Trivia: American actor James Arness had an unremarkable Minneapolis childhood, but his wartime experiences shattered that normality - literally. During the battle of Anzio, Arness' right leg was peppered with machine gun bullets, and when the bones were set they didn't mend properly, leaving him with a slight but permanent limp. The trauma of the experience mellowed into aimlessness after the war. Arness became a "beach bum," lived out of his car, and worked intermittently as a salesman and carpenter. Acting was treated equally lackadaisically, but by 1947 Arness had managed to break into Hollywood on the basis of his rugged good looks and his 6'6" frame. Few of his screen roles were memorable, though one has become an object of cult worship: Arness was cast as the menacingly glowing space alien, described by one character as "an intellectual carrot," in The Thing (1951). For a time it looked as though Arness would continue to flounder in supporting roles, while his younger brother, actor Peter Graves, seemed destined for stardom. John Wayne took a liking to Arness when the latter was cast in Wayne's Big Jim McLain (1953). Wayne took it upon himself to line up work for Arness, becoming one of the withdrawn young actor's few friends. In 1955, Wayne was offered the role of Matt Dillon in the TV version of the popular radio series Gunsmoke. Wayne turned it down but recommended that Arness be cast and even went so far as to introduce him to the nation's viewers in a specially filmed prologue to the first Gunsmoke episode. Truth be told, Arness wasn't any keener than Wayne to be tied down to a weekly series, and as each season ended he'd make noises indicating he planned to leave. This game went on for each of the 20 seasons that Gunsmoke was on the air, the annual result being a bigger salary for Arness, more creative control over the program (it was being produced by his own company within a few years) and a sizeable chunk of the profits and residuals. When Gunsmoke finally left the air in 1975, Arness was the only one of the original four principals (including Amanda Blake, Milburn Stone and Dennis Weaver) still appearing on the series. Arness made plans to take it easy after his two-decade Gunsmoke hitch, but was lured back to the tube for a one-shot TV movie, The Macahans (1976). This evolved into the six-hour miniseries How the West Was Won (1977) which in turn led to a single-season weekly series in 1978. All these incarnations starred Arness, back in the saddle as Zeb Macahan. The actor tried to alter his sagebrush image in a 1981 modern-day cop series, McClain's Law -- which being set in the southwest permitted Arness to ride a horse or two. It appeared, however that James Arness would always be Matt Dillon in the hearts and minds of fans, thus Arness obliged his still-faithful public with three Gunsmoke TV movies, the last one (Gunsmoke: The Last Apache) released in 1992. In between these assignments, James Arness starred in a 1988 TV-movie remake of the 1948 western film classic Red River, in which he filled the role previously played by his friend and mentor John Wayne.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

Trivia: Following her training in regional theatre and radio, red-headed actress Amanda Blake was signed by MGM in 1949, where she was briefly groomed for stardom. Among her MGM assignments was 1950's Stars in My Crown, in which she was cast for the first time opposite James Arness. Film fame eluded Amanda, especially after her sizeable role in the 1954 version of A Star is Born was almost completely excised from the release print. By 1955, she had to make do with appearances in such epics as the Bowery Boys' High Society. Amanda's fortunes took a turn for the better later in 1955, when she won the role of Miss Kitty, the euphemistically yclept "hostess" of the Long Branch Saloon on the TV western Gunsmoke, which starred James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon. She remained with Gunsmoke until its next-to-last season in 1974. After Gunsmoke, Amanda went into semi-retirement save for a handful of film projects like the made-for-TV Betrayal (1974), the theatrical releases The Boost (1988) and B.O.R.N (1989), and the 1987 reunion project Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge. Amanda Blake died in 1989 at the age of sixty.

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: Tom Brown was the "boy next door" type in many films, playing ideal, clean-cut, all-Americans youths in many films of the '30s. The son of vaudevillian Harry Brown and musical comedy star Marie (Francis) Brown, he was on radio and stage from infancy, Broadway from age nine. Brown began appearing in silent movies at age ten in 1923. Pleasantly baby-faced, in the thirties he acquired his typecast image, playing students, sons, sweethearts, military cadets, brothers. His first talkie was The Lady Lies (1929), playing Walter Huston's son; he appeared in more than 100 other films. After service in World War Two (as a paratrooper), he attempted to shed his image by playing heavies, without much success; his career was further derailed when he was called up for service in Korea, from where he returned as a lieutenant colonel. After that Brown did little film work but became a familiar face on TV; now bald-headed, he had continuing roles on the TV series Gunsmoke (as rancher Ed O'Conner) and on the soap operas General Hospital (as Al Weeks) and Days of Our Lives (as Nathan Curtis).

