Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma carpet layer, James Garner did stints in the Army and merchant marines before working as a model. His professional acting career began with a non-speaking part in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), in which he was also assigned to run lines with stars Lloyd Nolan, Henry Fonda, and John Hodiak. Given that talent roster, and the fact that the director was Charles Laughton, Garner managed to earn his salary and receive a crash course in acting at the same time. After a few television commercials, he was signed as a contract player by Warner Bros. in 1956. He barely had a part in his first film, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), though he was given special attention by director David Butler, who felt Garner had far more potential than the film's nominal star, Tab Hunter. Due in part to Butler's enthusiasm, Garner was cast in the Warner Bros. TV Western Maverick. The scriptwriters latched on to his gift for understated humor, and, before long, the show had as many laughs as shoot-outs. Garner was promoted to starring film roles during his Maverick run, but, by the third season, he chafed at his low salary and insisted on better treatment. The studio refused, so he walked out. Lawsuits and recriminations were exchanged, but the end result was that Garner was a free agent as of 1960. He did quite well as a freelance actor for several years, turning in commendable work in such films as Boys' Night Out (1962) and The Great Escape (1963), but was soon perceived by filmmakers as something of a less-expensive Rock Hudson, never more so than when he played Hudson-type parts opposite Doris Day in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All! (both 1963).Garner fared rather better in variations of his Maverick persona in such Westerns as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and The Skin Game (1971), but he eventually tired of eating warmed-over stew; besides, being a cowboy star had made him a walking mass of injuries and broken bones. He tried to play a more peaceable Westerner in the TV series Nichols (1971), but when audiences failed to respond, his character was killed off and replaced by his more athletic twin brother (also Garner). The actor finally shed the Maverick cloak with his long-running TV series The Rockford Files (1974-1978), in which he played a John MacDonald-esque private eye who never seemed to meet anyone capable of telling the truth. Rockford resulted in even more injuries for the increasingly battered actor, and soon he was showing up on TV talk shows telling the world about the many physical activities which he could no longer perform. Rockford ended in a spirit of recrimination, when Garner, expecting a percentage of the profits, learned that "creative bookkeeping" had resulted in the series posting none. To the public, Garner was the rough-hewn but basically affable fellow they'd seen in his fictional roles and as Mariette Hartley's partner (not husband) in a series of Polaroid commercials. However, his later film and TV-movie roles had a dark edge to them, notably his likable but mercurial pharmacist in Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his multifaceted co-starring stints with James Woods in the TV movies Promise (1986) and My Name Is Bill W. (1989). In 1994, Garner came full circle in the profitable feature film Maverick (1994), in which the title role was played by Mel Gibson. With the exception of such lower-key efforts as the noir-ish Twilight (1998) and the made-for-TV thriller Dead Silence (1997), Garner's career in the '90s found the veteran actor once again tapping into his latent ability to provoke laughs in such efforts as Space Cowboys (2000) while maintaining a successful small-screen career by returning to the role of Jim Rockford in several made-for-TV movies. He provided a voice for the popular animatedfeature Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and appeared in the comedy-drama The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Garner enjoyed a career resurgance in 2003, when he joined the cast of TV's 8 Simple Rules, acting as a sort of replacement for John Ritter, who had passed away at the beginning of the show's second season. He next appeared in The Notebook (2004), which earned Garner a Screen Actors Guild nomination and also poised him to win the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. His last on-screen role was a small supporting role in The Ultimate Gift (2007). In 2008, Garner suffered a stroke and retired acting. He died in 2014, at age 86.

Trivia: American actress Joanna Barnes went from Southern-belle complacency to a contract with Warner Bros. studios. Joanna was generally cast as steely-eyed, truculent blondes in such films as Home Before Dark (1958) and (freelancing for director Stanley Kubrick) Spartacus (1960). She also held the dubious distinction of being the latest in a long line of "Janes" in the 1959 cheapie Tarzan of the Apes. Barnes worked a great deal on television in the 1950s and 1960s: she was detective Dennis Morgan's girl Friday on 1959's 21 Beacon Street; the ex-wife of pennyante attorney Peter Falk in the 1965 weekly drama The Trials of O'Brien; and the hostess of the 5-minute ABC gossipfest Dateline Hollywood. In 1973, Joanna gave up acting to pursue a career as a novelist, and to that end took a room in a Los Angeles office building leased exclusively to professional writers. While Joanna Barnes might not be remembered for her writings, she made an indelible impression as Vassar-educated socialite Gloria Upson, who spoke as though she had novacaine in her upper lip (the playwrights' description of the character) in the 1958 film comedy Auntie Mame.

