Trivia: The son of an insurance salesman, David Wayne attended Western Michigan University. While working as a statistician in Cleveland, Wayne became attracted to the local theatrical activity. Auditioning for a Shakespearean repertory company, he won the role of Touchstone in As You Like It, which he performed before an audience for the first time at the 1935 Cleveland Exposition. In 1938, he made his first New York stage appearance in Escape This Night. Classified 4F at the outbreak of World War II, Wayne volunteered for the ambulance corps, subsequently serving as a Red Cross driver in North Africa. His theatrical career really began to pick up steam after the war: cast as Og the Leprechaun in the 1947 musical hit Finian's Rainbow, he became the first actor ever to win a Tony Award. The following year, he created the role of Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, and in 1955 he was seen as Okinawan interpreter Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon. While all of his major stage roles went to other actors in the film versions, Wayne enjoyed a substantial movie career of his own. Though he made his screen debut in 1947's Portrait of Jennie, Wayne was given "and introducing" billing in the Tracy/Hepburn comedy Adam's Rib (1949), in which he played capricious composer Kip Lurie. After playing Joe, cartoonist Bill Mauldin's mud-caked infantryman, in Universal's Up Front (1951), Wayne spent most of his screen time at 20th Century-Fox, where, among other things, he did two co-starring stints with Marilyn Monroe (1952's We're Not Married, 1953's How to Marry a Millionaire), played theatrical impresario Sol Hurok in Tonight We Sing (1953), starred as a tragedy-plagued small-town barber in the underrated Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie (1953) and portrayed schizophrenic Joanne Woodward's long-suffering husband in Three Faces of Eve (1957). One of Wayne's co-stars during his Fox years was Una Merkel, who once remarked "I loved David Wayne. I think he's one of the finest actors we have. He's so good they don't know what to do with him."One place where they evidently did know what to do with Wayne was television, where he worked steadily from 1948 onward. Besides playing such prominent personages as Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain and even "Old Scratch" (in a 1961 telecast of The Devil and Daniel Webster), he appeared in classic individual episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone, played "special guest villain" The Mad Hatter on Batman, and was a regular on the weekly series Norby (1955), The Good Life (1973), Ellery Queen (1975, as Inspector Queen), Dallas (1978), and House Calls (1980). In addition, Wayne appeared with New York's Lincoln Center Repertory, and was one of the hosts of the NBC weekend radio potpourri Monitor. Curtailing his activities in the late 1980s, David Wayne retired altogether in 1993, after the death of his wife of 51 years.

Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: American actor Bob Crane is best remembered for playing the crafty POW Col. Hogan on the 1960s television comedy Hogan's Heroes, but he also played leads in a few films during the '50s and '60s. Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He began his career as a drummer and played with dance bands and a symphony orchestra. He also worked as a radio announcer at various stations around the U.S. before hosting a morning talk show in Hollywood. Next Crane began appearing regularly on the Donna Reed Show. In 1978, he was mysteriously murdered, and the case remains unsolved. He was married to Sigrid Valdis, an actress.

Trivia: Trim, ladylike American film and theatre actress Elizabeth Allen has seldom been as appropriately cast as she was in John Ford's Donovan's Reef. Elizabeth played the Boston-bred daughter of rapscallion Jack Warden; her impending visit prompts Warden and his drinking buddies John Wayne and Lee Marvin to clean up their act double-quick. In a cinematic world where the "bad girls" get all the good roles, Elizabeth has not always been well-served. It was fascinating, however, to watch her portray an enemy-agent seductress on a 1966 episode of TV's The Man From UNCLE. In 1965, Elizabeth Allen starred in Richard Rodgers' Broadway musical Do I Hear a Waltz?, which closed in about two months, but which enabled Elizabeth to demonstrate her lovely singing voice on the well-circulated Original Cast Album.

Trivia: Staats Cotsworth is scarcely remembered today by anybody outside of the acting profession, and even then, they'd need to be very old actors to recall him. He had only three feature-film appearances to his credit, and didn't do too much theater work either, nor did he need to: For much of the 1940s, he was radio's busiest actor, performing continuing roles in as many as ten series at any given time, including Lone Journey, Stella Dallas, and Mr. and Mrs. North, and starring in Casey, Crime Photographer. Born in Oak Park, IL, in 1908, Cotsworth entered the acting profession as a member of Eva Le Gallienne's repertory company in New York. His arrival in the city coincided with the boom in radio, which became the dominant mass medium of the 1930s and was centered in New York. Although he was a classically trained actor with experience in Shakespearean roles, Cotsworth gravitated toward the new medium, which seemed to offer vast opportunities, and it was there that he made his name and his fortune. By the mid-'40s, when the average American's salary was 3,000 dollars a year, Cotsworth earned over 50,000 dollars a year on radio. It was only in the mid-'50s, with the medium's decline, that he began working on television, first on anthology series such as Studio One out of New York, and later on programs such as Dr. Kildare and Bonanza from Hollywood. During the 1960s, he was also a regular on As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, and also played the avuncular male lead in "Go Fight City Hall," a failed pilot for a proposed series that was to have starred Irene Dunne as a widowed mother who enters local politics. By that time, in his late fifties and sixties, he slipped easily into dignified older male character roles, often playing judges, senators, and similar parts. Cotsworth made his first feature-film appearance in Peyton Place (1957), playing Charles Partidge, and later appeared in Anthony Harvey's New York-filmed comedy They Might Be Giants (1971) (he was one of a group of old-time players, including Worthington Miner, Sudie Bond, and Frances Fuller, who appeared in the film). He also did a voice-over role in the 1973 horror movie Silent Night, Bloody Night.