Trivia: One of the precious few actors of the "pretty boy" school to survive past the 1950s, Robert Wagner was the son of a Detroit steel executive. When his family moved to Los Angeles, Wagner's original intention of becoming a businessman took second place to his fascination with the film industry. Thanks to his dad's connections, he was able to make regular visits to the big studios. Inevitably, a talent scout took notice of Wagner's boyish handsomeness, impressive physique, and easygoing charm. After making his unbilled screen debut in The Happy Years (1950), Wagner was signed by 20th Century Fox, which carefully built him up toward stardom. He played romantic leads with ease, but it wasn't until he essayed the two scene role of a shellshocked war veteran in With a Song in My Heart (1952) that studio executives recognized his potential as a dramatic actor. He went on to play the title roles in Prince Valiant (1954) and The True Story of Jesse James (1956), and shocked his bobby-soxer fan following by effectively portraying a cold-blooded murderer in A Kiss Before Dying (1955). In the early '60s, however, Wagner suffered a series of personal and professional reverses. His "ideal" marriage to actress Natalie Wood had dissolved, and his film career skidded to a stop after The Pink Panther (1964). Two years of unemployment followed before Wagner made a respectable comeback as star of the lighthearted TV espionage series It Takes a Thief (1968-1970). For the rest of his career, Wagner would enjoy his greatest success on TV, first in the mid-'70s series Switch, then opposite Stefanie Powers in the internationally popular Hart to Hart, which ran from 1979 through 1983 and has since been sporadically revived in TV-movie form (a 1986 series, Lime Street, was quickly canceled due to the tragic death of Wagner's young co-star, Savannah Smith). On the domestic front, Wagner was briefly wed to actress Marion Marshall before remarrying Natalie Wood in 1972; after Wood's death in 1981, Wagner found lasting happiness with his third wife, Jill St. John, a longtime friend and co-worker. Considered one of Hollywood's nicest citizens, Robert Wagner has continued to successfully pursue a leading man career into his sixties; he has also launched a latter-day stage career, touring with his Hart to Hart co-star Stefanie Power in the "readers' theater" presentation Love Letters. He found success playing a henchman to Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, and in 2007 he began playing Teddy, a recurring role on the hit CBS series Two and a Half Men.

Trivia: Born Stefania Federkiewicz, she is a lead actress of routine Hollywood films of the '60s and '70s. Soon after graduating from Hollywood High, she debuted onscreen in 1961; early in her career she was billed as Taffy Paul. She starred in the TV series Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Hart to Hart. From 1966-74 she was married to actor Gary Lockwood, then she became the constant companion of aging actor William Holden; following his death in 1981, she continued being active with the William Holden Wildlife Foundation, which worked to create a big-game preserve and study center in Kenya.

Trivia: New York-based stage actor Joe Mantell made his 1949 film debut as a newsboy in Undercover Man. Four years later, Mantell rose to prominence by way of a catchphrase: as Angie in the original 1953 TV production of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, the actor immortalized the Bronx-bachelor mantra "So waddya wanna do tonight, Marty?" That question was still on his lips when he repeated the role in the 1955 film version of Marty, earning an Academy Award nomination in the process. He went on to more conventional film and TV assignments, playing a surrogate Dean Martin to Jerry Lewis in The Sad Sack (1957) and a traditional next door neighbor on the weekly sitcom Pete and Gladys (1961). He showed up in several filmed TV anthologies of the 1950s and 1960s, most memorably as the literally two-faced protagonist in the 1960 Twilight Zone episode Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room. Hitchcock addicts will remember Mantell as the Travelling Salesman in the 1963 feature film The Birds. The best of Joe Mantell's latter-day film roles was Lawrence Walsh, partner and confidante to private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown; it was Walsh who uttered the film's cryptic closing line "C'mon, Jake. It's....Chinatown." Joe Mantell repeated his Lawrence Walsh characterization in the 1990 Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes.

Trivia: Erudite, distinguished-looking American actor Eduard Franz started his stage career with the Provincetown Players. He was a leading Broadway actor for nearly 20 years before making his film bow in 1947's The Wake of the Red Witch. Franz was at his best when playing such worldly intellectuals as Justice Louis Brandeis in The Magnificent Yankee (1950). In 1963, Eduard Franz was cast in the tailor-made role of psychiatric clinic director Edward Raymer on the weekly TV drama Breaking Point.

Trivia: Educated at the University of Pennsylvania, actor Philip Sterling made his first Broadway appearance in the 1955 musical Silk Stockings. Sterling was later spotlighted in such New York stage productions as Summertree, An Evening with Richard Nixon and Broadway Bound. In films from 1969's Me, Natalie, he has generally been cast as father figures or corporate bigwigs. His more notable film roles include Mr. Lipman in Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street (1975) and Hollywood mogul Joseph Schenck in the 1980 TV movie Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess. In addition, Philip Sterling has made numerous appearances in episodic television; in 1975, he co-starred with Wayne Rogers in the summer-replacement series City of Angels.

Trivia: Stage actor Peter Brocco made his first film appearance in 1932's The Devil and Deep. He then left films to tour in theatrical productions in Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Returning to Hollywood in 1947, Brocco could be seen in dozens of minor and supporting roles, usually playing petty crooks, shifty foreign agents, pathetic winos and suspicious store clerks. His larger screen roles included Ramon in Spartacus (1960), The General in The Balcony (1963), Dr. Wu in Our Man Flint (1963), and the leading character in the Cincinnati-filmed black comedy Homebodies (1974). The addition of a fuzzy, careless goatee in his later years enabled Brocco to portray generic oldsters in such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1977), The One and Only(1977), Throw Momma From the Train (1989) and War of the Roses (1983). In 1983, Peter Brocco was one of many veterans of the Twilight Zone TV series of the 1950s and 1960s to be affectionately cast in a cameo role in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

Trivia: Versatile comic actor Richard B. Shull attended Iowa State University before making his first Broadway appearance in 1954. Many of Shull's subsequent New York stage appearances have been in plays that looked good on paper but withered in the glare of audience and critical scrutiny (1969's Minnie's Boys, a musical biography of the Marx Brothers, was an all too typical example). He entered films in 1971, enjoying a particularly busy first year before the cameras in Klute, The Anderson Tapes and B.S. I Love You. He was featured on the weekly TV series Diana (1973) and Hail to the Chief (1985), and co-starred with John Schuck in the 1976 sci-fi sitcom Holmes and Yoyo (the producers' plans to make Shull and Schuck a permanent comedy team ended with the series after three months). Richard Shull was for many years the husband of Rhoda star Valerie Harper.