Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma carpet layer, James Garner did stints in the Army and merchant marines before working as a model. His professional acting career began with a non-speaking part in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), in which he was also assigned to run lines with stars Lloyd Nolan, Henry Fonda, and John Hodiak. Given that talent roster, and the fact that the director was Charles Laughton, Garner managed to earn his salary and receive a crash course in acting at the same time. After a few television commercials, he was signed as a contract player by Warner Bros. in 1956. He barely had a part in his first film, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), though he was given special attention by director David Butler, who felt Garner had far more potential than the film's nominal star, Tab Hunter. Due in part to Butler's enthusiasm, Garner was cast in the Warner Bros. TV Western Maverick. The scriptwriters latched on to his gift for understated humor, and, before long, the show had as many laughs as shoot-outs. Garner was promoted to starring film roles during his Maverick run, but, by the third season, he chafed at his low salary and insisted on better treatment. The studio refused, so he walked out. Lawsuits and recriminations were exchanged, but the end result was that Garner was a free agent as of 1960. He did quite well as a freelance actor for several years, turning in commendable work in such films as Boys' Night Out (1962) and The Great Escape (1963), but was soon perceived by filmmakers as something of a less-expensive Rock Hudson, never more so than when he played Hudson-type parts opposite Doris Day in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All! (both 1963).Garner fared rather better in variations of his Maverick persona in such Westerns as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and The Skin Game (1971), but he eventually tired of eating warmed-over stew; besides, being a cowboy star had made him a walking mass of injuries and broken bones. He tried to play a more peaceable Westerner in the TV series Nichols (1971), but when audiences failed to respond, his character was killed off and replaced by his more athletic twin brother (also Garner). The actor finally shed the Maverick cloak with his long-running TV series The Rockford Files (1974-1978), in which he played a John MacDonald-esque private eye who never seemed to meet anyone capable of telling the truth. Rockford resulted in even more injuries for the increasingly battered actor, and soon he was showing up on TV talk shows telling the world about the many physical activities which he could no longer perform. Rockford ended in a spirit of recrimination, when Garner, expecting a percentage of the profits, learned that "creative bookkeeping" had resulted in the series posting none. To the public, Garner was the rough-hewn but basically affable fellow they'd seen in his fictional roles and as Mariette Hartley's partner (not husband) in a series of Polaroid commercials. However, his later film and TV-movie roles had a dark edge to them, notably his likable but mercurial pharmacist in Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his multifaceted co-starring stints with James Woods in the TV movies Promise (1986) and My Name Is Bill W. (1989). In 1994, Garner came full circle in the profitable feature film Maverick (1994), in which the title role was played by Mel Gibson. With the exception of such lower-key efforts as the noir-ish Twilight (1998) and the made-for-TV thriller Dead Silence (1997), Garner's career in the '90s found the veteran actor once again tapping into his latent ability to provoke laughs in such efforts as Space Cowboys (2000) while maintaining a successful small-screen career by returning to the role of Jim Rockford in several made-for-TV movies. He provided a voice for the popular animatedfeature Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and appeared in the comedy-drama The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Garner enjoyed a career resurgance in 2003, when he joined the cast of TV's 8 Simple Rules, acting as a sort of replacement for John Ritter, who had passed away at the beginning of the show's second season. He next appeared in The Notebook (2004), which earned Garner a Screen Actors Guild nomination and also poised him to win the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. His last on-screen role was a small supporting role in The Ultimate Gift (2007). In 2008, Garner suffered a stroke and retired acting. He died in 2014, at age 86.

Trivia: Actor Jim Antonio has spent the bulk of his career playing supporting roles on television both in films and as a guest star on series. He has also occasionally appeared in feature films. His brother, Lou Antonio, is an actor and director.

Trivia: Supporting actress Irene Tedrow spent most of her 60-year career on stage, but she also had considerable experience in feature films and on television. Slender and possessing an austere beauty, Tedrow was well suited for the rather prim and moral characters she most often played. After establishing herself on stage in the early '30s, she made her film debut in 1937. She gained fame during the 1940s playing Mrs. Janet Archer in the Meet Corliss Archer film series. She kept the role in the subsequent television series. She played Mrs. Elkins on Dennis the Menace between 1959 and 1963. In 1976, Tedrow earned an Emmy for her performance in Eleanor and Franklin.

Trivia: Born in New York City while his father Noah Beery Sr. was appearing on-stage, Noah Beery Jr. was given his lifelong nickname, "Pidge," by Josie Cohan, sister of George M. Cohan "I was born in the business," Pidge Beery observed some 63 years later. "I couldn't have gotten out of it if I wanted to." In 1920, the younger Beery made his first screen appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro (1920), which co-starred dad Noah as Sergeant Garcia. Thanks to a zoning mistake, Pidge attended the Hollywood School for Girls (his fellow "girls" included Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Jesse Lasky Jr.), then relocated with his family to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, miles from Tinseltown. While some kids might have chafed at such isolation, Pidge loved the wide open spaces, and upon attaining manhood emulated his father by living as far away from Hollywood as possible. After attending military school, Pidge pursued film acting in earnest, appearing mostly in serials and Westerns, sometimes as the hero, but usually as the hero's bucolic sidekick. His more notable screen credits of the 1930s and '40s include Of Mice and Men (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (again 1939, this time as the obligatory doomed-from-the-start airplane pilot), Sergeant York (1941), We've Never Been Licked (1943), and Red River (1948). He also starred in a group of rustic 45-minute comedies produced by Hal Roach in the early '40s, and was featured in several popular B-Western series; one of these starred Buck Jones, whose daughter Maxine became Pidge's first wife. Perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, Beery appeared with his camera-hogging uncle Wallace Beery only once, in 1940's 20 Mule Team. Children of the 1950s will remember Pidge as Joey the Clown on the weekly TV series Circus Boy (1956), while the more TV-addicted may recall Beery's obscure syndicated travelogue series, co-starring himself and his sons. The 1960s found Pidge featured in such A-list films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and as a regular on the series Riverboat and Hondo. He kicked off the 1970s in the role of Michael J. Pollard's dad (there was a resemblance) in Little Fauss and Big Halsey. Though Beery was first choice for the part of James Garner's father on the TV detective series The Rockford Files, Pidge was committed to the 1973 James Franciscus starrer Doc Elliot, so the Rockford producers went with actor Robert Donley in the pilot episode. By the time The Rockford Files was picked up on a weekly basis, Doc Elliot had tanked, thus Donley was dropped in favor of Beery, who stayed with the role until the series' cancellation in 1978. Pidge's weekly-TV manifest in the 1980s included Quest (1981) and The Yellow Rose (1983). After a brief illness, Noah Beery Jr. died at his Tehachapi, CA, ranch at the age of 81.

Trivia: Against some very long odds -- including being blacklisted -- Charles S. Dubin enjoyed a long and honored career as a director, primarily on television. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, Dubin was attracted to the arts while attending Samuel J. Tilden High School, and set the goal for himself of being an opera singer -- indeed, he wanted to be the next Feodor Chaliapin. He attended Brooklyn College, studying drama with Joe Davidson, the father of director Gordon Davidson, and graduated in 1941. He later trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in Manhattan under Sanford Meisner and also subsequently studied directing with Lee Strasberg. Dubin began performing in the Catskills, doing comedy, drama, and music, and was asked back as a director the following year. Thus began his directorial career, although standing six feet tall and extremely handsome, and possessed of a powerful voice, he couldn't avoid the inevitable offers of acting and singing work. After the Neighborhood Playhouse, Dubin moved on to the Papermill Playhouse and performed later professionally in Something for the Boys, understudying Allen Jenkins in the lead and in other productions, making his Broadway debut in early 1945; he also understudied William Gaxton and Victor Moore in Hollywood Pinafore, and performed with the Philadelphia Opera Company. Dubin was able to make the jump to the small screen when television became a commercially viable medium. In 1950, he was hired by ABC as an associate director and moved up to the director's chair a few months later; his first programs were Tales of Tomorrow, a science fiction anthology series, and a comedy series starring Peggy Ann Garner entitled Two Girls Named Smith. TV was all live in those days and Dubin became an expert at juggling actors, cameras, and microphones coherently and even artistically, on shows such as Motorola Playhouse, Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, and Philco Playhouse. On Omnibus, his productions included Advice to Bathers with Esther Williams, William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands, the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, and a brace of programs featuring Leonard Bernstein (including Young People's Concerts: What Does Music Mean?) and Agnes de Mille, dealing with music and dance, respectively. His reputation for being able to deliver quality quickly also got Dubin his first theatrical film credit, for the Alan Freed jukebox movie Mr. Rock and Roll (1957), featuring Clyde McPhatter, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, and an enviable array of other early rock & roll and R&B stars. By the mid-'50s he was working as the director of one of the medium's top-rated quiz shows, Twenty-One. In the spring of 1958, Dubin was called to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee, in its investigation of alleged Communist infiltration in the television and theater industries. Dubin refused to testify, asserting his right to silence under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, invoking the right 22 times. He later explained that he was not, at that time, a Communist Party member and had never known of any activity contrary to the interests of the United States, but also believed in his right not to testify. He was never cited for contempt, but NBC and the producers of Twenty-One dismissed the married father of two the next day. He didn't work in television for the next three years, until the makers of the series The Defenders hired him as a director -- he followed that with an episode of The Virginian, and then The Nurses, and suddenly he was back. After directing the 1964 television production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical Cinderella, Dubin became one of the busiest directors in television over the next 25 years, on series such as Ironside, Bracken's World, Room 222, Judd for the Defense, Cannon, Hawaii Five-O, Kung Fu, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Lou Grant, Sledge Hammer, and Matlock, though he probably made his greatest impact on the series M*A*S*H, for which he directed more than 50 episodes. In the mid-'70s, he also moved into miniseries and made-for-television features, among them episode two of Roots: The Next Generations and the 1979 remake of Topper with Kate Jackson and Andrew Stevens. He also directed his second feature film, Moving Violation (1976), a chase-thriller similar in plot to Richard Compton's Macon County Line (1974). Most of his work was confined to television, however, and beyond his activities for the commercial networks, Dubin also did top-notch work for PBS, including a special devoted to Agnes de Mille, and acclaimed dramas including The Belle of Amherst, starring Julie Harris. By the mid-'80s he had ten Emmy nominations to his credit, and was equally at home doing serious, high-brow subjects or light comedies. Dubin retired after 1989 at the age of 70, after 39 years in television and 48 years in entertainment. He died in 2011 at the age of 92.