Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: American actor James MacArthur was the adopted son of stage legend Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur. Despite his mother's insistence that James have a normal childhood, it was difficult not to be intoxicated by the theatre when growing up around the greatest acting and literary talent in the '40s. At age 8, young MacArthur appeared in a stock-company production of The Corn is Green. Fresh out of Harvard, MacArthur became a movie juvenile, specializing in tortured-teen roles in such films as The Young Stranger (1957) and Disney's Light in the Forest (1958). Outgrowing his somewhat charming awkwardness, MacArthur was less satisfying as a standard leading man, and by 1967 he was wasting away in pictures like The Love Ins. That same year, the pilot film for a new Jack Lord cop series, Hawaii Five-O, was screened for a test audience. The group liked the film but not the young man (Tim O'Kelly) who played Lord's assistant, deeming him too young for the part. Hawaii producer Leonard Freeman then called upon 30-year-old MacArthur, with whom Freeman had worked on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang 'Em High. From 1968 through 1979, MacArthur played Hawaii Five-0's detective Danny Williams, always handy whenever Jack Lord felt the need to snap "Book 'em, Danno." Though the series enriched MacArthur and made him a vital member of the Honolulu society and business world, the actor finally packed it in after 11 seasons, when it seemed as though he'd be Danno forever (the show continued for one more season). Too wealthy to care about a career at this point, James MacArthur still took an occasional role into the '80s; his most prominent post-Hawaii assignment was the 1980 TV movie Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story, in which he played a rare non-sympathetic character. MacArthur died in October 2010 of natural causes at age 72.

Trivia: Although Brandon DeWilde's mother was an actress and his father a stage manager, the boy didn't express any interest in performing himself until show business was virtually thrust upon him. In 1950, a friend of DeWilde's father, a Broadway casting director, mentioned that he was looking for a sensitive youngster to play a key juvenile role in the upcoming production A Member of the Wedding. DeWilde senior volunteered Brandon; despite a shaky opening night, the 7-year-old boy stayed with the show for well over a year, winning the coveted Donaldson Award for his performance--the first child actor to do so. Brandon was brought to Hollywood in 1952 for the film version of Wedding. One year later, he was Oscar-nominated for his unforgettable performance as a hero-worshipping frontier boy in George Stevens' Shane. In 1954, he was starred in the brief TV sitcom Jamie, holding his own opposite veteran scene-stealer Ernest Truex. DeWilde made a successful transition to teenaged roles as the unwed father in 1959's Blue Denim. He went on to play the younger brother of Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1961) and the nephew of Paul Newman in Hud (1963)--in both instances displaying his now-familiar character traits of idolatry and disillusionment. While in Denver to appear in a 1972 stage production of Butterflies are Free, 30-year-old Brandon DeWilde was killed in an auto accident.

Trivia: Though many viewers will associate him exclusively with Asian character roles in Hollywood features, Hawaii native Randall Duk Kim actually gained his footing as a classically trained thespian in Shakespearean plays, many of which were mounted at the New York Shakespeare Festival during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Kim hardly limited his on-stage activity to the musings of the great Bard, however, with a resumé that included leads and supporting roles in dozens of non-Shakespearean plays -- everything from J.B. Priestley's When We Are Married to Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. One of his most prestigious accomplishments involved founding the American Players Theater in Wisconsin with Charles Bright and Anne Occhiogrosso. Kim's endless panoply of on-stage accomplishments brought him an off-Broadway Obie Award for "Sustained Excellence of Performance" in theatrical work. Unsurprisingly, Kim's Hollywood assignments (which began in 1994, after a 20-year stint focusing exclusively on the theater) represented several steps down in terms of sophistication and, as indicated, often typecast him in stock ethnic roles in martial arts or fantasy films. Credits included the epic Anna and the King (1999), the effects-laden action opus The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and the CG-animated action comedy Kung Fu Panda (2008).