Trivia: The younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, American actor Peter Graves worked as a musician and radio actor before entering films with 1950's Rogue River. At first, it appeared that Graves would be the star of the family, since he was cast in leads while brother Jim languished in secondary roles. Then came Stalag 17 (1953), in which Graves was first-rate as a supposedly all-American POW who turned out to be a vicious Nazi spy. Trouble was, Graves played the part too well, and couldn't shake the Nazi stereotype in the eyes of most Hollywood producers. Suddenly the actor found himself in such secondary roles as Shelley Winters' doomed husband in Night of the Hunter (1955) (he was in and out of the picture after the first ten minutes), while sibling James Arness was riding high with Gunsmoke. Dissatisfied with his film career, Graves signed on in 1955 for a network kid's series about "a horse and the boy who loved him." Fury wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but it ran five years and made Graves a wealthy man through rerun residuals--so much so that he claimed to be making more money from Fury than his brother did from Gunsmoke. In 1966, Peter Graves replaced Steven Hill as head honcho of the force on the weekly TV adventure series Mission: Impossible, a stint that lasted until 1973. Though a better than average actor, Graves gained something of a camp reputation for his stiff, straight-arrow film characters and was often cast in films that parodied his TV image. One of the best of these lampoonish appearances was in the Zucker-Abrahams comedy Airplane (1980), as a nutty airline pilot who asks outrageous questions to a young boy on the plane (a part the actor very nearly turned down, until he discovered that Leslie Nielsen was co-starring in the film). Peter Graves effortlessly maintained his reliable, authoritative movie persona into the '90s and 2000s, and hosted the Biography series on A&E, for which he won an Emmy; he also guest-starred on programs including Cold Case, House and American Dad. Graves died of natural causes in March 2010, at age 83.

Trivia: Fans of the original action /espionage series Mission Impossible (1966-70) may recognize black actor Greg Morris for playing electronics wizard Barney Collier. Morris spent most of his career on television, appearing on such shows as Ben Casey, The Dick Van Dyck Show and The Twilight Zone. During the 1970s, Morris was a regular on Vega$ (1978-81), playing police officer Lt. David Neslon. A native of Cleveland who spent part of his childhood in New York City, his mother worked as a secretary for black labor leader A. Phillip Reynolds. Before becoming a television actor during the early '60s, Morris attended Ohio State University and the University of Iowa. Morris passed away at the age of 61 on August 27, 1996. The cause of death was unreported.

Trivia: Actress Lynda Day George was quite busy on TV in guest-starring roles throughout the 1960s. Before she officially changed her professional name from "Day" to "Day George" -- to acknowledge her marriage to actor Christopher George -- Day George was a regular on The Silent Force, a 1970 Mission: Impossible clone. Ironically, one year later she was cast on the real Mission: Impossible as undercover operative Casey, a role she retained until the series' cancellation in 1973. While she has appeared in the occasional theatrical film, most of Day George's best work could be seen in such small-screen miniseries as Rich Man, Poor Man, Once an Eagle, and Roots. In the early '80s, Lynda Day George began turning down network roles to devote her energies to religious television, remaining active in this field long after the death of her husband in 1983.

Trivia: Born in Canada, he was brought up in New York City. For a while he was a professional swimmer in a water carnival. He became a stage actor, appearing in many productions in stock and on Broadway; he often appeared in Shakespeare. In the mid '40s he began working in films, at first in lead roles that tended to be introspective; as time went by, he was cast in secondary roles, often as a pessimistic bad guy. For his work in All the King's Men (1949) he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In the '60s his career began to dry up, and he appeared in many low-budget Italian films; however, he stayed busy as a screen actor into the '80s, often appearing in action or horror films. He co-directed and co-produced the film Outlaw Territory (1953). From 1949-56 he was married to actress Joanne Dru.

Trivia: Though weighing in at a sylphlike 155 pounds, Jack Ging starred for three years in the backfield of the University of Oklahoma football team. After a hitch in the Marines, Ging headed to Hollywood to break into the movies. He made his film debut in The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959), then secured the continuing role of Beau McCloud on TV's Tales of Wells Fargo (1961-62). From 1962 to 1964, Ging starred as clinical psychologist Paul Graham on the NBC weekly The Eleventh Hour. Jack Ging went on to play authoritative supporting roles in three TV series: Detective Chuck Morris in Dear Detective (1979), Lt. Ted Quinlan in Riptide (1984-85) and Sheriff Hollings in PS I Luv U (1991).