Trivia: Born in Germany, but raised in the U.S., actor Rhodes Reason primarily appeared in second features of the '60s and '70s. He also appeared on television. Reason's brother, Rex Reason (aka Bart Roberts), was also an actor.

Trivia: Canadian supporting actor, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: Racking up a staggering number of small-screen credits over the course of his impressive 50-year career, Stacy Keach Sr. also appeared in countless television commercials in addition to feature roles in The Parallax View (1974), Pretty Woman (1990), and Cobb (1994), among many others. Born Walter Stacy Keach in Chicago, IL, in May of 1914, the future star earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern and impressed teachers so much that he was appointed a Dramatic Arts instructor as a graduate student. Keach would subsequently teach at Armstrong College and founded the Savannah Playhouse, later relocating to the West Coast for a stint at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was there that Keach was signed by Universal Studios as an actor/director/writer, and though he would stay there for nearly five years he would eventually relocate to RKO as a producer. During his stint at RKO, Keach would produce and direct the popular radio series Tales of the Texas Rangers. Keach was widely recognized for his roles on such popular television series as The Lone Ranger, Mannix, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. In addition to his work in the entertainment industry, Keach also founded Kayden Records, an award-winning education company, and proved an early developer of industrial films. The father of actors Stacy and James, Keach married Mary Cain Peckham in June of 1937 and remained wed until his death resulting from heart failure in early 2003. He was 88.

Trivia: Actor Edward Byrnes broke into films around 1957, playing a few bits (he can be seen as one of Jimmy Piersall's buddies in the 1957 biopic Fear Strikes Out) and minor roles. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract, Byrnes connected with the public in the role of a punkish villain in Girl on the Run, the 90-minute pilot episode of 77 Sunset Strip. Audience response to the young actor was so overwhelmingly positive that he was signed as a regular for the Sunset Strip series proper. As hipster parking lot attendant Gerald Lloyd Kookson III, aka "Kookie," he skyrocketed to teen idoldom via the simple expedient of combing his hair at least once per episode. He went on to parlay this schtick into a Top 40 song hit, "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb." During the second season of 77 Sunset Strip, Byrnes followed the example of fellow Warner contractees James Garner and Clint Walker, threatening to quit the series if he wasn't given more money and better scripts. Warners acquiesced to his demands: The studio also improved the social status of Byrnes' character on the series, promoting him to junior detective. After leaving the series in 1963, Byrnes moved to Europe, where he flourished as a star of spaghetti Westerns and espionage flicks. A pop-culture icon by the late '70s, Byrnes made occasional returns to Hollywood in such campy roles as Dick Clark-clone Vince Fontaine in Grease (1978). In addition, Ed Byrnes played "the Emcee" on the 1979 anthology series Sweepstakes, and in 1974, "Kookie" hosted the pilot episode of the evergreen quiz show Wheel of Fortune.

Trivia: The son of vaudeville monologist Julius Tannen, Charles Tannen launched his own film career in 1936. For the rest of his movie "life," Tannen was most closely associated with 20th Century Fox, playing minor roles in films both large (John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath) and not so large (Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns). Rarely receiving screen credit, Tannen continued playing utility roles well into the 1960s, showing up in such Fox productions as The Fly (1958) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Charles Tannen's older brother, William, was also an active film performer during this period.

Trivia: Actor Richard Collier was more a fixture in the realm of television, having made well over 1000 appearances on the small screen, but was nonetheless employed frequently for films. A native of Boston, Collier started acting as most people do, on stage in the theater circuit throughout Massachusetts. When World War II broke out, his acting career was put on hold as he served in the U.S. Army. Only after the war did Collier begin making appearances in film and the new medium of television. Some of the many television shows the actor appeared on include The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, and Batman. Collier died, at the age of 80, in early 2000.

Trivia: From a family of minstrel performers, tough-looking John Cliff (born Clifford) toured with carnivals prior to landing in Hollywood shortly after World War II. In scores of films from 1946, the dark-haired Cliff was almost always cast as a heavy, notably in Westerns, and would later become equally busy on television. He retired from performing in 1968 and went into real estate.