Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: Kam Fong was an actor who was best known to millions of television viewers for his portrayal of Sgt. Chin Ho Kelly on the first 10 seasons of the series Hawaii Five-O. He came from a place far away from acting, however, though very much a part of the series' later setting. Born Kam Tong Chun in Honolulu in 1918, he grew up in dire poverty, owing to a split in his family -- over his father's extramarital affair -- that led to his father's exile from the family business. His mother supported the family, in part, by making bootleg whiskey, and he spent a part of his childhood hiding her product from the police. He graduated from President William McKinley High School in 1938 and later found work as a boilermaker at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, where he witnessed the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base on December 7, 1941. He continued as a civilian defense worker through the war. In January 1944, he lost his first wife, Esther, and children Marilyn and Donald in a freak accident when two B-24 bombers collided over Honolulu and incinerated their home. He tried to drink himself to death and, failing that, came within seconds of shooting himself, until his mother interceded. In 1946, he joined the Honolulu Police Department, and later admitted that initially he hoped to be killed in the line of duty. He got his life back together over the next few years, and remarried in 1949, and had four children. He served on the police force for 16 years before retiring, and after that sold real estate, worked as a disc jockey, and started to dabble in local theater work. His name change, from Kam Tong Chun to Kam Fong Chun, initially came about when he was a young boy when a teacher misunderstood his real name.In 1966, when pre-production began on the pilot episode for Hawaii Five-O, the call went out for anyone in the island state with acting experience. At the time, Hawaii had no film facilities or movie industry, and barely any acting community, and Fong's community theater work was relevant, although he wasn't inclined to do anything about the opportunity. It was his real estate partner who signed him up for an audition without his knowledge and persuaded him to go. As soon as producer Leonard Freeman and the rest of the production crew saw him read, and then discovered he was a 16-year veteran of the Honolulu Police Department, the role of Chin Ho was his. The only request that the CBS network made was that he shorten his name, which was how he became Kam Fong. Over his 10 seasons on the series, Fong was one of the most popular members of the cast, with the public as well as his fellow actors. Audiences responded to the personal qualities that he brought to the role, particularly his serious yet gentle demeanor; and also to the verisimilitude his presence gave the series. Accounts say his technical expertise behind the scenes, and the tweaking of the scripts he helped provide, was almost as valuable as his acting. Fong was a mainstay of the cast across 10 years. By 1978, however, the now nearly 60-year-old Fong had decided to give up the grind of weekly series work. He also felt he and the writers had gone as far as they could with the Chin Ho Kelly character, who was killed off in the final episode of the season. He subsequently returned to acting in two episodes of Magnum P.I., another series shot in Hawaii, and made a run for governor of Hawaii at the end of the 1980s. In 1997, when Stephen J. Cannell tried to revive Hawaii Five-O, he got several ex-cast members back to reprise their roles, including Fong (the producer was apparently unaware that Fong's Chin Ho Kelly had been killed off in season 10, a fact that was only recalled after shooting was concluded, far too late to rewrite or re-edit his part, and the character was left in). Fong, a long-time smoker (who reportedly wanted to be buried with a cigar and three packs of cigarettes), died of lung cancer in 2002. His son Danny Chun is also an actor.

Trivia: German-born Hans Gudegast was still in his teens when he made his first film appearance in The Colossus of Rhodes (1957). Spending virtually his entire career in Hollywood, Gudegast achieved TV fame as the eternally outflanked Afrika Korps officer Hauptman on the weekly TV series The Rat Patrol (1967-1969). Sensing that he'd forever be typecast as a Nazi under his given name, Gudegast changed his professional cognomen to Eric Braeden in 1970 (he reportedly borrowed the name of his home town in Germany, though some sources indicate that he was actually born in Kiel). The actor's instincts were correct: under his new professional name, Braeden was afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his versatility as both leading man -- he was Charles Forbin in Colossus: The Forbin Project -- and villain. He was often called upon to convey insufferable arrogance, vide his memorable appearance as a media critic on an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (that's the one where Braeden received a pie in the face, courtesy of Ted Knight). Eric Braeden's best-known characterization was as the smoothly sinister Victor Newman in the CBS daytime drama The Young and the Restless. Braeden played a small role as the wealthy John Jacob Astor in 1997's mega-hit Titanic, and co-starred in the comedy Meet the Deedles the following year. Following a long run on The Young and the Restless, Braeden co-starred with fellow Titanic alumni Billy Zane in The Man Who Came Back (2008), and took on the role of Robin Scherbatsky, Sr. for the television series How I Met Your Mother.

Trivia: Met her husband, director-producer R.W. Goodwin, on the set of the early-'70s drama Men at Law. Hired for her role as Margaret Scully on The X-Files without letting the casting office know she was married to Goodwin, the show's executive producer. Since 1993, has lived in Washington state, where she has performed in local theater. Has a psychotherapy practice; majored in both psychology and theater in college.

Trivia: American entertainer Peggy Ryan came from a large vaudevillian family, billed as the Merry Dancing Ryans; she was onstage from infancy and in films from age 6 (The Wedding of Jack and Jill [1930]). Peggy's peak movie years were 1941-1945, during which she was costarred in several lightweight musicals with fellow Universal contractee Donald O'Connor. Ryan and O'Connor usually played teenaged sweethearts who found themselves hoofing away at the drop of an orchestra leader's baton (though O'Connor was larger and more mature looking, Ryan was in fact the older of the two). So locked in was Ms. Ryan with her costar that, while she was performing a musical number with Lou Costello in Here Come the Co-Eds (1945), Costello airily remarked "I feel just like Donald O'Connor." Ryan and O'Connor were also a popular fixture of USO tours, at least until O'Connor himself was put into uniform. Her film career faltered as she grew older, though Ryan remained in musicals until 1953's All Ashore, in which she appeared opposite Mickey Rooney. After running her own dance school, Peggy Ryan retired to Hawaii, returning before the cameras occasionally in the Honolulu-filmed TV series Hawaii 5-O.