Trivia: The son of a barber, Richard Conte held down jobs ranging from truck driver, to Wall Street clerk before finding his place as an actor. In 1935, Conte became a waiter/entertainer in a Connecticut resort, which led to stage work when he was spotted by Group Theatre's Elia Kazan and John Garfield. Through Kazan's help, Conte earned a scholarship to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His first Broadway appearance was in the fast-flop Moon Over Mulberry Street. In 1939, still billed as Nicholas Conte, the actor made his first film, 20th Century-Fox's Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence (1939). It was Fox which would build up the intense, brooding Conte as the "New John Garfield" upon signing him to a contract in 1943. His best parts during his Fox years included the wrongly imprisoned man who is exonerated by crusading reporter James Stewart in Call Northside 777 (1947), and the lead role as a wildcat trucker in Thieves' Highway (1949). Among Conte's many TV assignments was a co-starring stint with Dan Dailey, Jack Hawkins and Vittorio De Sica on the 1959 syndicated series The Four Just Men. Appearing primarily in European films in his last years, Conte directed the Yugoslavian-filmed Operation Cross Eagles. Richard Conte's most important Hollywood role in the 1970s was as rival Mafia Don Barzini in the Oscar-winning The Godfather (1972).

Trivia: American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood. Unable to find film work there, he returned to New York and acted in radio dramas while going to night school at CCNY to learn accounting. Returning to California in 1931, he made his stage debut with the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York in 1935, he joined the celebrated Group Theater and appeared in several plays with them, including Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. He began his film career in 1937, going on to star and play supporting roles in dozens of films straight through to the end of his life. Cobb was most frequently cast as menacing villains, but sometimes appeared as a brooding business executive or community leader. His greatest triumph on stage came in the 1949 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which he played the lead role, Willy Loman (he repeated his performance in a 1966 TV version). Between 1962-66, he also appeared on TV in the role of Judge Garth in the long-running series The Virginian. He was twice nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" Oscars for his work in On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958).

Trivia: Barbara Lawrence already had 10 years' experience as a photographer's model when, at age 17, she appeared in her first film, Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (1945). She completed her studies at UCLA while co-starring in such 20th Century-Fox productions as Margie (1946) and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). Only occasionally a leading lady, Lawrence was generally cast as the heroine's best friend -- or, if there was a man involved, worst enemy. Lawrence's best-known screen role was the giggling Gertie Cummings in Oklahoma (1955), a part she had previously played on stage. In 1977, an unexpected biography appeared, Jim Connor's Hollywood Starlet: The Career of Barbara Lawrence.

Trivia: Born to American parents in Cuba, Millard Mitchell enjoyed moderate success as a New York-based stage and radio actor in the 1930s. His first appearances before the cameras were in a handful of Manhattan-filmed industrial shorts; his Hollywood feature-film bow was in MGM's Mr. and Mrs. North (1941). After the war, Mitchell toted up an impressive list of film credits, usually cast in sarcastic, phlegmatic roles. While he was afforded top billing in 1952's My Six Convicts, Mitchell's best screen role (at least in the eyes of MGM-musical buffs) was movie mogul R. F. Simpson in the splendiferous Singin' in the Rain (1952). Millard Mitchell died suddenly of lung cancer at the age of 50.

