Trivia: Willowy brunette actress Kate Jackson spent her early adulthood in summer stock, in training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and as a page and tour guide at the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center. Anxious to burst forth with reams of dialogue as a film and TV actress, Jackson found herself in the utterly non-speaking role of a glamorous ghost on the mid-1960s daytime TV serial Dark Shadows. She was allowed to flap her gums a little more often as Jill Danko on TV's The Rookies (1973-76). Full stardom arrived for Jackson when she was cast as Sabrina Duncan, "the smart one" on the prime time jigglefest Charlie's Angels; she remained with this series from 1976 through 1979. Her last regular weekly TV effort was Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-1987) in which she played an average housewife who moonlighted as a secret agent. Though Jackson has made sporadic film appearances, it is safe to say that her greater fame rests upon her small-screen work. Jackson received an outpouring of industry sympathy and support when she battled breast cancer in the early 1990s. Kate Jackson has been a prolific and popular TV commercial spokesperson, and narrated Trouble in Mind, a series documenting the effects of mental illness, from 1999 to 2000.

Trivia: After attending Trinity University and the University of San Antonio, brunette Jaclyn Smith flourished as a model and cover girl. Making her first film appearance in 1969, Smith endured such negligible movie projects as The Moonshiners (1974) before achieving stardom as Kelly Garrett, showgirl-turned-PI, on the spectacularly successful TV series Charlie's Angels. She was the only member of the original Angels to remain with the series from its debut in 1976 to its final telecast in 1981. Like her Charlie's Angels cohorts Cheryl Ladd and Farrah Fawcett, Smith went on to a busy career in made-for-TV movies, efficiently playing the title roles in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1982) and Florence Nightingale (1985). In 1989, she returned to the weekly-TV grind as star of the mystery series Christine Cromwell. That same year, a random sampling of Hollywood insiders (technicians, grips, "gofers", etc.) voted Smith as one of the nicest and most cooperative actresses in the business (parenthetically, her Charlie's Angels co-star Kate Jackson was elected one of the least likeable performers in Tinseltown). Jaclyn Smith was previously married to actors Roger Davis and Dennis Cole, and cinematographer Tony Richmond. Her fourth marriage was to Dr. Bradley Allen in 1998.

Trivia: Although sandy-voiced character actor David Doyle sometimes gave the onscreen impression of being an unprepossessing, slow-on-the-uptake "little man," in truth Doyle stood six feet tall, weighed 200 pounds, and had an I.Q. of 148. Born into a family of lawyers, Doyle was drawn to amateur theatricals at the age of ten. In an effort to please both his parents and his own muse, he attended pre-law classes at the University of Nebraska, all the while taking acting lessons at Virginia's Barter Theatre and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. His first theatrical break came in 1956, when he replaced Walter Matthau in the Broadway hit Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He subsequently spent several seasons as an actor/director in a Midwestern traveling stock company, then returned to New York, where he appeared in S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part and seven other Broadway plays. After a decade's worth of film and TV supporting appearances and commercials, Doyle was cast in the recurring role of Walt Fitzgerald in the 1972 sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie; that same year, he made semi-weekly visits to The New Dick Van Dyke Show in the role of Ted Atwater. From 1976 and 1981, Doyle had the enviable task of playing John Bosley, liaison man between unseen private eye Charlie and the gorgeous female stars of TV's Charlie's Angels. Since that time, David Doyle has been seen as Frank Macklin on the short-lived 1987 series Sweet Surrender, and heard as the voice of Grandpa Pickles on the Nickleodeon cable network's animated series Rugrats (1991- ). Doyle died of heart failure at age 67 on February 27, 1997. One of his last feature film performances was that of the voice of Pepe in The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996).

