Trivia: After a four-year hitch with the Naval Reserve, actor Steven Hill made his first New York stage appearance in Ben Hecht's A Flag is Born (1946), which also featured a young Marlon Brando. Hill made his film debut in 1950, then returned to the Navy for two more years before settling down to acting on a permanent basis. He was particularly busy in the so-called Golden Age of live TV drama, appearing in such prestigious video offerings as The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti (1959). In 1966, he was cast as Daniel Briggs--as in "Good morning, Mr. Briggs"--on the hit TV adventure series Mission: Impossible. He left this lucrative assignment in 1967, reportedly because his Orthodox Jewish faith prevented him from filming on weekends; his replacement was Peter Graves as "Mr. Phelps" (in 1989, Hill guest-starred on the short-lived Mission: Impossible revival). Hill remained very much in demand throughout the 1980s and 1990s playing parental and authority-figure roles in such films as Yentl (1983) Heartburn (1986) and Billy Bathgate (1991). Contemporary TV viewers are most familiar with Steven Hill for his work as Michael Steadman's father on thirtysomething (1987-91) and DA Adam Schiff on the weekly TVer Law and Order, a role he stayed with from 1990 to 2000. Hill died in 2016, at age 94.

Trivia: Following his screen debut in 1949's Twelve O'Clock High, Richard Anderson was groomed for stardom at MGM. His stature in Hollywood seemed assured when he married the daughter of former MGM luminary Norma Shearer. But Anderson was -- by his own admission -- a less-than-noble figure in his younger days, losing both prestige and several plum film roles through his arrogance, his explosive temper, and his after-hours carousing. A kinder, mellower Richard Anderson resurfaced on television in the 1970s, gaining a modest but loyal fan following thanks to his weekly appearances as Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man. Anderson also played Goldman on the spin-off series The Bionic Woman -- the result being that, for several years in the mid-1970s, he was simultaneously co-starring on two different TV series in the same role. Richard Anderson's additional TV-series stints included Mama Rosa (1950), Bus Stop (1961), Dan August (1970), Cover-Up (1984) and Dynasty (1986-87 season).

Trivia: Georgia-born Joanna Moore spent two decades of her life in acting, a profession that she claimed never to have really wished to pursue. And across that time she got to play a couple of highly visible parts in important movies: she was the daughter of the murder victim whose killing starts the action in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) and was the learning-disabled prostitute in Edward Dmytryk's A Walk on the Wild Side (1962). But despite those two stand-out credits and movie-star looks, she had the misfortune to have come along too late to make a lasting impression. Born Dorothy Cook in Americus, GA, in 1934, she didn't begin her screen acting career until the mid-'50s, a point where television had started to overwhelm the movie business, leaving no more room for studios to develop young talent. As a result, as beautiful as she was, Moore spent most of her career on the small screen, on anthology shows such as Lux Video Theater, or doing one-shot appearances on The Rifleman, Riverboat, Adventures in Paradise, and the countless other dramatic series that filled the home screen. She took what there was in feature film work, the dubious (Monster on the Campus) and the good (The Last Angry Man), but following Walk on the Wild Side, her best opportunities came from Elvis Presley (Follow That Dream), and the Disney organization, which memorably cast her as femme fatale Desiree de la Roche in Son of Flubber (1963). She did work in some better quality dramatic series, such as Route 66 and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but her best career opportunity seems to have come along in 1963, when Moore was cast as Peggy MacMillan, the new love interest for Sheriff Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) on The Andy Griffith Show, but that proved to be only a four-episode gig. It did allow her to show off her range in comedy as well as drama, however, and even to sing the folk song "Down in the Valley" in one show, and it became the screen role for which she may be best remembered.Moore married actor Ryan O'Neal that same year, and became much better known in the press from that personal union than for any of her screen work; O'Neal's sudden rise to fame with the advent of the series Peyton Place in 1964 made them one of the most visible (and attractive) young couples in Hollywood during the mid-'60s. Moore kept very busy during this period, working in episodes of everything from My Three Sons to Gunsmoke, and she even turned up on Peyton Place in 1966. By 1967, however, the marriage -- which produced two children, Tatum O'Neal and Griffin O'Neal -- had ended in divorce. By the end of the 1960s, Moore's personal life had begun falling apart, and she lost custody of both children owing to substance abuse problems. She was still extremely busy, however, appearing in Robert Altman's 1968 space-exploration feature film drama Countdown, as well as sitcoms (The Governor and J.J.) and television dramas (Judd for the Defense) right into 1970. After that, her appearances became much more sporadic, and it was said that Moore was living a post-hippie lifestyle on various communes when she wasn't working in episodes of Kung Fu or making a rare feature film appearance in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg (1975), where she was almost lost amid the all-star cast of the gargantuan disaster movie. She made two on-screen appearances in the 1980s, but otherwise had been unseen in the 20 years before her death in 1997.