One of Peter Falk’s first film roles was as a gentleman gangster in Pocketfull of Miracles which was the last film role of Thomas Mitchell, a character actor perhaps best known for playing Scarlett’s father Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (in Pocketfull he played an elegant pool-hustler and drunk). Mitchell died the next year after starring on Broadway as Detective Columbo (the same Columbo Falk would play on television).
Gone with the Wind was an early film role for actor George Reeves, who played Stuart Tarleton. Reeve’s most famous role was that of Superman in the syndicated Adventures of Superman TV show. He also appeared in From Here to Eternity, leading to the legend that so many people recognized him as Superman that his role had to be cut. This has been debunked; according to director Fred Zinnemann, every scene filmed with Reeves was in the final movie.
Gary Mitchell was a friend and shipmate of James T. Kirk, with whom he shared many adventures. Kirk was forced to kill Mitchell in the Star Trek episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” after Mitchell gained godlike powers and posed a grave danger to the Enterprise. Mitchell returned in the recent fan-made film Of Gods and Men, although played by a different actor.
Myself, I’d say his best-known role was as Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer prize for her sole major literary publication, Gone with the Wind, published in 1936.
Margaret Mitchell married Berrien “Red” Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger and an abusive alcoholic. She modelled Rhett Butler after him.
Mitchelle was also the distant cousin to famous gunfighter/dentist, Doc Holliday, who participated in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is also thought that she modeled Ashley Wilkes, after Holliday and her second husband, John Marsh.
Gunfighter and lawman Bat Masterson, who had his first gunfight in Sweetwater, Texas in 1876, ended his days as a New York City newspaperman – sports writer, editor and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph – collapsing from a heart attack at his desk upon finishing his last column in 1921.
The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at Little Big Horn a week earlier cast a pall over the U.S. Centennial celebrations on July 4, 1876.
Jack Armstrong, All American Boy was a radio series featuring Jack and his adventures around around the world. It was sponsored by Wheaties.
In May 2005, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon (duh!), became involved in an unusual legal battle with his barber of 20 years, Marx Sizemore. After cutting Armstrong’s hair, Sizemore sold some of it to a collector for US$3,000 without Armstrong’s knowledge or permission. Armstrong threatened legal action unless the barber returned the hair or donated the proceeds to a charity of Armstrong’s choosing. Sizemore, unable to get the hair back, decided to donate the proceeds to the charity of Armstrong’s choice.
Gioacchino Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution (Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione) was based on a play by Pierre Beaumarchais, the first of his Figaro Trilogy. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was based on the second play. The third, The Guilty Mother (La Mère coupable), has escaped orchestration.
Prince Poppycock became an audience favorite on America’s Got Talent wearing 18th century dandy attire and singing two excerpts from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, an act he (Poppycock, aka John Quale) had originated in strip clubs.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Faramir, after the deaths of his father Denethor and his older brother Boromir, is named Steward of Gondor and Prince of Ithilien by the new King, Elessar.
Way to get out of a rut there, EH. 
Macbeth rose from Thane of Glamis to the addition of Thane of Cawdor, and finally King of Scotland, through serial murder, despite being warned against the attempt by three witches, before being killed himself by Macduff.
Hmm. What rut would that be?
Patrick Stewart, long a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, played Macbeth in a recent BBC production with a quasi-Stalinist setting.
During the 1920’s, one of the gathering places for the “Lost Generation” of writers in Paris was a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. Among its habitués were Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford.
Ezra Pound was never considered for a Father of the Year award. He had two children, a daughter Mary with his mistress who he repeatedly announced he didn’t want while her mother was pregnant and who he and the mother essentially gave to the girl’s wet nurse (a German woman whose own child had died), though they paid a small amount of money and had contact with the child later. His son Omar was by another mistress and neither parent took much interest in him, giving him to the child’s maternal grandmother novelist/artist Olivia Shakespear until she died when he was 12.
William Shakespeare of Kalamazoo, MI invented the level-winding fishing reel in 1895. Now part of K2 Sports, The Shakespeare Company is still one of the world’s major manufacturers of fishing equipment.
K2 in the Himalayas is the second highest mountain on Earth, next to Mr. Everest. It got its name from the first survey of the Karakoram Range, a part of the greater Himalayas. Surveyors named the most prominent peaks K1 and K2; K2 was taller. It had never acquired a local name due to its remoteness: it is not visible from any nearby settlements.
After a survey by a team led by Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, confirmed the mountain now known as Everest was the world’s tallest, the next task was to name it. The survey was anxious to preserve local names if possible, but Waugh argued that he was unable to find any commonly used local name. His search for a local name was hampered by Nepal and Tibet being closed to foreigners at the time (they had to make their survey observations from India). Many local names existed, with perhaps the best known in Tibet for several centuries being Chomolungma, which had appeared on a 1733 map published in Paris by the French geographer D’Anville. However, Waugh argued that with the plethora of local names, it would be difficult to favour one specific name over all others. So, he decided that was then known as Peak XV should be named after George Everest, his predecessor as Surveyor General of India.
Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is a dark comedy about a talentless English poet who meets a mortuary cosemetologist in late 1940s Los Angeles. They meet after his screenwriter uncle hangs himself. Dennis’s ode to his uncle includes the line “They say dear Francis Hinsley, they say that you were hung, With red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue”. The movie version featured Liberace as a funeral planner and Jonathan Winters as a minister and his twin brother who owns a pet cemetery.