Trivia: Big, burly Dan Blocker only did a handful of movies in his 17-year acting career, but he became one of the most beloved and popular television stars of the 1960s for his portrayal of Hoss Cartwright on the Western series Bonanza. Weighing 14 pounds at birth, Blocker was the largest baby ever born in Bowie County, TX. At 18, he stood 6'3" and weighed close to 300 pounds, and was legendary for his physical prowess. Blocker attended the Texas Military Institute and studied for his B.A. at Sul Ross State College, where he initially majored in athletics. His build accidentally led him to the drama department for a production of Arsenic and Old Lace -- a stage hand was needed who was big and strong enough to quickly remove the dummies representing corpses on the set, between acts. While working on the production, Blocker was bitten by the acting bug and switched his major to drama. He pursued his theatrical aspirations in earnest after graduation, working in one season of summer stock before he was drafted. Blocker served in combat during the Korean War, after which he earned a master's degree, married, moved to Los Angeles, and settled down to raise a family, earning his living as a high school teacher. It was his successful audition for the small role of a cavalry lieutenant on Gunsmoke during the 1956 season, in the episode "Alarm at Pleasant Valley," that rekindled Blocker's interest in an acting career. Over the next three years, he took any work that he could get, on programs like Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Cheyenne, Tales of Wells Fargo, Zane Grey Theater, Wagon Train, Colt .45, Zorro, Maverick, and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Blocker also got some movie work, portraying a bartender in the offbeat murder mystery The Girl in Black Stockings and an android in Outer Space Jitters, a very late Three Stooges short. His career took an upturn when he got a guest-starring role in an episode of the series The Restless Gun, starring John Payne, in 1958; his work was good enough to catch the attention of the producer, David Dortort. A year later, Dortort was putting together a new, hour-long Western series called Bonanza and cast Blocker in the role of "Hoss" Cartwright, the big-boned, good-natured middle son in a ranching family near Virginia City, NV, set in the mid- to late 19th century (the time frame of Bonanza was always vague, with stories shifting between the early 1860s to the 1870s and 1880s). Blocker's character's real name, incidentally, was Eric, but Hoss -- a nickname from his mother's Norwegian language that meant "friend" -- was what he was known as to everyone on the series and all viewers. Despite the weaknesses in the scripts during the early seasons, the role was a dream part for the actor, who got a chance to display his gentle, sensitive side as well as his gift for comedy, and also work in a serious dramatic context as well on many occasions, and show off his brute strength as well. It is arguable that Blocker was the most popular member of the cast during the 1960s; he was especially beloved of younger viewers, in part because his character was always very sympathetic to children. In contrast to the other stars of the series, Blocker's big-screen career wasn't halted by his work on Bonanza. He appeared in The Errand Boy, playing himself in an uncredited cameo, and played a role in the Frank Sinatra movie Come Blow Your Horn. Blocker got his first major movie part five years later in the Sinatra film Lady in Cement (1968), playing Waldo Gronsky, a burly, potentially murderous thug who hires private detective Tony Rome (played by Sinatra) to find his missing girlfriend. By the end of the 1960s, Blocker was taken seriously enough as an actor to star in two features, Something for a Lonely Man, a beautiful and poignant Western/comedy-drama, and the broader comedy The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. Some of Blocker's television appearances separate from Bonanza also reflected his personal side -- his politics were essentially liberal Democratic (in sharp contrast to the conservative Republican sympathies of his co-stars Michael Landon and Lorne Greene), and he appeared in several public service announcements promoting brotherhood and racial tolerance, as well as on one television special that gently satirized American popular culture, starring Henry Fonda. He was also part of the liberal contingent in the 1971 John Wayne-hosted patriotic special Swing Out, Sweet Land. In 1972, Blocker was chosen for what could have been the breakthrough role to a major movie career, when he won the part of Roger Wade, the has-been author in Robert Altman's revisionist detective movie The Long Goodbye. In May of that year, however, he went into the hospital for routine gall bladder surgery, and during recovery he died suddenly of a blood clot in his lung. Sterling Hayden replaced Blocker in The Long Goodbye, which was dedicated to the actor's memory. Blocker's passing, immediately before the shooting for the 1972-1973 season of Bonanza was to begin, signed the death knell for the series. The cast and crew were genuinely shaken by his sudden death; scripts had to be hastily rewritten to explain the passing of Hoss Cartwright, and Blocker's absence and the reason behind it removed any element of lightheartedness that the series had displayed. The final season, despite the best efforts of surviving stars Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, and David Canary, was characterized by grim, downbeat stories and a dark mood that seemed to repel longtime viewers. Coupled with this change in tone, the NBC network moved Bonanza from its longtime Sunday nighttime slot to Tuesday nights, where it died a quick death, cancellation coming halfway through the 1972-1973 season. Blocker left behind a wife and four children, among them actor Dirk Blocker and director/producer David Blocker. He also left behind a legacy of good will that survives to this day, as Bonanza is in perpetual reruns on various cable channels, decades after its cancellation. Significantly, the final season, in which he did not appear, is the body of episodes that is shown (and requested) the least of its 14 years' worth of programs.

