Trivia: American actor James Arness had an unremarkable Minneapolis childhood, but his wartime experiences shattered that normality - literally. During the battle of Anzio, Arness' right leg was peppered with machine gun bullets, and when the bones were set they didn't mend properly, leaving him with a slight but permanent limp. The trauma of the experience mellowed into aimlessness after the war. Arness became a "beach bum," lived out of his car, and worked intermittently as a salesman and carpenter. Acting was treated equally lackadaisically, but by 1947 Arness had managed to break into Hollywood on the basis of his rugged good looks and his 6'6" frame. Few of his screen roles were memorable, though one has become an object of cult worship: Arness was cast as the menacingly glowing space alien, described by one character as "an intellectual carrot," in The Thing (1951). For a time it looked as though Arness would continue to flounder in supporting roles, while his younger brother, actor Peter Graves, seemed destined for stardom. John Wayne took a liking to Arness when the latter was cast in Wayne's Big Jim McLain (1953). Wayne took it upon himself to line up work for Arness, becoming one of the withdrawn young actor's few friends. In 1955, Wayne was offered the role of Matt Dillon in the TV version of the popular radio series Gunsmoke. Wayne turned it down but recommended that Arness be cast and even went so far as to introduce him to the nation's viewers in a specially filmed prologue to the first Gunsmoke episode. Truth be told, Arness wasn't any keener than Wayne to be tied down to a weekly series, and as each season ended he'd make noises indicating he planned to leave. This game went on for each of the 20 seasons that Gunsmoke was on the air, the annual result being a bigger salary for Arness, more creative control over the program (it was being produced by his own company within a few years) and a sizeable chunk of the profits and residuals. When Gunsmoke finally left the air in 1975, Arness was the only one of the original four principals (including Amanda Blake, Milburn Stone and Dennis Weaver) still appearing on the series. Arness made plans to take it easy after his two-decade Gunsmoke hitch, but was lured back to the tube for a one-shot TV movie, The Macahans (1976). This evolved into the six-hour miniseries How the West Was Won (1977) which in turn led to a single-season weekly series in 1978. All these incarnations starred Arness, back in the saddle as Zeb Macahan. The actor tried to alter his sagebrush image in a 1981 modern-day cop series, McClain's Law -- which being set in the southwest permitted Arness to ride a horse or two. It appeared, however that James Arness would always be Matt Dillon in the hearts and minds of fans, thus Arness obliged his still-faithful public with three Gunsmoke TV movies, the last one (Gunsmoke: The Last Apache) released in 1992. In between these assignments, James Arness starred in a 1988 TV-movie remake of the 1948 western film classic Red River, in which he filled the role previously played by his friend and mentor John Wayne.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

Trivia: Actor's Studio graduate Arch Johnson was first seen off-Broadway in 1952's Down in the Valley, and on-Broadway the following year in Mrs. McThing. Johnson's most famous Broadway role was bigoted NYPD detective Schrank in West Side Story (1956). In films from 1953, the burly Johnson was usually cast as western heavies, occasionally with a swarthy tongue in cheek and a roguish twinkle in the eye. Some of his non-western movie assignments include The Sting (1973), Walking Tall (1977) and The Buddy Holly Story (1978). In the spring of 1961, Arch Johnson was seen as Captain Gus Honochek on the weekly TV version of The Asphalt Jungle.

