DANA HILL (1964-1996)

Hill started working as a child actress on TV in the late 1970s, then gave a smashing dramatic performance in her 1982 movie debut as the oldest daughter of Albert Finney and Diane Keaton in the classic divorce movie Shoot the Moon. She was almost as good as Rip Torn's daughter, a year later, in Cross Creek. In 1985, she took on the mysteriously ever-shifting role of Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation. However, she was still playing characters at the vaguely pubescent stage while Hill herself was by now in her early twenties; she suffered from diabetes so serious that it stunted her growth and which, by the mid-80s, was affecting her health to such a degree that, except for a cable TV production of Picnic and Jack Fisk's Final Verdict, she shifted the focus of her career entirely to voice work. Her distinctive rasp kept her much in demand until her death from a stroke in 1996.

CLAUDIA JENNINGS (1949-1979)

Jennings was Playboy's Playmate of the Year in 1970, and if you think that guarantees you a movie career, try reeling off the names of Playmates of the Year 1971 through 2008. In such drive-in fare as Unholy Rollers, Truck Stop Women, Moonshine County Express, Deathsport, and my personal favorite, Gator Bait, in which she played a Cajun terminator in cut-offs named Desiree Thibodeau, Jennings had the special aura of someone who the camera just loves. (You could practically hear the camera kicking dirt while it tried to work up the courage to ask if she was seein' anybody.) In 1979, David Cronenberg added to her luster by adding her, along with William "Big Bill" Smith and John Saxon, to the thinking-person's exploitation-movie case of his little-seen labor-of-love drag race film, Fast Company. But that same year, she got a sense of the glass ceiling above her career when she was rejected for the cast of Charlie's Angels, reportedly because the network was uncomfortable with the Playboy connection. She died later that year in a car accident.

LARRY RILEY (1953-1992)

Riley had a good year in 1984, when he made his movie debut in Louis Malle's flop comedy Crackers, appeared in a classic episode of Miami Vice (you remember, the one with Charlie Barnett and the killer Jamaicans), and then delivered a sensational performance in A Soldier's Story as C. J. Memphis, the high-spirited, blues-playing barracks musician whose country accent and laid-back affability inspire the self-hating sergeant who sees him as a geechie clown to railroad him into the stockade and drive him to suicide. After that, Riley bounced around in other roles on TV series and TV movies before settling in for five seasons on Knots Landing. When he discovered that he'd contracted AIDS, Riley tried to keep it a secret, and so the first sign most people got that he was ill came when he reported to work after a hiatus with eighty pounds missing from his once-burly frame. He died just months later.

LYDA ROBERTA (1906-1938)

The madcap Mata Hari of our beloved Million Dollar Legs was the offspring of circus performers who, having given birth to her in Warsaw, kept her on tour with them, eventually breaking her in as a trapeze artist. Her mother, a trick rider, got fed up with her father and jumped ship in Shanghai with her daughter in tow. Lyda helped support the two of them by singing, and by 1931, they had made it to the States and Lyda had secured her Broadway debut, charming the patrons both with her talent and with the patchwork carpet accent and manhandled syntax that she'd developed in her travels: she really sounded like that! An established commodity on Broadway and radio, she appeared in such films as The Kid from Spain, George White's 1935 Scandals, and The Big Broadcast of 1936. Slowed by heart disease, she died of a heart attack when she was 31.

DIANA SANDS (1934-1973)

Sands played the younger sister of the hero in the original Broadway cast of A Raisin in the Sun when she was 25, then recreated the role for the 1961 movie version. It was her first real movie role, though she'd had uncredited bits in earlier films, including A Face in the Crowd and Odds Against Tomorrow. It soon became clear that her talent and beauty would take her as far as she could get in an entertainment industry that still had no idea what to do with black actresses more suited to leading lady roles than mammy parts, though it was not immediately clear just how far that might be. She did a lot of TV, appearing on such shows as East Side/ West Side, Dr. Kildare Julia, and I, Spy; appeared on Broadway in The Owl and the Pussycat and The Gingham Dog; and starred in a handful of small movies, including Willie Dynamite, a botched action flick called Honeybaby, Honeybaby, the soapy soft-core Doctors' Wives, and Georgia, Georgia, which was written by Maya Angelou and set in Stockholm. Her best movie, and best role, was in Hal Ashby's The Landlord, in which she was caught in an interracial triangle with Beau Bridges and Louis Gossett, Jr. She won the title role in the 1974 romantic comedy Claudine, but by then, she was already ill and was forced to drop out.

