Trivia: Big, burly Dan Blocker only did a handful of movies in his 17-year acting career, but he became one of the most beloved and popular television stars of the 1960s for his portrayal of Hoss Cartwright on the Western series Bonanza. Weighing 14 pounds at birth, Blocker was the largest baby ever born in Bowie County, TX. At 18, he stood 6'3" and weighed close to 300 pounds, and was legendary for his physical prowess. Blocker attended the Texas Military Institute and studied for his B.A. at Sul Ross State College, where he initially majored in athletics. His build accidentally led him to the drama department for a production of Arsenic and Old Lace -- a stage hand was needed who was big and strong enough to quickly remove the dummies representing corpses on the set, between acts. While working on the production, Blocker was bitten by the acting bug and switched his major to drama. He pursued his theatrical aspirations in earnest after graduation, working in one season of summer stock before he was drafted. Blocker served in combat during the Korean War, after which he earned a master's degree, married, moved to Los Angeles, and settled down to raise a family, earning his living as a high school teacher. It was his successful audition for the small role of a cavalry lieutenant on Gunsmoke during the 1956 season, in the episode "Alarm at Pleasant Valley," that rekindled Blocker's interest in an acting career. Over the next three years, he took any work that he could get, on programs like Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Cheyenne, Tales of Wells Fargo, Zane Grey Theater, Wagon Train, Colt .45, Zorro, Maverick, and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Blocker also got some movie work, portraying a bartender in the offbeat murder mystery The Girl in Black Stockings and an android in Outer Space Jitters, a very late Three Stooges short. His career took an upturn when he got a guest-starring role in an episode of the series The Restless Gun, starring John Payne, in 1958; his work was good enough to catch the attention of the producer, David Dortort. A year later, Dortort was putting together a new, hour-long Western series called Bonanza and cast Blocker in the role of "Hoss" Cartwright, the big-boned, good-natured middle son in a ranching family near Virginia City, NV, set in the mid- to late 19th century (the time frame of Bonanza was always vague, with stories shifting between the early 1860s to the 1870s and 1880s). Blocker's character's real name, incidentally, was Eric, but Hoss -- a nickname from his mother's Norwegian language that meant "friend" -- was what he was known as to everyone on the series and all viewers. Despite the weaknesses in the scripts during the early seasons, the role was a dream part for the actor, who got a chance to display his gentle, sensitive side as well as his gift for comedy, and also work in a serious dramatic context as well on many occasions, and show off his brute strength as well. It is arguable that Blocker was the most popular member of the cast during the 1960s; he was especially beloved of younger viewers, in part because his character was always very sympathetic to children. In contrast to the other stars of the series, Blocker's big-screen career wasn't halted by his work on Bonanza. He appeared in The Errand Boy, playing himself in an uncredited cameo, and played a role in the Frank Sinatra movie Come Blow Your Horn. Blocker got his first major movie part five years later in the Sinatra film Lady in Cement (1968), playing Waldo Gronsky, a burly, potentially murderous thug who hires private detective Tony Rome (played by Sinatra) to find his missing girlfriend. By the end of the 1960s, Blocker was taken seriously enough as an actor to star in two features, Something for a Lonely Man, a beautiful and poignant Western/comedy-drama, and the broader comedy The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. Some of Blocker's television appearances separate from Bonanza also reflected his personal side -- his politics were essentially liberal Democratic (in sharp contrast to the conservative Republican sympathies of his co-stars Michael Landon and Lorne Greene), and he appeared in several public service announcements promoting brotherhood and racial tolerance, as well as on one television special that gently satirized American popular culture, starring Henry Fonda. He was also part of the liberal contingent in the 1971 John Wayne-hosted patriotic special Swing Out, Sweet Land. In 1972, Blocker was chosen for what could have been the breakthrough role to a major movie career, when he won the part of Roger Wade, the has-been author in Robert Altman's revisionist detective movie The Long Goodbye. In May of that year, however, he went into the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery, and during recovery he died suddenly of a blood clot in his lung. Sterling Hayden replaced Blocker in The Long Goodbye, which was dedicated to the actor's memory. Blocker's passing, immediately before the shooting for the 1972-1973 season of Bonanza was to begin, signed the death knell for the series. The cast and crew were genuinely shaken by his sudden death; scripts had to be hastily rewritten to explain the passing of Hoss Cartwright, and Blocker's absence and the reason behind it removed any element of lightheartedness that the series had displayed. The final season, despite the best efforts of surviving stars Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, and David Canary, was characterized by grim, downbeat stories and a dark mood that seemed to repel longtime viewers. Coupled with this change in tone, the NBC network moved Bonanza from its longtime Sunday nighttime slot to Tuesday nights, where it died a quick death, cancellation coming halfway through the 1972-1973 season. Blocker left behind a wife and four children, among them actor Dirk Blocker and director/producer David Blocker. He also left behind a legacy of good will that survives to this day, as Bonanza is in perpetual reruns on various cable channels, decades after its cancellation. Significantly, the final season, in which he did not appear, is the body of episodes that is shown (and requested) the least of its 14 years' worth of programs.

