These two young ladies made their screen debuts in an MGM short subject, then went on to become top stars of their era.

And yes, yesterday’s stars were Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie with character actor Murray Alper. The film was The Hard Way, directed by Vincent Sherman.

Picnic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sunset Boulevard, Fedora, Paris When It Sizzles, S.O.B, The Wild Bunch, Sabrina, Stalag 17, Network.

William Holden starred in them all.  They were among his some 75 credits rolled up over more than 40 years, mostly spent as one of Hollywood’s biggest male stars at the box office.  The public liked this guy as did the critics — who particularly admired his work as he got older.

Holden had his share of offscreen woes.  His end was both untimely and ungainly.  He was married for some three decades, a union that ultimately came to be seen as part sham, at least at the end.

He had affairs with costars Capucine, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. His final romance was with tv actress Stefanie Powers, his partner in African wildlife preservation via the William Holden Wildlife Foundation in Kenya.

There’s no gainsaying that Holden was a BIG male star for many years.  Still, how much did you know about him? Let’s get to our Mini-Quiz answers to find out.  To refresh yourselves about the questions, just scroll down to the blog below.  Here we go:

1) Answer:  Holden was Oscar nominated as best actor for 1950′s Sunset Boulevard and for 1976′s Network.  But he won the award for 1953′s Stalag 17. (Typically underrating his abilities, he felt he didn’t deserve the win.)

2) Answer:  Holden was married to d) actress Brenda Marshall. Fact is that for three decades, they were one of Hollywood’s best looking married couples. (See photo below.) But, despite its durability their union (1941 to 1971) was far from happy, marred by multiple separations and infidelities on both sides. No question, though.  They were a handsome sight to behold (see below). Marshall died of cancer at age 76 in 1992, 11 years after Holden’s death.

3) Answer:  c) Billy Wilder, who directed Holden in Stalag 17, Sunset Boulevard and the much underrated Fedora. Need we say more?

4) Answer: b) Barbara Stanwyck , who pushed for an inexperienced Holden’s hiring for the lead as the musician-turned-boxer in 1939′s Golden Boy. The movie was a big boost to Holden’s fledgling career for which he was forever grateful.  It’s been reported that he sent Stanwyck flowers each year marking the first day of the movie’s filming.

5) Answer:  By 1981, Holden, an inveterate world traveler, was in the U.S. where he maintained a Palm Springs home and a co-op apartment on the fifth floor of 535 Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California.  The actor, who had multiple business investments, had a piece of the 12-story building. In mid-November, 1981, Holden’s dead body was discovered in a bedroom floor in a pool of blood.  He had been dead for four to five days.  A subsequent County Coroner’s investigation ruled that Holden — a heavy drinker for much of his career — had been drunk, and evidently banged his head against a night table on getting out of bed, and had passed out before he could get help.

Our late friend Patricia Williamson was a Chevronette during World War II, and sold War Bonds with some of the top stars of the era.

Of course you recognize the lovely lady with her in today’s photo taken from Pat’s private scrapbook.

Who is she? And who, pray tell, were the Chevronettes? (Answers on Monday.)

And speaking of scrapbooks, how many readers out there have some which they’d like to share?

On Oct. 7, we wrote about successful transformation of Dick Powell from singer-dancer to crime buster. Well, here’s another look at one of Hollywood’s more interesting career transformations.

Remember John Payne? Of course you do (says Joe, confidently).  But do you remember him as a leading man in musicals or as a hard bitten detective? He starred and superbly acquitted himself in both. There he is above with Betty Grable and Victor Mature in Footlight Serenade.

Unlike Powell, Payne he never fully abandoned his skills as a singer, and kept at it in one venue or another pretty much up to his death at 77 in 1989 of congestive heart failure. But Frank remembers Payne less from his musical work than for his deft appearances in action movies and crime thrillers where nary a song crossed the actor’s mind.

Perhaps his best of the latter is director Phil Karlson’s 1952 crime drama, Kansas City Confidential. Payne plays a good-natured truck driver out on parole who is set up as the fall guy for band of nasties (Preston Foster, Jack Elam, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef) pulling off an armored car robbery.

Payne’s falsely accused character is forced to hunt down the real robbers, a job complicated by the fact that the bad guys don’t know each other.  A cleverly constructed, suspenseful noir with Payne handling the emotional shifts — from geniality to anger to violence — easily and credibly.

As film noir specialist Eddy Muller notes, director Karlson had a profitable association with John Payne, making two other punchy noirs, ’99 River Street’ (United Artists, 1955) and ’Hell’s Island’ (Paramount, 1955), in which he transformed the popular songbird into a lonesome nighthawk.

Born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1912, Payne was musically trained from childhood. His mother was an operatic soprano. Before making his film debut in 1936, Payne sang professionally on the radio and in Shubert Brothers vaudeville/stage presentations. After a stint at Warner Bros. in the late Thirties, his largely musical tenure at 20th Century Fox began in earnest in the early Forties.

He teamed with former radio partner Grable in 1942′s Springtime in the Rockies before beginning a two-year Army hitch.  After wartime service, he resumed his career at Fox mostly squiring onscreen Fox’s biggest female stars — Grable, Alice Faye and Sonja Henie — in an array of musical vehicles, many shot in glossy Technicolor.

Payne also had handily created a breezy, macho image for himself, which studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck found useful.  When Tyrone Power went to (serve in World War II), there was John Payne to be the cocky heel-with-a-heart, wrote Zanuck biographer Mel Gussow.

Payne was a notable ladies man. Two of his three marriages were to fresh-faced actresses, first to Anne Shirley (1937-1943) and the second to Gloria DeHaven (1944-1951). Payne also enjoyed his share of extra-marital flings.

In her autobiography, Jane Russell confides that she began what she described as a “very serious affair” with Payne, whom she described as “a thinker, a reader, a writer.”  He certainly was a far-sighted businessman. While employed at 20th Century Fox, Payne invested in land along the Malibu coastline.