Miss America runner-up Margia Dean, born Marguerite Skliris back in '22, made her TV debut in 1950 with a recurring role as Police Officer Mary Faelb on Dick Tracy.
In '51, you could see her on Racket Squad; in '52, The Adventures of Superman; in '53, Revlon Mirror Theater and The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse; and after a big-screen role in '54, she was back in '55 with a small-screen role on The Joe Palooka Story.
Olaf Pooley turned one hundred last month: he was still acting in his nineties, after getting work on Star Trek: Voyager and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in his eighties, and MacGyver and LA Law in his seventies, and et cetera dating back to well over half-a-dozen TV credits between 1950 and 1955, after appearing in various movies back in the '40s.
Paul Collins voiced John Darling for the Peter Pan cartoon, and before '57 was getting live-action work on Fireside Theatre and The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse and everything else from a TV movie to a Mutiny-On-The-Bounty episode of You Are There.
The better part of a century later, he’s in his seventies and still picking up occasional work on Sons of Anarchy and The Good Wife and et cetera – after racking up dozens of appearances, in his sixties, as the Secretary of the Navy on JAG.
(Incidentally, his most recent movie credit was in Evan Almighty – more than six decades after his big-screen debut back in '46.)
Mitzi McCall kept acting on TV in the '10s and '00s after racking up recurring roles on Silk Stalkings and Life Goes On in the '90s and writing credits in the '80s (on ALF and Charles in Charge) and '70s (Eight Is Enough, One Day At A Time) after becoming a Laugh-In regular and Twilight Zone actress in the '60s, after yet other TV work dating back to '55 (on The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse and The Colgate Comedy Hour – same year she did a Jerry Lewis movie, fifty-plus years before doing a Robin Williams one).
With yet another movie in the works for next year, Don Murray has had an interesting career: he made his screen debut way back in 1950, in a made-for-television version of The Taming of the Shrew, did Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse episodes in 1951; got work on Kraft Theatre and Lux Video Theatre in 1952; and otherwise bounced around from Danger and Justice to The United States Steel Hour before picking up an Oscar nomination opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop…
…after which, in '57, the folks at Playhouse 90 let him act in an episode he wrote, a formula he of course duplicated upon heading back to the big screen: producing and writing and starring in movie after movie during the '60s. (Now, sure, after playing actor/writer/producer/director in the '70s, he was down to acting on episodes of Knots Landing he was writing in the '80s, but that’s still pretty good.)
Now eighty, Kathryn Grant – aka Kathryn Crosby, aka Bing Crosby’s widow – got plenty of TV work by the end of '57: on Damon Runyon Theater and The George Sanders Mystery Theater and a couple of episodes of Lux Video Theatre and yet more episodes of The Ford Television Theatre, as well as Father Knows Best and Celebrity Playhouse, after which you could see her on the big screen in movies like Anatomy of a Murder and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
Her most recent acting role was in 2010, incidentally.
Patricia Morison, who has movie credits dating back to the '30s, was singing on The Milton Berle Show and The Ed Sullivan Show in the '40s before becoming a castmember on The Cases of Eddie Drake in '52 and otherwise bouncing around from Pulitzer Prize Playhouse to Four Star Playhouse to Screen Directors Playhouse to Schlitz Playhouse and et cetera before '57.
Between serving in WWII and earning 17 Grammys, Tony Bennett not only appeared on The Milton Berle Show and The Nat King Cole Show and The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jackie Gleason Show and The Dave Garroway Show and The Julius LaRosa Show but also hosted, well, The Tony Bennett Show.
And still going strong this year, as anyone who saw Muppets Most Wanted knows.
Back in 1937 – yes, you read that right – teenaged actress Muriel Pavlow parlayed her big-screen experience into playing Gretel in a TV movie of Hansel and Gretel; ten years after that, she was in her twenties and playing Ophelia in a 1947 TV movie of Hamlet; and ten years after that, we’re at the OP’s 1957 cut-off date and she’s got yet more TV movie credits under her belt, along with work on a couple of TV shows.
