Trivia: Like Clark Gable, David Janssen lost quite a few film roles in the early stages of his career because his ears were "too big" and -- also like Gable-- he did pretty well for himself in the long run. The son of a former beauty queen-cum-stage mother, Janssen was virtually strong-armed into show business, appearing as a child actor on-stage and as a juvenile performer in such films as Swamp Fire (1946). Signed to a Universal contract in 1950, he showed up fleetingly in films both big-budget (To Hell and Back) and small (Francis Goes to West Point). Full stardom eluded Janssen until 1957, when he was personally selected by actor/producer Dick Powell to star in the TV version of Powell's radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Though he didn't exactly become a millionaire (for several years he earned a beggarly 750 dollars per week), Janssen's saleability soared as a result of his three-year Diamond gig, and by 1960 he was earning top billing in such Allied Artists productions as King of the Roaring 20s (1960), in which he played gambler Arnold Rothstein, and Hell to Eternity (1960). In 1963, he landed his signature role of Dr. Richard Kimble on TV's The Fugitive. For the next four years, Janssen/Kimble perambulated throughout the country in search of the "one-armed man" who committed the murder for which Kimble was sentenced to death, all the while keeping one step ahead of his dogged pursuer, Lieutenant Gerard (Barry Morse). The final episode of The Fugitive, telecast in August of 1967, was for many years the highest-rated TV episode in history. There was little Janssen could do to top that, though he continued appearing in such films as Warning Shot (1967) and Green Berets (1969), and starring in such TV series as O'Hara, U.S. Treasury (1971) and Harry O (1974-1976). David Janssen died of a sudden heart attack at age 49, not long after completing his final TV movie, City in Fear (1980).

Trivia: "As familiar as a favorite leather easy chair" is how one magazine writer described the craggy, weather-beaten face of ineluctable character actor James Gregory. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any time in the past six decades that Gregory hasn't been seen on stage, on TV or on the big screen. There were those occasional periods during the 1930s and 1940s when he was working on Wall Street rather than acting, and there were those uniformed stints in the Marines and the Naval Reserve. Otherwise, Gregory remained a persistent showbiz presence from the time he first performed with a Pennsylvania-based travelling troupe in 1936. Three years later, he was on Broadway in Key Largo; he went on to appear in such stage hits as Dream Girl, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and The Desperate Hours. In films from 1948, Gregory was repeatedly cast as crusty no-nonsense types: detectives, military officers, prosecuting attorneys and outlaw leaders. With his bravura performance as demagogic, dead-headed senator Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Gregory launched a second career of sorts, cornering the market in portraying braggadocio blowhards. One of his best characterizations in this vein was as the hard-shelled Inspector Luger in the TV sitcom Barney Miller. He played Luger for six seasons (1975-78, 1979-81), with time out for his own short-lived starring series, Detective School (1978). He also played Prohibition-era detective Barney Ruditsky on The Lawless Years (1959-61) and T. R. Scott in The Paul Lynde Show (1972), not to mention nearly 1000 guest appearances on other series. James Gregory has sometimes exhibited his sentimental streak by singing in his spare time: he has for many years been a member of the SPEBQSA, which as any fan of The Music Man can tell you is the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.

Trivia: During his formative years, Roy Thinnes had wanted to become a doctor or football player--or, if one wants to believe his early press releases, both. Having made his professional acting debut as a teen-aged firebug in a 1957 pilot for the never-sold TV series Chicago 212, Thinnes spent several lean years "between engagements," working as a hotel clerk, vitamin salesman and copy boy to Chicago Sun Times columnist Irv Kupcinet. His first regular TV work was as Phil Brewer on the daytime soap opera General Hospital; during this period, the young actor became the television equivalent of a matinee idol, sparking a barrage of protest mail when he briefly left GH in pursuit of other acting jobs. Aggressively campaigning for the starring role of Ben Quick on the 1965 weekly-TV version of the 1958 film Long Hot Summer, Thinnes won the part, as well as a whole new crop of adoring female fans. While Summer was unsuccessful, Thinnes enjoyed a longer run as David Vincent on the Fugitive-like sci-fi series The Invaders (1967-68). Though he'd occasionally show up in such theatrical features as Hindenburg (1975), Airport 75 (1975) and Blue Bayou (1990), Thinnes would remain essentially a TV star for the rest of his career. Among Roy Thinnes' post-Invaders TV-series roles was Dr. James Whitman on The Psychiatrist (1971), Capt (and later Major) Holms on From Here to Eternity (1979-80), Nick Hogan on Falcon Crest (who, in 1983, married Victoria Gioberti [Jamie Rose] in a highly-rated ceremony) and the dual role of Roger Collins and Reverend Trask in the 1991 prime-time revival of Dark Shadows.