Trivia: Chinese/American actor Victor Sen Yung would always be limited by stereotype in his selection of film roles, but it cannot be denied that he did rather well for himself within those limitations. Billed simply as Sen Yung in his earliest films, the actor was elevated to semi-stardom as Jimmy Chan, number two son of screen sleuth Charlie Chan. He first essayed Jimmy in 1938's Charlie Chan in Honolulu, replacing number one son Keye Luke (both Luke and Yung would co-star in the 1948 Chan adventure The Feathered Serpent). Not much of an actor at the outset, Yung received on-the-job training in the Chan films, and by 1941 was much in demand for solid character roles. With the absence of genuine Japanese actors during World War II (most were in relocation camps), Yung specialized in assimilated, sophisticated, but nearly always villainous Japanese in such films as Across the Pacific (1942). Remaining busy into the '50s, Yung co-starred in both the stage and screen versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. His longest-lasting assignment in the '60s was as temperamental cook Hop Sing on the TV series Bonanza. Victor Sen Yung died in his North Hollywood home of accidental asphyxiation at the age of 65.

Trivia: Jeanne Bal's career took her from important roles in the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to the science fiction of Gene Roddenberry, all in less than 20 years. She was a natural fit in show business by temperament and birth. Born in 1928 in California, she was the daughter of Peter Bal, a scene designer at Monogram Pictures. By her own account, she was a gangly girl -- too tall and gawky until her final year of high school when she blossomed and developed an interest in acting. Bal attended Los Angeles City College until she was lured away by a role in Gypsy Lady, a musical that took her from Los Angeles to New York and then to London. She returned to New York after the show closed and discovered that she also made an excellent model on top of being an actress; she supported herself that way between shows. Bal appeared in a series of flops until George Abbott picked her for a role in Call Me Madam. She subsequently joined the cast of Guys and Dolls as Sarah Brown, replacing Jan Clayton during the Los Angeles run of its national tour. Bal later made her mark as Nellie Forbush in the national touring company of South Pacific. Bal married Russ Bowman, the show's stage manager, during the tour. In between stage engagements, Bal made numerous appearances on television during the '50s in comedy and drama, and sang at local night spots such as The Maisonette in the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan. In 1958, Bal became a regular on the Sid Caesar Show on ABC, doing sketches with Caesar and co-stars Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner. The following season she was a regular cast member of the situation comedy Love and Marriage, playing William Demarest's daughter. From there she returned to Broadway in the cast of The Gay Life, and during the early '60s appeared in such dramatic series as Perry Mason, Route 66, Wagon Train, and The Fugitive. In 1963, she was also a regular member of the cast of the series Mr. Novak, starring James Franciscus. Bal occasionally played romantic roles, such as a guest on the touching "Instant Family" episode of the sitcom Hey Landlord (co-created by Garry Marshall), in which she played a single mother with a child who becomes seriously involved with the young protagonist Woody Banner (Will Hutchins). But her most memorable television role was ultimately far-removed from (though intertwined with) romance: Bal had the honor in 1966 of portraying the first monster ever seen on Star Trek, in the episode "The Man Trap." She gave a bravura performance in the role of Nancy Crater, the one-time love of series regular Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley); the role was far more complex than that, however, for the being who appears to be Nancy Crater to the starship's landing party is actually the last surviving member of a predatory alien species that has adopted the guise of the woman, stalking members of the crew, killing them for the salt content of their bodies. Bal plays a this deadly, thirsting predator (and immensely strong, as we see when she tosses Leonard Nimoy across a room) and was convincingly vulnerable, loving, and even flirtatious, and intensely ferocious and savage, having a look of desperate hunger in her eyes. At other times, she was just bone-chilling as she switched from acting like "Nancy" to behaving as the "salt vampire," touching her victims' faces in a mysterious deadly caress, the purpose of which becomes horribly clear in the final two minutes. Bal retired from television and from acting at the outset of the '70s.

