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: Michigan-born actor Michael Tolan is a graduate of Wayne State University. Tolan made his Broadway bow in the original 1955 production of George Axelrod's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, then went on to appear in such long-runners as A Hatful of Rain and Romanoff and Juliet. Reportedly in films from 1953 (he is credited in many sources with a bit in Julius Caesar), Tolan has essayed such character roles as Dr. Ballinger in All That Jazz (1980) and Mr. Polhemus in Presumed Innocent (1990). Continually busy on television, Michael Tolan was seen on a weekly basis as resident Dr. Alex Tazinski during the 1964-65 season of The Nurses, and as administrative aide Jordan Boyle on the 1970 Hal Holbrook starrer The Senator.

Trivia: Severn Darden was born in New Orleans, educated at Mexico City College, and given his first professional acting opportunity at Virginia's Barter Theater. A charter member of the Compass Theater, the improvisational group that would later evolve into Second City, Darden distinguished himself as an "intellectual" monologist, effortlessly weaving allusions to Freud and Kant into his hilariously nonsensical ramblings. From 1963's Goldstein onward, Darden worked in films as a character actor and sometimes writer/director. He chalked up quite a few eccentric characterizations in films like Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). He was at the top of his form in The President's Analyst (1967) as Kropotkin, a gay Soviet counterintelligence agent who turns out (much to his own surprise) to be one of the film's heroes. The peripatetic Severn Darden settled down long enough to appear as a TV-series regular on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1977; as Popesco), Beyond Westworld (1980; as Foley), and Take Five (1987; as psychiatrist Noah Wolf).

Trivia: American stage actress Marj Dusay began making films in the mid '60s. She had supporting roles in productions like Sweet November (1968), Pendulum (1968), the Clint Eastwood-directed Breezy (1973), MacArthur (1976) and Made in Heaven (1987). Television has also afforded Dusay ample opportunity to flex her acting muscles. Marj Dusay played Myrna Clegg on the daytime drama Capitol (1982-87), then went on to a stint as Pamela Capwell on another soap, Santa Barbara (1984-92).

Trivia: Tough-guy American actor James Luisi could usually be found playing cops or plainclothes detectives. Luisi spent four (1976-80) years in the role of Lt. Doug Chapman on TV's The Rockford Files, later repeating the characterization (now promoted to Captain) in two Rockford TV-movies of the mid-1990s. On daytime TV, he was seen as Phil Wainwright in Another World. James Luisi's TV resumé also included the roles of garage owner Harry Foreman in Harris and Company (1979) and police lieutenant Marciano in Renegades (1983).