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: Like Clark Gable, David Janssen lost quite a few film roles in the early stages of his career because his ears were "too big" and -- also like Gable-- he did pretty well for himself in the long run. The son of a former beauty queen-cum-stage mother, Janssen was virtually strong-armed into show business, appearing as a child actor on-stage and as a juvenile performer in such films as Swamp Fire (1946). Signed to a Universal contract in 1950, he showed up fleetingly in films both big-budget (To Hell and Back) and small (Francis Goes to West Point). Full stardom eluded Janssen until 1957, when he was personally selected by actor/producer Dick Powell to star in the TV version of Powell's radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Though he didn't exactly become a millionaire (for several years he earned a beggarly 750 dollars per week), Janssen's saleability soared as a result of his three-year Diamond gig, and by 1960 he was earning top billing in such Allied Artists productions as King of the Roaring 20s (1960), in which he played gambler Arnold Rothstein, and Hell to Eternity (1960). In 1963, he landed his signature role of Dr. Richard Kimble on TV's The Fugitive. For the next four years, Janssen/Kimble perambulated throughout the country in search of the "one-armed man" who committed the murder for which Kimble was sentenced to death, all the while keeping one step ahead of his dogged pursuer, Lieutenant Gerard (Barry Morse). The final episode of The Fugitive, telecast in August of 1967, was for many years the highest-rated TV episode in history. There was little Janssen could do to top that, though he continued appearing in such films as Warning Shot (1967) and Green Berets (1969), and starring in such TV series as O'Hara, U.S. Treasury (1971) and Harry O (1974-1976). David Janssen died of a sudden heart attack at age 49, not long after completing his final TV movie, City in Fear (1980).

Trivia: Raised in Bronxville, N.Y., the granddaughter of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Anne Baxter took up acting at the age of 11 with Maria Ouspenskaya, debuting on Broadway two years later (in Seen but Not Heard); she continued working on Broadway until her screen debut at age 17 in Twenty-Mule Team (1940), a minor Western featuring Wallace Beery and Marjorie Rambeau. Charming if not beautiful, she tended to play shy and innocent types and gave a few outstanding performances, such as that with Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950); she and Davis were both nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, but it went to Judy Holliday. Her "breakthrough" film was Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), leading to many more roles in the next few years. At home in a variety of parts, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1946 for her work in The Razor's Edge. Although she has worked with many of Hollywood's most celebrated and accomplished directors (Welles, Hitchcock, Lang, Mankiewicz, Wilder Wellman), after the mid-'50s she tended to get poor roles in mediocre movies. Baxter left Hollywood in 1961 for an isolated cattle station in Australia, an experience she described in her critically-acclaimed book Intermission: A True Story. She made a few more films, but her major work was as Lauren Bacall's replacement as Margo Channing in Applause, the musical version of All About Eve; having played Eve in the film, she now assumed the role earlier held by Davis. Baxter also did some TV work, including a part in the early '80s series Hotel. She was married from 1946-53 to actor John Hodiak, whom she met while filming Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944).