Trivia: Saturnine character actor Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News before switching to acting. In 1955, his career got off to a promising beginning, when out of 2,000 applicants, only he and one other actor (Steve McQueen) were accepted by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. Extremely busy in the days of live, Manhattan-based television, Landau made his cinematic mark with his second film appearance, playing James Mason's henchman in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In 1966, Landau and his wife Barbara Bain were both cast on the TV adventure/espionage series Mission: Impossible. For three years, Landau portrayed Rollin Hand, a master of disguise with the acute ability to impersonate virtually every villain who came down the pike (banana-republic despots were a specialty). Unhappy with changes in production personnel and budget cuts, Landau and Bain left the series in 1969. Six years later, they costarred in Space: 1999 a popular syndicated sci-fi series; the performances of Landau, Bain, and third lead Barry Morse helped to gloss over the glaring gaps in continuity and logic which characterized the show's two-year run. The couple would subsequently act together several times (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981) was one of the less distinguished occasions) before their marriage dissolved.Working steadily in various projects throughout the next few decades, Landau enjoyed a career renaissance with two consecutive Oscar nominations, the first for Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and the second for Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Landau finally won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood; his refusal to cut his acceptance speech short was one of the high points of the 1995 Oscar ceremony. He would continue to work over the next several years, appearing in movies like City of Ember and Mysteria, as well as on TV shows like Without a Trace and Entourage.

Trivia: A former University of Illinois sociology major, ash-blonde leading lady Barbara Bain studied for a theatrical career at New York's Actors Studio and Neighborhood Playhouse. While attending an actor's workshop in 1956, Barbara made the acquaintance of an intense young performer named Martin Landau. It was love at first sight, and they married in 1957. Landau and Bain strove to maintain separate careers, and while her husband tended to work more often than she did, Barbara was well-represented with guest appearances on such series as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Get Smart and The Dick Van Dyke Show. In 1964, the Landaus worked together for the first time on an episode of The Greatest Show on Earth. They didn't care much for the experience, and vowed not to co-star again -- at least, not until producer Bruce Geller made them an offer they couldn't refuse with the weekly TV suspenser Mission: Impossible. Cast as silken espionage agent Cinammon Carter, Bain won three consecutive Emmies for her work on the series (if you're wondering why Cinammon never adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, it is because Bain suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup). Then, after three seasons' worth of Mission: Impossible, the Landaus quit the series in 1969, citing poor scripts and insufficient creative challenges. In later years, Bain would comment ruefully that leaving the show ruined her career. The record doesn't quite bear this out: indeed, during the early 1970s she racked up an impressive list of TV movie appearances, and was offered a great deal of money to reteam with Landau in the syndicated sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77). In 1989, Bain appeared in her very first theatrical feature, Trust Me (1989), playing a truculent, dishonest art collector. Though long-divorced from Martin Landau, Barbara Bain did not express an aversion to the possibility of playing a cameo alongside her ex-husband in the 1996 film version of Mission: Impossible, should either one of them be asked to do so (alas, they weren't).

Trivia: Prior to his stage work with the Old Vic and other such venerable British theatrical institutions, Jeremy Kemp was trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Attaining nationwide popularity on the long-running BBC crime series Z Cars, Kemp quit the series cold in 1965 to concentrate on films. Those film historians who've summed up Kemp's post-Z Cars TV appearances as "sporadic" evidently haven't seen his small-screen work in such miniseries as Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance (he played German general Armin Von Roon in both); he also played Cornwall in Sir Laurence Olivier's 1983 television adaptation of King Lear, and was featured in the internationally produced historical multiparters George Washington (1985) and Peter the Great (1986). Exuding class and professionalism from every pore, Kemp was afforded ample screen time as Sir John Delaney in the 1994 box-office hit Four Weddings and a Funeral. Evidently, Jeremy Kemp expends all his energy on his acting: when asked in 1981 to list his favorite off-stage hobbies, he wrote "Bad sports and pure idleness."

