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: A graduate of the University of Minnesota, baleful-eyed, prematurely gray Charles Cioffi made his first off-Broadway appearance in William Gibson's A Cry of Players. Cioffi continued as a familiar presence on the off-Broadway scene, finally making his on Broadway bow in 1990's Stand-Up Tragedy. In his film and TV work, Cioffi has most often been seen as an excitable police official or an uptight executive with something to hide (e.g., the sexually deviant "solid citizen" Peter Cable in Klute). His television work has encompassed a number of daytime soap operas, including Another World, Where the Heart Is, Ryan's Hope, and Days of Our Lives (as Ernest Toscano). Charles Cioffi has also been a regular in the prime-time weeklies Assignment: Vienna (1971), Get Christie Love! (1974), and the 1989 revival of Kojak.

Trivia: Actress Rita Wilson has played supporting and leading roles on television and in feature films. Her first TV work was the recurring role of Nurse Lacey on the long-running CBS sitcom M*A*S*H. An athletic beauty, Wilson had leading roles in two short-lived series, The Cheerleaders (1976) and The Beach Girls (1977). She made her film debut in Cheech & Chong's Next Movie (1978). Though she could have continued her career playing fluffy roles, Wilson had higher aspirations and accepted an invitation to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. When not studying, Wilson honed her dramatic skills at the Macowan Theatre in London. Upon her return to the U.S., Wilson co-starred with Tom Hanks in Volunteers (1985). A romance flowered between the two and they married three years later. In 1993, Wilson played one of her best-known roles, that of Suzy, the girl who falls to pieces while describing the movie An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle. Wilson had a rare starring role opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the holiday comedy Jingle All the Way (1996). Wilson has subsequently divided her time between films and television work, appearing in Hanks' feature directorial debut That Thing You Do! (1996) as well as such popular sitcoms as Mad About You and Frasier in addition to the acclaimed Hanks-produced miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. After a turn in Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho, Wilson could be seen in such romantic comedy/dramas as Runaway Bride and The Story of Us before her role as Leelee Sobieski's ill-fated mother in The Glass House (2001). In 2002 she had a huge hit as a producer when she helped bring the indie smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding to the big screen, and she got good reviews playing the wife of sex-addicted celebrity Bob Crane in Paul Schrader's drama Auto Focus. She went on to appear in Raise Your Voice, The Chumscrubber, Old Dogs, It's Complicated, and Larry Crowne, while she scored another success as a producer with the ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia!