Trivia: Arguably the most popular -- and certainly the busiest -- movie leading man in Hollywood history, John Wayne entered the film business while working as a laborer on the Fox lot during summer vacations from U.S.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. He met and was befriended by John Ford, a young director who was beginning to make a name for himself in action films, comedies, and dramas. Wayne was cast in small roles in Ford's late-'20s films, occasionally under the name Duke Morrison. It was Ford who recommended Wayne to director Raoul Walsh for the male lead in the 1930 epic Western The Big Trail, and, although it was a failure at the box office, the movie showed Wayne's potential as a leading man. During the next nine years, be busied himself in a multitude of B-Westerns and serials -- most notably Shadow of the Eagle and The Three Mesquiteers series -- in between occasional bit parts in larger features such as Warner Bros.' Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. But it was in action roles that Wayne excelled, exuding a warm and imposing manliness onscreen to which both men and women could respond. In 1939, Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the adventure Stagecoach, a brilliant Western of modest scale but tremendous power (and incalculable importance to the genre), and the actor finally showed what he could do. Wayne nearly stole a picture filled with Oscar-caliber performances, and his career was made. He starred in most of Ford's subsequent major films, whether Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949], Rio Grande [1950], The Searchers [1956]); war pictures (They Were Expendable [1945]); or serious dramas (The Quiet Man [1952], in which Wayne also directed some of the action sequences). He also starred in numerous movies for other directors, including several extremely popular World War II thrillers (Flying Tigers [1942], Back to Bataan [1945], Fighting Seabees [1944], Sands of Iwo Jima [1949]); costume action films (Reap the Wild Wind [1942], Wake of the Red Witch [1949]); and Westerns (Red River [1948]). His box-office popularity rose steadily through the 1940s, and by the beginning of the 1950s he'd also begun producing movies through his company Wayne-Fellowes, later Batjac, in association with his sons Michael and Patrick (who also became an actor). Most of these films were extremely successful, and included such titles as Angel and the Badman (1947), Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954), and Hondo (1953). The 1958 Western Rio Bravo, directed by Howard Hawks, proved so popular that it was remade by Hawks and Wayne twice, once as El Dorado and later as Rio Lobo. At the end of the 1950s, Wayne began taking on bigger films, most notably The Alamo (1960), which he produced and directed, as well as starred in. It was well received but had to be cut to sustain any box-office success (the film was restored to full length in 1992). During the early '60s, concerned over the growing liberal slant in American politics, Wayne emerged as a spokesman for conservative causes, especially support for America's role in Vietnam, which put him at odds with a new generation of journalists and film critics. Coupled with his advancing age, and a seeming tendency to overact, he became a target for liberals and leftists. However, his movies remained popular. McLintock!, which, despite well-articulated statements against racism and the mistreatment of Native Americans, and in support of environmentalism, seemed to confirm the left's worst fears, but also earned more than ten million dollars and made the list of top-grossing films of 1963-1964. Virtually all of his subsequent movies, including the pro-Vietnam War drama The Green Berets (1968), were very popular with audiences, but not with critics. Further controversy erupted with the release of The Cowboys, which outraged liberals with its seeming justification of violence as a solution to lawlessness, but it was successful enough to generate a short-lived television series. Amid all of the shouting and agonizing over his politics, Wayne won an Oscar for his role as marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a part that he later reprised in a sequel. Wayne weathered the Vietnam War, but, by then, time had become his enemy. His action films saw him working alongside increasingly younger co-stars, and the decline in popularity of the Western ended up putting him into awkward contemporary action films like McQ (1974). Following his final film, The Shootist (1976) -- possibly his best Western since The Searchers -- the news that Wayne was stricken ill with cancer (which eventually took his life in 1979) wiped the slate clean, and his support for the Panama Canal Treaty at the end of the 1970s belatedly made him a hero for the left. Wayne finished his life honored by the film community, the U.S. Congress, and the American people as had no actor before or since. He remains among the most popular actors of his generation, as evidenced by the continual rereleases of his films on home video.

