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: John Marley's craggy face, cement-mixer voice and shock of white hair were familiar to stagegoers from the 1930s onward. Marley started out as one-half of a comedy team, but soon found that his true metier was drama. In films on an infrequent basis since 1941, Marley stepped up his moviemaking activities in the mid-1960s, playing such sizeable roles as Jane Fonda's father in Cat Ballou (1965). He won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance as a miserable middle-aged husband in John Cassavetes' Faces (1968), and was Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Ali MacGraw's blue-collar dad in Love Story. Arguably Marley's most unforgettable assignment was The Godfather (1972), in which, as movie mogul Lou Woltz, he wakes up to find himself sharing his bed with a horse's head. John Marley's television work included a regular role on the obscure NBC daytime drama Three Steps to Heaven.

Trivia: Character actor Harry Hickox worked on radio, television, stage, and in a few feature films of the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Big Spring, TX, Hickox found his first professional work on the radio, in post-WWII Hollywood. His Broadway credits include a role as the anvil salesman in The Music Man, a part he would reprise in the 1962 film version. He made his film debut in The Scarlet Hour (1956) and went on to appear in a variety of 1960s features, including the Elvis Presley vehicle Speedway (1968) and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1964), opposite Don Knotts. On television, Hickox played Sgt. King in No Time for Sergeants (1964-1965) and Herb Thornton in Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1965-1966). He also guest starred in numerous series.

Trivia: African American actor Yaphet Kotto was one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the upsurge in black-oriented theatrical pieces of the late 1950s; he appeared in many prestigious Broadway and off-Broadway productions, taking regional theatre work rather than accept stereotypical "mainstream" roles in movies and TV. Kotto's first film was Nothing But a Man (1964), an independently produced study of black pride in the face of white indifference. Though he vehemently steered clear of most of the '70s blaxploitation fare, in 1972, Kotto produced, directed and wrote the feature film Speed Limit 65 (aka The Limit and Time Limit), a one-of-a-kind "black biker" film. The biggest production with which Kotto was associated in the early 1970s was the James Bond film Live and Let Die, in which, as the villainous Mr. Big, he was blown up in the final scene (a similarly grisly fate awaited Kotto in 1979's Alien). On television, Yaphet Kotto was a regular on the TV series For Love and Honor (1983) and Homicide: Life on the Streets (1992), and was seen as Ugandan president Idi Amin in the 1977 TV movie Raid on Entebbe.

Trivia: Square-jawed, mellow-voiced character actor David Canary achieved his greatest prominence on television, in roles that typecast him as a "man's man" with an unmistakably tough edge but a smooth demeanor and approach. Born in Elwood, IN, Canary grew up in Ohio as the son of a JC Penney manager. He took to musical performance (as a baritone vocalist) during adolescence, then after high school attended the University of Cincinnati on a football scholarship and concurrently took classes at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, qualifying as the first person to combine studies at both institutions, graduating as a music major in voice from the university. During that period, the university theater director, Paul Rutledge, observed Canary's innate dramatic gifts and strongly encouraged the student to try out for roles in numerous productions, many of which he landed with great ease, thereby opening himself up to a talent all but unrecognized and untapped, and paving the way for a prestigious foray into acting that commenced with several years of summer stock. Canary began his professional acting career on-stage, in musicals, but he made his Broadway debut in the play Great Day in the Morning, opposite Colleen Dewhurst. His career was put on hold for a time when he was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed at a base in Texas, but he made the most of it, entertaining the troops and winning the All Army Entertainment Contest for best popular singer. When his service time was completed, Canary returned to the theater, but it wasn't long before he moved into filmed work.As a professional actor, Canary divided his time between big- and small-screen outings, but placed his strongest emphasis on television. He is best known for two ongoing, multi-season series roles: Candy, a wanderer hired onto the Cartwright property as a ranch hand, on the immensely popular Western saga Bonanza (a part held from 1967 through 1970 and again during the final season of 1972-1973), and -- on a much different note -- long-running portrayals of twins Adam and Stuart Chandler on the ABC daytime drama All My Children. Canary retired from acting in 2013; he died in 2015, at age 77.

