Trivia: Over her long career, character actress Eileen Heckart has distinguished herself on stage, television, and in feature films. Tall and thin with sharp angular features, she often plays outspoken, strong-willed, and highly intelligent women. Fans of The Mary Tyler Moore show from the 1970s will remember Heckart for playing Mary's brassy Aunt Flo. Trained at the American Theater Wing following studies at Ohio State University, Heckart was on Broadway in the early '40s and appeared in numerous major productions. For the 1957-1958 theater season, Heckart earned a New York Drama Critics Award for her work in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. She has won six Tony nominations during her stage career and in the late '90s was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Heckart began her sporadic television career in 1952 and made her feature-film debut with Miracle in the Rain (1956). She earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination that year for her work in The Bad Seed (1956); she was also awarded a Golden Globe for the film. In 1972, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1976 for her role in Butterflies Are Free. In 1967, Heckert received an Emmy for Win Me a Place at Forest Lawn. She won her second one in 1994 for a 1993 appearance on the sitcom Love & War. In addition to her many kudos, Heckart has also been awarded three honorary doctorates.

Trivia: Rough-hewn American leading man Richard Boone was thrust into the cold cruel world when he was expelled from Stanford University, for a minor infraction. He worked as a oil-field laborer, boxer, painter and free-lance writer before settling upon acting as a profession. After serving in World War II, Boone used his GI Bill to finance his theatrical training at the Actors' Studio, making his belated Broadway debut at age 31, playing Jason in Judith Anderson's production of Medea. Signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1951, Boone was given good billing in his first feature, Halls of Montezuma; among his Fox assignments was the brief but telling role of Pontius Pilate in The Robe (1953). Boone launched the TV-star phase of his career in the weekly semi-anthology Medic, playing Dr. Konrad Steiner. From 1957 through 1963, Boone portrayed Paladin, erudite western soldier of fortune, on the popular western series Have Gun, Will Travel. He directed several episodes of this series. Boone tackled a daring TV assignment in 1963, when in collaboration with playwright Clifford Odets, he appeared in the TV anthology series The Richard Boone Show. Unique among filmed dramatic programs, Boone's series featured a cast of eleven regulars (including Harry Morgan, Robert Blake, Jeanette Nolan, Bethel Leslie and Boone himself), who appeared in repertory, essaying different parts of varying sizes each week. The Richard Boone Show failed to catch on, and Boone went back to films. In 1972 he starred in another western series, this one produced by his old friend Jack Webb: Hec Ramsey, the saga of an old-fashioned sheriff coping with an increasingly industrialized West. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador. Richard Boone died at age 65 of throat cancer.