Trivia: Born into a show business family, George Kennedy made his stage debut at the age of two in a touring company of Bringing up Father. By the time he was seven, he was spinning records on a New York radio station. Kennedy' showbusiness inclinations were put aside when he developed a taste for the rigors of military life during World War II, and he wound up spending 16 years in the army. His military career ended and his acting career began when a back injury in the late 1950s inspired him to seek out another line of work.Appropriately enough, given his background, Kennedy first made his name with a role as a military advisor on the Sergeant Bilko TV series. In films from 1961, the burly, 6'4" actor usually played heavies, both figuratively and literally; quite often, as in Charade (1963) and Straitjacket (1964), his unsavory screen characters were bumped off sometime during the fourth reel. One of his friendlier roles was as a compassionate Union officer in Shenandoah (1965), an assignment he was to treasure because it gave him a chance to work with the one of his idols, Jimmy Stewart.Kennedy moved up to the big leagues with his Academy Award win for his portrayal of Dragline in Cool Hand Luke (1967). An above-the-title star from then on, Kennedy has been associated with many a box-office hit, notably all four Airport films. Unlike many major actors, he has displayed a willingness to spoof his established screen image, as demonstrated by his portrayal of Ed Hocken in the popular Naked Gun series. On TV, Kennedy has starred in the weekly series Sarge (1971) and The Blue Knight (1978), and was seen as President Warren G. Harding in the 1979 miniseries Backstairs at the White House. During the mid '90s, he became known as a persuasive commercial spokesman in a series of breath-freshener advertisements. In 1997, he provided the voice for L.B. Mammoth in the animated musical Cats Don't Dance, and the following year again displayed his vocal talents as one of the titular toys-gone-bad in Small Soldiers. Kennedy continued to steadily work through the next two decades; his final role was in The Gambler in 2014. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: Curly haired American actor Gary Grimes is best remembered for his film debut in which he played the callow Hermie opposite Jennifer O'Neill's older, more sophisticated Dorothy in The Summer of '42 (1971). He appeared in several more films of the '70s, including The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) and Gus (1976). But for a small role as the voice of one of the Beatles in the 1987 Canadian film Concrete Angels, Grime's acting career ended with the 1976 television miniseries Once an Eagle.

Trivia: The oldest child of an itinerant bridge builder, actor Neville Brand intended to make the military his career, and indeed spent ten years in uniform. During World War II, he became America's fourth most decorated soldier when he wiped out a German 50-caliber machine gun nest. He also decided that he'd seek out another line of work as soon as his hitch was up. Paying for acting classes with his GI Bill, he started his career off-Broadway. In 1949, he made his film debut in D.O.A., playing a psychotic hoodlum who delights in punching poisoned hero Edmond O'Brien in the stomach. Brand spent most of the early '50s at 20th Century Fox, a studio that surprisingly downplayed the actor's war record by shuttling him from one unstressed supporting role to another (though he's the principal villain in 1950's Where the Sidewalk Ends, he receives no screen credit). He fared far better on television, where he won the Sylvania Award for his portrayal of Huey Long in a 1958 telestaging of All the King's Men. Even better received was his portrayal of Al Capone on the TV series The Untouchables, a characterization he repeated in the 1961 theatrical feature The George Raft Story. In 1966, Brand briefly shed his bad-guy image to play the broadly hilarious role of bumbling Texas Ranger Reese Bennett on the TV Western series Laredo. His off-camera reputation for pugnacity and elbow-bending was tempered by his unswerving loyalty to his friends and his insatiable desire to better himself intellectually (his private library was one of the largest in Hollywood, boasting some 5000 titles). Fighting a losing battle against emphysema during his last years, Neville Brand died at the age of 70.

