Trivia: Emerging into the public's consciousness in 1958, country & western performer Johnny Cash hit his first popularity peak in the mid-'60s with his hard-driving prison, train, and "underdog" ballads. Changing tastes, coupled with his own volatile temperament, resulted in as many lows as highs in the late 20th century, but Cash is a survivor, and was still very much on hand for the country & western upsurge of the late '80s. His first film appearances were in shapeless semi-concert pictures like Hootenanny Hoot (1963), but he went on to excel as a naturalistic actor in such Westerns as A Gunfight (1971) and The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (1986). Johnny Cash is shown to best cinematic advantage as "himself" in the 1970 documentary Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, which features Cash's wife, June Carter. Cash was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Lincoln Center in 1997.Still hugely popular as the millennuim turned, the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards found Cash's video for the song "Hurt" nominated for no less than six awards. The reflective video ultimately took home the prize for Best Cinematography, cementing Cash's status as an artist whose musical stylings truly knew no boundries. Shortly thereafter, in early September of 2003, Johnny Cash died of complications of diabetes in Nashville, TN. at the age of 71. His death came just four short months after that of his longtime wife June Carter Cash.

Trivia: Brooklynite Brenda Vaccaro was raised in Texas, where she began acting in amateur theatricals. She returned to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse, securing stage and TV roles from 1961 onward. Vaccaro's first important film appearance was as Jon Voigt's "intellectual" vis-à-vis in the latter portions of Midnight Cowboy (1969). In 1971 she co-starred in Summertree with her longtime lover Michael Douglas; the eventual breakup of this relationship was made doubly traumatic by the disproportionate amount of press coverage it received. Shortly after earning an Oscar nomination for 1975's Once Is Not Enough, Brenda Vaccaro briefly became a weekly TV star, playing a 19th century frontier schoolteacher in Sara; she later appeared in another short-lived series, 1979's Dear Detective.

Trivia: Long before earning his B.A. from the University of Texas and his M.A. in Education from C.C.N.Y., Eli Wallach made his first on-stage appearance in a 1930 amateur production. After World War II service and intensive training at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, the bumpy-nosed, gravel-voiced Wallach debuted on Broadway in Skydrift (1945). In 1951, he won a Tony award for his portrayal of Alvaro Mangiaco in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo. Though a staunch advocate of "The Method," Wallach could never be accused of being too introspective on-stage; in fact, his acting at times was downright ripe -- but deliciously so. He made his screen debut in Baby Doll (1956) playing another of Tennessee Williams' abrasive Latins, in this instance the duplicitous Silva Vaccaro; this performance earned Wallach the British equivalent of the Oscar. He spent the bulk of his screen time indulging in various brands of villainy, usually sporting an exotic accent (e.g., bandit leader Calvera in The Magnificent Seven [1960]). Perhaps his most antisocial onscreen act was the kidnapping of Hayley Mills in The Moon-Spinners (1965). Even when playing someone on "our" side, Wallach usually managed to make his character as prickly as possible: a prime example is Sgt. Craig in The Victors (1963), who manages to be vituperative and insulting even after his face is blown away. Busy on stage, screen, and TV into the 1990s, Wallach has played such unsavory types as a senile, half-blind hitman in Tough Guys (1986) and candy-munching Mafioso Don Altobello in The Godfather III (1990). He continued to work steadily into the 1990s with parts in the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes, the remake of Night and the City, Article 99, and narrating a number of documentaries. He didn't slow down much at all during the 21st century, appearing in the comedy Keepin the Faith, Clint Eastwood's Oscar Winning Mystic River, and The Hoax. In 2010 he acted for Roman Polanski in his thriller The Ghost Writer, and for Oliver Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which was to be his last film role; Wallach died in 2014 at age 98.His television work has included an Emmy-winning performance in the 1967 all-star TV movie The Poppy Is Also a Flower and the continuing role of mob patriarch Vincent Danzig in Our Family Honor. Married since 1948 to actress Anne Jackson, Wallach has appeared on-stage with his wife in such plays as The Typists and the Tiger, Luv, and Next, and co-starred with her in the 1967 comedy film The Tiger Makes Out. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson are the parents of special effects director Peter Wallach.

Trivia: Supporting actor Boyd has appeared onscreen from the '70s.