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: Craggy character actor Roy Engel made his first film appearance in the 1949 noir classic D.O.A. He quickly established himself as a regular in such science fiction films as The Flying Saucer (1950), Man From Planet X (1951), and The Colossus of New York (1958). When not dealing with extraterrestrials, he could be seen playing sheriffs, bartenders, and the like in such Westerns as Three Violent People (1955) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). Among Roy Engel's last films was Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) which combined elements of both sci-fi and Westerns.

Trivia: The grandson of a governor of New Mexico, pioneering screen cowboy Edmund Cobb began his long career toiling in Colorado-produced potboilers such as Hands Across the Border (1914), the filming of which turned tragic when Cobb's leading lady, Grace McHugh, drowned in the Arkansas River. Despite this harrowing experience, Cobb continued to star in scores of cheap Westerns and was making two-reelers at Universal in Hollywood by the 1920s. But unlike other studio cowboys, Cobb didn't do his own stunts -- despite the fact that he later claimed to have invented the infamous "running w" horse stunt -- and that may actually have shortened his starring career. By the late '20s, he was mainly playing villains. The Edmund Cobb remembered today, always a welcome sign whether playing the main henchman or merely a member of the posse, would pop up in about every other B-Western made during the 1930s and 1940s, invariably unsmiling and with a characteristic monotone delivery. When series Westerns bit the dust in the mid-'50s, Cobb simply continued on television. In every sense of the word a true screen pioneer and reportedly one of the kindest members of the Hollywood chuck-wagon fraternity, Edmund Cobb died at the age of 82 at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: American actress Peggy Rea began gaining notice in the 1960s as a member of Red Skelton's TV stock company. In the 1970s, she was seen as Olivia Walton's cousin Rose Burton in The Waltons and on an irregular basis as man-chasing Lulu Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard. Later seen in maternal roles, Peggy Rea was featured on Step By Step (1991) as Ivy Williams, the mother of Suzanne Sommers' character, and as Brett Butler's mom Jean Kelly in Grace Under Fire (1993- ).