Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Gordon Pinsent is one of Canada's busiest and most recognizable character actors. Many viewers remember Pinsent as the President of the United States in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969). Kids have heard him as the voice of the title character in the animated HBO series Babar (1989-93). Pinsent's other weekly TV roles have included Sergeant Scott in The Forest Rangers (1964), the title character in Quentin Dergens MP (1966), Hap Shaughnessy in Red Green (1990- ) and Sergeant Frazer in Due South (1994-95). Gordon Pinsent has also occasionally written and directed, performing both functions in the 1968 Canadian feature film John and the Missus.

Trivia: She trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater and began appearing in films in 1957. She also did much work onstage and on TV; she was a regular on the TV series Peyton Place. After 1970 her screen appearances were infrequent; however, she participated in the American Film Institute's workshop program for women and directed short films and episodes of TV series. She was also a skilled aviator; she survived the crash of a Piper Cub in 1966, and in 1970 she won the Powder Puff Derby air race and was named Pilot of the Year. Later she attempted to become the first woman to fly a single-engine plane solo from New York to Moscow; she reached Denmark but then was denied permission to enter Soviet air space. She authored a memoir, Odyssey (1983). She died of cancer in 1990.

Trivia: Richard Carlson received his M.A. at the University of Minnesota and taught there briefly before working in the theater as an actor, director, and writer. He appeared on Broadway, then was brought to Hollywood in 1938 by David O. Selznick, who hired him as a writer assigned to work on the film The Young at Heart; Janet Gaynor, the film's star, urged that he appear in the movie, which became his debut. After that, he had lead and costarring roles in many films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Typecast early in his career as a diffident juvenile, he had trouble breaking out of the mold and landing more mature roles; he tended to appear in monster flicks and B-movies in the '50s. He turned to directing in that decade, beginning with Riders to the Stars (1954), which he also wrote and in which he acted. Besides acting and directing, he also became a magazine writer and wrote scripts for TV. Carlson starred in the TV series I Led Three Lives and McKenzie's Raiders and appeared in episodes of numerous others.

Trivia: The son of a real-estate man, blonde, athletic John Charles Andes became Keith Andes when signed to a contract by David O. Selznick in the 1940s. At that time, Andes, a recent Temple University graduate, was a member of the Army Air Force, touring in the all-serviceman stage production Winged Victory. His stage reputation rested on his rich baritone singing voice, which he seldom got to utilize in his film and TV work. After several failed pilot films, Andes was given his own starring series in 1959: the syndicated This Man Dawson, in which he played an ex-military man hired to clean up a corrupt police department in a unnamed city. To bone up on his role, Andes was permitted to sit in on the LAPD three-man board which determined who would be selected as police officers--and became so adept at his "job" that he ended up rejecting a few candidates! Andes' later TV work included a 13-week stint as Glynis Johns' long-suffering husband on the 1963 sitcom Glynis. Never completely abandoning the stage, Keith Andes co-starred with Lucille Ball in the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat, and later in the decade headlined a touring company of Man of La Mancha.