Trivia: Most filmgoers and television viewers know Jason Evers for his performances on such series as The Guns of Will Sonnett, movies like The Green Berets, and guest-starring roles on programs such as Star Trek ("Wink of an Eye"). In reality, the actor has had a much longer career than those movie and television credits rooted in the 1960s and 1970s. Born Herbert Evers in the Bronx, NY, in 1922, he was the son of a theatrical ticket agent. Evers left De Witt Clinton High School before graduation in order to pursue an acting career and landed an apprenticeship with the Ethel Barrymore Colt Jitney Players, with whom he toured the country for two years at the end of the 1930s. In the early '40s, he was signed up by producer Brock Pemberton, who cast him in his breakthrough part, as Pvt. Dick Lawrence in the play Janie. That play established Evers as a handsome male ingenue, of a type similar to contemporaries such as Van Heflin, Van Johnson, and Bill Williams. He subsequently endured a series of flop plays, as well as two years in uniform. After returning to civilian life, Evers resumed his career, principally in road company productions, including a tour of I Am a Camera with Veronica Lake. By then Evers was married to actress Shirley Ballard and the two frequently found themselves struggling financially between roles. Strangely enough, their marriage ended just at a point when the two were working together in a successful Broadway play entitled Fair Game. By 1960, Evers was ready to make the jump to the potentially greener pastures of the West Coast, and possible film work. He landed the leading role in a summer replacement television series called Wrangler, portraying a rugged, laconic cowboy. In the bargain, he also traded in his first name for the smoother and more manly Jason Evers. The series wasn't picked up for the regular season but Evers was on the map, his new name and image working very much in his favor. Jason Evers was a fresh name and face, and he had also acquired an intense, edgy quality, in sharp contrast to the callow handsomeness of his image in the 1940s and 1950s. Herbert Evers seemed a slightly bland leading man, but Jason Evers, in name and image, conveyed intensity and even danger. He did a few small movie roles at the outset of the decade, and then got the only starring screen role of his career -- unfortunately, the latter was in the horror thriller The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962). The actor -- credited as Herb Evers -- played a scientist obsessed with the idea of keeping the severed head of his fiancée alive. Luckily, no one of any consequence in the entertainment industry ever saw the film (which has since been embraced by bad-movie cultists, and has turned up on Mystery Science Theater 3000), or tied "Herb Evers" up with Jason Evers. In 1964, he got another crack at a series with Channing, a topical drama set at a university -- a kind of collegiate answer to Mr. Novak -- co-starring Henry Jones. That program failed to find an audience, but by then, Evers was making a massive number of guest-star appearances, on series as different as Gunsmoke and Star Trek, often playing villains. He also played important supporting roles in feature films, including an excellent performance in The Green Berets, as the doomed Captain Coleman, the outgoing commander of the forward base where John Wayne's Colonel Kirby tries to make a stand. Evers landed what was arguably his best television role on the series The Guns of Will Sonnett, portraying Jim Sonnett, the gunslinger who is the object of a search through the West by his father (Walter Brennan) and son (Dack Rambo). Evers was perfect as Jim Sonnett, grim and taciturn and, yet, beneath his nasty veneer as a tired veteran gunman, concerned for the well-being of his father and son once he knows they are looking for him. The only problem with the role was that he hardly ever got to play it -- as the object of the quest at the center of the series' plot, he only actually appeared onscreen a handful of times during the two-year run of the series. Still, it was an actor's dream of a part, in the sense that his character was discussed prominently in every episode, and figured in virtually every plot complication and development; no performer could ask for a better lead-in than that to his actually taking the stage, and his appearances were memorable. Evers' career began to wind down during the 1970s, amid roles of varying size in such movies as Escape From the Planet of the Apes and Barracuda, and the horror-exploitation movie Claws. Evers has been in retirement since the mid-'80s, although he did briefly return to work, portraying a role in Basket Case 2 (1990).

Trivia: Eddie Carmel was a giant-sized performer who appeared in two feature films. He was a well-known celebrity in his time, during the 1950s and 1960s, one of a small, unusual group of actors -- which included the likes of Rondo Hatton and Andre the Giant -- whose careers onscreen were made possible by diseases that ultimately doomed them. Carmel was a victim of acromegalia, the same pituitary gland disorder that afflicted 1940s actor Rondo Hatton. In contrast to Hatton -- who contracted the disease as an adult and manifested enlargements of his facial features, joints, and extremities, making him ideal for monstrous roles -- Carmel developed the disease when he was in his teens; the result was an immense growth of his whole body, to a height of nearly nine feet. Carmel was born in Palestine in 1936, and in 1939 he came to the United States when his parents moved back to the Bronx, NY, where most of his family lived and where they'd originally come from. He was a perfectly normal boy until age 15, when he suddenly fell violently ill, for no discernible reason. His violent fevers settled down, and a series of tests revealed the cause as acromegalia, a rare and -- at that time -- incurable disease, caused by a tumor on the pituitary gland. He began to grow at a frightening pace, shooting up several feet in the next few years. In grade school, he was known as friendly, outgoing, and good-natured, but he became bitter as he passed seven and then eight feet in height in his teens. Trapped in an outsized body, he was unable to find a way for himself in the world, or even a job that he could do. Carmel, with his eight-and-a-half foot frame and elongated features (typical for sufferers of the disease), was accustomed to attracting attention and didn't mind it, except when children were afraid of him, or when he was singled out while trying to engage in his private life. He tried to find a productive side to his situation by working for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, billed as "the tallest man in the world," and was profiled memorably on the television series You Asked for It in the late '50s; on that program, he looked far older than his mid-twenties, even allowing for the distortion of his features. For a time, he even worked for entertainment impresario Joe Franklin, answering phones in his office. Like Rondo Hatton before him, Carmel finally tried to take advantage of his affliction -- or perhaps he was taken advantage of because of his affliction -- by going into the movies. By the 1960s, however, there was no organized Hollywood studio system, with its established B-movie units, to offer Carmel even what little dignity that Hatton had found at Universal Pictures. Instead, he went to work for independent producer Rex Carlton, playing "the monster" (as he was billed) in The Brain That Wouldn't Die, shot in Tarrytown, NY -- not much more than his arm was seen in most of his scenes, and the movie was so ineptly made that when Carmel appeared, one could scarcely tell how big he was. He also later worked in 50,000 B.C. (Before Clothing), an independent vehicle built around the work of comedian Charlie Robinson. In neither case did any of the roles involve "acting" as an actor would define it; like Rondo Hatton in most of his movies, Carmel merely had to look menacing, which he could do simply by standing in a room. Indeed, in 1970, Carmel and his parents were the subjects of an acclaimed picture by award-winning photographer Diane Arbus taken in the family's apartment, which showed the frightening contrast between the huge man, bending his head and shoulders and leaning on a cane to stand, and his parents, literally half his size, standing before him. Carmel died of heart failure in 1972 at the age of 36, his height somewhere between 8'9" and nine feet tall.