Trivia: The parents of American actor Jack Oakie had hopes that their son would enter the business world, but a spell as telephone clerk in a brokerage house convinced Oakie to look elsewhere for a career. After appearing at an amateur show staged by Wall Street executives for the Cardiac Society, Oakie was encouraged by the show's director to give acting his full attention. Oakie's professional debut was in the chorus of the 1922 George M. Cohan musical Little Nellie Kelly. Several Broadway productions later, Oakie travelled westward to try his luck in films, the first of which was Finders Keepers. Transferring without a hitch to talkies, Oakie found himself much in demand, usually playing a dimwitted braggart (with one of the best "double takes" in the business) who somehow made good and got the girl before fadeout time. By the late 1930s Oakie's career had gone into decline. The experience humbled the bombastic comedian and convinced him take a new approach to his career. After his unforgettable Mussolini take-off in Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), Oakie entered a new movie phase as second lead and character actor, which sustained him through many a musical comedy of the 1940s. And when called upon to do so, he could still carry a picture with finesse, as witness the 1945 fantasy That's the Spirit. Stage and TV work took up much of his time in the 1950s and 1960s, with occasional choice character parts in such films as The Rat Race (1960) and Lover Come Back (1962). Unpredictable in his likes and dislikes, Oakie was the sort of fellow who brusquely shooed away autograph seekers, but who also visited ailing comedian Stan Laurel, a man Oakie barely knew, to brighten up Stan's hospital stay at a time when some of Laurel's "close" pals didn't want to show up. Just before his death, Jack Oakie committed his memories to a sometimes fanciful but always entertaining biography, Jack Oakie's Double Takes, which was published posthumously by Jack's widow, actress Victoria Horne.

Trivia: Joseph Pevney may not be the first name that one thinks of in terms of record-breaking movies, but the actor-turned-director -- who had a pretty considerable stage career before turning exclusively to the movies in the second half of the 1940s -- was responsible for some of the highest-grossing movies in the first four decades of Universal Pictures; and between and around them, he was one of the most reliable filmmakers in Hollywood, a touch he didn't lose when he jumped to television in the second half of the 1960s. He was a director with a widely recognized knack for making something substantial out of very little script, which proved a priceless gift on both the large and small screens. Joseph Pevney was born in Manhattan in 1911, the son of a watchmaker and amateur songwriter. He was a natural performer and made his debut at age 12, in 1924, as a boy soprano, in vaudeville. In those days, kid acts had a novelty value, but among the practitioners were a few genuine prodigies who had what it took to extend their career into adulthood -- Alfred Newman was one on the piano, and Joe Pevney was one as an actor. He hated vaudeville and intended to become a doctor, even becoming a pre-med student at New York University, but by then he couldn't escape the lure of the theater. He was soon devoting his energy to directing varsity dramatics and before graduation ever became an issue, he was an assistant stage manager and bit player on Broadway. His first professional appearance on stage as a serious actor was in Johnny Johnson, and he subsequently appeared in such major plays as The World We Make, Key Largo, Golden Boy, and Native Son. Pevney juggled his acting and directing work throughout the 1930s, and it was while directing in a summer theater in Iveryton, CT, in 1939 that he first met Mitzi Green, an actress who'd been working from an even earlier age and had lately made her Broadway debut. They were married in 1942 and had two children who they raised in a successful bi-coastal life, keeping a home in the San Fernando Valley and one in Flushing, Queens. Pevney's career was interrupted by World War II, which took him to Europe as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He was also in the 1944 revival of Counselor at Law on Broadway starring Paul Muni, playing Harry Becker, the injured, wild-eyed communist agitator (played by Vincent Sherman in the movie). His last major stage appearance was in Home of the Brave, in which he played Coney. Pevney made his big-screen debut in 1946, in Edwin L. Marin's crime thriller Nocturne starring George Raft and Lynn Bari, and the following year played a major co-starring role with John Garfield and Lilli Palmer in Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947). He was in a couple of more very good movies, including Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949) and his own Outside the Wall (1950), before he gave up acting permanently in favor of directing. He was signed up at Universal and proved to be a dual-threat director, very good with actors -- obviously as a result of his years of experience on stage -- and yet was also well able to set up and bring off an action scene on budget and excitingly. Pevney worked with such future stars as Rock Hudson (whom he initially did not want) in the movie The Iron Man, Mamie van Doren, and Frank Sinatra when he was still trying to prove that he could be a serious actor, and did well with and by all of them. He was equally good at drama, comedy, thrillers, and costume epics, but he seemed to have special success -- in terms of the acting that resulted -- working with Tony Curtis (in Six Bridges to Cross) and Jeff Chandler. He and Chandler, with George Nader and Richard Boone in supporting roles, proved an unbeatable combination in Away All Boats, which became the highest grossing movie in the history of the studio up to that time. He followed that grim, intense war drama up barely a year later with a gentle, lyrical, romantic, and seductive Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), which was not only a huge hit but also yielded a string of sequels (none directed by Pevney). He was not a great stylist, but for reasons that even they themselves don't understand, the French film critics liked his movies anyway, and if American critics were less accommodating, the American public expressed their approval of his work by turning it into a string of hits. He moved into television during the 1960s and directed dozens of episodes of Bonanza and some of the most popular episodes from the first and second seasons of Star Trek, including "Arena," "Amok Time," "The Trouble With Tribbles," and "The Immunity Syndrome," before turning to directing made-for-television features. Pevney retired in the 1980s, but his best movies and television episodes have continued to find new life on cable television and DVD releases well into the 21st century. He died in 2008 at age 96.

