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: American actor James MacArthur was the adopted son of stage legend Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur. Despite his mother's insistence that James have a normal childhood, it was difficult not to be intoxicated by the theatre when growing up around the greatest acting and literary talent in the '40s. At age 8, young MacArthur appeared in a stock-company production of The Corn is Green. Fresh out of Harvard, MacArthur became a movie juvenile, specializing in tortured-teen roles in such films as The Young Stranger (1957) and Disney's Light in the Forest (1958). Outgrowing his somewhat charming awkwardness, MacArthur was less satisfying as a standard leading man, and by 1967 he was wasting away in pictures like The Love Ins. That same year, the pilot film for a new Jack Lord cop series, Hawaii Five-O, was screened for a test audience. The group liked the film but not the young man (Tim O'Kelly) who played Lord's assistant, deeming him too young for the part. Hawaii producer Leonard Freeman then called upon 30-year-old MacArthur, with whom Freeman had worked on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang 'Em High. From 1968 through 1979, MacArthur played Hawaii Five-0's detective Danny Williams, always handy whenever Jack Lord felt the need to snap "Book 'em, Danno." Though the series enriched MacArthur and made him a vital member of the Honolulu society and business world, the actor finally packed it in after 11 seasons, when it seemed as though he'd be Danno forever (the show continued for one more season). Too wealthy to care about a career at this point, James MacArthur still took an occasional role into the '80s; his most prominent post-Hawaii assignment was the 1980 TV movie Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story, in which he played a rare non-sympathetic character. MacArthur died in October 2010 of natural causes at age 72.

Trivia: Dour, lantern-jawed character actor John Anderson attended the University of Iowa before inaugurating his performing career on a Mississippi showboat. After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Anderson made his Broadway bow, then first appeared on screen in 1952's The Crimson Pirate. The actor proved indispensable to screenwriters trafficking in such stock characters as The Vengeful Gunslinger, The Inbred Hillbilly Patriarch, The Scripture-Spouting Zealot and The Rigid Authority Figure. Anderson's many screen assignments included used-car huckster California Charlie in Psycho (1960), the implicitly incestuous Elder Hammond in Ride the High Country (1962), the title character in The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) and Caiaphas in In Search of Historic Jesus (1980). A dead ringer for 1920s baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Anderson portrayed that uncompromising gentleman twice, in 1988's Eight Men Out and the 1991 TV biopic Babe Ruth. A veteran of 500 TV appearances (including four guest stints on The Twilight Zone), John Anderson was seen as FDR in the 1978 miniseries Backstairs in the White House, and on a regular basis as Michael Spencer Hudson in the daytime drama Another World, Virgil Earp in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) and the leading man's flinty father in MacGiver (1985-92).

Trivia: The remarkably named Joy Bang was a memorable cult figure across a string of movies and television shows of the late 1960s and early 1970s, usually typecast as "hippie" chicks who were free and easy-going in their sexuality. Born Joy Wener in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945, she was raised in New York City, and turned to acting in the 1960s, working under the name Joy Bang. Her screen debut came with a small role in Jack Bond's drama Separation (1968). At the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s, Bang appeared in a string of low-budget movies such as Maidstone and The Sky Pirate. At one point, she also briefly became part of Don Kirshner's extended stable of talent when she was cast in the pilot for a proposed musical/western series called The Kowboys. The series, co-starring a young Michael Martin Murphey and Boomer Castleman, both of the band the Lewis & Clark Expedition, was an odd western/musical adventure series, sort of The Monkees meets Here Come The Brides, and failed to sell, though the pilot did air in the summer of 1970. Bang resumed her career as a perennial guest star, working in television dramas (Mission Impossible, The Bold Ones, The Young Lawyers, Hawaii Five-0) before returning to feature film work in Red Sky At Morning and Pretty Maids All In A Row. In most of these movies, and in her television work in a toned-down manner, Bang usually played a gentle free-spirited girl, evocative of the popular perception of the "hippie" ethos, seemingly innocent about yet cognizant of her youthful sexuality, and all the more provocative for that combination of attributes. As a point of reference, Carly Simon had achieved something of a similar portrayal with her on-screen acting/performing appearance in Milos Forman's Taking Off at just about this same time. And with her image, innocent looks, and inherently provocative name, Bang should have been a natural for the talk-show circuit (one can just imagine Johnny Carson, in his "Art Fern/Tea-Time Movie" voice, having merciless fun announcing her as a guest) and media stardom. But it never quite happened that way, and she remained a working actress with a small (but growing) cult following.Bang did move up to a better class of movie and much larger big-screen roles in 1972, in Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike and Paul Williams' Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, before making what should have been a career-defining appearance in Woody Allen's film of his own stage hit Play It Again, Sam (1972), as Julie, the willowy, free-loving girl that Allen's nebish-y protagonist takes out on a disastrous date. (Ironically, Diane Keaton, who co-starred in the movie Play It Again, Sam and the original play, had been up for the role that Bang won in The Kowboys pilot). That same year, she had a co-starring role in Night Of The Cobra Woman, a low-budget Philippines-made horror picture in which Bang -- playing a research scientist -- battles a supernatural menace. This picture, rather than Allen's movie, seemed to define the path of her career -- by the following year, she was co-starring in the horror film Messiah Of Evil (which earned her screen credits alongside the likes of Elisha Cook, Jr. and Royal Dano). These pictures weren't enough to sustain a career, however -- horror stardom at that production level wouldn't become a route to enduring work until the following decade, and the advent of made-for-cable and direct-to-video genre films -- and after appearances in episodes of Adam-12 and Police Story she retired from acting. As of the start of the twenty-first century, she reportedly was working as a professional in the health-care field.

Trivia: An actor-turned production assistant-turned-director, Michael Anderson had a relatively undistinguished record in motion pictures until the mid 1950s, when he directed The Dam Busters. One of the more successful British films about World War II, it involved mixed drama and special effects work in a combination that pointed the way toward Anderson's later career in international pictures. His mid 1950s version of 1984 received mixed notices but wide distribution, and Around The World In 80 Days brought him into international prominence, despite producer Michael Todd being the dominant personality involved in shaping the movie, and Anderson worked in the United States as often as he did in England over the next two decades. Operation Crossbow and The Shoes of the Fisherman were dramas featuring international casts and large canvases for their action, in which Anderson largely held the proceedings together, in spite of major script problems. His most popular movie, other than Around The World In 80 Days, is the science-fiction adventure Logan's Run, in which he once again overcame a weak script by getting some strong performances out of his actors and pulling them together around extremely impressive special-effects sequences.