TRINIDAD SILVA (1950-1988)

For most of his career, from the unintentionally hilarious 1979 Walk Proud (starring Robby Benson, in brownface makeup and a Frito Bandito accent, as a Chicano) to his ever-evolving role as Jesus on Hill Street Blues to Dennis Hopper's Colors, Silva was the go-to guy for a Latino gang leader. He also appeared in Alambisto!, The Jerk, El Norte, Crackers, The Milagro Beanfield War, and the Weird Al Yankovich movie UHF, which he was shooting when he killed by a scumbag drunk driver, and which is dedicated to him. He gave an exceptionally fine performance in another film he didn't live long enough to see, the 1988 TV movie Stones for Ibarra, based on Harriet Doerr's novel. There, liberated from having to flash gang signs, he gave a comic heartbreaker of a turn as a Mexican villager who's devoted his life to trying to build a better future for the girlfriend and younger brother who end up running off together.

KELLIE WAYMIRE (1967-2003)

Waymire is a good stand-in for all the actors who never get their name above the title in big movies but who leave a small imprint on the memories of anyone who ever saw them at their best. A quirky comic find, she had small roles in such films as Playing by Heart and also made memorable guest appearances on The X-Files, CSI, The Practice, Wonderfalls, Six Feet Under, and assorted Star Trek spin-offs. For my part, I've been packing around a crush on her since seeing her on a late Seinfeld episode in which she played a single mother who seemed to have contracted a terminal disease in order to threaten Elaine Benes with leaving her custoy of her kids, before doing something with George Costanza on the floor of her kitchen that was clearly dirty and probably illegal and seemed to involve pastrami ("the most sensual of all the smoked meats"). She died of cardiac arrhythmia in 2003.

ROBERT WILLIAMS (1897-1931)

Williams was a stage veteran best known as the star of Abie's Irish Rose on Broadway, with a short string of forgettable movies to his credit, when Frank Capra cast him as the hero of the 1931 comedy Platinum Blonde, a newspaperman who marries an heiress (Jean Harlow) while the audience keeps pointing at the Loretta Young, as the platonic gal pal standing beside him, and yelling, "What're ya, blind?" Williams's performance here nicely combines the stylized, staccato delivery and wisecracking toughness of the smartass reporter stereotype so popular at the time with the suggestion of a regular-guy sensitivity necessary for the character to function as a romantic hero, and the general consensus at the time was that it would make him a star. General consensus wasn't counting on Williams's appendix, which burst four days after the film premiered.

TREY WILSON (1948-1989)

Wilson made his first movie appearance in 1976's Drive-In and started to get decent roles around 1984, but he really burst loose during the last year or so of his life, by which time he had ripened into the very image of a middle-aged, weather-beaten cracker of a comic authority figure. His performance as Nathan Arizona, the unpainted furniture king who irritably describes the pajamas his kidnapped tyke was wearing at the time of his disappearance--"Jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!"--amounted to handing out to each member of the audience engraved notices announcing that his career had now begun in earnest. As if aware that time was of the essence, he quickly appeared in Bull Durham as the team manager who can barely contain his contempt for lollygaggers; in Married to the Mob, as the FBI director whose explanation of the difference between working for the federal government and working for the Mafia can be, and probably has been, enjoyed by good liberals and militia group members alike; Twins; and the three films released after his death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Miss Firecracker, Great Balls of Fire (in which he played Sam Phillips), and Welcome Home, all of which are dedicated to him. Before he died, he had been set to play the Albert Finney role in Miller's Crossing.

Click here for Part One