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: Respected in North America and the United Kingdom, actor John Vernon has worked steadily on stage, television, and feature films since the 1950s. A native of Montréal, Canada, Vernon's formal studies began after he won a scholarship to London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Prior to attending the school, Vernon gained experience in amateur theater. During his time in London, Vernon worked with several repertory companies. In 1956, he voiced the part of Big Brother in 1984, but he did not make his formal film debut until 1958 in The Long Rifle and the Tomahawk. By the mid-'50s, Vernon had returned to Canada and went on to specialize in Shakespearean television shows and theater presentations. Vernon made his first Broadway bow in Royal Hunt of the Sun. From there he went to Hollywood to start a prolific career as a supporting and occasional lead actor. Vernon was frequently cast as a villain.

Trivia: Born Albert Hedison, David Hedison billed himself as Al Hedison when he signed his 20th Century-Fox contract in 1958. He was still Al when he starred in his best-known film, The Fly, as the unfortunate researcher who ends up as lunch for a slavering spider ("Hellllp meeeeee"). By 1959, he was David Hedison, both as leading man of the 17-episode TV series Five Fingers and as romantic lead of still another fantasy film, The Lost World (1960). In 1964, Hedison worked off his Fox contract in the role of Captain Lee Crane in the weekly TVer Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-67). The most amusing episode of that Irwin Allen production was a 1963 entry which utilized generous stock footage from Lost World, with Hedison "out of uniform" so that he could match shots of himself lensed three years earlier. In the last three decades, David Hedison has co-starred in numerous made-for-TV movies, and has been seen on two television soap operas: the daytime Another World and the nighttime The Colbys.