Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: A graduate of NYU, American actor Richard Masur has been seen in supporting TV and movie roles since the early 1970s. His pliable facial features, boyish demeanor and indeterminate age have enabled Masur to play a rich variety of roles: a mentally retarded stockboy on All in the Family, a hotshot program manager on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and even a "friendly stranger" child molester in the 1981 TV movie Fallen Angel. Masur's film credits include Semi-Tough (1977); Who'll Stop the Rain (1978); My Girl (1991), as Jamie Lee Curtis' prickly ex-husband; and the deservedly maligned Heaven's Gate (1980). Masur has also been a regular on several TV series: From 1975 through 1976, for example, he was divorcee Bonnie Franklin's much-younger boyfriend (and almost her second husband) on One Day at a Time. In 1987, Masur made his film directorial bow with the Oscar-nominated short subject Love Struck, but he continues to work primarily as an actor in both TV and film.

Trivia: The oldest of three sons of Broadway star Alan Arkin, American actor Adam Arkin has had stage and movie work, but is best known for his TV assignments. In 1977 Arkin was starred in his first series, the one-season sitcom Bustin' Loose, wherein the 21-year-old actor played a man finally escaping his overprotective parents. Arkin went on to play an inner-city biology teacher in the brief 1982 TV series Teachers Only; a Chicago bookie in the short-lived 1986 weekly Tough Cookies; and an attorney in 1988's A Year in the Life, which lasted eight months of our lives. In 1990, just when it seemed as though Arkin was going to become the King of Cancellation, he made the first of many guest appearances on the quirky CBS series Northern Exposure as Adam, the sociopathic, in-your-face hermit/gourmet chef. The character reappeared sporadically until 1993, sometimes as a welcome touch of anarchy, other times as merely a loud-mouthed royal pain. In 1994, Adam Arkin was given his most recent crack at regular weekly series work, playing a dedicated but mercurial doctor on the TV drama Chicago Hope, where he was matched insult for insult by the equally obstreperous Mandy Patinkin. Though that well-regarded series came to a close in 2000, Arkin continued to work steadily in both movies and TV appearing in a diverse string of projects including A Slight Case of Murder, the sitcom Baby Bob, and the Will Smith vehicle Hitch. He had a major part on the short-lived TV series Life starting in 2007, and in 2009 appeared in the Coen Brothers Best Picture nominee A Serious Man. He also maintained a steady career as a director of series television helming episodes of Monk, Ally McBeal, and Grey's Anatomy. In 2012 he could be seen in The Sessions, a film that won the audience award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.