Trivia: Trained at New York's Professional Children's School, Warren Berlinger made his first stage appearance at the age of 11. At 17, Berlinger was showered with critical praise for his performance in the 1955 Broadway production A Roomful of Roses, in which he appeared with his future wife, actress Betty Lou Keim. Both Berlinger and Keim repeated their roles in the 1956 film version of Roses, retitled Teen-age Rebel. In 1958, he won a Theatre World Award for his performance in Blue Denim, again re-creating his role in the 1959 film adaptation. He scored a huge hit in the 1963 London production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, essaying his favorite role, J. Pierpont Finch. In films, Berlinger's stock-in-trade has been the portrayal of plump, good-natured schmoes; he was still conveying this image into the 1980s and 1990s in films like The World According to Garp (1982) and Hero (1992). On television, he played the lead in the "Kilroy" episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color(1965) and had regular roles on The Joey Bishop Show (1961), as Joey's brother Larry, The Funny Side (1971), A Touch of Grace (1973), Operation Petticoat (1977) and Small and Frye (1983). Distantly related to comedian Milton Berle, Warren Berlinger appeared with "Uncle Miltie" in the 1975 feature Lepke.

Trivia: American actress Farrah Fawcett was an art student at the University of Texas before she deduced that she could make more money posing for pictures than painting them. A supermodel before that phrase had fallen into common usage, Fawcett moved from Wella Balsam shampoo ads into acting, making her first film Myra Breckenridge in 1970. She worked in TV bits and full supporting parts, obtaining steady employment in 1974 with a small recurring role on the cop series Harry O, but true stardom was still some two years down the road. In 1976, producer Aaron Spelling cast Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith in a pilot for an adventure series titled Charlie's Angels. The pilot graduated to a series, and the rest was TV history; during her Charlie's Angels tenure Fawcett was the most visible of the three actresses, adorning magazine covers and pin-up posters (including one particularly iconic image), which set sales records. There were even Farrah Fawcett dolls before the first season of Charlie's Angels was over.Now in the hands of high-profile agents and advisors, Fawcett (billed Farrah Fawcett-Majors after her marriage to Lee Majors) decided she'd outgrown Angels and left the series, even though she had another year on her contract. While the studio drew up legal papers to block her move, she was replaced by Cheryl Ladd. Fawcett settled her dispute by agreeing to a set number of guest appearances on the program. Some industry cynics suggested that Fawcett would have problems sustaining her popularity. Certainly such lukewarm film projects as Sunburn (1979), Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978) and Saturn 3 (1980) seemed to bear this theory out. But Fawcett took matters into her own hands and decided to make her own opportunities--and like many other performers who strive to be taken seriously, she chose the most extreme, demanding method of proving her acting mettle. Playing a vengeful rape victim in both the play and 1986 film version of Extremities (an apt title) and making a meal of her role as a battered wife who murders her husband out of self-defense in the TV movie The Burning Bed (1984), Fawcett confounded her detractors and demonstrated she was a more-than-capable actress. Other TV movie appearances of varying quality cast her as everything from a child killer to a Nazi hunter to famed LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Never as big a name as she was in 1976, Fawcett nonetheless affirmed her reputation as an actress of importance. Her fans were even willing to forgive her misbegotten fling at situation comedy in the 1991 series Good Sports, in which she co-starred with her longtime "significant other" Ryan O'Neal. Fawcett died in 2009 at age 62, following a lengthy and well-publicized battle with cancer.

Trivia: Prior to his first TV appearance on a 1961 episode of Dobie Gillis, Bill Bixby had been a college student (he dropped out of UC Berkeley in his senior year), a lifeguard, a male model, and a regional stock-company actor. Bixby went on to play small roles in films like Lonely Are the Brave and Irma La Douce, and was featured in the Broadway comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree. In 1963, he graduated to TV stardom with the role of Tim O'Hara on the popular sci-fi sitcom My Favorite Martian. Anxious to change his "wholesome" image after Martian ended its three-year run in 1966, Bixby accepted a small but flashy role as a cowardly villain in the big-screen Western Ride Beyond Vengeance (1966). Like it or not, however, Bixby's future lay in sympathetic parts on episodic television. In each of his subsequent starring series -- The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1969-1972), The Magician (1973), The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982), True Confessions (1984), and Goodnight Beantown (1983) -- Bixby frequently did double-duty as actor and director. He also directed such made-for-TV movies as Barbary Coast (1974), Another Pair of Aces: Three of a Kind (1991), and the Roseanne/Tom Arnold vehicle The Woman Who Loved Elvis (1993). Long one of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors, Bixby finally took the marital plunge with actress Brenda Benet; the union ended tragically when Benet, distraught over the death of her son, Christopher, committed suicide. Bixby's second wife was Judith Kliban, daughter of magazine cartoonist B. Kliban. At the time of his death from prostate cancer, Bill Bixby was principal director of the TV series Blossom.