Trivia: Life literally began at 60 for American actor Burt Mustin, who didn't enter show business until that age and didn't make his film debut until Detective Story (1951), at which time he was 68. After a decade of uncredited movie roles as hillbilly patriarchs and Town's Oldest Citizens, Mustin began getting name recognition for numerous TV appearances in the late '50s and early '60s. The actor was a particular favorite of producer/actor Jack Webb, who cast Mustin several times on Dragnet; in one episode Burt was an octogenarian burglar, and in another was a retired detective who solved a murder case - and chewed out a young cop for not knowing the proper way to take fingerprints! Situation comedy producers made good use of Burt Mustin as well, and he was featured in innumerable cameos on such programs as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Get Smart and The Jack Benny Program, usually stealing most of the laughs from the stars. Mustin had regular TV roles as eccentric neighbor Finley on Date with the Angels, Gus the Fireman on Leave It to Beaver, barber shop patron Jud Crowley on The Andy Griffith Show, the amorous senior-citizen husband of Queenie Smith on The Funny Side, and nursing-home refugee Justin Quigley on All in the Family. Mustin got the biggest press coverage of his career when, in character as Arthur Lanson, he married Mother Dexter - played by 82-year-old Judith Lowry - on the December 13, 1976 episode of Phyllis. It was a hilarious and, in retrospect, poignant moment in TV history: Judith Lowry had died a few days before the program was aired, and Burt Mustin, who was too ill to watch the show, passed away six weeks later.

Trivia: Character actor Hal Baylor made a career out of pummeling (or being pummeled by) heroes ranging from John Wayne to Montgomery Clift. The 6'3", 210-pound Baylor, born Hal Fieberling, was an athlete in school and did a hitch in the United States Marines before embarking on a boxing career. He moved into acting in the late '40s, initially by way of one of the most acclaimed boxing films ever made in Hollywood, Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949), playing Tiger Nelson, the young fighter in the film, whose fresh good looks stood out from the pug-worn visages of most of the men around him. His first released film, however -- a short feature done after The Set-Up but released first -- was a very different kind of boxing movie, Joe Palooka in Winner Take All. He also appeared in Allan Dwan's 1949 The Sands of Iwo Jima, playing Private "Sky" Choyuski, which was where he first began working with John Wayne. All of those early appearances were credited under his real name, Hal Fieberling (sometimes spelled "Feiberling"), but by 1950 the actor had changed his name to Hal Baylor. Whether in Westerns, period dramas, or war movies, Baylor usually played tough guys, and as soon as John Wayne began producing movies, he started using him, in Big Jim McLain (1952), in which Baylor played one of the two principal villains, a tough, burly Communist (just to show, from the movie's point of view, that they weren't all slimy-mannered, smooth-talking intellectuals) who is always getting in the face of Wayne's two-fisted investigator, and who is bounced all over the set in the film's climactic punch-up; and in Island in the Sky (1953), as Stankowski the engineer. As with any working character actor, his films ranged in quality from John Ford's exquisite period drama The Sun Shines Bright (1953) to Lee Sholem's juvenile science fiction-adventure Tobor the Great (1954), and every class of picture in between. If anything, he was even busier on television; beginning in 1949 with an appearance on The Lone Ranger, Baylor was a fixture on the small screen in villainous parts. He was downright ubiquitous in Westerns during the 1950s and early '60s, working regularly in Gunsmoke, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Have Gun