Trivia: The son of a New York University professor of marketing, American actor James Drury spent his youth dividing his time between Manhattan and Oregon, where his mother ran a ranch. At age 8, Drury made his stage debut as King Herod-- crepe beard and all--in a Christmas production at a Greenwich Village settlement house. Sidelined by polio at age 10, Drury became a voracious reader, often acting out the characters in the books. At NYU, Drury dove full-force into acting, developing his craft to such an extent that in 1954 he was signed by MGM. His film roles were of the "other guy in the room" calibre (Forbidden Planet [1956]), so Drury's contract lapsed, after which he spent time at 20th Century-Fox in support of Pat Boone (Bernardine [1957]) and Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender [1958]). In 1958, Drury was cast by Screen Gems studios in a TV pilot film based on the Owen Wister story The Virginian. It didn't sell, but in 1962 Universal optioned the rights to The Virginian, bringing Drury in along for the ride. He spent the next nine years in The Virginian, during which time Drury's reputation for recalcitrance on the set and reluctance to reveal anything of himself in interviews earned him the soubriquet "The Garbo of the Sagebrush" (a nickname bestowed by Drury's father!) James Drury wasn't seen much after The Virginian, though he did show up on the small screen as the lead in an Emergency clone titled Firehouse, which ran on the ABC network for eight months in 1974.

Trivia: Raw-boned blonde leading man Doug McClure came to films in 1957, but it was television that made him a star. He played secondary roles on such MCA series as The Overland Trail (1960) and Checkmate (1961-62) before striking paydirt as Trampas on the long-running (1962-71) western series The Virginian. During his first flush of stardom, McClure played leads in two Universal remakes, Beau Geste (1966) and The King's Pirate (the 1967 remake of Errol Flynn's Against All Flags). He also dashed through a trio of British-filmed Edgar Rice Burroughs derivations, The Land That Time Forgot (1974), At the Earth's Core (1976) and The People That Time Forgot (1977). He perpetuated his athletic, devil-may-care image into his brief 1975 TVer, Search (1975). In the late 1980s, Doug McClure reemerged as an agreeable comic actor, playing an Eastwoodish movie-star-cum-small-town-mayor in the syndicated sitcom Out of This World (1987-88).

Trivia: Actress Lynda Day George was quite busy on TV in guest-starring roles throughout the 1960s. Before she officially changed her professional name from "Day" to "Day George" -- to acknowledge her marriage to actor Christopher George -- Day George was a regular on The Silent Force, a 1970 Mission: Impossible clone. Ironically, one year later she was cast on the real Mission: Impossible as undercover operative Casey, a role she retained until the series' cancellation in 1973. While she has appeared in the occasional theatrical film, most of Day George's best work could be seen in such small-screen miniseries as Rich Man, Poor Man, Once an Eagle, and Roots. In the early '80s, Lynda Day George began turning down network roles to devote her energies to religious television, remaining active in this field long after the death of her husband in 1983.

Trivia: Robert Fuller spent his first decade in show business trying his best to avoid performing. After his film debut in 1952's Above and Beyond, Fuller studied acting with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse but never exhibited any real dedication. He tried to become a dancer but gave that up as well, determining that dancing was "sissified." Fuller rose to nominal stardom fairly rapidly in the role of Jess Harper on the popular TV western Laramie (1959-63). Once he found his niche in cowboy attire, he stuck at it in another series, Wagon Train, turning down virtually all offers for "contemporary" roles. When westerns began dying out on television in the late 1960s, Fuller worked as a voiceover actor in commercials, earning some $65,000 per year (a tidy sum in 1969). On the strength of his performance in the Burt Topper-directed motorcycle flick The Hard Ride, Fuller was cast by producer Jack Webb as chief paramedic Kelly Brackett on the weekly TVer Emergency, which ran from 1972 through 1977. In 1994, Robert Fuller was one of several former TV western stars who showed up in cameo roles in the Mel Gibson movie vehicle Maverick.