Trivia: The son of a London shopkeeper, Barry Morse enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at age 15. Upon graduation, Morse spent four years in provincial repertory, playing (by his own count) some 300 roles. In 1942 he made his first film appearance in Will Hays's The Goose Steps Out. Firmly established in London theatrical circles by 1951, he starred in an early BBC telecast of Hamlet--then left for Canada, where he would spend the next decade. Dubbed "the Laurence Olivier of Canada" by more than one admirer, Morse appeared with regularity on the CBC, occasionally producing and directing as well. He began dividing his time between Toronto and Hollywood in 1959, showing up in such American TV anthologies as Playhouse 90 and The Twilight Zone. In 1963, he was hired by producer Quinn Martin to play the diligent Lieutenant Girard in the popular weekly series The Fugitive. Morse's post-Fugitive television work includes two weekly series, The Adventurer (1974) and Space: 1999 (1975-77), and any number of specials and miniseries. Barry Morse's best performances of the past two decades include his interpretation of Menachem Begin in the American miniseries Sadat (1980) and his hilarious turn as a numbskull American president (who happens to be a former movie actor!) in the London Weekend Television black comedy Whoops Apocalypse (1982). Morse died in February 2008 at age 89.

Trivia: An Australian actor with a cult following in England and America, Nick Tate has enjoyed a successful career on three continents since the 1970s. Nicholas John Tate was born in Sydney, Australia, into a family of British and Russian extraction, with actors (and singers) on both sides going back two generations -- his father, John Tate (1914-1979), was a busy character actor whose movie appearances later included roles in On the Beach (1959) and The Day of the Triffids (1962). A performing career might have seemed a natural choice for Nick, but his parents initially tried to discourage this, hoping that he would choose a more conventional career. By age 14, however, Tate was playing the title role in the Sydney Opera Company's production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. That led to an entrée to Australian radio and, later, the fledgling television industry, for which he intended to work behind the camera, as a technician and director, learning the technical side of the visual medium over the next few years. By the mid-'60s, however, Tate was once again pursuing aspirations as an actor, encouraged by those around him who felt his talent and his rugged good looks would translate well in any medium. After a two-year interruption for the army, Tate returned to civilian life and immediately began getting stage and television work. In 1965, he emigrated to England, in part to restore some kind of contact with his father, who had moved to England in the wake of the breakup of his marriage to Tate's mother. What work the younger Tate got was mostly in action and crime series, such as Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars -- which, ironically enough, were also the kinds of series in which John Tate appeared -- along with small roles in major movies, including A Man For All Seasons and Battle of Britain. Tate subsequently returned to Australia to work in a musical version of The Canterbury Tales and out of that got a leading role in an Australian television series called Dynasty (1970), in a role that teamed him onscreen with his father, who retired following the run of the series. Tate continued to do theatrical work, juggling it with television appearances, but by the mid-'70s he had returned to England. It was on that occasion that he was called in to read for the producers of a pilot for an intended new science fiction series called Space: 1999, which was to be distributed internationally. He was originally cast as a lunar pilot who is killed off in the first episode, but he was good enough that, in a casting shuffle, he won the co-starring role of Alan Carter, the chief pilot of Moonbase Alpha, a part that had to be rewritten for him to play it as an Australian. Tate's two seasons on Space: 1999 gave him a worldwide following, and his was easily the most popular character on the series, a resourceful, no-nonsense man of action, a sort of futuristic equivalent to the RAF pilots of World War II. His work on the series didn't distract him from more serious roles, however, and he was also cast in Fred Schepisi's The Devil's Playground in the part of Brother Victor, a role for which he won several acting awards. Tate's subsequent films have included Summerfield, The Gold and the Glory, and Cry Freedom, and he has also done a large amount of television work in England and Australia; he even managed to slip in work in the late '80s on the FOX network series Open House, which, for a change of pace, was a sitcom. Tate has since appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Murder, She Wrote, and JAG, and also portrayed Noodler in Steven Spielberg's Hook. In the 1990s, he also established himself as a voice artist, including work on the new run of episodes of Jonny Quest, among other animated series. After the dawn of the new century, Tate brought his family and career back to Australia, where, in addition to acting, he went on to write and direct.