Will Travel, 26 Men, The Californians, Maverick, and The Alaskans; Rawhide, The Virginian, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Bat Masterson, The Big Valley, and Temple Houston (the latter allowing him to hook up with actor/producer Jack Webb, who would become one of his regular employers in the mid- to late '60s). During the mid-'60s, as Westerns faded from the home screen, Baylor got more work in crime shows, sometimes as police officers but more often as criminals, including a notably violent 1967 episode of Dragnet entitled "The Shooting," in which he and diminutive character actor Dick Miller played a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of would-be cop killers. He also played a brief comic-relief role in the Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," as a 1930s police officer who confronts a time-transported Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock stealing clothes. Baylor's career was similar to that of his fellow tough-guy actors Leo Gordon, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef, almost always centered on heavies, and, like Gordon, on those rare occasions when he didn't play a villain, Baylor stood out -- in Joseph Pevney's Away All Boats (1956), he proved that he could act without his fists or his muscle, with a memorable portrayal of the chaplain of the attack transport Belinda; but it was his heavies that stood out, none more so than his portrayal of the anti-Semitic Private Burnecker in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions, tormenting and then beating Jewish draftee Montgomery Clift to a bloody pulp, before being similarly pummeled himself. During the later '60s, he acquired the nickname around the industry as "the Last of the Bigtime Bad Guys," with 500 television shows and 70 movies to credit and still working, in everything from Disney comedies (The Barefoot Executive, Herbie Rides Again) to cutting-edge science fiction (A Boy and His Dog). At the end of his career, he returned to Westerns in The Macahans, the two-hour made-for-television feature starring James Arness (who had used Baylor numerous times on Gunsmoke, and had known him at least since they both worked in Big Jim McLain) that served as the pilot for the series How the West Was Won.

Trivia: White-haired, patriarchal Canadian actor Lorne Greene attended Queen's University in pursuit of a chemical engineering degree. Amateur college theatricals whetted his appetite for the stage, and upon graduation he decided upon a performing career. He started out on radio, eventually emerging as Canada's top newscaster, designated "the voice of the CBC" (For a while, Greene managed a mail-order announcer's school; one of the "pupils" was Leslie Nielsen). Moving to New York in 1950, Greene became a stage, film and TV actor, co-starring on Broadway with Katherine Cornell in Prescott Proposals and in films with the likes of Paul Newman, Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford, generally in villainous roles. In 1959, Greene was cast as Ben Cartwright, owner of the Ponderosa ranch and father of three headstrong sons, in TV's Bonanza. He would hold down this job until 1972; during the series' run, Greene unexpectedly became a top-ten recording artist with his hit single "Ringo." Upon the cancellation of Bonanza, Greene vowed he'd retire, but within one year he was playing a private detective on the brief TV weekly Griff. Five years later, he starred on the network sci-fier Battlestar Gallactica. Active as chairman of the National Wildlife Foundation, Greene put forth the organization's doctrine in his popular syndicated TV series Lorne Greene's Last of the Wild. His final weekly television appearance was on the 1980 adventure series Code Red. In 1987, Lorne Greene was all set to recreate Ben Cartwright for the 2-hour TV movie Bonanza: The Next Generation, but he died before shooting started and was replaced by John Ireland.