Trivia: Hank Patterson is best known to audiences for his portrayal of farmer Fred Ziffel on Green Acres -- for five seasons, his laconic character and the antics of his pig Arnold helped make life hopelessly confusing for series protagonist Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert). Patterson, along with his younger contemporary Arthur Hunnicutt, was one of a handful of character actors who cornered the market on portraying cantankerous old coots, usually in a rural setting, in movies and on television during the middle of the 20th century. With his deep, resonant voice, which could project even when he spoke in the softest tones, Patterson could also evoke menace and doom, an attribute that producers and directors sometimes utilized to great effect on programs like Twilight Zone. He was born Elmer Calvin Patterson in Springville, AL, in 1888, but by the 1890s his family had moved to Texas, and Patterson spent most of his boyhood in the town of Taylor. His main interest was music, and he studied in hope of a serious performing career, but was forced to enter showbusiness as a vaudeville pianist, playing with traveling shows. By the end of the 1920s, he'd made his way to California, and he entered the movie business as an actor -- despite his lack of formal training -- during the 1930s. Patterson's earliest identified screen work was an uncredited appearance in the Roy Rogers Western The Arizona Kid (1939). His first credited screen role was in the drama I Ring Doorbells, made at Producers Releasing Corporation. Patterson spent the next nine years working exclusively in Westerns, starting with Thomas Carr's The El Paso Kid, starring Sunset Carson. Among the best of the oaters that Patterson worked in were Edwin L. Marin's Abilene Town and Henry King's The Gunfighter, but most of the pictures that he did were on the low-budget side, and far less prestigious. He played a succession of blacksmiths, hotel clerks, farmers, shopkeepers, and other townsmen, usually bit roles and character parts. Beginning with Jack Arnold's Tarantula, Patterson moved into occasional modern character portrayals as well. Patterson also appeared on dozens of television series, ranging from The Abbott & Costello Show (where he played a very creepy mugger in "Lou Falls for Ruby") to Perry Mason. He was nearly as ubiquitous a figure on Twilight Zone as he was in any Western series, appearing in at least three installments, most notably as an old man in a modern setting in "Kick the Can," and as an ominous general store proprietor in "Come Wander With Me." It was the 19th century and rural settings, however, that provided his bread and butter -- he had appeared in several episodes of Gunsmoke, and in 1963 became a continuing character on the series in the role of Hank Miller, the Dodge City stableman. That same year, Patterson took on the semi-regular role of farmer Fred Ziffel in the rural comedy Petticoat Junction; and in 1965, that role was expanded into the series Green Acres -- eventually, he even portrayed Fred Ziffel in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies as well. The association of his character with the utterly surreal (and extremely popular) porcine character of Arnold the Pig (also known as Arnold Ziffel) ensured that Patterson was one of the most visible supporting players on the series. Ironically, by the time he was doing Green Acres, Patterson was almost completely deaf, but the producers loved his portrayal so much, that they worked around this by having the dialogue coach lying on the floor out-of-shot, tapping at his leg with a yardstick when it was his cue to speak a line. Patterson passed away in 1975 of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 86. He was the great-uncle of actress Tea Leoni.

Trivia: A track star at the University of Oklahoma, Dennis Weaver went on to serve as a Navy Pilot during World War II. After failing to make the 1948 U.S. decathalon Olympic team, Weaver accepted the invitation of his college chum Lonny Chapman to give the New York theatre world a try. He understudied Chapman as "Turk Fisher" in the Broadway production Come Back Little Sheba, eventually taking over the role in the national company. Deciding that acting was to his liking, Weaver enrolled at the Actors' Studio, supporting his family by selling vacuum cleaners, tricycles and ladies' hosiery. On the recommendation of his Actors' Studio classmate Shelley Winters, Weaver was signed to a contract at Universal studios in 1952, where he made his film debut in The Redhead From Wyoming (1952). Though his acting work increased steadily over the next three years, he still had to take odd jobs to make ends meet. He was making a delivery for the florist's job where he worked when he was informed that he'd won the role of deputy Chester Goode on the TV adult western Gunsmoke. So as not to be continually upstaged by his co-star James Arness (who, at 6'7", was five inches taller than the gangly Weaver), he adopted a limp for his character--a limp which, along with Chester's reedy signature line "Mis-ter Diillon" and the deputy's infamously bad coffee, brought Weaver fame, adulation and a 1959 Emmy Award. Though proud of his work on Gunsmoke--"I don't think any less seriously of Chester than I did about King Lear in college"--Weaver began feeling trapped by Chester sometime around the series' fifth season. Having already proven his versatility in his film work (notably his portrayal of the neurotic motel night clerk in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil [1958]), Weaver saw to it that the Gunsmoke producers permitted him to accept as many "outside" TV assignments as his schedule would allow. Twice during his run as Chester, Weaver quit the series to pursue other projects. He left Gunsmoke permanently in 1964, whereupon he was starred in the one-season "dramedy" series Kentucky Jones (1965). In 1967, he headlined a somewhat more successful weekly, Gentle Ben (1967-69) in which he and everyone else in the cast played second fiddle to a trained bear (commenting upon his relationship with his "co-star", Weaver replied "I liked him, but it was a cold relationship...Ben didn't know me from a bag of doughnuts.") The most successful of Weaver's post-Gunsmoke TV series was McCloud, in which, from 1970 to 1977, he played deputy marshal Sam McCloud, a New Mexico lawman transplanted to the Big Apple. In addition to his series work, Weaver has starred in several made-for-TV movies over the past 25 years, the most famous of which was the Steven Spielberg-directed nailbiter Duel (1971). Dennis Weaver is the father of actor Robby Weaver, who co-starred with his dad on the 1980 TV series Stone.