Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: After briefly attending the College of the Pacific, Barbara Baxley headed to New York to pursue an acting career. Barbara studied at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse, then went on to become a charter member of the Actor's Studio. After making her New York stage bow in the 1948 revival of Private Lives, she spent the next several years taking over for a number of "big-name" actresses in long-running Broadway plays. She also starred in the original productions of Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Period of Adjustment, and worked extensively off-Broadway in projects like Brecht on Brecht. In the company of several of her Actor's Studios colleagues, Barbara made her film debut in East of Eden (1955), playing the nurse in the closing scenes. Other roles in her feature-film manifest included country-western matriarch Lady Pearl in Nashville (1975) and Leona in Norma Rae (1979). On television, Barbara was one of the stars of Norman Lear's satirical gender-switch soap opera All That Glitters (1977). In June of 1990, 62-year-old Barbara Baxley was found dead in her New York apartment, apparently the victim of heart failure.

Trivia: American actor Jackie Coogan belonged to a family of vaudevillians. At age four Coogan was already a stage attraction performing with his father when he caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, who immediately hired him (and his father as well). After giving him a bit part in the short A Day's Pleasure (1919), he made Coogan his co-star in the masterpiece The Kid (1921). This launched Coogan's film career and he went on to become one of the highest paid film actors of the day. Movie audiences worldwide doted on him, but his career as a child star petered out when he was 13 and too old to be "cute." In 1935 when his mother and stepfather refused to let him have the $4 million that he had amassed during his child acting days, he filed suit against them. When the settlement finally came, he received a mere $126,000., but the legal fight brought attention to such abuses, and resulted in the "California Child Actor's Bill" also known as the "Coogan Act" which protected the earnings of child actors. He was married to Betty Grable for 3 years, and to three other showgirls in succession afterwards. During his adulthood, he occasionally appeared in films playing character roles and worked frequently in television, most notably as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series. He died on March 1, 1984.

Trivia: Actors Studio-graduate Michael J. Pollard was first thrust upon the public as Maynard G. Krebs' funky cousin on the 1959 TV series Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). The leprechaunish Pollard had been hired as a potential replacement for Bob Denver (aka Maynard), who'd been drafted; but when Denver flunked his physical and returned to the series, Pollard was shown the exit. He went on to co-star in the 1961 musical Bye Bye Birdie (1961), then made his film debut in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962). Pollard earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as the moronic C.W.Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967); he followed this triumph by sharing co-star billing with Robert Redford in Little Fauss & Big Halsey (1969), and by essaying the role of Billy the Kid in Dirty Little Billy (1972). In all the above-mentioned films, as well as his many TV appearances in series like The Andy Griffith Show, Lost in Space and Star Trek, Pollard essentially played the same character: a slow-witted, stammering child-man, ever out of step with an unfeeling world. Audiences eventually tired of Pollard's one-note characterizations. No longer a star, Michael J. Pollard has continued accepting sizeable character roles in films, and was seen as Leonard the handyman in the 1986 TV sitcom Leo and Liz in Beverly Hills. In 1990, Michael J. Pollard was reunited with his Bonnie and Clyde co-star Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy, playing the amusing supporting part of police wiretapper Bug Bailey (also in the Tracy cast was another B&C alumnus, Estelle Parsons).