Trivia: Rough-hewn American leading man Richard Boone was thrust into the cold cruel world when he was expelled from Stanford University, for a minor infraction. He worked as a oil-field laborer, boxer, painter and free-lance writer before settling upon acting as a profession. After serving in World War II, Boone used his GI Bill to finance his theatrical training at the Actors' Studio, making his belated Broadway debut at age 31, playing Jason in Judith Anderson's production of Medea. Signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1951, Boone was given good billing in his first feature, Halls of Montezuma; among his Fox assignments was the brief but telling role of Pontius Pilate in The Robe (1953). Boone launched the TV-star phase of his career in the weekly semi-anthology Medic, playing Dr. Konrad Steiner. From 1957 through 1963, Boone portrayed Paladin, erudite western soldier of fortune, on the popular western series Have Gun, Will Travel. He directed several episodes of this series. Boone tackled a daring TV assignment in 1963, when in collaboration with playwright Clifford Odets, he appeared in the TV anthology series The Richard Boone Show. Unique among filmed dramatic programs, Boone's series featured a cast of eleven regulars (including Harry Morgan, Robert Blake, Jeanette Nolan, Bethel Leslie and Boone himself), who appeared in repertory, essaying different parts of varying sizes each week. The Richard Boone Show failed to catch on, and Boone went back to films. In 1972 he starred in another western series, this one produced by his old friend Jack Webb: Hec Ramsey, the saga of an old-fashioned sheriff coping with an increasingly industrialized West. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador. Richard Boone died at age 65 of throat cancer.

Trivia: American actor Robert Emhardt began his Broadway career in the late '30s as an understudy for corpulent character star Sidney Greenstreet whom he closely resembled. In films from 1952, the paunchy, phlegmatic Emhardt carved a niche in characterizations calling for gross, obnoxious villainy. His best and most typical screen role was the "respectable" crime boss in Sam Fuller's Underworld U.S.A. (1961). A television fixture well into the 1980s, Robert Emhardt showed up in several Alfred Hitchcock Presents installments, was seen on a regular basis as Mackenzie Cory on the daytime soap opera Another World, and won an Emmy for his wonderful performance as an ulcerated businessman stranded in Mayberry, NC, in "Man in a Hurry," a 1963 episode of The Andy Griffith Show.

Trivia: Sydney Pollack was born to first generation Russian-Jewish Americans on July 1, 1934. After graduating from his Indiana high school, he went to New York and became a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a celebrated Greenwich Village school, where he studied under Sanford Meisner. He served two years in the army before returning to the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1958 as a teacher, and began appearing as an actor in live television dramas. His appearance in a John Frankenheimer-directed television production led him to a job as dialogue coach in the filmmaker's 1961 crime drama The Young Savages. He quickly moved into television, directing on programs such as "The Defenders," "The Naked City," "The Fugitive," "Dr. Kildare," and "Ben Casey" during the early and mid 1960s, and in 1965 made his feature film debut in the director's chair with The Slender Thread.Pollack established himself as a competent, if unexceptional, director in such works as This Property Is Condemned, and one sequence of the Frank Perry-directed drama The Swimmer (based on a work of John Cheever). However, his real breakthrough came in 1969 with the downbeat period drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a brutal Depression-era piece set against the backdrop of a dance marathon contest, starring Jane Fonda and Gig Young. Young won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor while Pollack and Fonda were nominated for Best Director and Best Actress, respectively. (Fonda was said to have lost only because of the controversy surrounding her anti-Vietnam War activities.) Pollack again proved his skill at handling period drama four years later with The Way We Were, a romantic drama starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford that became one of the most popular serious movies of the decade. During the mid 1970s, Pollack also delved into the action genre with The Yakuza, about a kidnapping committed by Japanese gangsters. He achieved much greater success in 1975 with Three Days of the Condor, a post-Watergate suspense thriller starring Redford, Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunaway that proved an enduring favorite among genre fans as well as a hit with general audiences. Four years later, The Electric Horseman united his two top leads, Fonda and Redford, in a predictable but very successful update of the '30s screwball comedy, while Absence of Malice (1981), starring Paul Newman and Sally Field, took a much more serious tone in dealing with a story of an innocent man whose career is ruined by an ambitious reporter. In 1982, Pollack returned to comedy in top form with Tootsie, the story of an out-of-work actor (Dustin Hoffman) who achieves success by masquerading as a woman. The film scored a Best Director Oscar nomination for Pollack, as well as a win in the same category from the New York Critics Film Circle, and became the second highest grossing film of its year after E.T.. More success followed for the director with Out Of Africa (1985); starring Redford, it was one of a dwindling number of serious romantic dramas aimed at middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged audiences that scored big at the box office. Unfortunately, another such outing with Redford, the 1990 Havana, was a notorious failure. Pollack was back on top in 1993 with The Firm, a wildly successful adaptation of John Grisham's thriller that starred Tom Cruise. However, mirroring the unpredictable fluctuations of fortune in Hollywood, his next directorial effort, a 1995 remake of Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, proved to be a colossal critical and financial flop. In 1999, Pollack and Ford reunited to make Random Hearts, a drama about a man and a woman Kristin Scott Thomas who discover that their respective spouses--who died in a plane crash--were lovers.In addition to directing, Pollack has also served as a producer on a number of films (including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Presumed Innocent, Dead Again and Sense and Sensibility) and frequently appears as an actor, both in his own films and those of other directors (he had a starring role in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives). In 1999, he could be seen portraying a wealthy man with some questionable pastimes in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.The 21st century found Pollack working far more often as a producer than as a director thanks in part to the production company he ran with director Anthony Minghella, Mirage. Those credits include such award-winning films as Iris, The Quiet American, and the big-screen adaptation of the novel Cold Mountain. After a layoff of over five years, Pollack returned to the director's chair twice in 2005. He created both his first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry about the famous architect, and The Interpreter, an old-fashioned political thriller with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. In 2006 Pollack handled the producing duties on Anthony Minghella's drama Breaking & Entering, which reunited them with Cold Mountain star Jude Law. Pollack died of cancer at age 73 in May 2008.

