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: A bona fide member of the American aristocracy (her father was Wall Street magnate E.F. Hutton and her mother, Marjorie Merriweather Post, was heiress to a huge cereal fortune), Dina Merrill (born Nedinia Hutton) dropped out of George Washington University in the 1940s to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and become an actress. She spent ten years on-stage, including Broadway, performed on television, and made her Hollywood debut in Desk Set (1957). The cool, sophisticated, blonde supporting actress was typically cast as an heiress or socialite. She married actor Cliff Robertson in 1966 and took a decade off, but for a few television movie appearances, to raise a family until returning to films in 1975. In 1988, she launched Pavilion, an entertainment development and production company with her new lover, investment banker Ted Hartley. The two married in 1989. After the late '80s, Merrill started appearing more frequently in features and television movies.

Trivia: The son of a garage mechanic, Glenn Corbett was sent to live with his grandparents at the age of two. He later joined the Seabees and it was during his Navy years that he met his future wife, Judy, a speech major at Occidental College. With Judy's encouragement, Corbett began trying out for campus theatricals. His performance in Occidental's staging of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial led to his being signed by Columbia Pictures. After two year's worth of nondescript roles in films like The Mountain Road (1960) and Homicidal (1961), he landed the lead in the picturesque 1962 TV series It's a Man's World. Though the series lasted only 13 weeks, it gained enough of a cult following to assure Corbett's future stardom. In early 1963, he made a guest appearance as troublesome ex-G.I. Linc Case on the long-running series Route 66; by the fall of that year, he was appearing in that series on a weekly basis, as a replacement for defecting Route 66 star George Maharis. After the series ran its course in 1964, Corbett went on to co-star as Chance Reynolds in the prime-time Western The Road West, which lasted a single season (1966-1967). He kept busy in theatrical features, appearing with John Wayne in Chisum (1969) and Big Jake (1971), and starring in director Sam Fuller's West German-produced Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972). He went on to play Paul Morgan during the 1983-1984 season of Dallas, returning to the role in 1988. In his last years, he occasionally worked as a dialogue director. Glenn Corbett died of lung cancer in 1993.

Trivia: British lead actress, onscreen from the early '60s.