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: Chanin Hale never really made it in movies, apart from a relative handful in the mid-'60s in which she played prominent supporting roles. But on television as a wholesome-yet-voluptuous blonde, she was a memorable guest star and supporting player for years on programs as diverse as Dragnet and The Red Skelton Show. She was born Marilyn Victoria Chanine Hale Harvey in Dayton, OH, and survived a desperately unhappy childhood in a broken home from where even her adopted younger sister was given up. (According to Hale in a 1969 interview, her sister returned to the orphanage when her parents separated). Hale took her mother's family name. She was a creative and very athletic girl, winning art awards and was very competitive in sports. She was bitten by the performing bug while still in school. After graduating from high school and working as a secretary, she decided to do something about pursuing acting. Some limited work in student and community theater helped, along with dancing and singing lessons, but she felt out of place and somehow "off balance" when it came to performing, until one day she dyed her red hair platinum blonde and suddenly recognized herself. She joined the Dayton Y Players and gained experience in everything from Greek tragedy to low comedy, and enjoyed a taste of success in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun. A move to New York in 1955, at age 18, put her in position to be discovered. During her first six years, she toured in the revue High Time, performed in The Gazebo (with William Bendix), Come Blow Your Horn, and Bus Stop in regional theater. She also worked as a cocktail waitress at the Gaslight Club (a pre-Playboy club institution for the well-heeled man about town), fending off advances from the patrons (and from her employers) when she worked as a stenographer. She also did Annie Get Your Gun on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and sang at Manhattan's #1 Fifth Avenue, eventually landinga role in Little Mary Sunshine, playing a flirtatious character named Twinkle. Hale also started doing television, playing secretaries, corpses, and everything in between. Her big break came from television in 1963 when she went to Los Angeles to appear in a comedy production at U.C.L.A. and was discovered by Jack Albertson, who offered her an introduction to Red Skelton. The veteran comic was always on the lookout for women with pantomime skills for his show, and after meeting Hale and seeing her work, immediately put her onto his weekly comedy variety show in the pantomime segment. She worked for him as a semi-regular for the next seven years. She also managed to appear in a handful of subsequent feature films, among them Gunn, Synanon, Will Penny, and The Night They Raided Minsky's, and in numerous dramatic television series. The most notable among them was the '60s revival of Dragnet on which she did three episodes -- in one, playing the seductive hostess for a crooked gambling ring, she came convincingly close to melting Jack Webb's by-the-book persona as Sgt. Joe Friday; watching the show today, Hale came off like the '60s answer to Gloria Grahame, and she may have had as good a career if only films were being made that included partly fallen-but-redeemable women in their casts of characters, but it was mostly Anne Francis and, on the much older side, Ava Gardner getting those parts. Hale's other television work includes appearances on Death Valley Days, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hey Landlord, Hondo, The Donna Reed Show, The Danny Kaye Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Dating Game, and Girl Talk (the latter two as herself, out-of-character), as well as television productions of Brigadoon and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Hale was also a regular supporter of the USO and did tours of Vietnam and other overseas locations where American troops were stationed for more than a decade, well into the late '60s, working with John Welsh and John Malpezz on one tour. Indeed, she was one of the last fabulously successful pinups. In early 1969, a quarter century after the heyday of the pinup, when a picture of Hale in a homemade costume as "Eve" appeared in the New York Daily News, it generated so many requests from soldiers overseas that thousands of 8x10s had to be printed up and mailed. She continued working into the '70s on series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Adam-12, and Marcus Welby, M.D.

Trivia: African-American actor Bob Minor gained his cinematic entree as a stuntman. His earliest speaking roles came by way of the blaxploitation pictures of the '70s. Two of the more profitable examples of this genre were Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), both of which starred Pam Grier and featured Minor in supporting roles. The actor occasionally surfaced in mainstream films designed for a more generic audience, notably The Deep (1978) (as Wiley), White Dog (1982) and Glory (1989) but even after attaining this filmic level he couldn't quite escape such exploitation flicks as Swinging Cheerleaders (1976). Bob Minor worked with regularity on television, just missing consistent weekly work in such never-purchased pilots as Friendly Persuasion (1975), Dr. Scorpion (1978) and Samurai (1979).

Trivia: Hawaii-born actor Clyde Kusatsu has appeared in roles calling for a variety of indeterminate ethnic origins. Early film appearances included unbilled bits in Airport 75 (1975) and Alex and the Gypsy (1976). With his minor role as the Freighter Captain in Black Sunday (1977), Kusatsu began working his way up the featured-player ladder. On series television, Kusastu has had plenty of opportunity to display his talent in the roles of Ali in Bring 'Em Back Alive (1982) and Dr. Kenji Fushida in the Hawaii-based Richard Chamberlain vehicle Island Son (1989). In 1994, Clyde Kusastu was sixth-billed in the psychological nailbiter Dream Lover.