Trivia: The son of a St. Louis grocer, Morris Carnovsky inaugurated his stage career in 1919. He played an extensive variety of roles on Broadway, from Shakespeare to Clifford Odets. In films from 1937, he was seen in such noteworthy roles as Anatole France in the Oscar-winning Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Papa Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue (1945). He was also an effective "civilized heavy" opposite Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning (1947). Carnovsky's film career came to sudden halt in 1951 when he was blacklisted after an appearance as an unfriendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Though he was denied film and TV work, Carnovsky and his actress wife Phoebe Brand worked steadily on-stage in New York and Europe. He returned to films in the French-Italian production of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge (1962), and in 1974 made his first appearance in a Hollywood film in nearly a quarter of a century. Still active into his late eighties, Morris Carnovsky worked as an actor and director on the regional theater circuit.

Trivia: When the call went out for an actress to play a circus strongwoman capable of lifting both a chair and Spencer Tracy in 1949's Adam's Rib, there was but one performer who could logically fit the bill: character actress Hope Emerson, who scraped the ceiling at 6' 2" and weighed in at 230 pounds. Emerson made her Broadway debut as the leader of the Amazons in Lysistrata. Her performance in the Fred Stone musical Smiling Faces led to her screen bow in the 1932 filmization of that property. During the 1940s, Emerson gained fame as the radio voice of Borden's Elsie the Cow. After years in vaudeville and the legitimate stage, Emerson returned to films as a homicidal masseuse in the New York-filmed Cry of the City (1948). She went on to play the feuding Mrs. Hatfield in Goldwyn's Roseanna McCoy (1948), and the implicitly lesbian prison matron in Caged (1950), an assignment which earned her an Oscar nomination. In 1958, Emerson was cast as Mother, owner of the nightclub where the beauteous Lola Albright was featured songstress, on the popular TV private eye series Peter Gunn. She left this series in 1959 to take a larger role as a housekeeper named "Sarge" on the weekly sitcom The Dennis O'Keefe Show. Shortly after filming the last O'Keefe episode, Hope Emerson died of a liver ailment at the reported age of 51.

Trivia: American actor/director George Tyne began his performing career under his own name, Martin "Buddy" Yarus, in films as varied as Errol Flynn's Objective Burma (1945) and Laurel and Hardy's Dancing Masters (1943). Under the new soubriquet George Tyne, the actor had sizable roles in a multitude of films from 1946 to the late '70s. One of his better parts during this period was as Pfc. Harris in the splashy John Wayne war epic Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); he could also be seen in Thieves' Highway (1949), No Way Out (1950), Marlowe (1969) and I Will, I Will...For Now (1976). Turning increasingly to TV directing in the '60s, George Tyne worked extensively behind the camera on such situation comedies as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-70), Love American Style (1969-72) and Sanford and Son (1972-77).

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from the '40s; aka Edwin Miller.

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: David Opatoshu began his stage career in New York's Yiddish theatre in the late 1930s. Though he worked extensively in English-language plays, films and TV programs, the scholarly looking Opatoshu never completely severed his ties with his roots. His first film was the all-Yiddish The Light Ahead (1939); from 1941 through 1945, he delivered the news in Yiddish on New York radio station WEVD; in the 1970s, he was directing and starring in ethnic stage productions; and in 1985, he narrated a documentary film on the Yiddish theatre in America, Almonds and Raisins. Occasionally cast as a villain in mainstream productions, Opatoshu's "good" characters (notably his courageous political activists in 1960's Exodus and 1981's Masada) far outweigh his bad. A veteran of hundreds of television productions, David Opatoshu won an Emmy for his performance in "A Prayer for the Goldsteins," a 1990 episode of the weekly series Gabriel's Fire.

