Trivia: Guy Williams never became a movie star despite his good looks and a charismatic screen presence, but on television he was a star twice over, in the 1960s as Professor John Robinson on the Irwin Allen-produced series Lost in Space and, for those with longer memories, in the title role of the Walt Disney-produced series Zorro; he also cut a memorable presence in a series of episodes of Bonanza during the early '60s, as a cousin of the Cartwrights from south of the border. Born Armando Catalano in New York City, he was the son of one of Italy's champion swordsmen, and he was an expert fencer himself by the time he was in his teens. His good looks made him a natural as a model, and he appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines during the early to mid-'40s. In 1946, at the age of 23, he was signed to MGM, but the studio's declining postwar period proved a dead end of tiny bit roles that went nowhere. He studied acting with Sanford Meisner and was serious about being more than a model who could read lines, but it wasn't until the 1950s that he got his chance. In 1952, Williams was signed to Universal-International, where he finally began getting some respectable screen time, once he got past his initial Universal appearance, in Bonzo Goes to College and a thankless role in Nathan Juran's swashbuckler The Golden Blade. In The Mississippi Gambler (1953), The Man From the Alamo (1953), and The Last Frontier (1956), Williams played small to medium-sized supporting roles that showed him off to good advantage as an actor. His career seems to have stalled at the point where he appeared in American International Pictures' release of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). In 1957, however, Williams became a star on television when he was chosen to play the title role in the Disney television series Zorro. It was only in production for two seasons, but Disney's perpetual presence on television brought Williams' dashing heroic figure into households for years after the initial run had ended. Williams was subsequently pegged by the producers of Bonanza as a potential replacement for Pernell Roberts in the series, and he was tried out in the role as the Mexican-born cousin of the Cartwrights across numerous episodes. In 1963, he also starred in the German-made international film Captain Sinbad, directed by American adventure film specialist Byron Haskin. In 1964, Williams was cast in the most familiar role of his career, as Professor John Robinson on the series Lost in Space (1965-1968); although he was a co-star with June Lockhart, he came to be partly overshadowed by Billy Mumy and Jonathan Harris in the story lines. Nevertheless, he provided a firm dramatic anchor for the series. As with most of the cast of Lost in Space, work was relatively hard to come by once it was canceled, but Williams evidently had no worries about money, having done well in his own investments and various business ventures. He also discovered on a visit to South America that he was very much a pop culture hero in most of Latin America, where Zorro had been an enormous success on television and was seemingly being rerun in perpetuity. He moved to Buenos Aires, enjoying a very comfortable retirement from the mid-'70s, and died of a heart attack there in 1989.

Trivia: The daughter of actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, June Lockhart made her own acting bow at age 8. In 1938, the 12-year-old June appeared in her first film, A Christmas Carol (1938), in which her parents portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cratchit. Few of her ingenue roles of the 1940s were memorable, though Lockhart did get to play the title character in The She-Wolf of London (1945) (never mind that she turned out not to be a she-wolf by fadeout time). In 1958, Lockhart took over from a recalcitrant Cloris Leachman in the role of rural wife and mother Ruth Martin on the long-running TV series Lassie. Though she professed to despise the role, Lockhart remained with the series until 1964, and over 20 years later satirically reprised the character on an episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show. She went on to play the young matriarch of the "space family Robinson" on the Irwin Allen TV endeavor Lost in Space (1965-68), and portrayed a lady doctor on the last two seasons of the bucolic sitcom Petticoat Junction. In deliberate contrast to her TV image, Lockhart enjoyed a bohemian, kick-up-your-heels offscreen existence. At one juncture, she was fired from her co-hosting chores at the Miss USA pageant when it was revealed that (gasp!) she was living with a man much younger than herself. June Lockhart is the mother of Anne Lockhart, a prolific TV actress in her own right.

Trivia: One of the best child actors of the 1950s and 1960s, freckled-faced Billy Mumy performed with a directness and sincerity that put many an adult performer to shame. Before he was even ten years old, Mumy had played two of the most unforgettable juveniles in TV history: malevolently telekinetic Anthony Fremont on the 1961 Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," and the pistol-toting protagonist of "Bang! You're Dead," an incredibly suspenseful 1962 installment of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, directed by Hitchcock himself. In films from 1963, Mumy's finest cinematic hour-and-a-half was as Erasmus Leaf, an 8-year-old math genius with an all-consuming crush on Brigitte Bardot, in 1965's Dear Brigette. From 1965 to 1968, Mumy appeared as Will Robinson on the popular TV sci-fi fantasy series Lost in Space. As Mumy matured, he found roles harder to come by, though he was given generous screen time in the 1971 Stanley Kramer production Bless the Beasts and Children and was a regular on the 1975 TV weekly Sunshine. He kept busy in the 1980s on the sci-fi convention lecture circuit and as a scriptwriter; he also played cameo roles in remakes of "It's a Good Life" (the middle section of the 1983 Twilight Zone feature film) and "Bang! You're Dead" (one of the components of the 1985 TV revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents). The many fans of Bill Mumy's previous work in the realm of "fantastic television" were delighted in 1995 to find him playing the recurring role of Lennier on the syndicated TVer Babylon 5.

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.