Trivia: Pernell Roberts worked such odd jobs as butcher, forest ranger and tombstone-maker while studying acting and singing and scouting around for off-Broadway jobs. Roberts' film debut, in a characteristic Deep Brooder role, was in 1958's Desire Under the Elms. From 1959 through 1966, Roberts co-starred as black-clad, taciturn Adam Cartwright on Bonanza. "Aloof, rebellious and outspoken" was how Bonanza producer David Dotort summed up Roberts, who fought tooth and nail over every real or imagined challenge to his integrity (his biggest beef was that he had to call Lorne Greene "Pa" rather than "Father"). Fed up with what he perceived as the series' declining quality, Roberts left Bonanza in 1966; it was explained to fans that "Adam" had left to study at a European university. Free of his TV series commitment, Roberts returned to his first love, the stage--and also divested himself of the toupee he'd been forced to wear as Adam. The actor played the straw-hat circuit in such musicals as Camelot and The King and I, all the while accepting film and TV roles that came up to his standards. Unfortunately, his stubbornness and standoffishness left a sour taste with co-workers and fans alike, and Roberts was unable to soar to the artistic heights to which he aspired. After years of declaring that he'd never again return to the grind of weekly television, Roberts accepted the role of Dr. "Trapper" John McIntyre, chief of surgery at San Francisco memorial hospital, in the seven-season (1979-86) M*A*S*H spin-off Trapper John MD. In 1991 Pernell Roberts assumed the hosting duties of the TV anthology FBI: The Untold Stories.

Trivia: The son of a Jewish movie-publicist father and an Irish Catholic musical-comedy actress, Michael Landon grew up in a predominantly Protestant New Jersey neighborhood. The social pressures brought to bear on young Michael, both at home and in the schoolyard, led to an acute bedwetting problem, which he would later dramatize (very discreetly) in the 1976 TV movie The Loneliest Runner. Determined to better his lot in life, Landon excelled in high school athletics; his prowess at javelin throwing won him a scholarship at the University of Southern California, but a torn ligament during his freshman year ended his college career. Taking a series of manual labor jobs, Landon had no real direction in life until he agreed to help a friend audition for the Warners Bros. acting school. The friend didn't get the job, but Landon did, launching a career that would eventually span nearly four decades. Michael's first film lead was in the now-legendary I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), widely derided at the time but later reassessed as one of the better examples of the late-'50s "drive-in horror" genre. The actor received his first good reviews for his performance as an albino in God's Little Acre. This led to his attaining the title role in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley, which in turn was instrumental in his being cast as Little Joe Cartwright on the popular TV western Bonanza. During his fourteen-year Bonanza stint, Landon was given the opportunity to write and direct a few episodes. He carried over these newfound skills into his next TV project, Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1982 (just before Little House, Landon made his TV-movie directorial bow with It's Good to Be Alive, the biopic of baseball great Roy Campanella). Landon also oversaw two spinoff series, Little House: The New Beginning (1982-83) and Father Murphy (1984). Landon kept up his career momentum with a third long-running TV series, Highway to Heaven (1984-89) wherein the actor/producer/director/writer played guardian angel Jonathan Smith. One of the most popular TV personalities of the '70s and '80s, Landon was not universally beloved by his Hollywood contemporaries, what with his dictatorial on-set behavior and his tendency to shed his wives whenever they matured past childbearing age. Still, for every detractor, there was a friend, family member or coworker who felt that Landon was the salt of the earth. In early 1991, Landon began work on his fourth TV series, Us, when he began experiencing stomach pains. In April of that same year, the actor was informed that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. The courage and dignity with which Michael Landon lived his final months on earth resulted in a public outpouring of love, affection and support, the like of which was seldom witnessed in the cynical, self-involved '90s. Michael Landon died in his Malibu home on July 1, 1991, with his third wife Cindy at his side.

