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: Born Krekor Ohanian, American actor Mike Connors was born and raised in the heavily Armenian community of Fresno, California. He studied law at UCLA, but distinguished himself in sports (he'd gotten in on a basketball scholarship). While in the Air Force, Connors switched his career goals to acting on the advice of producer/director William Wellman, who'd remembered Connors' college athletic activities. Hollywood changed young Mr. Ohanian's last name to Connors, and since this was the era of "Rocks" and "Tabs" it was decided that the actor needed a suitably rugged first name. So Connors spent his first few acting years as Touch Connors, a nickname he'd gotten while playing college football. His first picture was the Joan Crawford vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) but handsome hunks were a glut on the market in the early '50s, so Connors found himself in "B" pictures, mostly at bargain-basement American International studios. Renaming himself "Mike," Connors was able to secure the lead role as an undercover agent on the 1959 detective series Tightrope. The series was a hit but was dropped from the network due to complaints about excessive violence, though it cleaned up in syndication for years afterward. After a few strong but non-starring roles in such films as Good Neighbor Sam (1963) and Where Love Has Gone (1964), Connors landed the title role in Mannix (1967), a weekly TV actioner about a trouble-prone private eye. For the next eight high-rated seasons, Connors' Joe Mannix was beaten up, shot at, cold-cocked and nearly run over in those ubiquitous underground parking lots each and every week. The series ran in over 70 foreign countries, allowing Connors a generous chunk of profits percentages in addition to his lofty weekly salary-- which became loftier each time that the actor announced plans to retire. Mike Connors has starred in the 1981 series Today's FBI and filmed a cop-show pilot titled Ohanian (playing a character with his own real name), but nothing has quite captured the public's fancy, or been as lucrative in reruns, as Connors' chef d'ouevre series Mannix.