Trivia: The son of a Jewish movie-publicist father and an Irish Catholic musical-comedy actress, Michael Landon grew up in a predominantly Protestant New Jersey neighborhood. The social pressures brought to bear on young Michael, both at home and in the schoolyard, led to an acute bedwetting problem, which he would later dramatize (very discreetly) in the 1976 TV movie The Loneliest Runner. Determined to better his lot in life, Landon excelled in high school athletics; his prowess at javelin throwing won him a scholarship at the University of Southern California, but a torn ligament during his freshman year ended his college career. Taking a series of manual labor jobs, Landon had no real direction in life until he agreed to help a friend audition for the Warners Bros. acting school. The friend didn't get the job, but Landon did, launching a career that would eventually span nearly four decades. Michael's first film lead was in the now-legendary I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), widely derided at the time but later reassessed as one of the better examples of the late-'50s "drive-in horror" genre. The actor received his first good reviews for his performance as an albino in God's Little Acre. This led to his attaining the title role in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley, which in turn was instrumental in his being cast as Little Joe Cartwright on the popular TV western Bonanza. During his fourteen-year Bonanza stint, Landon was given the opportunity to write and direct a few episodes. He carried over these newfound skills into his next TV project, Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1982 (just before Little House, Landon made his TV-movie directorial bow with It's Good to Be Alive, the biopic of baseball great Roy Campanella). Landon also oversaw two spinoff series, Little House: The New Beginning (1982-83) and Father Murphy (1984). Landon kept up his career momentum with a third long-running TV series, Highway to Heaven (1984-89) wherein the actor/producer/director/writer played guardian angel Jonathan Smith. One of the most popular TV personalities of the '70s and '80s, Landon was not universally beloved by his Hollywood contemporaries, what with his dictatorial on-set behavior and his tendency to shed his wives whenever they matured past childbearing age. Still, for every detractor, there was a friend, family member or coworker who felt that Landon was the salt of the earth. In early 1991, Landon began work on his fourth TV series, Us, when he began experiencing stomach pains. In April of that same year, the actor was informed that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. The courage and dignity with which Michael Landon lived his final months on earth resulted in a public outpouring of love, affection and support, the like of which was seldom witnessed in the cynical, self-involved '90s. Michael Landon died in his Malibu home on July 1, 1991, with his third wife Cindy at his side.

Trivia: Pernell Roberts worked such odd jobs as butcher, forest ranger and tombstone-maker while studying acting and singing and scouting around for off-Broadway jobs. Roberts' film debut, in a characteristic Deep Brooder role, was in 1958's Desire Under the Elms. From 1959 through 1966, Roberts co-starred as black-clad, taciturn Adam Cartwright on Bonanza. "Aloof, rebellious and outspoken" was how Bonanza producer David Dotort summed up Roberts, who fought tooth and nail over every real or imagined challenge to his integrity (his biggest beef was that he had to call Lorne Greene "Pa" rather than "Father"). Fed up with what he perceived as the series' declining quality, Roberts left Bonanza in 1966; it was explained to fans that "Adam" had left to study at a European university. Free of his TV series commitment, Roberts returned to his first love, the stage--and also divested himself of the toupee he'd been forced to wear as Adam. The actor played the straw-hat circuit in such musicals as Camelot and The King and I, all the while accepting film and TV roles that came up to his standards. Unfortunately, his stubbornness and standoffishness left a sour taste with co-workers and fans alike, and Roberts was unable to soar to the artistic heights to which he aspired. After years of declaring that he'd never again return to the grind of weekly television, Roberts accepted the role of Dr. "Trapper" John McIntyre, chief of surgery at San Francisco memorial hospital, in the seven-season (1979-86) M*A*S*H spin-off Trapper John MD. In 1991 Pernell Roberts assumed the hosting duties of the TV anthology FBI: The Untold Stories.

Trivia: Character actor Holly Bane (who sometimes billed himself as Michael Ragan) specialized in playing bad guys in low-budget Westerns and serials. He made his first film appearance in Wake Island (1942), then appeared frequently in films through 1966, when he worked opposite Elvis Presley in Gunpoint. In the 1970s, Bane became a makeup director and worked on such television series as Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter.