Trivia: Ex-telephone lineman Guy Madison was serving his country in the Navy at the time he made his screen debut as an extra in David Selznick's Since You Went Away (1944). After the war, Madison was signed by RKO, where he was given the star buildup in such films as Till the End of Time (1946) and Honeymoon (1947). Unpleasant publicity surrounding his stormy marriage to actress Gail Russell very nearly put an end to Madison's burgeoning career. Salvation came in the form of a syndicated TV series, Wild Bill Hickok, which starred Madison in the title role and which ran from 1951 through 1958. Thanks to his Hickok popularity, Madison was able to secure major roles in such "A" pictures as The Charge at Feather River (1953) and On the Threshold of Space (1956). After the cancellation of Wild Bill Hickok in 1958, Guy Madison's star faded somewhat, though he went on to make a good living as a leading man in German and Italian westerns and swashbucklers of the 1960s.

Trivia: White-haired, patriarchal Canadian actor Lorne Greene attended Queen's University in pursuit of a chemical engineering degree. Amateur college theatricals whetted his appetite for the stage, and upon graduation he decided upon a performing career. He started out on radio, eventually emerging as Canada's top newscaster, designated "the voice of the CBC" (For a while, Greene managed a mail-order announcer's school; one of the "pupils" was Leslie Nielsen). Moving to New York in 1950, Greene became a stage, film and TV actor, co-starring on Broadway with Katherine Cornell in Prescott Proposals and in films with the likes of Paul Newman, Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford, generally in villainous roles. In 1959, Greene was cast as Ben Cartwright, owner of the Ponderosa ranch and father of three headstrong sons, in TV's Bonanza. He would hold down this job until 1972; during the series' run, Greene unexpectedly became a top-ten recording artist with his hit single "Ringo." Upon the cancellation of Bonanza, Greene vowed he'd retire, but within one year he was playing a private detective on the brief TV weekly Griff. Five years later, he starred on the network sci-fier Battlestar Gallactica. Active as chairman of the National Wildlife Foundation, Greene put forth the organization's doctrine in his popular syndicated TV series Lorne Greene's Last of the Wild. His final weekly television appearance was on the 1980 adventure series Code Red. In 1987, Lorne Greene was all set to recreate Ben Cartwright for the 2-hour TV movie Bonanza: The Next Generation, but he died before shooting started and was replaced by John Ireland.

Trivia: American actor Barry Atwater was tall enough but not handsome enough to be a leading man, so his film and TV career found him playing villains, authority figures and medical men. A stage and TV veteran, Atwater's first film appearance was in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) though you'd never know it from the opening credits. Longtime fans of the ABC daytime drama General Hospital will recall Atwater's performances as Dr. John Prentice, who married nurse Jessie Brewer (Emily McLaughlin) and later was unceremoniously murdered. Barry Atwater's most spectacular acting assignment was as Janos Skorzeny, the modern-day vampire terrorizing Las Vegas in the classic made-for-TV chiller The Night Stalker (1956).

Trivia: American character actor Rudy Bond was brought to Hollywood in 1951 to recreated his stage role of Steve in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). He spent the next thirty years hopping back and forth between California and New York for stage and screen assignments, with the occasional TV gig thrown in. Bond played Moose in the Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront (1954); in Twelve Angry Men (1957), Bond had the non-angry part of the Judge in the film's opening sequence; in The Godfather (1972), the actor appeared as Cuneo. Rudy Bond died in Denver, Colorado, where he was appearing in a play.

Trivia: American actor Trevor Bardette could truly say that he died for a living. In the course of a film career spanning three decades, the mustachioed, granite-featured Bardette was "killed off" over 40 times as a screen villain. Entering movies in 1936 after abandoning a planned mechanical engineering career for the Broadway stage, Bardette was most often seen as a rustler, gangster, wartime collaborator and murderous backwoodsman. His screen skullduggery carried over into TV; one of Bardette's best remembered video performances was as a "human bomb" on an early episode of Superman. Perhaps being something of a reprobate came naturally to Trevor Bardette -- or so he himself would claim in later years when relating a story of how, as a child, he'd won ten dollars writing an essay on "the evils of tobacco," only to be caught smoking behind the barn shortly afterward.

Trivia: Rickie Sorenson was a child star of the late '50s and early '60s; while he did appear in a couple of feature films, he was primarily a television actor. He first acted in a failed pilot for a Tarzan television series that was eventually compiled with two other unsuccessful Tarzan pilots, all starring Gordon Scott, and released as Tarzan and the Trappers (1958). Sorenson played the jungle boy Tantu. From 1961 to 1962, he played Tommy Banks in the television sitcom Father of the Bride. He later guest starred occasionally on other series. In 1963, Sorenson voiced the character Wart in Disney's animated feature The Sword in the Stone.

Trivia: A stage actor from 1938, American-born Frank Richards made his earliest recorded-film appearance in 1940. Generally cast as stubble-chinned heavies and slick gangsters, he also served as an "art director" for the 1946 Western Rustler's Roundup. More notable among his 200 or so on-camera television credits was his bad-guy role on the 1951 Superman episode "A Night of Terror." Richards' last film was John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence in 1974. He died in 1992.

Trivia: The face of American actor Myron Healey was not in and of itself villainous. But whenever Healey narrowed his eyes and widened that countenance into a you-know-what-eating grin and exposed those pointed ivories, the audience knew that he was about to rob a bank, hold up a stagecoach, or burn out a homesteader, which he did with regularity after entering films in the postwar years. Still, Healey could temper his villainy with a marvelous sense of humor: for example, his hilarious adlibs while appearing in stock badguy roles in such TV series as Annie Oakley and Gene Autry. With 1949's Colorado Ambush Healey broadened his talents to include screenwriting. Usually heading the supporting cast, Myron Healey was awarded a bonafide lead role in the 1962 horror film Varan the Unbelievable (a Japanese film, with scattered English-language sequences), though even here he seemed poised to stab the titular monster in the back at any moment.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1937.