Trivia: James Best started appearing on film in 1950 in such westerns as Winchester 73 and Kansas Raiders, he was touted as a bright new face on the cinematic scene. When Best showed up as a regular on the 1963 TV series Temple Houston, he was promoted as a "promising" performer. When co-starred in Jerry Lewis' Three on a Couch in 1965, Best was given an "and introducing" credit. And in 1979, He finally found his niche when he was cast as Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane on the immensely popular weekly TVer The Dukes of Hazzard. Best played the role for all seven seasons of the show, and returned to it for TV movies and video games. He died in 2015, at age 88.

Trivia: Kevin Hagen is a veteran character actor long associated with intense dramatic roles. He has portrayed everything from hitmen and rapists to prosecutors and police officers, but is perhaps best known to television audiences for his portrayal of the avuncular Dr. Baker on the long-running series Little House on the Prairie. Hagen was born and raised in and around Chicago, but moved to Portland, OR, during his teens. Following a two-year hitch in the United States Navy, he attended college on the G.I. Bill, majoring in international relations, and later worked for the U.S. State Department in Germany. Bored with that job, he considered a career in law but dropped out after one year. While trying to figure out what he wanted to do for a career, he auditioned for a production of the play Blind Alley and won a small role, despite the fact that he had never acted before. Within a year, Hagen had moved up to playing the lead in a production of James Thurber's play The Male Animal, and spent the next few years scraping out a living in small theatrical productions around Los Angeles in between studying with Agnes Moorehead, among other notables. His breakthrough came with his portrayal of stern patriarch Ephraim Cabot in a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms -- that led to his getting an agent and, in turn, led to his television debut in an episode of Dragnet. He appeared in various dramatic anthology shows and played important guest-star parts on programs such as Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Cheyenne, M-Squad, and The Untouchables -- in one episode of the latter, "Stranglehold," Hagen brought a startling degree of humanity and depth to the part of a professional killer. Hagen made his feature-film debut in 1958 in the Disney-produced The Light in the Forest, and that same year, he got his first regular role in a series when he was cast in the part of John Colton, the city administrator of post-Civil War New Orleans, in Yancy Derringer. The show only ran for one season, but Hagen had more work than ever following the conclusion of filming, on such series as Bonanza, Perry Mason, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Felony Squad, and Mission: Impossible. He also did some film work, most notably in Andrew V. McLaglen's Civil War drama Shenandoah (1965), in which Hagen played the scavenging deserter who murders James Stewart's son (Patrick Wayne) and rapes and murders Stewart's daughter-in-law (Katharine Ross). During this period, he also began a string of appearances in television series produced by Irwin Allen, guest starring in episodes of Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Time Tunnel. Those roles led to Hagen's being cast as Inspector Kobick, the security officer pursuing the diminutive earthlings, in Allen's Land of the Giants. He brought a great deal of humanity and complexity to his portrayal of the character in the course of the series' two-season run. During the 1970s, Hagen made frequent guest appearances on series such as M*A*S*H, Quincy, and Knot's Landing. In 1974, Hagen was cast in the role for which he has become best known, as Dr. Baker in Little House on the Prairie. He portrayed the part for ten seasons and developed a serious fandom among the series' legions of viewers. Hagen left Hollywood for Oregon in the early '80s, and has continued his work in regional theater productions of such plays as West Side Story, Follies, and Oklahoma! He also performs his own one-man show, a mixture of songs, monologues, and prairie wit and wisdom drawn from his Little House persona.

Trivia: Originally intending to become a journalist, William Challee abandoned this dream when he began appearing in Chicago-based theatrical productions. Challee's Broadway career reached its peak in the late '30s with Wonder Boy. In films from 1943, he was usually seen as well-dressed gangsters, pushy reporters, and grim military officers. William Challee's later credits included such roles as Nicholas Duprea in the Jack Nicholson starrer Five Easy Pieces.