Trivia: Supporting actor Alan Feinstein first appeared onscreen in the '70s.

Trivia: Film and television actor Sidney Clute amassed well over 100 big- and small-screen credits across a career lasting just over 30 years. As a result of his personal popularity and the friendships borne of his professionalism, Clute's credits extended for three years beyond his death in 1985. Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1916, he began working professionally in summer stock productions, and didn't make the leap to film work until shortly after World War II. His movie debut came in an uncredited role in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), playing a drugstore clerk. His next appearance on film was on the small screen, in an uncredited role in the first-season Adventures of Superman episode "Czar of the Underworld", first seen in 1953. None of the five film and television roles he had in 1953 -- in the series Racket Squad, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, and Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman -- were credited, but they opened a three-decade career. He was busier in 1954, on the sitcom I Married Joan, the crime dramas Waterfront and The Lineup, and small roles in feature films, including Douglas Sirk's ancient-world costume drama Sign of the Pagan, playing a monk. And that was the shape of Clute's career for the next 25 years, individual days of work on series ranging from Westerns to melodramas, broken by the occasional feature-film role. He did have a recurring role on Steve Canyon as Crew Chief Sergeant Gerke, and producer/director Jack Webb used him in three episodes of Dragnet during the 1950s, but it was the action/adventure series Whirlybirds that kept Clute the busiest over its two seasons from 1957 through 1959. His bald head and hangdog features seemed to register well with audiences no matter which side of the law his characters were on, and his Brooklyn accent (which he could hide effectively) even worked well in Westerns. Directors and producers appreciated his ability to nail a character or a line in short order, as well as his genial personality behind the scenes. Clute was working more often in the 1960s, on Dick Powell Theatre, Wagon Train, Hogan's Heroes, Mannix, Ben Casey, Perry Mason, That Girl, and dozens of other series, though he was probably most visible in the revived series Dragnet, which used him in key supporting roles in seven episodes. His best part in that series was in "Public Affairs: DR-07", as a gun nut on a television talk show who takes an open microphone to express his opposition to California's licensing and registration laws. But his chameleon-like ability as an actor was showcased that same year with an appearance on Iron Horse, in the episode "Wild Track", as a duplicitous 19th century businessman involved in a high-stakes poker game on a train besieged by outlaws -- even those familiar with his work elsewhere could forget that it was the familiar face from Dragnet. Clute was just as active in the 1970s, jumping between theatrical thrillers such as Breakout and Executive Action and dozens of television series. Toward the end of the 1970s, he settled into recurring work on Lou Grant as the newspaper's national editor, and finally, in 1982, he landed a co-starring role in a successful series when he was cast as Detective Paul La Guardia in Cagney and Lacey. As the oldest member of the detective squad -- and the most sympathetic to the two female detectives of the title, played by Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless -- Clute was a memorable presence on the series for its first three seasons. He died suddenly in the fall of 1985 from an especially fast-moving form of cancer. In tribute to the actor, producer Barney Rosensweig, a good friend of Clute's, left his name and image in the credits and continued to have his character referred to as an active member of the squad for the remaining four seasons of the show.

Trivia: Born Dolores Heft, this lead actress, onscreen since 1954, was occasionally billed as Dolores Dorn-Heft.