Trivia: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: George Maharis was one of seven children of Greek immigrant parents. Though he could very easily have gone into his father's restaurant business, Maharis decided to try for a singing career. When his vocal chords were injured by overuse, Maharis switched to acting, studying at the Actors' Studio and making one of his earliest appearances as a Marlon Brando parody on the 1950s TV sitcom Mr. Peepers. Maharis was very active in the off-Broadway scene, appearing in Jean Genet's Deathwatch and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. He gained a fan following (primarily female) through his weekly appearances as handsome drifter Buzz Murdock on the TV series Route 66. He played Buzz from 1960 to 1963, leaving the series for a variety of reasons, among them artistic differences and a bout of hepatitis. His subsequent film career failed to reach the heights of his TV work, and by 1970 Maharis was back in the weekly small-screen grind in the adventure series The Most Dangerous Game. When not performing in nightclubs, summer stock or films, George Maharis spent a good portion of the 1970s and 1980s indulging in his pet hobby, impressionistic painting.

Trivia: A renowned character actor who never liked that label, Rod Steiger left his mark on 1950s and '60s Hollywood with forceful performances in such critical favorites as On the Waterfront (1954) and The Pawnbroker (1964), culminating in an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night (1967). Despite myriad health problems and less sterling job offers from the 1970s onward, Steiger never stopped acting before he passed away in 2002. Born on Long Island, Steiger was raised in New Jersey by his mother after his parents divorced. Dropping out of high school at 16, Steiger enlisted in the Navy in 1941, serving on a destroyer in the World War II South Pacific. Returning to New Jersey after his 1945 discharge, Steiger worked at the Veterans Administration and joined a civil service theater group where one of the female members urged him to make acting his career. Along with using his G.I. Bill to study at several New York schools, including the Actors Studio, Steiger began landing roles in live TV plays in 1947. Over the next five years, Steiger honed his formidable Method skills in 250-plus live TV productions, as well as on Broadway. Though he appeared in the movie Teresa (1951), Steiger didn't fully make the transition to film until his award-winning performance as the lonely title character in the 1953 TV production of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, which helped him nab a part in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. As Charley Malloy, Steiger most memorably shared the backseat of a cab with screen brother Marlon Brando as Brando's ex-boxer Terry laid the blame for his one-way trip to Palookaville on his corrupt older sibling. Though Kazan had guided Steiger to his first Oscar nomination, Steiger later condemned the Academy's controversial decision to award Kazan an honorary Oscar in 1999. After On the Waterfront, Steiger made his presence felt as a movie tycoon in his erstwhile TV director Robert Aldrich's Hollywood tale The Big Knife (1955), a scheming attorney in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), and the villain in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Oklahoma! (1955). Further underlining his effusive talent and his intense (if occasionally overwrought) screen style, Steiger co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in Bogart's final film, The Harder They Fall (1956); survived Samuel Fuller-style Western sadism as an Irish-accented ex-soldier in Run of the Arrow (1957); played a psychopath in Cry Terror! (1958); and raged as Al Capone (1959) (Steiger's Capone was later credited as the inadvertent model for Robert De Niro's performance in The Untouchables). Steiger still occasionally acted on-stage, including Orson Welles' unusual adaptation of Moby Dick in 1962. Nevertheless, Steiger concentrated mostly on movies, with his career taking on an international flavor after he married his second wife and Broadway co-star, Claire Bloom, in 1959. After appearing in the low-key British drama The Mark (1961), Steiger joined the impressive Hollywood all-star cast re-staging of D-Day in the war epic The Longest Day (1962). He returned to films after his 1962 theater hiatus as a dishonest politico in the Italian film Le Mani Sulla Città (1963). Steiger's forays into Italian movies preceded two of the best years of his career. In Sidney Lumet's groundbreaking independent drama The Pawnbroker, Steiger's powerful performance as a Holocaust survivor running a Harlem pawnshop earned the Berlin Film Festival's Best Actor prize in 1964 and garnered raves upon the film's 1965 U.S. release. That same year, Steiger also gleefully played the asexual embalmer Mr. Joyboy in Tony Richardson's outrageous comedy The Loved One (1965) and had a small part in David Lean's blockbuster romance Doctor Zhivago (1965). After his banner year resulted in a much-desired Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Pawnbroker, Steiger lost to Lee Marvin. The outcome was different for his next American film, the acclaimed racially charged police drama In the Heat of the Night. Starring opposite Sidney Poitier, Steiger imbued his bigoted Southern sheriff with enough complexity to make him more than just a cliché redneck, reaching a prickly, believable détente with Poitier's sophisticated Northern detective. Nominated alongside youngsters Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman's iconic "Cool Hand" Luke, and venerable lion Spencer Tracy, Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar and closed his acceptance speech by asserting, "We shall overcome." Though he co-starred with Bloom in two films post-In the Heat of the Night, The Illustrated Man (1969) and Three Into Two Won't Go (1969), they divorced in 1969. Steiger won critics' hearts again with his bravura performance as a schizoid serial killer in No Way to Treat a Lady (1968). His antiwar sentiments, however, provoked Steiger to turn down the eponymous World War II general in Patton (1970); Steiger instead played French emperor Napoleon in the European production depicting his defeat at Waterloo (1970). In search of good roles, Steiger mostly worked abroad in the early '70s. Though they clashed over Steiger's Method techniques during production, Steiger was excellent as a peasant caught up in the Mexican Revolution in Sergio Leone's Western Duck, You Sucker! (1972). He also worked with veteran Leone star Gian Maria Volonté in Francesco Rosi's Lucky Luciano (1974), and played Benito Mussolini in the The Last Days of Mussolini (1974). His performance in Claude Chabrol's Dirty Hands (1975), however, fell prey to his tendency to over-emote. Though he was a superb W.C. Fields in American biopic W.C. Fields and Me (1976), Steiger's Hollywood career had undeniably fallen from his 1950s and '60s heights. He shared the screen with new star Sylvester Stallone in one of Stallone's early flops, F.I.S.T. (1978), and chewed the haunted house scenery in schlock horror flick The Amityville Horror (1979). Steiger joined the distinguished cast of the British drama Lion of the Desert (1981) for his second turn as Il Duce, but the film sat on the shelf for two years before its release; appealing Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981) was buried by its distributor. Steiger was back in peak form as a Hasidic rabbi in the film version of The Chosen (1981), but that did little to stop Steiger's slide into TV movies and such B-horror pictures as The Kindred (1987) and American Gothic (1987) in the 1980s. Steiger's career problems were exacerbated by health difficulties, as he was forced to undergo open-heart surgery in 1976 and 1980. With producers wary of hiring him, and his third marriage ending in 1979, Steiger suffered debilitating bouts of depression in the late '70s and mid-'80s. Nevertheless, Steiger continued to work into the 1990s. Crediting his fourth wife, Paula Ellis, with keeping him sane, Steiger weathered his disappointment with The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), and took pleasure in appearing as "himself" in Robert Altman's acclaimed Hollywood evisceration The Player (1992) as well as playing Sam Giancana in the TV biopic Sinatra (1992). While he mostly worked in TV, Steiger turned up in small yet memorable feature roles as a Mafia capo in The Specialist (1994), a loony Army commander in Mars Attacks! (1996), a judge in The Hurricane (1999), and a bombastic priest in End of Days (1999). His final film, the indie drama Poolhall Junkies (2002) with Christopher Walken, was slated for release the same year he was one of the indie-friendly actors dining on Jon Favreau's IFC talk show Dinner for Five. Steiger passed away from pneumonia and kidney failure on July 9, 2002. He was survived by his fifth wife, his daughter with Bloom, and his son with Ellis.