Trivia: Pilar Seurat was an exotic beauty of Filipino descent who enjoyed a decade-long acting career in films and on television in America during the 1960s. Born Rita Hernandez in Manila in 1938, she was trained as an actress and dancer, and after arriving in Hollywood at the end of the 1950s, she began getting roles on a wide variety of television shows, as well as in a handful of movies, usually playing Asian characters. Seurat's youth and her good looks were also exploited in films such as Seven Women From Hell and Battle at Bloody Beach, both released in 1961. That same year, she gave a gripping performance in the best role of her entire career, as Louisa Escalante, the sister of the blind murder victim, in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages. Most of Seurat's work was confined to television, however, where she played guest-starring roles in series such as Adventures in Paradise (which exploited her dancing ability in one episode, "Blueprint for Paradise"), Bonanza, Naked City, The Wild Wild West, The High Chaparral, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Daniel Boone, Hawaii Five-O, and Star Trek ("Wolf in the Fold"), as well as a handful of TV movies, among them Loss of Innocence. Seurat married writer/producer Don Devlin. Their son is Dean Devlin, the producer of such hit thrillers as Universal Soldier and Godzilla, and the blockbuster Independence Day. The two divorced in the mid-'60s, and Seurat gave up acting after marrying teacher/writer Don Cerveris, whom she divorced in the early '80s. She died of cancer in 2001.

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: Robert J. Wilke's first taste of popularity came while he was performing with a high-dive act at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. Encouraged to give Hollywood a try, Wilke entered films as a stunt man and bit player in 1936. He spent most of his movie career in Westerns like High Noon (1952), Arrowhead (1953), The Lone Ranger (1955), and The Magnificent Seven (1960), generally playing bad-guy roles which required both menace and physical dexterity. In 1965, Robert J. Wilke was seen on a weekly basis as Sheriff Sam Corbett on the TV sagebrusher The Legend of Jesse James.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1966.

Trivia: The son of a London shopkeeper, Barry Morse enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at age 15. Upon graduation, Morse spent four years in provincial repertory, playing (by his own count) some 300 roles. In 1942 he made his first film appearance in Will Hays's The Goose Steps Out. Firmly established in London theatrical circles by 1951, he starred in an early BBC telecast of Hamlet--then left for Canada, where he would spend the next decade. Dubbed "the Laurence Olivier of Canada" by more than one admirer, Morse appeared with regularity on the CBC, occasionally producing and directing as well. He began dividing his time between Toronto and Hollywood in 1959, showing up in such American TV anthologies as Playhouse 90 and The Twilight Zone. In 1963, he was hired by producer Quinn Martin to play the diligent Lieutenant Girard in the popular weekly series The Fugitive. Morse's post-Fugitive television work includes two weekly series, The Adventurer (1974) and Space: 1999 (1975-77), and any number of specials and miniseries. Barry Morse's best performances of the past two decades include his interpretation of Menachem Begin in the American miniseries Sadat (1980) and his hilarious turn as a numbskull American president (who happens to be a former movie actor!) in the London Weekend Television black comedy Whoops Apocalypse (1982). Morse died in February 2008 at age 89.

Trivia: American actor Victor Millan played character roles on stage, television, and in feature films during the '50s and in the '70s and '80s. When not acting, associate professor Millan taught theater arts at Santa Monica College.

Trivia: Actor Grandon Rhodes worked steadily on stage, television, and in over 40 films during his four-decade career. On television, he had recurring roles on Bonanza (as a doctor) and Perry Mason.

Trivia: His European/Scandinavia heritage notwithstanding, actor Martin Garralaga was most effectively cast in Latin American roles. Many of his screen appearances were uncredited, but in 1944 he was awarded co-starring status in a series of Cisco Kid westerns produced at Monogram. Duncan Renaldo starred as Cisco, with Garralaga as comic sidekick Pancho. In 1946, Monogram producer Scott R. Dunlap realigned the Cisco Kid series; Renaldo remained in the lead, but now Garralaga's character name changed from picture to picture, and sometimes he showed up as the villain. Eventually Garralaga was replaced altogether by Leo Carrillo, who revived the Pancho character. Outside of his many westerns, Martin Garralaga could be seen in many wartime films with foreign settings; he shows up as a headwaiter in the 1942 classic Casablanca.

Trivia: Originally intending to become a journalist, William Challee abandoned this dream when he began appearing in Chicago-based theatrical productions. Challee's Broadway career reached its peak in the late '30s with Wonder Boy. In films from 1943, he was usually seen as well-dressed gangsters, pushy reporters, and grim military officers. William Challee's later credits included such roles as Nicholas Duprea in the Jack Nicholson starrer Five Easy Pieces.

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: Character actor Richard O'Brien was born in Fargo, ND, in 1917, far away from the bright lights of Hollywood. He didn't begin acting until the age of 46, when he began making appearances on numerous TV shows, from Family Affair to The Fugitive, often coming back to make subsequent appearances on the same show, but playing different characters. O'Brien's ability to take on a new persona so convincingly would keep him in steady work for decades to come, until his death in 1983 at the age of 66.

Trivia: Mexican actor Rodolpho Acosta first became known to North American audiences by way of his appearance in John Ford's The Fugitive (1948). Frequently typecast as a bandit or indigent peasant, Acosta held out for less stereotypical roles once he was established in Hollywood. In 1957, he was top-billed in The Tijuana Story, playing a courageous Mexican journalist who wages a one-man war against a vicious narcotics ring. Depending on the role, Rodolpho Acosta was sometimes billed as Rudy Acosta.