Trivia: Kevin Hagen is a veteran character actor long associated with intense dramatic roles. He has portrayed everything from hitmen and rapists to prosecutors and police officers, but is perhaps best known to television audiences for his portrayal of the avuncular Dr. Baker on the long-running series Little House on the Prairie. Hagen was born and raised in and around Chicago, but moved to Portland, OR, during his teens. Following a two-year hitch in the United States Navy, he attended college on the G.I. Bill, majoring in international relations, and later worked for the U.S. State Department in Germany. Bored with that job, he considered a career in law but dropped out after one year. While trying to figure out what he wanted to do for a career, he auditioned for a production of the play Blind Alley and won a small role, despite the fact that he had never acted before. Within a year, Hagen had moved up to playing the lead in a production of James Thurber's play The Male Animal, and spent the next few years scraping out a living in small theatrical productions around Los Angeles in between studying with Agnes Moorehead, among other notables. His breakthrough came with his portrayal of stern patriarch Ephraim Cabot in a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms -- that led to his getting an agent and, in turn, led to his television debut in an episode of Dragnet. He appeared in various dramatic anthology shows and played important guest-star parts on programs such as Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Cheyenne, M-Squad, and The Untouchables -- in one episode of the latter, "Stranglehold," Hagen brought a startling degree of humanity and depth to the part of a professional killer. Hagen made his feature-film debut in 1958 in the Disney-produced The Light in the Forest, and that same year, he got his first regular role in a series when he was cast in the part of John Colton, the city administrator of post-Civil War New Orleans, in Yancy Derringer. The show only ran for one season, but Hagen had more work than ever following the conclusion of filming, on such series as Bonanza, Perry Mason, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Felony Squad, and Mission: Impossible. He also did some film work, most notably in Andrew V. McLaglen's Civil War drama Shenandoah (1965), in which Hagen played the scavenging deserter who murders James Stewart's son (Patrick Wayne) and rapes and murders Stewart's daughter-in-law (Katharine Ross). During this period, he also began a string of appearances in television series produced by Irwin Allen, guest starring in episodes of Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Time Tunnel. Those roles led to Hagen's being cast as Inspector Kobick, the security officer pursuing the diminutive earthlings, in Allen's Land of the Giants. He brought a great deal of humanity and complexity to his portrayal of the character in the course of the series' two-season run. During the 1970s, Hagen made frequent guest appearances on series such as M*A*S*H, Quincy, and Knot's Landing. In 1974, Hagen was cast in the role for which he has become best known, as Dr. Baker in Little House on the Prairie. He portrayed the part for ten seasons and developed a serious fandom among the series' legions of viewers. Hagen left Hollywood for Oregon in the early '80s, and has continued his work in regional theater productions of such plays as West Side Story, Follies, and Oklahoma! He also performs his own one-man show, a mixture of songs, monologues, and prairie wit and wisdom drawn from his Little House persona.

Trivia: Blonde American leading lady Constance Ford made her first film appearance in 1956's The Last Hunt. Generally cast in sensible, straightlaced roles, Ford provided welcome relief to the youthful hijinks prevalent in such films as A Summer Place (1959), Claudelle Inglish (1961) and Rome Adventure (1962). Constantly employed on TV, Ford is best remembered for her work in soap operas, which both pre-dated and outlasted her film career. In 1954, Constance Ford starred on the short-lived serial Woman With a Past; and, from 1964 until 1989, Ford portrayed Ada Davis Downs Hobson on NBC's Another World.

Trivia: Following her training in regional theatre and radio, red-headed actress Amanda Blake was signed by MGM in 1949, where she was briefly groomed for stardom. Among her MGM assignments was 1950's Stars in My Crown, in which she was cast for the first time opposite James Arness. Film fame eluded Amanda, especially after her sizeable role in the 1954 version of A Star is Born was almost completely excised from the release print. By 1955, she had to make do with appearances in such epics as the Bowery Boys' High Society. Amanda's fortunes took a turn for the better later in 1955, when she won the role of Miss Kitty, the euphemistically yclept "hostess" of the Long Branch Saloon on the TV western Gunsmoke, which starred James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon. She remained with Gunsmoke until its next-to-last season in 1974. After Gunsmoke, Amanda went into semi-retirement save for a handful of film projects like the made-for-TV Betrayal (1974), the theatrical releases The Boost (1988) and B.O.R.N (1989), and the 1987 reunion project Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge. Amanda Blake died in 1989 at the age of sixty.