Trivia: Frank Overton was a New York theater actor who enjoyed a limited but productive career in feature films and a much busier one on the small screen. Although he often played thoughtful, compassionate, introspective characters, he could also exude an earthy side, or portray rule-bound authority figures, though one of his most memorable portrayals -- as General Bogan, the head of the Strategic Air Command, in Fail-Safe -- combined two of those sides. Born Frank Emmons Overton in Babylon, NY, in 1918, he gravitated to theater in the 1930s and participated in some experimental stage work -- including designing the sets for A Democratic Body, a production of Geoff and Mary Lamb at The New School in New York City -- at the outset of the 1940s. Overton's earliest screen work came not on camera, but as one of the voice actors (alongside Harry Bellaver and future producer Ilya Lopert) in the dubbing of the 1943 Soviet-made propaganda film Ona Zashchishchayet Rodinu (aka, No Greater Love). His on-camera screen career started in 1947 with an uncredited bit part in Elia Kazan's fact-based drama Boomerang! He appeared in two more feature films, John Sturges' Mystery Street and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (both 1950), but as an East Coast-based actor, he ended up a lot busier on television over the next few years, in between appearing in theater pieces such as the original stage version of The Desperate Hours, replacing James Gregory in the role of the deputy. Overton also worked with Lillian Gish in the original television presentation of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful in 1953, and in the Broadway production that followed that same year. He also did a great deal of work in anthology drama series, such as The Elgin Hour, Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Alcoa Hour, and The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse. In the latter, he portrayed Sheriff Pat Garrett to Paul Newman's Billy The Kid in The Death of Billy The Kid, scripted by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn, which was later remade in Hollywood as The Left-Handed Gun (with John Dehner replacing Overton in the role of Garrett).By the end of the 1950s, however, more television was being done on film from the West Coast and Overton made the move to California. Most baby-boom viewers will remember him best for his performance in one of the finest installments of The Twilight Zone ever produced, "Walking Distance," as the father of the character portrayed by Gig Young. He returned to feature films around this same time in Desire Under the Elms (1958), The Last Mile (1959), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), in between appearances on episodes of Peter Gunn, Riverboat, The Rebel, The Asphalt Jungle, Lawman, Checkmate, Perry Mason, Route 66, The Fugitive, Wagon Train, The Defenders, and others. He also periodically returned to New York to work on series such as Naked City. His biggest movie roles came in the early '60s, in Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) as Sheriff Tate, and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) as General Bogan.In 1964, he also took his first and only regular series costarring role, on the Quinn Martin-produced 12 O'Clock High, portraying Major Harvey Stovall, the adjutant for the 918th Heavy Bombardment Group commanded by Brig. Gen. Frank Savage (Robert Lansing). It was not an enviable assignment, as Dean Jagger had won the Oscar in the same role in the original 1949 feature film, which was still relatively fresh in people's minds as one of the best World War II aerial dramas; but Overton, with his rich, quietly expressive voice, succeeded in putting his own stamp on the part and got several episodes written around his character. He was also with the series for its entire three seasons, amid several major casting changes and was one of the key points of continuity on the show. When 12 O'Clock High went out of production in late 1966, Overton showed up in episodes of Bonanza and The Virginian in 1967. But his most widely rerun appearance, other than his Twilight Zone episode, was one of his last, as colonist leader Elias Sandoval in the first-season Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise," which is regarded by many as one of the best shows in the run of the series. Overton died of a heart attack in April 1967, a month after the show first aired.

Trivia: American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood. Unable to find film work there, he returned to New York and acted in radio dramas while going to night school at CCNY to learn accounting. Returning to California in 1931, he made his stage debut with the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York in 1935, he joined the celebrated Group Theater and appeared in several plays with them, including Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. He began his film career in 1937, going on to star and play supporting roles in dozens of films straight through to the end of his life. Cobb was most frequently cast as menacing villains, but sometimes appeared as a brooding business executive or community leader. His greatest triumph on stage came in the 1949 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which he played the lead role, Willy Loman (he repeated his performance in a 1966 TV version). Between 1962-66, he also appeared on TV in the role of Judge Garth in the long-running series The Virginian. He was twice nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" Oscars for his work in On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958).

Trivia: Endearing herself to television audiences as the devoted sitcom wife of Robert Young on Father Knows Best, petite brunette actress Jane Wyatt also essayed frequent big-screen roles highlighted by memorable performances in such films as Lost Horizon (1937), in which she plays Sondra, the lover of Robert Conway (Ronald Colman). Born in Campgaw, NJ, on August 12, 1910, to an investment banker father and a drama critic mother, and raised as a Manhattanite from age three, Wyatt received her formal education at the Chapin School and -- very briefly -- at New York City's Barnard College, where she spent two listless years. Following the irresistible call of the stage, Wyatt bucked university life in favor of honing her acting skills at Berkshire Playhouse in the western Massachusetts community of Stockbridge. Shortly after this, she accepted a position as understudy to Rose Hobart in a Broadway production of Trade Winds. Universal soon took note of Wyatt's talents and offered her a film role, in Frankenstein director James Whale's One More River (1934). Wyatt embarked on a lucrative screen career following her impressive debut, and many consider the performance in Lost Horizon her crowning achievement, though additional cinematic work throughout the 1940s proved both steady and rewarding. Following memorable performances in Clifford Odets' None But the Lonely Heart (1944) (alongside Cary Grant) and Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947, with Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire), the now-established actress transitioned smoothly into television in the early '50s, given her standing role as the matriarch of the Anderson family (mother of Bud, Princess, and Kitten, and wife of Jim) on the long-running CBS sitcom Father Knows Best. Wyatt deservedly won three Emmys for that role, and remained with the program over the course of its six-year run of original episodes. (Riding the crest of high ratings, CBS stretched prime-time reruns into the spring of 1963.) This marked the only major recurring prime-time role of Wyatt's career, though (alongside the work of others such as Barbara Billingsley and Harriet Nelson) it did much to establish the now-iconic image of the "archetypal 1950s sitcom mother," and earned the actress a beloved spot in American pop-culture history. In addition to this, Wyatt made occasional appearances, during the Father Knows Best run, on a dramatic anthology series headlined by her small-screen husband, Robert Montgomery Presents (NBC, 1950-1957). Six years after new episodes of Father wrapped, Star Trek landed on NBC, and Wyatt turned up occasionally on that program, as Mr. Spock's mother, Amanda Spock. She also made a guest appearance, alongside the late Bob Cummings, on the early-'70s comedic anthology series Love, American Style (the two play parents who are overanxious about their daughter's decision to embark on a European "swingers' holiday" with a boyfriend). If the preponderance of Wyatt's roles in the '70s, '80s, and '90s were largely supporting turns, it certainly said nothing about the actress' talent. She remained in the public eye as a fixture of such made-for-television features as You'll Never See Me Again (1973) and Amelia Earhart (1976). Though she entered semi-retirement in the late '70s, Wyatt later appeared (very infrequently) as an occasional supporting character in television's St. Elsewhere and reprised her role as Spock's mother in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).On October 20, 2006, after years of inactivity, Jane Wyatt died of natural causes in her sleep, at her home in Bel Air, CA. She was 96.