Trivia: Actor James Hong was working as a nightclub comic in San Francisco and Hawaii when he was tapped for his first regular TV role: "Number One Son" Barry Chan in the Anglo-American co-production The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957). Hong would later appear as Frank Chen in Jigsaw John (1976) and Wang in Switch (1977-78). In theatrical features, he played characters bearing such flavorful monikers as Chew, Lo Pan and Bing Wong. He was seen as Faye Dunaway's butler in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), repeating the role (minus Faye) in the 1990 sequel The Two Jakes. One of his most sizeable screen roles was Lamont Cranston's brainy assistant Li Peng in The Shadow (1994). James Hong has also directed a brace of feature films, including 1979's The Girls Next Door and 1989's The Vineyard.

Trivia: Actress Diane Baker's well-scrubbed, all-American beauty has frequently been employed as a cool veneer for film characters of smoldering passions. The daughter of actress Dorothy Harrington, Diane was studying at USC when she was tapped for her first film role as Millie Perkins' sister in 20th Century-Fox's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); the studio then cast Diane as Pat Boone's "girl back home," who didn't get to go along on Boone's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). She remained at Fox until 1962, essaying the title role in the studio's re-remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1961). Her most famous screen assignment was at Columbia, where she portrayed axe murderess Joan Crawford's supposedly well-balanced daughter in Straitjacket (1963). Diane became a documentary director in the 1970s with Ashanya, and a producer with Never Never Land (1982). The best of Diane Baker's latter-day roles was the media-savvy politico mother of the kidnap victim in Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Trivia: American actor Hugh O'Brian accrued his interest in acting while dancing with movie starlets at the Hollywood Canteen during his wartime Marine days. O'Brian attended the University of Cincinnati briefly, and later supported himself selling menswear door-to-door. He made his first film, Never Fear, in 1950, working but sporadically during the next five years; what few acting parts he received were on the basis of his broad shoulders and six-foot height. In one film, Fireman Save My Child (1954), O'Brian was cast because he and costar Buddy Hackett physically matched the previously filmed long shots of Fireman's original stars, Abbott and Costello. Answering a cattle-call tryout for the new ABC TV western Wyatt Earp in 1955, O'Brian was almost instantly chosen for the leading role by author Stuart Lake, who'd known the real Wyatt and had been his biographer for many years (reportedly Earp's widow also okayed O'Brien after a single glance). O'Brian became a major TV star thanks to Wyatt Earp, which ran for 249 episodes until 1961. The series was not only tough on the actor but on his fans; reportedly there was a sharp increase in gun accidents during Wyatt Earp's run, due to young would-be Earps who were trying to emulate Wyatt's fast draw (this despite the fact that the TV Earp, like the real one, used his firearms only when absolutely necessary). Like most western TV stars, O'Brian swore he was through with shoot-em-ups when Earp ceased production, and throughout the '60s he worked in almost every type of film and theatrical genre but westerns. He showed considerable skill in the realm of musical comedy, and became a top draw in the summer-stock and dinner theatre circuit. In 1972, O'Brian starred in the computer-happy secret-agent TV series Search, which lasted only a single season. As he became the focus of hero worship from grown-up Baby Boomers, O'Brian relaxed his resistance toward Wyatt Earp and began showing up on live and televised western retrospectives. The actor reprised the Earp role in two 1989 episodes of the latter-day TV western Paradise, opposite Gene Barry in his old TV role of Bat Masterson. He was Earp again in the 1991 TV movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, in which he managed to shine in the company of several other cowboy-show veterans (including Barry, again) and was permitted to walk into the sunset as an offscreen chorus warbled the Wyatt Earp theme music! Hugh O'Brian's most recent turn at Ol' Wyatt was in a hastily assembled CBS movie mostly comprised of clips from the old Earp series, and released to capitalize on Kevin Costner's big-budget Wyatt Earp film of 1994. O'Brian died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: Peter Lawford was a bushy-browed, slender, aristocratic, good-looking British leading man in Hollywood films. At age eight he appeared in the film Poor Old Bill (1931); seven years later he visited Hollywood and appeared in a supporting role as a Cockney boy in Lord Jeff (1938). In 1942 he began regularly appearing onscreen, first in minor supporting roles; by the late 1940s he was a breezy romantic star, and his studio promised him (incorrectly) that he would be the "new Ronald Colman." His clipped British accent, poise, looks, and charm made him popular with teenage girls and young women, but he outgrew his typecast parts by the mid '50s and spent several years working on TV, starring in the series Dear Phoebe and The Thin Man. Off screen he was known as a jet-setter playboy; a member of Frank Sinatra's "Rat Pack," he married Patricia Kennedy and became President John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law. From the 1960s he appeared mainly in character roles; his production company, Chrislaw, made several feature films, and he was credited as executive producer of three films, two in co-producer partnership with Sammy Davis Jr. In 1971-72 he was a regular on the TV sitcom The Doris Day Show. He divorced Kennedy in 1966 and later married the daughter of comedian Dan Rowan. He rarely acted onscreen after the mid-'70s.

Trivia: Leading man James Wainwright excelled in school, particularly in his art classes, but upon landing an art scholarship at Carnegie University, he abruptly switched gears and joined the Marines. After his discharge, he held down a variety of jobs before finding his true niche in the theater. Polishing his craft at the Actors Studio, Wainwright headed to Hollywood at age 30. At first cast as brutish villains, he was humanized somewhat in a recurring role on TV's Daniel Boone. In 1972, he landed the starring role of Bureau of Missing Persons investigator Frank Dain on the weekly actioner Jigsaw. James Wainwright has since been seen in character parts in films, and as "mad scientist" Simon Quaid in the 1980 TVer Beyond Westworld.

Trivia: Supporting and character actor Herve Villechaize appeared in 13 feature films, but he is best remembered for playing Tattoo, Ricardo Montalban's chirpy sidekick on Fantasy Island (1978-1983). Born to a French father and English mother, Villechaize was a dwarf who stopped growing taller after hitting 3'9". Before becoming an actor, Villechaize studied art in Paris and New York. Deciding acting was the better venue, he studied under drama teacher Julie Bovasso. He made his feature film debut in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971) and went on to play small "novelty" roles in exploitation and cult movies such as Malatesta's Carnival and Oliver Stone's Seizure (1974). One of his more notable roles was that of an evil dwarf in the James Bond thriller The Man With the Golden Gun (1974). Villechaize was married three times. On September 4, 1993, he fatally shot himself, allegedly to escape his many health problems.