Trivia: The younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, American actor Peter Graves worked as a musician and radio actor before entering films with 1950's Rogue River. At first, it appeared that Graves would be the star of the family, since he was cast in leads while brother Jim languished in secondary roles. Then came Stalag 17 (1953), in which Graves was first-rate as a supposedly all-American POW who turned out to be a vicious Nazi spy. Trouble was, Graves played the part too well, and couldn't shake the Nazi stereotype in the eyes of most Hollywood producers. Suddenly the actor found himself in such secondary roles as Shelley Winters' doomed husband in Night of the Hunter (1955) (he was in and out of the picture after the first ten minutes), while sibling James Arness was riding high with Gunsmoke. Dissatisfied with his film career, Graves signed on in 1955 for a network kid's series about "a horse and the boy who loved him." Fury wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but it ran five years and made Graves a wealthy man through rerun residuals--so much so that he claimed to be making more money from Fury than his brother did from Gunsmoke. In 1966, Peter Graves replaced Steven Hill as head honcho of the force on the weekly TV adventure series Mission: Impossible, a stint that lasted until 1973. Though a better than average actor, Graves gained something of a camp reputation for his stiff, straight-arrow film characters and was often cast in films that parodied his TV image. One of the best of these lampoonish appearances was in the Zucker-Abrahams comedy Airplane (1980), as a nutty airline pilot who asks outrageous questions to a young boy on the plane (a part the actor very nearly turned down, until he discovered that Leslie Nielsen was co-starring in the film). Peter Graves effortlessly maintained his reliable, authoritative movie persona into the '90s and 2000s, and hosted the Biography series on A&E, for which he won an Emmy; he also guest-starred on programs including Cold Case, House and American Dad. Graves died of natural causes in March 2010, at age 83.

Trivia: Fans of the original action /espionage series Mission Impossible (1966-70) may recognize black actor Greg Morris for playing electronics wizard Barney Collier. Morris spent most of his career on television, appearing on such shows as Ben Casey, The Dick Van Dyck Show and The Twilight Zone. During the 1970s, Morris was a regular on Vega$ (1978-81), playing police officer Lt. David Neslon. A native of Cleveland who spent part of his childhood in New York City, his mother worked as a secretary for black labor leader A. Phillip Reynolds. Before becoming a television actor during the early '60s, Morris attended Ohio State University and the University of Iowa. Morris passed away at the age of 61 on August 27, 1996. The cause of death was unreported.

Trivia: Actress Lynda Day George was quite busy on TV in guest-starring roles throughout the 1960s. Before she officially changed her professional name from "Day" to "Day George" -- to acknowledge her marriage to actor Christopher George -- Day George was a regular on The Silent Force, a 1970 Mission: Impossible clone. Ironically, one year later she was cast on the real Mission: Impossible as undercover operative Casey, a role she retained until the series' cancellation in 1973. While she has appeared in the occasional theatrical film, most of Day George's best work could be seen in such small-screen miniseries as Rich Man, Poor Man, Once an Eagle, and Roots. In the early '80s, Lynda Day George began turning down network roles to devote her energies to religious television, remaining active in this field long after the death of her husband in 1983.

Trivia: Though early on, short, pugnacious American actor Gerald S. O'Loughlin dreamed of becoming a lawyer, the prohibitive cost of law school forced him to steer toward engineering as a career. O'Loughlin was deflected from this ambition by an increasing interest in the theatre. After a long stint with the Marines, O'Loughlin used his GI Bill money to finance his participation at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Working steadily on stage and in live TV drama, O'Loughlin made an inauspicious debut as the romantic lead in the Manhattan-filmed turkey Lovers and Lollipops (1956); one year later, he was shown to better advantage re-creating his stage role in the filmization of Michael Gazzo's play A Hatful of Rain (1957). For many children of the '70s, Gerald O'Loughlin will always be the tough-but-tender Lt. Ryker on the long-running cop series The Rookies. Even in his subsequent TV series assignments (Automan [1983-1984], Our House [1986]) one half expected O'Loughlin to drop character and start barking out "Hey! Danko." Gerald O'Loughlin was married to casting director Meryl Abeles.

Trivia: Christopher Stone's movie career got off on the right foot with his portrayal of pandering rock singer Jay Rigney in 1970's Grasshopper. Later that same year, Stone was cast a "swinging" doctor Pooch Hardin on the short-lived TV series The Interns. While he never quite attained the upper reaches of stardom, Stone has been steadily employed in Hollywood for the past quarter century, most often as a TV-series regular on such weeklies as Spencer's Pilots (1976), Harper Valley PTA (1981) and Dallas (1984-85 season only, as Dave Stratton). Christopher Stone is married to actress Dee Wallace Stone, with whom he appeared in the theatrical features Cujo and The Howling, and in the 1989 syndicated TVer The New Lassie.

Trivia: American-born Anthony Caruso decided early in his showbiz career to cash in on his last name by becoming a singer. Though he enjoyed some success in this field, Caruso had better luck securing acting roles. Typecast as a villain from his first film, Johnny Apollo (1940), onward, he remained a reliable screen menace until the 1980s. Usually cast as an Italian (he was Louis Chiavelli in 1950's The Asphalt Jungle), he has also played his share of Greeks, Spaniards, Slavs, and Indian chiefs. He was occasionally afforded an opportunity to essay sympathetic characters on the various TV religious anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s, notably This Is the Life. In 1976, Anthony Caruso enjoyed one of his biggest and most prominent screen roles in Zebra Force.On April 4, 2003 Anthony Caruso died following an extended illness in Brentwood, CA. He was 86.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from the early '70s.

Trivia: University of Oklahoma alumnus Lonny Chapman inaugurated his professional acting career in 1948. While co-starring in the Broadway production of Come Back Little Sheba, Chapman arranged for his college chum Dennis Weaver to understudy for him. Weaver went on to TV fame as Chester on the Western series Gunsmoke, while Chapman prospered as a film character actor, playing such roles as Roy in East of Eden (1955), Rock in Baby Doll (1957), and Deke Carter in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). On TV, Lonny Chapman starred as private eye Jeff Prior in the 1958 summer-replacement series The Investigator, and was featured as another detective, Frank Malloy, in the 1965 courtroom weekly For the People (1965).

Trivia: American comic character actor/impressionist Buddy Lewis appeared in a few films during the '50s, '60s and '70s.