Trivia: A Utah girl born and bred, actress Marie Windsor attended Brigham Young University and represented her state as Miss Utah in the Miss America pageant. She studied acting under Russian stage and screen luminary Maria Ouspenskaya, supporting herself as a telephone operator between performing assignments. After several years of radio appearances and movie bits, Windsor was moved up to feature-film roles in 1947's Song of the Thin Man. She was groomed to be a leading lady, but her height precluded her co-starring with many of Hollywood's sensitive, slightly built leading men. (She later noted with amusement that at least one major male star had a mark on his dressing room door at the 5'6" level; if an actress was any taller than that, she was out.) Persevering, Windsor found steady work in second-lead roles as dance hall queens, gun molls, floozies, and exotic villainesses. She is affectionately remembered by disciples of director Stanley Kubrick for her portrayal of Elisha Cook's cold-blooded, castrating wife in The Killing (1956). Curtailing her screen work in the late '80s, Windsor, who is far more agreeable in person than onscreen, began devoting the greater portion of her time to her sizeable family. Because of her many appearances in Westerns (she was an expert horsewoman), Windsor has become a welcome and highly sought-after presence on the nostalgia convention circuit.

Trivia: Lead and supporting actor, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: During the 1960s, muscular Dan Vadis played the leads in 16 European spectaculars, including Il Trionfo de Ercoli (Hercules vs. the Giant Warriors) (1964). He went on to play supporting roles in Hollywood-made Clint Eastwood (and other features) films such as High Plains Drifter (1972).

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.

Trivia: Had he been born a decade earlier, American actor Denver Pyle might well have joined the ranks of western-movie comedy sidekicks. Instead, Pyle, a Colorado farm boy, opted for studying law, working his way through school by playing drums in a dance band. Suddenly one day, Pyle became disenchanted with law and returned to his family farm, with nary an idea what he wanted to do with his life. Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he moved on to the shrimp boats of Galveston, Texas. A short stint as a page at NBC radio studios in 1940 didn't immediately lead to a showbiz career, as it has for so many others; instead, Pyle was inspired to perform by a mute oilfield coworker who was able to convey his thought with body language. Studying under such masters as Michael Chekhov and Maria Ouspenskaya, Pyle was able to achieve small movie and TV roles. He worked frequently on the western series of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry; not yet bearded and grizzled, Pyle was often seen as deputies, farmers and cattle rustlers. When his hair turned prematurely grey in his early '30s, Pyle graduated to banker, sheriff and judge roles in theatrical westerns -- though never of the comic variety. He also was a regular on two TV series, Code 3 (1956) and Tammy (1966). But his real breakthrough role didn't happen until 1967, when Pyle was cast as the taciturn sheriff in Bonnie and Clyde who is kidnapped and humilated by the robbers -- and then shows up at the end of the film to supervise the bloody machine-gun deaths of B&C. This virtually nonspeaking role won worldwide fame for Pyle, as well as verbal and physical assalts from the LA hippie community who regarded Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes! From this point forward, Denver Pyle's billing, roles and salary were vastly improved -- and his screen image was softened and humanized by a full, bushy beard. Returning to TV, Pyle played the star's father on The Doris Day Show (1968-73); was Mad Jack, the costar/narrator of Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978-80); and best of all, spent six years (1979-85) as Uncle Jesse Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. Looking stockier but otherwise unchanged, Denver Pyle was briefly seen in the 1994 hit Maverick, playing an elegantly dishonest cardshark who jauntily doffs his hat as he's dumped off of a riverboat. Pyle died of lung cancer at Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center at age 77.

Trivia: American actor Jackie Coogan belonged to a family of vaudevillians. At age four Coogan was already a stage attraction performing with his father when he caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, who immediately hired him (and his father as well). After giving him a bit part in the short A Day's Pleasure (1919), he made Coogan his co-star in the masterpiece The Kid (1921). This launched Coogan's film career and he went on to become one of the highest paid film actors of the day. Movie audiences worldwide doted on him, but his career as a child star petered out when he was 13 and too old to be "cute." In 1935 when his mother and stepfather refused to let him have the $4 million that he had amassed during his child acting days, he filed suit against them. When the settlement finally came, he received a mere $126,000., but the legal fight brought attention to such abuses, and resulted in the "California Child Actor's Bill" also known as the "Coogan Act" which protected the earnings of child actors. He was married to Betty Grable for 3 years, and to three other showgirls in succession afterwards. During his adulthood, he occasionally appeared in films playing character roles and worked frequently in television, most notably as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series. He died on March 1, 1984.