Trivia: A track star at the University of Oklahoma, Dennis Weaver went on to serve as a Navy Pilot during World War II. After failing to make the 1948 U.S. decathalon Olympic team, Weaver accepted the invitation of his college chum Lonny Chapman to give the New York theatre world a try. He understudied Chapman as "Turk Fisher" in the Broadway production Come Back Little Sheba, eventually taking over the role in the national company. Deciding that acting was to his liking, Weaver enrolled at the Actors' Studio, supporting his family by selling vacuum cleaners, tricycles and ladies' hosiery. On the recommendation of his Actors' Studio classmate Shelley Winters, Weaver was signed to a contract at Universal studios in 1952, where he made his film debut in The Redhead From Wyoming (1952). Though his acting work increased steadily over the next three years, he still had to take odd jobs to make ends meet. He was making a delivery for the florist's job where he worked when he was informed that he'd won the role of deputy Chester Goode on the TV adult western Gunsmoke. So as not to be continually upstaged by his co-star James Arness (who, at 6'7", was five inches taller than the gangly Weaver), he adopted a limp for his character--a limp which, along with Chester's reedy signature line "Mis-ter Diillon" and the deputy's infamously bad coffee, brought Weaver fame, adulation and a 1959 Emmy Award. Though proud of his work on Gunsmoke--"I don't think any less seriously of Chester than I did about King Lear in college"--Weaver began feeling trapped by Chester sometime around the series' fifth season. Having already proven his versatility in his film work (notably his portrayal of the neurotic motel night clerk in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil [1958]), Weaver saw to it that the Gunsmoke producers permitted him to accept as many "outside" TV assignments as his schedule would allow. Twice during his run as Chester, Weaver quit the series to pursue other projects. He left Gunsmoke permanently in 1964, whereupon he was starred in the one-season "dramedy" series Kentucky Jones (1965). In 1967, he headlined a somewhat more successful weekly, Gentle Ben (1967-69) in which he and everyone else in the cast played second fiddle to a trained bear (commenting upon his relationship with his "co-star", Weaver replied "I liked him, but it was a cold relationship...Ben didn't know me from a bag of doughnuts.") The most successful of Weaver's post-Gunsmoke TV series was McCloud, in which, from 1970 to 1977, he played deputy marshal Sam McCloud, a New Mexico lawman transplanted to the Big Apple. In addition to his series work, Weaver has starred in several made-for-TV movies over the past 25 years, the most famous of which was the Steven Spielberg-directed nailbiter Duel (1971). Dennis Weaver is the father of actor Robby Weaver, who co-starred with his dad on the 1980 TV series Stone.

Trivia: The son of the Los Angeles Times' drama editor, William Schallert was, along with Sydney Chaplin, one of the co-founders of Hollywood's highly regarded Circle Theatre troupe. Sent to Great Britain on a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theatre, Schallert guest-lectured at Oxford on several occasion before heading home. A character actor of almost intimidating versatility, Schallert began his long film and TV career in 1951. While he appeared in films of every variety, Schallert was most closely associated with the many doctors (mad or otherwise), lab technicians and scientific experts that he played in such science fiction endeavors as The Man From Planet X (1951), Gog (1954), Them! (1954) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Monolith Monsters (1959). Director Joe Dante paid homage to Schallert's prolific horror-flick work by casting the actor in his Matinee, where he played yet another dabbler in Things Man Is Not Meant to Know in the film-within-a-film "Mant." Schallert's hundreds television credits could fill a book in themselves; the Nickelodeon cable network once tried to put together a montage of the actor's guest star appearances, touching only the tip of the iceberg. He was a regular on such series as Dobie Gillis (as literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit, who always dismissed his class as though announcing the beginning of the Indy 500), Get Smart (as a senile 97-year-old Navy admiral), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (as Nancy's attorney father) The New Gidget (as Gidget's professor father) The Nancy Walker Show, Little Women and Santa Barbara. His most famous TV role was as Patty Lane's ever-patient newspaper-editor dad on The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963 through 1966; over twenty years later, Mr. Schallert and Ms. Duke were touchingly reunited--again as father and daughter--on an episode of The Torkelsons (1991-92). William Schallert once served as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a position later held...by Patty Duke. Shallert continued acting until the early 2010s; he died in 2016, at age 93.

Trivia: More familiar for his radio work than his film appearances, American actor Ben Wright was active professionally from the early '40s. Dialects were a specialty with Wright, as witness his two-year hitch as Chinese bellhop Hey Boy on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel. Most of Wright's film roles were supporting or bit appearances in such productions as A Man Called Peter (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Fortune Cookie (1964). On TV, Wright was one of Jack Webb's stock company (including fellow radio veterans Virginia Gregg, Stacy Harris, and Vic Perrin) on the '60s version of Dragnet. Ben Wright's most frequently seen film appearance was as the humorless Nazi functionary Herr Zeller in the 1965 megahit The Sound of Music.

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.

Trivia: A staple of Western-themed films and television series, veteran character actor Rayford Barnes began his onscreen career with John Wayne in Hondo, and in recent years appeared on television in Walker, Texas Ranger and ER. After beginning his career in New York training with Stella Adler and the Neighborhood Playhouse, Barnes moved to San Francisco to open his own theater, and later relocated to San Francisco, where he landed his role in Hondo. A veteran of WWII, Barnes made regular appearances on such TV series as Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Little House on the Prairie while concurrently appearing in Westerns like The Wild Bunch and The Hunting Party. Rayford Barnes died on November 11, 2000, at St. Andrews Medical Center in Santa Monica, CA. He was 80.

