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: Disdaining the "surfer" mentality of his California boyhood friends, Anthony Zerbe chose to head to New York to become an actor. He studied with Stella Adler and worked off-Broadway before achieving success in the mid-'60s. He made his film debut in 1967's Will Penny, after which he settled into a series of sharkish, saturnine villainous portrayals. An adherent of EST training, Zerbe preferred to work with people who allowed him "space" to develop a characterization; one such person was David Janssen, with whom Zerbe appeared on the mid-'70s TV series Harry O (in which he won an Emmy award for his portrayal of Lieutenant Trench). Active on-stage and in films and television into the 1990s, Anthony Zerbe has contributed some unforgettable acting moments to the big screen, notably as the shadow-enshrouded leper in 1971's Papillon and the "blowed up real good" secondary villain in the 1989 James Bond opus License to Kill.

Trivia: Richard Carlson received his M.A. at the University of Minnesota and taught there briefly before working in the theater as an actor, director, and writer. He appeared on Broadway, then was brought to Hollywood in 1938 by David O. Selznick, who hired him as a writer assigned to work on the film The Young at Heart; Janet Gaynor, the film's star, urged that he appear in the movie, which became his debut. After that, he had lead and costarring roles in many films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Typecast early in his career as a diffident juvenile, he had trouble breaking out of the mold and landing more mature roles; he tended to appear in monster flicks and B-movies in the '50s. He turned to directing in that decade, beginning with Riders to the Stars (1954), which he also wrote and in which he acted. Besides acting and directing, he also became a magazine writer and wrote scripts for TV. Carlson starred in the TV series I Led Three Lives and McKenzie's Raiders and appeared in episodes of numerous others.