Trivia: Jack Hogan is a character actor and leading man best known for his work in television -- most notably as Private Kirby on the long-running 1960s series Combat! -- and in action films and dramas. Born Richard Roland Benson, Jr. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1929, he briefly studied architecture at the University of North Carolina before entering the army in 1948, which took him to stations in the Far East. After leaving the service in 1952, he decided to try his hand at acting, and received training at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and the American Theatre Wing in New York. His screen career began in 1956 with the western in Man From Del Rio, starring Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado. Two years later, he played "Guy Darrow" (sic), the film-a-clef stand-in for the notorious Depression-era bank robber Clyde Barrow in William Witney's The Bonnie Parker Story (1958), starring Dorothy Provine. And that same year, he co-starred with Michael Landon in Ted Post's The Story of Tom Dooley. Hogan appeared in episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel and Bonanza over the next few years, interspersed with occasional film work, until the series Combat! came along in 1962. Hired by director Robert Altman, who shepherded the series through its early stages, Hogan portrayed Private William Kirby in the middle of a strong cast headed by Vic Morrow and Rick Jason, and also including notable character actors Dick Peabody, Pierre Jalbert, and Conlan Carter. He still managed to stand out -- his Private William Kirby (nicknamed "Wild Man" back home) was a sometime screw-up, a skirt-chaser, and complainer, but also a top man with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and exactly the kind of soldier any sergeant would want in a tight spot. Hogan was perfect in the role, completely convincing in the action scenes, yet also the valid butt of jokes from his comrades (when one too-young recruit is being shipped home at the end of one episode and promises to be back in two years, he adds that "you guys will probably have this wrapped up by then," to which Vic Morrow's Sgt. Saunders, looking at Hogan after the boy leaves, says, "With you on our side, Kirby, it might be ten.")Following the series' cancellation, Hogan continued to work in television, on programs such as Adam-12, and also had a short-lived series called Sierra. He retired from acting in the 1980s and moved to Hawaii, where he founded a construction business, also working as casting director on Magnum, P.I. and appearing on Jake And The Fat Man. And thanks to the release of Combat! on DVD, and the series' being rerun on ME-TV, he is finding a whole new generation of fans for his work on the series in the twenty-first century.

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: White-haired, patriarchal Canadian actor Lorne Greene attended Queen's University in pursuit of a chemical engineering degree. Amateur college theatricals whetted his appetite for the stage, and upon graduation he decided upon a performing career. He started out on radio, eventually emerging as Canada's top newscaster, designated "the voice of the CBC" (For a while, Greene managed a mail-order announcer's school; one of the "pupils" was Leslie Nielsen). Moving to New York in 1950, Greene became a stage, film and TV actor, co-starring on Broadway with Katherine Cornell in Prescott Proposals and in films with the likes of Paul Newman, Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford, generally in villainous roles. In 1959, Greene was cast as Ben Cartwright, owner of the Ponderosa ranch and father of three headstrong sons, in TV's Bonanza. He would hold down this job until 1972; during the series' run, Greene unexpectedly became a top-ten recording artist with his hit single "Ringo." Upon the cancellation of Bonanza, Greene vowed he'd retire, but within one year he was playing a private detective on the brief TV weekly Griff. Five years later, he starred on the network sci-fier Battlestar Gallactica. Active as chairman of the National Wildlife Foundation, Greene put forth the organization's doctrine in his popular syndicated TV series Lorne Greene's Last of the Wild. His final weekly television appearance was on the 1980 adventure series Code Red. In 1987, Lorne Greene was all set to recreate Ben Cartwright for the 2-hour TV movie Bonanza: The Next Generation, but he died before shooting started and was replaced by John Ireland.

Trivia: Along with his brother Bill, Joe Yrigoyen began his screen career performing stunts for pennies at Nat Levine's ramshackle Mascot Pictures, the early sound era's busiest provider of serial thrills. The Yrigoyen brothers stayed with the company when it was incorporated into Republic Pictures, doubling for the action studio's cowboy and serial stars, and most of their villains too. Joe Yrigoyen, who also worked tirelessly on such television shows as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Davy Crockett, retired in the late '70s. In 1985, he was awarded the prestigious Golden Boot Award, presented to him by old friend Roy Rogers.

Trivia: Jim Davis' show business career began in a circus where he worked as a tent-rigger. He came to Los Angeles as a traveling salesman in 1940, gradually drifting into the movies following an MGM screen test with Esther Williams. After six long years in minor roles, he was "introduced" in 1948's Winter Meeting, co-starring with Bette Davis (no relation, though the Warner Bros. publicity department made much of the fact that the two stars shared the same name). He never caught on as a romantic lead, however, and spent most of the 1950s in secondary roles often as Western heavies. He starred in two syndicated TV series, Stories of the Century (1954) and Rescue 8 (1958-1959), and made at least 200 guest star appearances on other programs. Jim Davis is best known today for his work as oil-rich Jock Ewing on the prime time TV serial Dallas, a role he held down from 1978 to his unexpected death following surgery in 1981.