Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Open-faced, bulb-nosed character actor John Larch entered films in 1954, appearing mostly in westerns and outdoor adventures. During the "crime exposé" film cycle, Larch alternated between playing honest cops and dirty-palmed politicos. An old crony of actor/director Clint Eastwood, Larch appeared in such Eastwood efforts as Dirty Harry (1971) and Play Misty For Me (1972). His TV work has included weekly roles on two briefies of the 1960s, Arrest and Trial (1963) and Convoy (1965). Twilight Zone fans will instantly recognize John Larch as the walking-on-eggs father of malevolent telekinetic youngster Anthony Fremont (Billy Mumy) in the 1961 Zone chiller "It's a Good Life."

Trivia: John Rubinstein was born in Los Angeles in 1946, the same year that his celebrated father, 59-year-old concert pianist Arthur B. Rubinstein, became an American citizen. A fine musician in his own right, John has worked on the scores of such films as The Candidate (1972) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). The younger Rubinstein is, however, far better known as an actor. He made a well-received Broadway debut in the popular musical Pippin and later co-starred in Children of a Lesser God and A Soldier's Tale. A familiar TV and movie face since 1970, Rubinstein starred in the 1972 theatrical feature Pippin, was featured as Meredith Baxter's ex-husband in the Mike Nichols-produced TV series Family (1976-1980), and was cast as MGM mogul Irving Thalberg in the 1980 TV movie The Silent Lovers. He was most familiar for his three-season (1984-1986) portrayal of uptight attorney Harrison K. Fox on the tongue-in-cheek private eye weekly Crazy Like a Fox. John Rubinstein is married to actress Judy West.

Trivia: Prolific American character actress Louise Latham was essentially a stage performer until the early 1960s. Latham made an impressive film debut as Tippi Hedrens slatternly mother in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964). Her regular weekly-TV roles include landlady Martha Higgins in Sara (1976), Alma Captor in The Contender (1980) and Louise Dougherty in Hothouse (1988). In addition, Louise Latham was featured in a wealth of made-for-TV movies, notably Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal (1981) and Pray TV (1982).

Trivia: The son of a real-estate man, blonde, athletic John Charles Andes became Keith Andes when signed to a contract by David O. Selznick in the 1940s. At that time, Andes, a recent Temple University graduate, was a member of the Army Air Force, touring in the all-serviceman stage production Winged Victory. His stage reputation rested on his rich baritone singing voice, which he seldom got to utilize in his film and TV work. After several failed pilot films, Andes was given his own starring series in 1959: the syndicated This Man Dawson, in which he played an ex-military man hired to clean up a corrupt police department in a unnamed city. To bone up on his role, Andes was permitted to sit in on the LAPD three-man board which determined who would be selected as police officers--and became so adept at his "job" that he ended up rejecting a few candidates! Andes' later TV work included a 13-week stint as Glynis Johns' long-suffering husband on the 1963 sitcom Glynis. Never completely abandoning the stage, Keith Andes co-starred with Lucille Ball in the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat, and later in the decade headlined a touring company of Man of La Mancha.

Trivia: Gamine-like Canadian singer-dancer Allyn Ann McLerie built her reputation on Broadway, where she made her debut at 16 in the chorus of One Touch of Venus. She rose to stardom playing soubrette roles in such hits as Leonard Bernstein's On the Town and Irving Berlin's Miss Liberty Four years after her tentative movie debut in the 1948 MGM feature Words and Music Ms. McLerie won a Warner Bros. contract when she repeated her Broadway role of Amy Spettigue in the film version of Frank Loesser's Where's Charley? Rapidly outgrowing the wearisome ingenues assigned her by the studio, Allyn temporarily retired in 1954. Resuming her acting, singing and dancing lessons in the mid-1960s, Allyn slowly reemerged as a versatile character actress, popping up in such small but powerful roles as Red Buttons' psychotic dance partner in They Shoot Horses, Don't They (1969) and the "wrong" White House source in All the President's Men (1976). On TV, she played spinsterish secretary Janet Reubner on The Tony Randall Show (1976-78), while on the 1987 critic's darling Days and Nights of Molly Dodd she portrayed Molly's divorced mother. Allyn Ann McLerie has been married twice, to actor/playwright/lyricist Adolph Green and to Broadway leading man George Gaynes.