Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: Yale-educated actor Murvyn Vye was closely associated with the Theatre Guild in the 1940s, originating the role of Jigger Craigin in the Guild's 1945 staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. Vye brought his froglike countenance to Hollywood in 1947. In his first film, Golden Earrings, he played the gypsy who warbled the title song. Vye went on to play a dour Merlin in the Bing Crosby version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949) before returning to Broadway. He was cast as the Kralahome in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I, but left the production during tryouts when his songs were cut. Back in Hollywood, Vye continued essaying sinister film and TV roles throughout the 1950s. For reasons best known to himself, he went unbilled in the important part of Joan Collins' martini-imbibing husband in Leo McCarey's Rally Round the Flag, Boys (1959). In 1961, Vye was cast as the hero's general factotum in The Bob Cummings Show (not to be confused with Love That Bob), an assignment which lasted all of 13 weeks. Murvyn Vye's last film was the independent, Manhattan-based Andy (1965).

Trivia: A former secretary, Julie Adams inaugurated her film career in a series of slapped-together westerns starring James Ellison and Russell Hayden. She billed herself under her real name of Betty Adams until she was signed by Universal in 1949; she then became Julia Adams, which was modified to Julie by the early 1950s. Fans of the 1953 horror film Creature From the Black Lagoon tend to believe that Julie became a leading lady on the strength of her role in this film as the imperiled--and fetchingly underclad--heroine. In fact, she had been cast in good parts as early as 1950, notably the wealthy fiancee of newly blinded GI Arthur Kennedy in Bright Victory (1951). Curiously, some of her largest roles of the 1950s, in films like The Private War of Major Benson (1955) and Away All Boats (1956), were her least interesting. She cut down on her film appearances in the early 1960s to concentrate on television, a medium that permitted her to hold out for meatier acting assignments. Though she still tended to be cast in such negligible roles as the star's wife in The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971), Julie was proud of her many powerful guest-star appearances on dramatic programs: she was particularly fond of her performance as a middle-aged pregnant woman on a 1969 installment of Marcus Welby MD. Julie Adams was at one time married to actor/director Ray Danton.