Trivia: Born William Anderson, this brawny, blond second lead had the looks of a Viking god. He worked as a band vocalist and trombone player, then gained a small amount of stage experience before debuting onscreen in a bit part (as a corpse) in Wanderer of the Wasteland (1935). Billed by Paramount as Glenn Erickson, he began his screen career as a leading man in Westerns. Because of his Nordic looks he was renamed Leif Erikson, which he later changed to Erickson. He played intelligent but unexciting second leads and supporting parts in many films. Erickson took four years off to serve in World War II and was twice wounded. He made few films after 1965 and retired from the screen after 1977. Also working on Broadway and in TV plays, he played the patriarch Big John Cannon in the TV series High Chaparral (1967-1971). From 1934 to 1942, he was married to actress Frances Farmer, with whom he co-starred in Ride a Crooked Mile (1938); later, he was briefly married to actress Margaret Hayes (aka Dana Dale).

Trivia: Argentinian actress Linda Cristal made her first American film in 1956. Typecast by virtue of her accent and her exotic Latino features, Linda could usually be found in westerns, notably Comanche (1956), The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958), The Alamo (1960) and Two Rode Together (1961). She also showed up in such European sword-and-sandal affairs as The Pharoah's Woman (1961). In 1959, Linda was given a rare opportunity to display her comic know-how as a temperamental Hollywood starlet in the Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh vehicle The Perfect Furlough. From 1967 through 1971, Linda Cristal played Victoria Cannon on the TV western The High Chaparral.

Trivia: Not wishing to be typecast in Latino roles, actor Henry Thomas Delgado changed his professional name to Henry Darrow -- only to spend his first dozen or so years in show business playing Hispanics. Darrow gained nationwide attention when briefly cast as a Mexican lawyer on the ABC daytime drama General Hospital; he had previously been active in Spanish-language soap operas, and as a Hollywood voice-over artist, dubbing Hispanic films into English. While appearing in an L.A.-based stage play in early 1967, Darrow was spotted by TV producer David Dortort, who was then in the process of casting the upcoming Western series The High Chaparral. Dortort created the character of aristocrat-turned-ranchhand Manolito Montoya with Darrow specifically in mind; the actor remained in this role until High Chapparal completed its four-season run in 1971. Darrow was then seen in a handful of films (Badge 373, Maverick, etc.) and a whole slew of weekly TV programs, including The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1973-1974 season, as stage manager Alex Montenez) and Time Trax (1993). He also returned to the daily-serial grind as Rafael Castillo on Santa Barbara (1984-1992). In 1983, Henry Darrow was starred on the spoofish series Zorro and Son as Zorro Sr. (aka Don Diego de la Vega), a character he'd previously played via voice-over on the Saturday morning cartoon weekly The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour (1981); and in 1989, he was seen as the title character's father on the Family Channel cable series Zorro.

Trivia: The son of a Pennsylvania minister, actor Cameron Mitchell first appeared on Broadway in 1934, in the Lunts' modern-dress version of Taming of the Shrew. He served as a bombardier during World War II, and for a brief period entertained thoughts of becoming a professional baseball player (he allegedly held an unsigned contract with the Detroit Tigers until the day he died). Mitchell was signed to an MGM contract in 1945, but stardom would elude him until he appeared as Happy in the original 1949 Broadway production of Death of the Salesman. He re-created this role for the 1951 film version, just before signing a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. Throughout the 1950s, Mitchell alternated between likeable characters (the unpretentious business executive in How to Marry a Millionaire [1952]) and hissable ones (Jigger Craigin in Carousel [1956]); his best performance, in the opinion of fans and critics alike, was as drug-addicted boxer Barney Ross in the 1957 biopic Monkey on My Back. Beginning in the 1960s, Mitchell adroitly sidestepped the IRS by appearing in dozens of Spanish and Italian films, only a few of which were released in the U.S. He also starred in three TV series: The Beachcomber (1961), The High Chapparal (1969-1971), and Swiss Family Robinson (1976). Mitchell spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s squandering his talents in such howlers as The Toolbox Murders, though there were occasional bright moments, notably his performance as a neurotic mob boss in 1982's My Favorite Year. A note for trivia buffs: Cameron Mitchell also appeared in the first CinemaScope film, The Robe (1953). Mitchell was the voice of Jesus in the Crucifixion scene.

Trivia: American director William F. Claxton started out as a film editor with Edward Small Productions in 1940. Claxton's first directorial effort was 1951's All That I Can Have. He spent much of the 1950s with 20th Century-Fox's Regal Pictures subsidiary, turning out such worthwhile medium-budget efforts as God is My Partner (1956) and Desire in the Dust (1960); occasionally, as in the cast of Rockabilly Baby (1957), he produced as well as directed. Though his film credits are extensive, he is best known for his TV work, beginning with his producer/director stint on the religious anthology This is the Life (1951-1980). A favorite of the late Michael Landon, Claxton directed Landon in such weekly TVers as Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven. William F. Claxton also directed the feature-length series pilot Bonanza: The Next Generation (1988).

