Trivia: Van Williams is best remembered for having played the title role in the 20th Century Fox television series The Green Hornet (1966-1967). At the end of the 1950s, he was one of the more promising leading men signed by Warner Bros.' television division. In a group that included Troy Donahue, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Roger Smith, Williams probably had the strangest route to being discovered. Born in Fort Worth, TX, to a cattle-ranching family, he graduated from Texas Christian University and became a professional diver based in Hawaii. He was earning extra money working at industrialist Henry J. Kaiser's Hawaiian Village, and happened to be teaching two of Kaiser's guests -- producer Mike Todd and his wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor -- how to dive, when Todd suggested that the 23-year-old Williams go for a screen test. The producer was killed in a plane crash before the screen test could be done, but Williams still managed to get his shot at an acting career, on the small screen, with help from actress Lurene Tuttle after he arrived in Hollywood. At her urging, he took speech and drama lessons and was ready when a spot opened up in a television production starring Ronald Reagan. A small role followed, and then a contract with Warner Bros. television -- after playing a guest role in an episode of the series Lawman, Williams was cast in the detective series Bourbon Street Beat, set in New Orleans, which wasn't successful. This was followed, however, by Surfside 6, a similar series about private investigators set in Miami, FL, which ended up running for four seasons and took full advantage of Williams' good looks and muscular build. Williams followed it up with a supporting role in The Tycoon, a comedy series starring Walter Brennan and Jerome Cowan, which lasted for only one season -- he had little to do in that program, alas, except play it straight to Brennan's cantankerous multi-millionaire senior citizen, for whom his character worked. Following the cancellation of The Tycoon, Williams was up for the role of a submarine commander in a proposed World War II action series, Pursuit and Destroy, that never made it into production. Instead, he took the role with which he has been most identified for more than 30 years, Britt Reid (aka the Green Hornet) in the 1966-1967 ABC series The Green Hornet. The program ran for only one season, but developed a strong cult following, largely due to the presence of Williams' co-star, Bruce Lee, who dazzled audiences every week with his exhibitions of martial arts skills. Williams had the bad fortune to be caught playing a dual role that didn't really constitute a complete character between them. His portrayal of Britt Reid suffered from the limited time that the character was on the screen, while he was, in turn, limited in what he could do as an actor playing the Green Hornet, who had to remain a man of mystery to those around him. One actually knew more, in terms of background and interior emotional life, about Lee's Kato than one did about Williams' Britt Reid/the Green Hornet. Following the cancellation of the series, Williams made some guest appearances on shows such as Mannix and The Big Valley, and sitcoms like Nanny & The Professor. The best performance of his whole career, however, was probably in the 1974 Gunsmoke episode "Thirty a Month and Found," which garnered strong critical praise on its original airing. Williams obviously found some favor with Gunsmoke star James Arness, because he played in three episodes of Arness' later series How the West Was Won. His last attempt at a series of his own came in 1975 with Westwind, but during the 1980s, as his acting career slowed, he took on numerous outside business interests, including cattle ranches in Texas, Idaho, and Hawaii. He still made a rare foray or two back into television, most notably in "Love Is the Word," a 1979 episode of The Rockford Files, starring his old Warner Bros. stablemate James Garner. He has also served as an auxiliary volunteer for the Los Angeles County Sheriffs' Department. Because of the association of The Green Hornet with Lee's memory, and the reissue of several episodes of the show in edited form on DVD, Williams remains a fondly remembered leading man from 1960s television. Williams died in 2016, at age 82.

Trivia: Born in San Francisco to Eurasian parents, Bruce Lee moved to Hong Kong when he was three. There, the young actor played tough juvenile roles in several films, using the professional name Li Siu-Lung (Little Dragon). As scrappy offscreen as on, Lee learned to channel his pugnaciousness into the rigidly disciplined field of martial arts while attending St. Francis Xavier College. Returning to the U.S., Lee majored in Philosophy at the University of Washington and supported himself as a kung fu instructor. While participating in a martial arts competition in Long Beach, CA, Lee was selected to play the role of faithful valet Kato on the 1966 TV series The Green Hornet. (After his death, several episodes of the series were cobbled together into a "feature film," with Lee afforded top billing over nominal Green Hornet star Van Williams.) He received his first American film role in Marlowe (1969) on the recommendation of screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who attended Lee's kung fu classes. Having lost the leading role in the TV series Kung Fu to David Carradine, Lee decided to prove his box-office value by starring in several low-budget martial arts efforts financed by Hong Kong producer Raymond Chow. On the strength of these efforts, Warner Bros. signed Lee to star in his signature film, Enter the Dragon (1973), which made money by the truckload. He made his directorial debut in what many consider his best film, 1973's Return of the Dragon. It would be the last film that the actor would complete. While in Hong Kong filming The Game of Death, Lee collapsed on the set, apparently suffering an epileptic seizure. After taking a pain killer, he fell asleep -- and never woke up. Rumors still persist that Lee was killed by a group of kung fu experts who resented the actor for exposing their "trade secrets" to the world. Whatever the circumstances of his death, Lee's legend did not die with him. For several years thereafter, "new" films appeared composed of outtakes and stock footage from previous Lee films; in addition, audiences were subjected to scores of imitators, most of them with soundalike names (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, et al.) In a grimly ironic twist, Bruce Lee's son, actor Brandon Lee, also died under mysterious circumstances while making a film in 1993.

