Trivia: American actor Robert Brown -- not to be confused with the British actor of the same name whose credits include the James Bond movie The Living Daylights -- was born in Trenton, NJ, in 1926 (some sources say 1927), of Welsh and Scottish descent. He studied drama at the New School Dramatic Workshop, where his fellow students included Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, future director Gene Saks, and actor-singer Harry Belafonte. Brown was principally a theater actor for the first two decades of his career, making his Broadway debut 1948 in Skipper Next to God, directed by Lee Strasberg and starring John Garfield. His other Broadway credits included Maxwell Anderson's Barefoot in Athens (1951) and Christopher Fry's The Dark Is Light Enough, the latter starring Katharine Cornell. Brown's tall, rangy good looks should have made him a natural for movies, but as a New York-based actor, his big-screen credits were minimal. He played a small role in the Benedict Bogeaus-produced Appointment in Honduras (1953), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and a much larger part, as the dissolute (but ultimately self-sacrificing) brother to Arthur Franz in The Flame Barrier (1958). Brown appeared in various dramatic anthology shows, and in episodes of series such as Perry Mason, and was somewhat busier in movies in the 1960s. His most prominent acting job, however, was in an episode of Star Trek, in a role that came to him accidentally. John Drew Barrymore was supposed to be the featured guest star in "The Alternative Factor," a 1967 episode, in a difficult dual role, but he never reported for filming, and Brown was cast in the part of the mysterious alien Lazarus at the last possible moment. He never had a chance to absorb the script the way he might have, in what was a difficult acting job. Despite the fact that he and the rest of the cast were rushed through his scenes, Brown managed to bring a good deal of humanity and complexity to his portrayals of the two roles. Ironically, thanks to the enduring popularity of the series, this has probably been Brown's most widely seen television appearance. In 1968, Brown won the leading role in an unusual nonviolent Western called Here Come the Brides. The series' roots lay in an unproduced film project that was to have starred Burt Lancaster, and Brown's portrayal of Jason Bolt evoked images of Lancaster (and also Errol Flynn) at their most charismatic. Brides only lasted two seasons, but Brown was sufficiently well-established to get the lead in another very different series, Primus, about a marine biologist. Following the cancellation of that series, Brown appeared intermittently on television into the 1980s.

Trivia: Sporting a winning smile and fashionably shaggy hair, Bobby Sherman was a genuine teen idol during the late '60s and early '70s. Sherman first surfaced as a regular on ABC-TV's mid-'60s rock spectacular Shindig!, then co-starred on the warmhearted program Here Come the Brides. He stormed the pop charts as a vocalist in 1969-1970 with the well-produced "Little Woman," "La La La (If I Had You)," "Easy Come, Easy Go," and "Julie, Do Ya Love Me," all four songs credited as million sellers on the Metromedia label. The hits stopped in 1972, and Sherman moved to working mostly behind the scenes in television.

Trivia: The son of a Chicago minister, actor David Soul actually launched his career as a folk singer. Born David Richard Solbert on August 28, 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, David moved to Mexico during his youth, when his father took a lengthy assignment as diplomatic advisor for the U.S. State Department. The experience (and the Mexican environment) engendered in young Solberg a permanent love of indigenous folk music. For the remainder of his youth, the whole world was Soul's backyard as his father was transferred from post to post during the 1950s and early 1960s. The blossoming performer could never quite shake either his inbred wanderlust (he attended Augustana College in South Dakota, the University of the Americas in New Mexico, and the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis) or his musical inclinations. After impulsively deciding to become a stage performer, and studying with the legendary Uta Hagen in New York, Soul definitively opted to embark upon a singing career. From 1966 to 1967, the performer turned up as the hooded "mystery singer" on the syndicated television talkfest The Merv Griffin Show. At about the same time, Soul also landed gigs opening for musical acts including Frank Zappa, The Lovin' Spoonful and The Byrds. The singer's decision, not long after, to finally remove his "mask" on television and reveal himself to the public backfired; it took away the novelty, and made it eminently more difficult for Soul to book concerts. Taking this as a cue, the actor returned to television, and was cast as Joshua Bolt on the 1968 TV adventure series Here Come the Brides, co-starring with another promising vocalist, Bobby Sherman. While Sherman became an instant teen idol, Soul would not truly hit it big until 1976, when he was cast as urban cop David Starsky and teamed with Paul Michael Glaser on the cop series Starsky and Hutch (1975-79). During the series and immediately following its cancellation, Soul attempted to trade off of his tube success by revitalizing his recording career, but did so with intermittent success; his syrupy ballad "Don't Give Up on Us" (parodied by Owen Wilson years later during a scene in the 2004 big-screen movie Starsky & Hutch) peaked at #1 in 1977 and became an FM and then AM radio staple for decades, but his albums charted much lower and did little to further his musical success.The actor went on to star in the TV weeklies Casablanca (1983, in the Bogart role!), The Yellow Rose (1983-84), Unsub (1989), and the telemovie adventure Pentathalon (1994). He also made a cameo alongside Glaser at the conclusion of the aforementioned Starsky & Hutch movie. Married several times, Soul's ex-wives include Karen Carlson, Lynn Marta, and Julia Nickson.

