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: Leading man James Wainwright excelled in school, particularly in his art classes, but upon landing an art scholarship at Carnegie University, he abruptly switched gears and joined the Marines. After his discharge, he held down a variety of jobs before finding his true niche in the theater. Polishing his craft at the Actors Studio, Wainwright headed to Hollywood at age 30. At first cast as brutish villains, he was humanized somewhat in a recurring role on TV's Daniel Boone. In 1972, he landed the starring role of Bureau of Missing Persons investigator Frank Dain on the weekly actioner Jigsaw. James Wainwright has since been seen in character parts in films, and as "mad scientist" Simon Quaid in the 1980 TVer Beyond Westworld.

Trivia: Character actor of stage, screen, and television, Barnard Hughes specializes in playing authoritarians and lovable old curmudgeons. During the 1970s, Hughes won a Tony for his portrayal of a dead but still intrusive Irish father whose memory bedevils his son in the drama Da. He reprised the role in the 1988 film version starring opposite Martin Sheen as the tormented playwright/son. Though he has worked in many films, Hughes may be most recognizable for his television filmography. Over his career, he has been a regular on four soap operas, including Dark Shadows, and starred in series such as Doc (1975-1976) and The Cavanaughs (1986-1989), as well as guest starred on such series as Cannon (1971-1976), The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978), and Lou Grant (1977-1982), where Hughes won an Emmy for playing a senile judge.

Trivia: He was born John Williams, but there already was a John Williams in show business (several of them, in fact), so the Canadian-born actor selected John McLiam as his professional moniker. McLiam's man-on-the-street countenance could be molded into a vast array of characterizations, ranging from a cockney low-life (My Fair Lady) to a Southern redneck (Cool Hand Luke). The actor's bland normality was a key factor in his being cast as real-life murder victim Herbert Clutter in 1967's In Cold Blood. John McLiam accepted more TV guest-star assignments than can possibly be listed here; he was also a regular on the weekly series Men From Shiloh (1970) and Two Marriages (1983).

Trivia: As a Hollywood starlet, American actress Brooke Bundy started off well with a good supporting role in the James Stewart-Henry Fonda western Firecreek (1968). She then joined a sizable cast of twentysomething actors (including Patty McCormick, Richard Dreyfuss and Kevin Coughlin) in the Sam Katzman-produced exploitation flick The Young Runaways (1968). This tawdry little item seemed to set the tone for Brooke's subsequent film achievements, which included Nightmare on Elm Street sequels #3 and #4, (1987 and 1988 respectively), Night Visitor (1990), and that shoe-in for the Oscars titled Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers (1991). Brooke Bundy's TV credits included stints on Days of Our Lives, as Rebecca North, and General Hospital, as Diana Maynard; she also guested on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Naked Now."