Trivia: The son of actors, Percy Helton began his own career at age two in a Tony Pastor revue in which his parents were performing. The undersized Helton was a valuable juvenile player for producer David Belasco, making his film debut in a 1915 Belasco production, The Fairy and the Waif. Helton matured into adult roles under the stern guidance of George M. Cohan. After serving in the Army during World War I, Helton established himself on Broadway, appearing in such productions as Young America, One Sunday Afternoon and The Fabulous Invalid. He made his talkie debut in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, playing the inebriated Macy's Santa Claus whom Edmund Gwenn replaces. Perhaps the quintessential "who is that?" actor, Helton popped up, often uncredited, in over one hundred succinct screen characterizations. Forever hunched over and eternally short of breath, he played many an obnoxious clerk, nosey mailman, irascible bartender, officious train conductor and tremulous stool pigeon. His credits include Fancy Pants (1950), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Rally Round the Flag Boys (1959), The Music Man (1962) and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965), as well as two appearances as sweetshop proprietor Mike Clancy in the Bowery Boys series. Thanks to his trademarked squeaky voice, and because he showed up in so many "cult" films (Wicked Woman, Kiss Me Deadly, Sons of Katie Elder), Helton became something of a high-camp icon in his last years. In this vein, Percy Helton was cast as the "Heraldic Messenger" in the bizarre Monkees vehicle Head (he showed up at the Monkees' doorstep with a beautiful blonde manacled to his wrist!), the treacherous Sweetieface in the satirical western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and the bedraggled bank clerk Cratchit on the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Supporting actress Irene Tedrow spent most of her 60-year career on stage, but she also had considerable experience in feature films and on television. Slender and possessing an austere beauty, Tedrow was well suited for the rather prim and moral characters she most often played. After establishing herself on stage in the early '30s, she made her film debut in 1937. She gained fame during the 1940s playing Mrs. Janet Archer in the Meet Corliss Archer film series. She kept the role in the subsequent television series. She played Mrs. Elkins on Dennis the Menace between 1959 and 1963. In 1976, Tedrow earned an Emmy for her performance in Eleanor and Franklin.

Trivia: American actor Dick Wessel had a face like a Mack Truck bulldog and a screen personality to match. After several years on stage, Wessel began showing up in Hollywood extra roles around 1933; he is fleetingly visible in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), and the Columbia "screwball" comedy She Couldn't Take It (1935). The size of his roles increased in the '40s; perhaps his best feature-film showing was as the eponymous bald-domed master criminal in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). He was a valuable member of Columbia Pictures' short subject stock company, playing a variety of bank robbers, wrestlers, jealous husbands and lazy brother-in-laws. Among his more memorable 2-reel appearances were as lovestruck boxer "Chopper" in The Three Stooges' Fright Night (1947), Andy Clyde's invention-happy brother-in-law in Eight Ball Andy (1948), and Hugh Herbert's overly sensitive strongman neighbor in Hot Heir (1947). Wessel was shown to good (if unbilled) advantage as a handlebar-mustached railroad engineer in the superspectacular Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and had a regular role as Carney on the 1959 TV adventure series Riverboat. Dick Wessel's farewell screen appearance was as a harried delivery man in Disney's The Ugly Dachshund (1965).

Trivia: A stage actor from 1938, American-born Frank Richards made his earliest recorded-film appearance in 1940. Generally cast as stubble-chinned heavies and slick gangsters, he also served as an "art director" for the 1946 Western Rustler's Roundup. More notable among his 200 or so on-camera television credits was his bad-guy role on the 1951 Superman episode "A Night of Terror." Richards' last film was John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence in 1974. He died in 1992.

