in films until the mid '50s (he was the justice of the peace who marries Marlon Brando to Teresa Wright in 1950's The Men), Hamilton also supplemented his income with a group of advertisements for an eyeglasses firm. John Hamilton is best known to TV-addicted baby boomers for his six-year stint as blustering editor Perry "Great Caesar's Ghost!" White on the Adventures of Superman series.

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."

Trivia: Diminutive, baby-faced actress Noel Neill entered films as a Paramount starlet in 1942. Though she was showcased in one of the musical numbers in The Fleet's In (1944) and was starred in the Oscar-nominated Technicolor short College Queen (1945), most of her Paramount assignments were thankless bit parts. She fared better as one of the leads in Monogram's Teen Agers series of the mid- to late '40s. In 1948 she was cast as intrepid girl reporter Lois Lane in the Columbia serial The Adventures of Superman, repeating the role in the 1950 chapter play Atom Man vs. Superman. At the time, she regarded it as just another freelance job, perhaps a little better than her cameos in such features as An American in Paris (in 1951 as the American art student) and DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1953). But someone was impressed by Neill's appealingly vulnerable interpretation of Lois Lane, and in 1953 she was hired to replace Phyllis Coates as Lois in the TV version of Superman. She remained with the series for 78 episodes, gaining an enormous fan following (consisting primarily of ten-year-old boys) if not a commensurately enormous bank account. Retiring to private life after the cancellation of Superman in 1958, she was brought back into the limelight during the nostalgia craze of the 1970s. She made countless lecture appearances on the college and film convention circuit, and in 1978 returned to films as Lois Lane's mother in the big-budget Superman: The Movie: alas, most of her part ended up on the cutting-room floor, and neither she nor fellow Adventures of Superman alumnus Kirk Alyn received billing. Noel Neill's last TV appearance to date was a guest spot in a 1991 episode of the syndicated The Adventures of Superboy; she made a cameo appearance in 2006's Superman Returns. Neill died in 2016, at age 95.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Keith Richards spent virtually his entire movie career at Paramount Pictures. In 1941, Richards was signed as a Paramount contract player, appearing in roles of varying sizes in such films as Buy Me That Town (1941), Nothing but the Truth (1941), and One Night in Lisbon (1942); West Point Widow (1942), The Forest Rangers (1942), Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1942), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Wake Island (1943), and Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). After freelancing for a while in Westerns and independent crime films, Richards came back home to Paramount, where he remained until the late '50s. Though blessed with leading man looks, Keith Richards seldom rose above the supporting ranks -- not even when playing a character designated as "the Leading Man" in 1957's The Buster Keaton Story.

Trivia: Sandra Harrison was an ingenue of the late 1950s who worked in films and television. Her first major screen appearance (in which she was credited as Sandy Harrison) was in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Man Who Made Dreams Come True", playing a wide-eyed high-school student who gets to meet Superman through the manipulations of a confidence man. Although she also appeared in major films such as Desire Under the Elms, her work usually consisted of small uncredited roles. Her biggest role was the tormented Nancy Perkins, who is victimized by a mad science teacher, in Herbert L. Strock's Blood of Dracula. Harrison left acting after an appearance in a 1965 episode of Burke's Law.

Trivia: Actress Laurie Mitchell was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. When she was in her teens, her family moved to Los Angeles, and she started taking acting lessons. which paid off in 1954 when she landed a small but memorable role in the opening section of Walt Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. That same year, she started appearing on various dramatic anthology shows on television, and some more uncredited film work followed. She was in a large number of television shows, including Whirlybirds, The Lineup, Colt .45, and M-Squad, and the occasional feature film. The latter included the cult favorite Attack of the Puppet People (1957), in which she played a character who was shrunk to a height of six inches tall; and the camp classic Queen Of Outer Space (1958), in which Mitchell played the title role, the radiation-scarred ruler of the planet Venus, who plans to destroy the Earth. That movie offered Mitchell her biggest and most memorable role, as well as a great opportunity as an actress -- working beneath heavy makeup and behind a mask, she got to emote intensely and dominate the screen in her scenes. Ironically, at almost the same time that she did Queen Of Outer Space, Mitchell was also cast in Missile To the Moon, a very similar but much lower-budgeted movie. Those science fiction credits have been among Mitchell's most recognizable roles across the decades since, though her acting continued, mostly on television, right into 1971. In the years since, she has re-emerged as a favorite guest at film conventions.

Trivia: Actor John Banner was forced out of his native Austria in 1938 when Hitler marched in. Though most familiar to filmgoers and TV viewers as a man of considerable heft, he was a trim 180 pounds when, while touring with an acting troupe in Switzerland, he found he couldn't return to Austria because he was Jewish. Banner came to America as a refugee; though unable to speak a word of English, he was almost immediately hired as emcee for a musical revue, From Vienna, for which he had to learn all his lines phonetically. Picking up the language rapidly, Banner was cast in several films of the 1940s, starting with Pacific Blackout. Because of his accent and Teutonic features, he most often played Nazi spies -- a grim task, in that Banner's entire family in Austria was wiped out in the concentration camps. Tipping the scales at 280 pounds in the 1950s, Banner worked steadily as a character man in films and on television; he can be seen as a variety of foreign-official types on such vintage TV series as The Adventures of Superman and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. In 1965, Banner was cast as Sgt. Schultz in the long-running wartime sitcom Hogan's Heroes. A far cry from the villainous Nazis he'd played in the 1940s, Schultz was a pixieish, lovable blimp of a man who'd rather have been working as a toymaker than spending the war guarding American POWS, and who, to protect his own skin, overlooked the irregularities occurring in Stalag 13 (which as every TV fan knows was Colonel Hogan's secret headquarters for American counterespionage) by bellowing "I know nothing! I see nothing! Nothing!" John Banner enjoyed playing Schultz, but bristled whenever accused of portraying a cuddly Nazi: "I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of goodness in every generation," the actor told TV Guide in 1967. As to the paradox of an Austrian Jew playing a representative of Hitler's Germany, Banner replied, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Or who could play them funnier than John Banner?