Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: Vietnamese-American supporting actor, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Alternately blonde and brunette, American actress Nancy Kovack entered films with a Columbia contract in 1960. She had several good scenes as an imbibing suburbanite in Strangers When We Meet (1960), was killed off after an elaborate strip-tease in the Dean Martin spy spoof The Silencers (1966) and at one point even got to play Medea, albeit briefly, in the juvenile-oriented adventure film Jason and the Argonauts (1963). One of Nancy's oddest (but best remembered) Columbia assignments was as Annie Oakley in the Three Stooges' western comedy The Outlaws is Coming (1965) - in which her leading man, a gun-shy Easterner, was a pre-Batman Adam West. Despite the seductive nature of many of her screen roles, Ms. Kovack offscreen was well known for her sturdy moral values and her unwillingness to be sucked in by the Hollywood "swingers" scene. Nancy Kovack married Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra conducter Zubin Mehta early in the '70s, briefly maintaining her career under her married name but ultimately giving up acting to become a charming and highly respected social leader in New York and Los Angeles musical circles.

Trivia: David Opatoshu began his stage career in New York's Yiddish theatre in the late 1930s. Though he worked extensively in English-language plays, films and TV programs, the scholarly looking Opatoshu never completely severed his ties with his roots. His first film was the all-Yiddish The Light Ahead (1939); from 1941 through 1945, he delivered the news in Yiddish on New York radio station WEVD; in the 1970s, he was directing and starring in ethnic stage productions; and in 1985, he narrated a documentary film on the Yiddish theatre in America, Almonds and Raisins. Occasionally cast as a villain in mainstream productions, Opatoshu's "good" characters (notably his courageous political activists in 1960's Exodus and 1981's Masada) far outweigh his bad. A veteran of hundreds of television productions, David Opatoshu won an Emmy for his performance in "A Prayer for the Goldsteins," a 1990 episode of the weekly series Gabriel's Fire.

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: 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.