Trivia: A lovable star with a vivacious personality, mesmerizing smile, and big blue eyes, Joan Blondell, the daughter of stage comic Eddie Blondell (one of the original Katzenjammer Kids), spent her childhood touring the world with her vaudevillian parents and appearing with them in shows. She joined a stock company at age 17, then came to New York after winning a Miss Dallas beauty contest. She then appeared in several Broadway productions and in the Ziegfield Follies before being paired with another unknown, actor James Cagney, in the stage musical Penny Arcade; a year later this became the film Sinners Holiday, propelling her to stardom. Blondell spent eight years under contract with Warner Bros., where she was cast as dizzy blondes and wisecracking gold-diggers. She generally appeared in comedies and musicals and was paired ten times on the screen with actor Dick Powell, to whom she was married from 1936-45. Through the '30s and '40s she continued to play cynical, wisecracking girls with hearts of gold appearing in as many as ten films a year during the '30s. In the '50s she left films for the stage, but then came back to do more mature character parts. Blondell is the author of a roman a clef novel titled Center Door Fancy (1972) and was also married to producer Mike Todd (1947-50).

Trivia: Beckman is a stocky character actor, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: Starting out in musicals and comedies, leather-lunged character actor Henry Jones had developed into a versatile dramatic actor by the 1950s, though he never abandoned his willingness to make people laugh. Jones scored his first cinematic bullseye when he re-created his Broadway role as the malevolent handyman Leroy in the 1956 cinemadaptation of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed (1956). Refusing to be typed, Jones followed this triumph with a brace of quietly comic roles in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. He returned to Broadway in 1958, winning the Tony and New York Drama Critics' awards for his performance in Sunrise at Campobello. Since that time, Jones has flourished in films, often making big impressions in the tiniest of roles: the coroner in Vertigo (1958), the bicycle salesman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the hotel night clerk in Dick Tracy (1990) and so on. From 1963's Channing onward, Jones has been a regular on several weekly TV series, most notably as Judge Jonathan Dexter in Phyllis (1975-76) and B. Riley Wicker on the nighttime serial Falcon Crest (1985-86). Henry Jones is the father of actress Jocelyn Jones.

Trivia: Fans of the original Star Trek and its movie spin-offs will recognize Mark Lenard for playing Sarek, the Vulcan father of first officer Mr. Spock. Lenard was also a respected theatrical actor and had appeared in other feature films and television shows. He first appeared on Star Trek as a Romulan commander in "Balance of Terror" (1966) and did not play Sarek until the following year in "Journey to Babel." He appeared a Klingon captain in Star Trek: The Movie (1979) before reprising his role as Sarek in parts III, IV and VI, as well as in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.Lenard launched his professional career on-stage and first bowed on Broadway in Carson McCullers' Square Root of Wonderful (1957). He went on to play supporting and co-leads in many highly regarded plays, including Much Ado About Nothing opposite John Gielgud. Lenard made his feature film debut in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Prior to that, he had played a regular role on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow during the 1959-1960 season. After Star Trek, Lenard was a supporting regular on several other television series including Here Come the Brides (1968-1970) and Planet of the Apes (1974). Lenard died of multiple myeloma at the age of 68.