Trivia: David Dortort contributed to a number of feature films of the 1950s as a screenwriter, but it was as a producer on television that he made his lasting impact on popular culture. Although he couldn't have known it when he launched Bonanza in 1959, Dortort created one of the great iconic series on American television, and perhaps most popular "franchise" series this side of Star Trek. David Dortort had a strong interest in the American West as a boy during the 1920s, which he soon began indulging, in both his reading and his writing. Dortort attended City College in New York and, after earning a B.A., went to work for the city-owned radio station WNYC, and wrote stories for magazines in his spare time. He served four years in the military during World War II, and after returning to civilian life he decided to begin writing again. In 1947, he published a novel, Burial of the Fruit, dealing with juvenile delinquency and drugs, which went on to sell a reported two million copies. He wrote one more novel, The Post of Honor, which was published in 1949 but proved rather less successful. Following the sale of Burial of the Fruit's film rights to Hecht-Lancaster, Dortort headed to Hollywood. He received his first two screenwriting credits in 1952, for the script of Fritz Lang's melodrama Clash by Night and for Nicholas Ray's rodeo drama The Lusty Men. By the mid-'50s, he'd demonstrated a talent for writing psychological thrillers as well, most notably the screenplay for A Cry in the Night (1956), a suspense film about a deranged man (Raymond Burr) whose obsession with a young woman (Natalie Wood) leads to her kidnapping and a city-wide manhunt. During the late '50s, he returned to writing Western scripts, including the screenplays for Reprisal and The Big Land. Dortort also began writing for television during the mid-'50s, earning Emmy nominations for his adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident to television, and transposing William Faulkner's fiction to the small screen in An Error in Chemistry. In 1957, Dortort started writing for the Western series The Restless Gun, starring John Payne, and quickly moved into the producer's spot on the show, which ran for two seasons. In 1958, he began devising the television series that would immortalize him, entitled Bonanza. An hour-long show shot in color -- the first of its kind on television -- the series told the story of the Cartwright family of Virginia City, NV, during the mid- to late 19th century. Bonanza went on the air in September of 1959 and survived scathing early reviews and lackluster initial ratings to become one of the NBC network's top-rated programs. Within four years, Bonanza was one of the defining Western series on television. In tandem with Gunsmoke, it dominated the genre for most of its run over the decade that followed. One characteristic of the series that still elicits comment is the relatively disposable role that women played in the structure and content of the show through its run. The core of the series was the relationship between the father, Ben Cartwright, and his sons, and of the sons with each other; female characters were virtually an intrusion on the formula, regardless of how good or powerful an actress was cast in a particular guest role, or what kind of performance she gave -- it was always a guest role, and that character would never be around to join the Cartwrights in the final shot of the episode. One running joke, even among fans of the series, is that the fastest way for a woman character in a television Western to contract a fatal illness, get shot, or meet with a horrible accident was to fall in love with -- or, worse yet, get engaged to -- a Cartwright on Bonanza. The formula worked for 14 years, Dortort himself describing the series at one point as a family love story between four men. For the actors involved -- Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker, and Pernell Roberts -- it meant getting the kind of good scenes and center-stage exposure that turned them into full-fledged stars and pop-culture icons; and in the relatively innocent sexual ethos of the 1960s, Bonanza itself became a kind of pop-culture touchstone, an allegory about male familial relations that resonated far beyond the series' high ratings. There were Bonanza action figures and comic books for the kids, and the series eventually took on epic seriousness and profound issues, which kept the adults fascinated from week to week. During the middle of Bonanza's run, Dortort was one of the busier writer/producers in Hollywood, serving as president of the Producers' Guild of America and as president of the Television-Radio branch of the Writers' Guild; he taught classes in screenwriting at UCLA as well, but he still found time to create and produce a new series set deeper in the American southwest, The High Chaparral, which ran for three seasons on NBC. Bonanza was canceled after 14 years on the air, during the 1972-1973 season, following the sudden death of Dan Blocker in the spring of 1972. In the following years, Dortort served as executive producer on a handful of television series and movies, including The Cowboys -- based on the John Wayne movie of that name -- and The Chisholms, and was the executive producer of the 1987 film Going Bananas. His career, however, always seemed to curve back toward Bonanza, and with good reason. Bonanza became one of the earliest hour-long Westerns to go into prime-time syndication on local television. The early ratings were good and got better, and the series proved almost as potent a cultural phenomenon after its cancellation as it did during its run. Part of that success had to do with fortuitous timing: Bonanza had ended its run in 1973, just before the political upheavals of Watergate, the resignation of President Nixon, and the social turmoil of the 1970s manifested themselves. The series had a built-in nostalgia factor (especially the pre-1970 episodes, which were mostly what were shown for the first few years), coupled with good scripts, and seemed -- thanks to Dortort's vision of the program, the writers, and the work of the cast -- to stand for all of the cultural values that were being eclipsed by events in the '70s, the '80s, and beyond. By the '90s, the series was regarded with fondness by a huge portion of the viewing public, a major part of which hadn't even been born when the show had been canceled. Dortort then served as executive producer of Bonanza: The Return (1993), and as consultant on The Ponderosa, the "pre-quel" series, telling the history of the Cartwright family before most of the events depicted on the original series, which premiered on cable television during the 2001-2002 season. Bonanza thus became the second television series in history, after Star Trek, to spawn a generational spin-off of its original characters and setting. References to the original series also turn up regularly throughout American popular culture in the 21st century, perhaps most visibly in occasional snatches of dialogue on the sitcom Frasier, from the mouth of crusty would-be patriarch Martin Crane (John Mahoney), who often compares his relationship with his two sons unfavorably to that of Ben Cartwright and his sons on the series.