Trivia: Actor E. G. Marshall started out on radio in his native Minnesota, then headed for New York and Broadway. After several years' solid stage service, Marshall began accepting small roles in such films as 13 Rue Madeline (1945) and Call Northside 777 (1947). A mainstay of television's so-called Golden Age, Marshall excelled in incisive, authoritative roles. Long before winning two Emmy awards for his portrayal of lawyer Lawrence Preston on TV's The Defenders (1961-65), Marshall was associated with fictional jurisprudence as the military prosecutor in The Caine Mutiny (1954) and as Juror #4 in Twelve Angry Men (1957). In contrast to his businesslike demeanor, Marshall is one of Hollywood's most notorious pranksters; he was never more impish than when he ad-libbed profanities and nonsequiturs while his lips were hidden by a surgical mask in the 1969-73 TV series The Bold Ones. The best of E.G. Marshall's work of the 1970s and 1980s includes the role of the straying husband in Woody Allen's Interiors (1977), the U.S. President in Superman II (1978) and General Eisenhower in the 1985 TV miniseries War and Remembrance. Continuing to flourish into the 1990s, Marshall was seen in the 1993 TV adaptation of Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, and was cast as Arthur Thurmond on the 1994 medical series Chicago Hope. Radio fans will remember E.G. Marshall as the unctuous host ("Pleasant dreeeaaammms") of the 1970s anthology The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre.

Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.

Trivia: Following studies at the Theatre Guild, Linda Watkins made her Broadway debut when she was only 16 years old. She subsequently became a major theatrical star and played both leading ladies and ingénues. During the early '30s, she appeared in a few films, but she did not achieve the same popularity and so returned to the stage until the late '50s when she became a screen character actress.