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: The son of actors Harry Carey and Olive Golden, Harry Carey Jr. never answered to "Harry" or "Junior"; to his friends, family and film buffs, he was always "Dobe" Carey. Raised on his father's California ranch, the younger Carey spent his first six adult years in the Navy. While it is commonly assumed that he made his film debut under the direction of his dad's longtime friend John Ford, Carey in fact was first seen in a fleeting bit in 1946's Rolling Home, directed by William Berke. It wasn't until his third film, Three Godfathers (dedicated to the memory of his father) that Carey worked with Ford. Honoring his promise to Harry Sr. that he'd "look after" Dobe, Ford saw to it that the younger Carey was given a starring assignment (along with another of the director's proteges, Ben Johnson), in Wagonmaster (1950). Though he handled this assignment nicely, exuding an appealing earnest boyishness, Carey wasn't quite ready for stardom so far as the Hollywood "higher-ups" were concerned, so he settled for supporting roles, mostly in westerns. John Ford continued to use Carey whenever possible; in 1955's The Long Gray Line, the actor has a few brief scenes as West Point undergraduate Dwight D. Eisenhower. Carey was also featured on the "Spin and Marty" segments of Walt Disney's daily TVer The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-59). In later years, Carey's weather-beaten face was seen in choice character assignments in films ranging from The Whales of August (1987) to Back to the Future III (1990); he was also hired by such John Ford aficionados as Peter Bogdanovich, who cast Carey as an old wrangler named Dobie (what else?) in Nickelodeon (1976), and as an ageing bike-gang member named Red in Mask (1985). In 1994, Harry Carey Jr. published his autobiography, Company of Heroes. Carey died of natural causes at age 91 in late December 2012.

Trivia: American actor Walter Barnes was what was described by casting directories as an "outdoor action type." His first regular TV work was as Finn on 1959's Tales of the Vikings, a Kirk Douglas-produced syndicated series filmed in the German Alps. Remaining in Europe, Barnes continued to work swashbucklers like Captain Sinbad (1963) and westerns like Frontier Hellcat (1966) and The Big Gundown (1968). He returned to America in the late 1960s, where he was featured in such westernized productions as John Wayne's Cahill: US Marshal (1970), The Travelling Executioner (1972), Mackintosh and J.J. (1975), and Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) (as Sheriff Sam Shaw) and Broncho Billy (1980). Walter Barnes was as sturdy and steadfast as ever in 1981, when he appeared as the father of sheriff Buford Pusser (Bo Svenson) on the weekly TV version of Walking Tall.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: Bald, lanky, laconic American actor Hank Worden made his screen debut in The Plainsman (1936), and began playing simpleminded rustics at least as early as the 1941 El Brendel two-reel comedy Love at First Fright. A member in good standing of director John Ford's unofficial stock company, Worden appeared in such Ford classics as Fort Apache (1948) and Wagonmaster (1950). The quintessential Worden-Ford collaboration was The Searchers (1955) wherein Worden portrayed the near-moronic Mose Harper, who spoke in primitive, epigrammatic half-sentences and who seemed gleefully obsessed with the notion of unexpected death. Never a "normal" actor by any means, Worden continued playing characters who spoke as if they'd been kicked by a horse in childhood into the '80s; his last appearance was a recurring role in the quirky David Lynch TV serial Twin Peaks. In real life, Hank Worden was far from addled and had a razor-sharp memory, as proven in his many appearances at Western fan conventions and in an interview program about living in the modern desert, filmed just before Worden's death for cable TV's Discovery Channel.

Trivia: Chuck Roberson was a rancher before serving in World War II. Upon his discharge, he sought out film work as a stunt man. While under contract to Republic Pictures, Roberson doubled for John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch (1948). Thereafter, he worked in virtually all of Wayne's films as stunt double, action coordinator, second-unit director and bit actor. His best speaking part was Sheriff Lordin in the Duke's McClintock (1963). Chuck Roberson's career served as the inspiration for the Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy (1981-86).