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: Upon earning his BA degree from the University of Chicago, Fritz Weaver began his formal acting training at the H-B studios. Paying his dues with such regional stock companies as Virginia's Barter Theatre and Massachussett's Group 20 Players, Weaver made his first off-Broadway appearance in a 1954 production of The Way of the World. His inaugural Broadway effort was 1955's The Chalk Circle. Weaver went on to appear in such classic stage roles as Hamlet and Peer Gynt, and also amassed a remarkable list of film credits, including two Twilight Zone appearances. In 1964, he made his film debut as the unstable Colonel Caserio in the doomsday thriller Fail Safe. The following year, he starred on Broadway in Baker Street, a musicalization of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1970, he won the Tony award for his work as Jerome Malley in Child's Play. Most often cast as aristocratic villains in films (his resemblance to William F. Buckley has not gone unnoticed by producers), Fritz Weaver made his biggest international impact in the sympathetic role of Josef Weiss in the TV miniseries Holocaust (1978). Weaver worked mostly in television for the rest of his career (save for a supporting role in 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair), with guest spots in shows like The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, The X-Files, Frasier and Law & Order. Weaver died in 2016, at age 90.

Trivia: Pencil-thin Canadian actress Lynn Carlin was Oscar-nominated for her very first film, the John Cassavetes-directed Faces. Ms. Carlin had some difficulty matching that early career peak in her subsequent roles, often taking pedestrian assignments; in one 1974 episode of Hawaii 5-0, she was killed off before the second commercial! The actress was better served with her top-billed portrayal of Buck Henry's "liberated" middle-aged wife in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971). In 1977, Lynn Carlin was seen as the mother of mixed-up teenager Lance Kerwin on the critically praised TV series James at 15.

Trivia: Though born in close proximity to Hollywood, Robert Webber chose to head East to launch his acting career shortly after World War II. On Broadway from 1948, Webber made his film bow in 1950's Highway 501, playing the first of many villains. His career moved in fits and starts until he was cast by director Sidney Lumet as Juror Number 12 in the 1957 filmization of Twelve Angry Men. Webber flourished in the 1960s, mostly playing outwardly charming but inwardly vicious types; who could forget his torturing of Julie Harris in Harper (1966), grinning all the while and saying lines like "I just adore inflicting pain"? A personal favorite of director Blake Edwards, Webber was given roles of a more comic nature in such Edwards films as Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), 10 (1969), and S.O.B (1981). One of Robert Webber's better later roles was as the father of erstwhile private eye Maddie Ross (Cybill Shepherd) on the cult-favorite TV series Moonlighting.

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.