Trivia: Raised in the only Jewish family in his neighborhood, American actor Ed Asner grew up having to defend himself both vocally and physically. A born competitor, he played championship football in high school and organized a top-notch basketball team which toured most of liberated Europe. Asner's performing career got its start while he was announcing for his high school radio station; moving to Chicago in the '50s, the actor was briefly a member of the Playwrights Theatre Club until he went to New York to try his luck on Broadway. Asner starred for several years in the off-Broadway production Threepenny Opera, and, toward the end of the '50s, picked up an occasional check as a film actor for industrial short subjects and TV appearances. Between 1960 and 1965, he established himself as one of television's most reliable villains; thanks to his resemblance to certain Soviet politicians, the actor was particularly busy during the spy-show boom of the mid-'60s. He also showed up briefly as a regular on the New York-filmed dramatic series Slattery's People. And though his film roles became larger, it was in a relatively minor part as a cop in Elvis Presley's Change of Habit (1969) that Asner first worked with Mary Tyler Moore. In 1970, over Moore's initial hesitation (she wasn't certain he was funny enough), Asner was cast as Lou Grant, the irascible head of the WJM newsroom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The popular series ran for seven seasons, during which time the actor received three Emmy awards. His new stardom allowed Asner a wider variety of select roles, including a continuing villainous appearance on the miniseries Roots -- which earned him another Emmy. When Moore ceased production in 1977, Asner took his Lou Grant character into an hour-long dramatic weekly about a Los Angeles newspaper. The show's title, of course, was Lou Grant, and its marked liberal stance seemed, to some viewers, to be an extension of Asner's real-life viewpoint. While Lou Grant was in production, Asner was twice elected head of the Screen Actors Guild, a position that he frequently utilized as a forum for his political opinions -- notably his opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America. When Asner suggested that each guild member contribute toward opposing the country's foreign policy, he clashed head to head with Charlton Heston, who wrested Asner's office from him in a highly publicized power play. Although no tangible proof has ever been offered, it was Asner's belief that CBS canceled Lou Grant in 1982 because of his politics and not dwindling ratings. The actor continued to prosper professionally after Lou Grant, however, and, during the remainder of the '80s and into the '90s, starred in several TV movies, had guest and recurring roles in a wide variety of both TV dramas and comedies, and headlining two regular series, Off the Rack and The Bronx Zoo. Slowed but hardly halted by health problems in the '90s, Asner managed to find time to appear in the weekly sitcoms Hearts Afire and Thunder Alley -- atypically cast in the latter show as an ineffective grouch who was easily brow-beaten by his daughter and grandchildren.

Trivia: A Broadway actor who also found marked success in celluloid with roles in such film noir classics as The Set-Up and The Narrow Margin, David Clarke embarked on an enduring screen career following his debut in the 1941 boxing drama Knockout. The Chicago native found a powerful ally in the business when he made fast friends with star Will Geer while pounding the boards in his hometown early on, and after being abandoned in Seattle following a failed touring play, the talented duo set their sights on Broadway. Both actors were hired to appear in the 1936 Broadway play 200 Were Chosen, and in the years that followed, both Geer and Clarke went on to achieve notable success on both stage and screen. Clarke also found frequent work on television on such popular series as Kojak and Wonder Woman as well as a recurring role in the small-screen drama Ryan's Hope. Clarke and Geer remained lifelong friends, appearing together in both the 1949 film Intruder in the Dust and the enduring television drama The Waltons -- in which Clarke made several guest appearances. David Clarke married actress Nora Dunfee in 1946; the couple would frequently appear together on-stage and remained wed until Dunfee's death in 1994. On April 18, 2004, David Clarke died of natural causes in Arlington, VA. He was 95.