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: 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: Comic actor Robert Ball was a fixture in television and, to a lesser degree, movies, from the late 1950s until the early 1990s. Mostly seen in group settings and character roles -- and billed variously as Robert Ball, Robert E. Ball, Bob Ball, and Bobby Ball -- his somewhat diminutive size only served to accentuate the impact of his wry, sardonic delivery, an attribute that various producers (including Leonard Stern and, later, Carl Reiner and Garry Marshall) used to piercing effect in episodes of their television series. Ball made his small-screen debut during 1957 on the series The Adventures of McGraw, and a year later he was part of the cast of Bruno VeSota's The Brain Eaters (1958), a low-budget science fiction film. These were both straight acting jobs, and any humor in The Brain Eaters, in particular, was wholly unintended. But when VeSota -- a busy character actor who occasionally worked as a filmmaker -- next occupied the director's chair four years later for Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962), Ball (billed as Bob Ball) had the lead role of Private Philbrick and was running on all comic cylinders. Alas, the movie wasn't up to what Ball and costar Frankie Ray brought to their roles, and it was singularly unappreciated by most critics. It has since become a kind of cult touchstone among aficionados of low-budget science fiction, horror, and so-called "psychotronic" cinema. In between The Brain Eaters and Invasion of the Star Creatures, Ball busied himself with small roles on every kind of television series, including Peter Gunn, Perry Mason, Route 66, Frontier Circus, Dr. Kildare, The Twilight Zone, I'm Dickens...He's Fenster, Mr. Novak, Ben Casey, The Jack Benny Program, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. He was particularly effective on the latter, in the episode "Bupkis", as Rob Petrie's larcenous former Army buddy who had signed his name to a song he had almost nothing to do with. Ball was something of a chameleon-like presence and could melt into a part, and even those familiar with his work could miss him in some of those roles. But stars and producers obviously liked his work. Dick Van Dyke Show creator/producer Carl Reiner used him in The Comic (1969) and in the subsequent New Dick Van Dyke Show, and longtime Reiner cohort Howard Morris used him in Who's Minding the Mint (1967). Ball had a relatively easy time slipping into the counter-culture era, getting roles in such representative films of the period as Easy Rider (as one of the mimes), Bunny O'Hare, and Zachariah. Continuing in television, he worked steadily across genres, including Westerns such as Bonanza and '70s topical sitcoms like Maude. Producer Garry Marshall -- himself a Dick Van Dyke Show alumnus -- gave him memorable comedic roles in The Odd Couple, Laverne and Shirley, and Happy Days; and Ball was one of the Marshall stock company picked up for the feature films Young Doctors in Love (1982) and Beaches (1988). This was, of course, sandwiched in between work on Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, and a dozen other TV series. Ball retired after 1992.

Trivia: Beckman is a stocky character actor, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: Bandleader/actor Frank DeVol began his professional career in 1931. The son of a Canton, Ohio, orchestra leader, DeVol worked with several bands as vocalist and arranger before organizing his own aggregation in 1935. That same year, he went on tour with the George Olsen-Ethel Shutta musical troupe, receiving his first acting experience fielding one-liners from the stars. He went on to network radio, conducting orchestras for such stars as Ginny Simms and Jack Carson. In 1954, he began a long association with Hollywood director Robert Aldrich, writing scores for Aldrich films ranging from World for Ransom (1954) to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) to All the Marbles (1981). He received an Academy Award nomination for his work on Aldrich's Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1965), and was also Oscar-nominated for Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (1959), Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965) and Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1965). On TV, where he was frequently billed simply as "DeVol," he was musical director for The Rosemary Clooney Show (1957), The Betty White Show (1958), George Gobel Show (1958), and The Dinaah Shore Chevy Show (1961-62); in addition, he penned the well-known theme music for the long-running comedy series My Three Sons. In 1960, writer/director David Swift, an old friend from the radio days, hired the bald, dry-witted DeVol to play the role of a hapless camp counselor in The Parent Trap (1961). Frank DeVol scored so well in this brief appearance that he would thereafter evenly divide his time between acting and music: he went on to portray Bannister the Builder in the 1963 TV sitcom I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, a half-baked movie executive in Jerry Lewis' theatrical feature The Big Mouth (1967), and dour bandleader "Happy Kyne" on Norman Lear's talk-show satires Fernwood 2Night (1977) and America 2-Night (1978).

Trivia: American actor Bruce Kirby made his Broadway bow at age 40 in the 1965 production Diamond Orchid. More stage work followed, and then movie assignments, commencing with the all-star Catch 22 (1970), and continuing into the 1980s with such productions as Sweet Dreams (1985) and Throw Momma from the Train (1987). Kirby's TV career has embraced both series successes (1989's Anything But Love, as Jamie Lee Curtis' father), ignoble failures (1976's Holmes and Yoyo, as Henry Sedford), and a few projects which never sold (Kirby was in two busted pilots for something called McNamara's Band). In 1984, Kirbyreturned to Broadway to understudy Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the revival of Death of a Salesman. Bruce Kirby, sometimes billed as Bruce Kirby Sr., was the father of actor Bruno Kirby, who formerly billed himself as B. Kirby Jr.