And she kept getting work on TV shows in the '60s, and the '70s, and the '80s, and the '90s, and the '00s, after which she neatly came full circle with a TV movie role in '04 before heading back to the big screen in '09.
In '58, Audrey Dalton was all over the place on television – Man With A Camera, Wagon Train, The Millionaire, Bat Masterson – after (a) doing movies with everyone from Olivia de Havilland to Joan Fontaine: a western with Alan Ladd, a comedy with Gene Barry, a drama with Lana Turner, sci-fi with Hans Conried, et cetera; and (b) acting on episodes of The Bob Cummings Show and episodes of Lux Video Theatre plus Men of Annapolis and The 20th Century-Fox Hour.
If you were a fan of the Star Trek franchise in '99, you probably watched episode after episode featuring Vic Fontaine: the holographic simulation of a Rat-Pack-era Vegas crooner amidst showgirls and mobsters – played by James Darren, who in '59 was singing on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, and acting on The Donna Reed Show, and singing and acting on the big screen as Moondoggie in Gidget.
Granted, those all came after the OP’s cut-off date – but Darren’s first small-screen role was back in '57, which still qualifies. And he kept at it in the 1960s (as one of the Time Tunnel guys) and the 1970s (as a TV game-show regular) and the 1980s (with his recurring TJ Hooker role) and, yes, the 1990s (directing and acting on Melrose Place) before putting out his most recent album in '01.
Note that James Darren shouldn’t be confused with James Karen, who has television credits that stretch back even further – to Lux Video Theatre in the early '50s, and The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in the late '40s – and who, at ninety, is set to appear in yet another movie later this year.
Lois Smith appeared on Ponds Theater in '53, and Studio One In Hollywood in '54, and Robert Montgomery Presents in '55, and The United States Steel Hour in '56, and Matinee Theatre in '57, and et cetera before the cut-off date, and promptly kept racking up TV credits in the '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s and '00s and '10s.
(Plenty of movie credits, too – from East of Eden to Five Easy Pieces to Fatal Attraction to Twister to Minority Report – and plenty of Broadway credits, with a couple of Tony nominations along the way.)
Vic Damone has TV credits dating back to The Morey Amsterdam Show in the 1940s, and after making the rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Milton Berle Show and so on from '50 to '55 hosted The Vic Damone Show in '56 and '57 – taking a quick break from that gig to act on The Alcoa Hour with Olive Dunbar, who’d gone from Broadway to The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse years earlier.
Forsyth, who sang and danced from the Radiolympia Exhibition over BBC-TV as an eleven-year-old, might be the Mickey Rooney of video. Now 86, he just formally stepped down as host of the rather oddly titled Strictly Come Dancing.
Bea Wain, heartthrob singer of the 30s and 40s, turns 97 today. She is best known from radio and the big bands, but was a guest performer on TV by at least 1948, on Horn & Hardart’s Children’s Hour. (H&H ran the famous Automat cafés.)
Actress-singer Pat Englund (b. 1925) and actress Patricia Englund (no dates) have separate IMDb bios and no cross credits. But if Pat is Patricia, she co-starred on a June 1947 production of Kraft Television Theatre.
double post - oops…
Ms. Pavlow now displaces Norman Lloyd (1939) for the earliest known TV appearance by a living person. Hansel and Gretel was televised in live adaptation by the BBC on Dec. 23, 1937.
In the '50s, Bradford Dillman graduated from Yale, served in the USMC, and took home the Best Actor award at Cannes for his big-screen work; he’d also picked up plenty of small-screen roles by '57 – bouncing from Ponds Theater to Kraft Theatre to Matinee Theatre, doing a TV movie along the way, and so on – before eventually authoring book after book about professional football.
That’s a weird career arc.
After his film debut in '56 and all those TV westerns in '57 – Maverick, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, Colt .45 – Michael Dante racked up big-screen and small-screen acting credits in the '60s and '70s and '80s before hosting a radio show in the '90s and '00s, and is set to appear in yet another movie later this year.
Happy 90th birthday to Theodore Bikel. Who, like basically everyone I can think of lately, has already been listed in this thread.