Trivia: Actress Ellen Burstyn enjoyed her greatest prominence during the '70s, a decade during which she was a virtual fixture of Academy Award voters' ballots. Born Edna Rae Gillooly in Detroit, MI, on December 7, 1932, as a teen she studied dancing and performed in an acrobatic troupe. She later became a model for paperback book covers, subsequently dancing in a Montréal nightclub under the name "Keri Flynn." In 1954, she was tapped to appear as a Gleason Girl on television's Jackie Gleason Show, and in 1957, she made her Broadway debut in Fair Game, again with a new stage name, "Ellen McRae." While in New York, Burstyn studied acting under Stella Adler, and later married theatrical director Paul Roberts. She briefly relocated to Los Angeles for television work but soon returned east to work at the Actors' Studio. She made her film debut in 1964's For Those Who Think Young, quickly followed by Goodbye Charlie. The cinema did not yet suit her, however, and she spent the remainder of the decade appearing on the daytime soap opera The Doctors.It was after marrying her third husband, actor Neil Burstyn, that she adopted the name most familiar to audiences, and was so billed in 1969's film adaptation of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. While the picture was unsuccessful, it did attract the notice of director Paul Mazursky, who cast her in his 1970 project Alex in Wonderland. Burstyn then began a string of high-profile films which established her among the preeminent actresses of the decade: The first, Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 masterpiece The Last Picture Show, earned her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination, but she lost out to co-star Cloris Leachman. Burstyn next appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's acclaimed The King of Marvin Gardens before starring in William Friedkin's 1973 horror hit The Exorcist, a performance which earned her a Best Actress nomination. For Mazursky, she co-starred in the whimsical 1974 tale Harry and Tonto, and then appeared in a well-received TV feature, Thursday's Game.However, it was 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore which truly launched Burstyn to stardom. Warner Bros. had purchased the screenplay at her insistence two years earlier, but her efforts to bring it to the screen were met with considerable resistance. Her first choice for director was Francis Ford Coppola, who declined, but he suggested she approach Martin Scorsese. In the wake of Mean Streets, Scorsese was eager to attempt a "woman's film," and agreed to take the project on. The result was a major critical and commercial success, and on her third attempt Burstyn finally won an Oscar. That same year, she won a Tony for her work on Broadway in the romantic drama Same Time, Next Year, the first actress to score both honors during the same awards season since Audrey Hepburn two decades prior. However, upon wrapping up her theatrical run, Burstyn was not besieged by the offers so many expected her to receive. In fact, she did not appear onscreen for three years, finally resurfacing in Alain Resnais' Providence.The film was not a success, nor was 1978's Jules Dassin-helmed A Dream of Passion. With co-star Alan Alda, Burstyn reprised her Broadway performance in a 1978 feature version of Same Time, Next Year, but it too failed to meet expectations, although she was again Oscar-nominated. After a two-year hiatus, she starred in Resurrection, followed in 1981 by Silence of the North, which went directly to cable television. For the networks, she starred in 1981's The People vs. Jean Harris, based on the notorious "Scarsdale diet" murder. After 1984's The Ambassador, Burstyn co-starred in the following year's Twice in a Lifetime, which was to be her last feature film for some years. She instead turned almost exclusively to television, appearing in a series of TV movies and starring in a disastrously short-lived 1986 sitcom, The Ellen Burstyn Show. Finally, in 1988, she returned to cinemas in Hanna's War, followed three years later by Dying Young. Other notable projects of the decade included 1995's How to Make an American Quilt, The Spitfire Grill (1996), and the 1998 ensemble drama Playing by Heart, in which she played the mother of a young man dying of AIDS. If her success and talents had eluded younger audiences for the past decade all of that would change with Burstyn's role as the delusional mother of a heroin addict in Darren Aranofsky's grim addiction drama Requiem for a Dream. An adaptation of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s novel of the same name, Burstyn's heartbreaking performance as an abandoned mother whose dreams come shattering down around proved an Oscar nominated performance. She subsequently appeared in such made-for-television dramas as Dodson's Journey and Within These Walls (both 2001) and such films as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Cross the Line (both 2002). Burstyn appeared in a variety of well-received television films including Mrs. Harris and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and had a role in the short-lived series The Book of Daniel. She maintained her presence on the big screen by reteaming with Arronofsky in his big-budget tale The Fountain, and she appeared in Neil La Bute's remake of The Wicker Man. Burstyn was soon gearing up to reteam with Aranofsky for the time travel fantasy thriller The Fountain. She continued to work steadily in various projects such as the political biopic W.; Lovely, Still; and played a stern matriarch in the indie drama Another Happy Day.