Trivia: Wende Wagner (sometimes credited as Wendy Wagner) was a gorgeous actress who never reached the stardom to which she seemed destined. This was mostly owing to her free-spirited nature, which made her a poor fit to the careerist demands of movie and television success. She was a natural athlete, her Naval officer father a former Olympic coach and her mother an ex-skier. She came by her dark, exotic looks naturally, a product of her mixed German, French, and Native American ancestry. Wagner got her start as a model in her late teens, and she made her screen acting debut at age 19 in an episode of Wagon Train. She might well have parlayed that appearance into more acting work, but Wagner was much more interested in seeing exotic locations and in athletics, especially swimming. Her next steady entertainment work was as a stunt double in the underwater sequences on the series Sea Hunt. That job put her in contact with underwater filming expert Ricou Browning and producer Ivan Tors, who later used Wagner in the series The Aquanauts, and also on the film September Storm, where she met her future husband, fellow stunt diver Courtney Brown. When Tors and Browning were working on the series Flipper in the mid-'60s, Wagner finally got a credited acting role -- and a co-starring one at that -- in one episode, entitled "Flipper's Monster," in which she showed her considerable onscreen charm for the first time, playing (surprise) an actress/diver making an underwater adventure film. Wagner did straight acting roles in the movies Rio Conchos (1964), in which she portrayed a Native American girl, and she later brought her acting and swimming abilities together in the movies Out of Sight and Destination Inner Space (both from 1966). That same year, she was cast in a co-starring role in the 20th Century Fox television series The Green Hornet as Lenore "Casey" Case, the secretary to the hero, Britt Reid (Van Williams), and one of three people who knows his secret identity. The series lasted only one season. Wagner's biggest film role came in 1968 in Rosemary's Baby, playing Tiger, the girlfriend of Rosemary (Mia Farrow). She had a role in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), but the rest of her work was in television, through the early '70s. Wagner left the business in 1973 to raise a family. She passed away in 1997 from cancer.

Trivia: It's hard to believe that American actor Walter Brooke, who always looked about 45 years old, actually made his first film in 1942 when he was all of 27. Confined for the most part to B productions after his film debut in Bullet Scars (1942), Brooke's film roles improved as he grew into his familiar businesslike demeanor, as in his plot-motivating character in Conquest of Space (1953). Character actors never seem to be out of work, and Brooke was no exception. A full two decades after his film bow, he was still getting good parts in films like The Graduate (1967) (as Mr. Maguire) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In between film assignments, Brooke kept busy on television. Among his many guest-starring spots (including the 1963 Twilight Zone episode "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain"), Walter Brooke played Bill Herbert for two years on the early serial One Man's Family (1950-52); he was a regular two other soap operas, Three Steps to Heaven (1953) and Paradise Bay (1965); and he was seen as District Attorney Scanlon on the adventure series The Green Hornet (1966), costarring with Van Williams and a young Bruce Lee.

Trivia: Red-haired character-actor Michael Gough was brought to Hollywood in 1948 after 14 years on Broadway. Gough's burgeoning film career was cut short when he was blacklisted on the basis of alleged communist ties; likewise prohibited from working in films was Gough's wife, Karen Morley. The most immediate effect of Gough's blacklisting occurred in the opening titles of RKO's Rancho Notorious (1952); though Gough was prominently cast as the film's principal villain, RKO head man Howard Hughes, a rabid commie-hater, demanded that the actor's name be removed from the credits. Gough retreated to the stage, returning before the cameras in the 1960s, by which time Hollywood's witch-hunt mentality had dissipated. One of his first "comeback" roles was as Michael Axford in the 1966 TV series The Green Hornet. In the 1976 film The Front, Lloyd Gough was reunited with several other former blacklistees, including actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and Joshua Shelley, director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein.