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: Possibly in defiance of the old adage "those that can't do, teach," American actor Harold Gould gave up a comfortable professorship in the drama department of the University of California to become a performer himself. Building up stage and TV credits from the late '50s onward, Gould made his first film, Two for the Seesaw, in 1962. He divided his time between stage and screen for the rest of the '60s, winning an Obie Award for the off-Broadway production Difficulty of Concentration. Gould was prominently cast in such slick '70s products as The Sting (1973), Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975), and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976) (as a classically gesticulating villain). Often nattily attired and usually comporting himself like a wealthy self-made businessman, Gould was generously employed on TV for three decades. He co-starred with Daniel J. Travanti in the 1988 American Playhouse production of I Never Sang for My Father, played WASP-ish Katharine Hepburn's aging Jewish lover in the TV movie Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986), and had regular stints on such series as The Long Hot Summer (1965), He and She (1967), Rhoda (1974) (as Rhoda's father), The Feather and Father Gang (1977), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), Park Place (1981) Foot in the Door (1983), Spencer (1984) and Singer and Sons (1990). However, when the time came in 1974 to make a series out of the pilot film for Happy Days, an unavailable Harold Gould was replaced by Tom Bosley.