Trivia: Born John Myrtland LaVarre, John Merton has appeared on Broadway as "Myrtland LaVarre" in the Theatre Guild's hit production of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1922). More theater work followed and he was spotted in the background of several silent films, including as a fireman in W.C. Fields' It's the Old Army Game (1926). But the handsome, slightly frosty-looking actor found his rightful place in B-Westerns and serials. He would appear in a total of 170 films, turning up as an assortment of blackguards. Usually a bit more sophisticated than the average "dog heavy," Merton could nevertheless rough it with the best of 'em, a talent he passed on to his equally tough-looking son, Lane Bradford. Father and son appeared in six films together, including 1947's Jack Armstrong. (Another son played supporting roles on television in the '50s under the moniker of Robert La Varre.) Retiring after a bit in Cecil B. DeMille's gigantic The Ten Commandments (1956), Merton died of a heart attack at the age of 58.

Trivia: Bespectacled American actor Walter Baldwin was already a venerable stage performer at the time he appeared in his first picture, 1940's Angels over Broadway. With a pinched Midwestern countenance that enabled him to portray taciturn farmers, obsequious grocery store clerks and the occasional sniveling coward, Baldwin was a familiar (if often unbilled) presence in Hollywood films for three decades. Possibly Baldwin's most recognizable role was as Mr. Parrish in Sam Goldwyn's multi-Oscar winning The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which the actor received thirteenth billing. He also had a prime opportunity to quiver and sweat as a delivery man whose truck is commandeered by homicidal prison escapee Robert Middleton in The Desperate Hours (1955). Seemingly ageless, Walter Baldwin made his last film appearance three years before his death in 1969's Hail Hero.

Trivia: Howland Chamberlain was the quintessential character actor who turned his expertise at playing nervous, fidgety roles into an array of memorable portrayals in some of the most important movies of the late '40s and early '50s. At that time, just as he'd appeared in one of the most acclaimed movies of the decade, High Noon, his screen career came to a halt after he was called as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify. Chamberlain, whose name was sometimes spelled Chamberlin in film credits (and in his Variety obituary), was born in New York City and moved to California in the 1930s, where he went to work with the WPA's Federal Theater Project in Los Angeles and met his future wife Leona. According to a 1976 SoHo Weekly News article by Jennifer Merlin, they delayed their wedding as a matter of economic survival, as a married couple couldn't both have jobs with the WPA. In the late '30s, Chamberlain became a member of the Pasadena Playhouse, which was something of a minor league "farm team" for aspiring Hollywood actors. In the mid-'40s, Chamberlain began appearing onscreen in character roles, starting with The Best Years of Our Lives as Mr. Thorpe. His career over the next six years carried him into the casts of a surprising number of crime dramas and film noirs, among them Michael Gordon's The Web, Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, Fritz Lang's House by the River, and Hugo Haas' Pickup; these were broken up by work in the occasional comedy, such as A Song Is Born (in which he played a nervous lawyer). Chamberlain also did television work. One example which has endured as his best work was as a pair of identical twins involved in a radium smuggling scheme in the episode "Double Trouble" from The Adventures of Superman. His two most notable screen appearances were in Force of Evil and High Noon, as the vengeful hotel clerk who wishes harm to Marshal Kane. In 1956, after the House Un-American Activities Committee incident, Chamberlain and his family moved to New York, where he resumed his acting career on the stage. Chamberlain appeared in dozens of plays on tour (including A Raisin in the Sun), on Broadway and off-Broadway (in Children of Darkness and The Courageous One), and the Festival in the Park (including Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra). The Chamberlains later acted together in off-Broadway theater as well, including a production of Morton Lichter's Old Timer's Sexual Symphony (and other notes). He had appeared in small roles again on television as early as 1960, on programs like Bonanza, and by the mid-'70s he was acting regularly in Los Angeles, including productions at the Mark Taper Forum. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s, with Kramer vs. Kramer (in which he played Judge Atkins), 27 years after his last film appearance, that Chamberlain did any more movie work. He kept working in movies such as Fred Schepisi's Barbarosa and Steve Barron's Electric Dreams, until his death from heart and related problems in the late summer of 1984.

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.