Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: Greco-American actor Nico Minardos inaugurated his film career in 1955. Many of his earlier assignments were unstressed minor roles like "Ali" in the Errol Flynn starrer Istanbul (1956). His larger parts include Carlos, potential "Latin Lover" to tourists Jill St. John and Carol Lynley, in Holiday For Lovers (1959), and hard-bitten westerner DeLeon in Day of the Evil Gun (1968). Nico Minardo's last film was 1975's Assault on Agathan, which he also produced.

Trivia: A supporting player and occasional lead, Capri appeared onscreen from the '60s.

Trivia: A rugged, craggy-faced, bushy-browed lead actor and character player, he began his stage career in 1937, which was interrupted by service in World War Two. He debuted onscreen in Winged Victory (1944), but did not begin regularly appearing in films until 1949; he was usually cast as grim, determined, humorless men in action features. From 1950-60 he was married to actress Bette Davis, with whom he appeared in three films. His many TV credits include a role in the series Young Dr. Kildare. He was politically active in liberal causes, and played a part in rejuvenating Maine's Democratic party; he also helped elect Edmund Muskie to governor of that state in 1953. In 1965 he took part in the Selma-Montgomery civil rights march. At odds with President Johnson's Vietnam policy, he switched parties and in 1968 tried unsuccessfully to win a Republican nomination to the Maine legislature as an anti-war, pro-environmentalist primary candidate. He authored an autobiography, Bette, Rita and the Rest of My Life (1989); "Rita" refers to actress Rita Hayworth, with whom he'd had a romantic affair.

Trivia: An alumnus of the Yale School of Drama, Alan Baxter came to films in 1935 after three seasons' stage work. Though occasionally cast in a leading role, Baxter was more convincing as a character actor, usually playing roles with sinister undertones. Hitchcock devotees will remember Baxter as the bespectacled, implicitly homosexual Nazi spy in the Hoover Dam sequences of Saboteur (1942). Alan Baxter continued accepting supporting roles into the 1970s, often portraying big-time gangsters or disreputable politicians.

Trivia: Actors Studio-graduate Michael J. Pollard was first thrust upon the public as Maynard G. Krebs' funky cousin on the 1959 TV series Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). The leprechaunish Pollard had been hired as a potential replacement for Bob Denver (aka Maynard), who'd been drafted; but when Denver flunked his physical and returned to the series, Pollard was shown the exit. He went on to co-star in the 1961 musical Bye Bye Birdie (1961), then made his film debut in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962). Pollard earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as the moronic C.W.Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967); he followed this triumph by sharing co-star billing with Robert Redford in Little Fauss & Big Halsey (1969), and by essaying the role of Billy the Kid in Dirty Little Billy (1972). In all the above-mentioned films, as well as his many TV appearances in series like The Andy Griffith Show, Lost in Space and Star Trek, Pollard essentially played the same character: a slow-witted, stammering child-man, ever out of step with an unfeeling world. Audiences eventually tired of Pollard's one-note characterizations. No longer a star, Michael J. Pollard has continued accepting sizeable character roles in films, and was seen as Leonard the handyman in the 1986 TV sitcom Leo and Liz in Beverly Hills. In 1990, Michael J. Pollard was reunited with his Bonnie and Clyde co-star Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy, playing the amusing supporting part of police wiretapper Bug Bailey (also in the Tracy cast was another B&C alumnus, Estelle Parsons).