Trivia: Saturnine character actor Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News before switching to acting. In 1955, his career got off to a promising beginning, when out of 2,000 applicants, only he and one other actor (Steve McQueen) were accepted by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. Extremely busy in the days of live, Manhattan-based television, Landau made his cinematic mark with his second film appearance, playing James Mason's henchman in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In 1966, Landau and his wife Barbara Bain were both cast on the TV adventure/espionage series Mission: Impossible. For three years, Landau portrayed Rollin Hand, a master of disguise with the acute ability to impersonate virtually every villain who came down the pike (banana-republic despots were a specialty). Unhappy with changes in production personnel and budget cuts, Landau and Bain left the series in 1969. Six years later, they costarred in Space: 1999 a popular syndicated sci-fi series; the performances of Landau, Bain, and third lead Barry Morse helped to gloss over the glaring gaps in continuity and logic which characterized the show's two-year run. The couple would subsequently act together several times (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981) was one of the less distinguished occasions) before their marriage dissolved.Working steadily in various projects throughout the next few decades, Landau enjoyed a career renaissance with two consecutive Oscar nominations, the first for Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and the second for Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Landau finally won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood; his refusal to cut his acceptance speech short was one of the high points of the 1995 Oscar ceremony. He would continue to work over the next several years, appearing in movies like City of Ember and Mysteria, as well as on TV shows like Without a Trace and Entourage.

Trivia: Upon graduating from Nichols College, Charles Ruppert entered the professional world as a salesman. When he decided to switch to acting, Ruppert changed his name to Drake. In films from 1939, Drake was signed to a Warner Bros. contract and appeared in such films as The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), Dive Bomber (1942), Air Force (1943), and Mr. Skeffington (1944). Freelancing in the mid-'40s, he played the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers flick A Night in Casablanca (1946). Once he moved to Universal in 1949, Drake proved that the fault lay not in himself but in the roles he'd previously been assigned to play. He was quite personable as Dr. Sanderson in Harvey (1950) and thoroughly despicable as the cowardly paramour of dance-hall girl Shelley Winters in Winchester '73 (1950). One of his most unusual performances was as the ostensible hero of You Never Can Tell (1951), who after spending two reels convincing the viewer that he's a prince of a fellow, turns out to be the villain of the piece. Drake did some of his best work at Universal as a supporting player in the vehicles of his offscreen pal Audie Murphy. In 1955, Drake turned to television as one of the stock-company players on Robert Montgomery Presents; three years later, he was star/host of the British TV espionage weekly Rendezvous. Charles Drake prospered as a character actor well into the early 1970s.

Trivia: A former University of Illinois sociology major, ash-blonde leading lady Barbara Bain studied for a theatrical career at New York's Actors Studio and Neighborhood Playhouse. While attending an actor's workshop in 1956, Barbara made the acquaintance of an intense young performer named Martin Landau. It was love at first sight, and they married in 1957. Landau and Bain strove to maintain separate careers, and while her husband tended to work more often than she did, Barbara was well-represented with guest appearances on such series as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Get Smart and The Dick Van Dyke Show. In 1964, the Landaus worked together for the first time on an episode of The Greatest Show on Earth. They didn't care much for the experience, and vowed not to co-star again -- at least, not until producer Bruce Geller made them an offer they couldn't refuse with the weekly TV suspenser Mission: Impossible. Cast as silken espionage agent Cinammon Carter, Bain won three consecutive Emmies for her work on the series (if you're wondering why Cinammon never adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, it is because Bain suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup). Then, after three seasons' worth of Mission: Impossible, the Landaus quit the series in 1969, citing poor scripts and insufficient creative challenges. In later years, Bain would comment ruefully that leaving the show ruined her career. The record doesn't quite bear this out: indeed, during the early 1970s she racked up an impressive list of TV movie appearances, and was offered a great deal of money to reteam with Landau in the syndicated sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77). In 1989, Bain appeared in her very first theatrical feature, Trust Me (1989), playing a truculent, dishonest art collector. Though long-divorced from Martin Landau, Barbara Bain did not express an aversion to the possibility of playing a cameo alongside her ex-husband in the 1996 film version of Mission: Impossible, should either one of them be asked to do so (alas, they weren't).

Trivia: Chuck Hicks was both a character actor and a stunt man who worked in feature films, television and television commercials. He later became a stunt coordinator and an instructor.