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: Born in California in 1936, Joel Fabiani went through a multitude of schools and jobs, in addition to a stint in the army, before returning to college, where he first started acting. Based in San Francisco, he trained at the Actors' Workshop and later moved to New York, where he began working in commercials. His first major acting credit was in the feature-length pilot episode for the television series Ironside. He later appeared on such prime time network shows as N.Y.P.D. and Marcus Welby, M.D., in addition to daytime dramas, including Dark Shadows and The Doctors. Fabiani's major bid for TV stardom came when he was spotted by producers of the British series Department S, who were putting together the cast and needed a muscular American to play Stewart Sullivan, the team's man of action. The series was sold around the world and ran in the U.S. (among other countries) for its 28-show 1969-1970 season. Fabiani returned to America after the series was over and did extensive television work -- including appearances on Columbo, The Cosby Show, and Murder, She Wrote -- and occasional film work, with roles in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Reuben, Reuben. He also had a long run on the soap opera All My Children beginning in 1999.

Trivia: In films since 1949's White Heat, American actor Ford Rainey most often played judges, doctors and police officials. Rainey's weekly TV roles included small-town newspaper editor Lloyd Ramsey in Window on Main Street (1961), research director Dr. Barnett in Search (1972) James Barrett in The Manhunter (1974) and Jim in The Bionic Woman (1975). Undoubtedly his most rewarding TV-series assignment was The Richard Boone Show (1963), in which, as a member of Boone's "repertory company," he was allowed to essay a different role each week. When last we saw Ford Rainey, he was playing a big-time counterfeiter on Wiseguy (1987).