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 Wayne took it upon himself to line up work for Arness, becoming one of the withdrawn young actor's few friends.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: 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: Darren McGavin dropped out of college after one year and moved to New York, where he trained for the stage at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio. In the mid '40s he began landing small roles in occasional films, but worked primarily onstage. He first made an impression onscreen as a painter in David Lean's Summertime and a drug pusher in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (both 1955); nevertheless, his subsequent film work tended to occur in intermittent spurts, with long periods off-screen between roles. He is best known as a TV actor; he starred in the TV series Crime Photographer, Mike Hammer, Riverboat, The Outsider, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and also appeared in a number of TV movies. He occasionally directed episodes of his TV shows, and directed and produced the film Happy Mother's Day, Love George (1973), whose title was later changed to Run, Stranger, Run.

Trivia: Manhattan-born Everett Sloane first set foot on-stage at age seven, in the role of Puck in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. At 18, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to join a stock company. Poor reviews convinced Sloane that his future did not lie in the theater, so he secured a job as a Wall Street runner -- only to return to acting after the 1929 crash. He went into radio, playing anything and everything (he was the standard voice of Adolph Hitler on "The March of Time"), then made his Broadway bow with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. Welles brought Sloane to Hollywood in 1940 to play the wizened Mr. Bernstein in the cinema classic Citizen Kane; Sloane remained a Mercury associate until 1947, when he played the crippled attorney Bannister in Welles' Lady From Shanghai. Outside of the Welles orbit, Sloane was seen in the 1944 Broadway hit A Bell for Adano, and starred as the ruthless business executive in both the television and screen versions of Rod Serling's Patterns. Sloane's additional TV work included a 39-week starring stint on the syndicated series Official Detective, the voice of Dick Tracy in a batch of 130 cartoons produced in 1960 and 1961, and several episodic-TV directorial credits. Reportedly depressed over his encroaching blindness, Everett Sloane committed suicide at the age of 55.

Trivia: Actress Aneta Corseaut made her feature film debut appearing opposite young Steve McQueen and an oozy pile of goo in The Blob (1958). She subsequently played occasional leads and supporting roles in feature films and television. Fans of the nostalgic sitcom The Andy Griffith Show will recognize her as school teacher Helen Crump, longtime girlfriend of Mayberry sheriff Andy Taylor (Griffith). Other television roles include that of Nurse Bradley on House Calls during the late '70s and early '80s. Corseaut's additional film credits include Bad Ronald (1974) and The Toolbox Murders (1978).

Trivia: Though early on, short, pugnacious American actor Gerald S. O'Loughlin dreamed of becoming a lawyer, the prohibitive cost of law school forced him to steer toward engineering as a career. O'Loughlin was deflected from this ambition by an increasing interest in the theatre. After a long stint with the Marines, O'Loughlin used his GI Bill money to finance his participation at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Working steadily on stage and in live TV drama, O'Loughlin made an inauspicious debut as the romantic lead in the Manhattan-filmed turkey Lovers and Lollipops (1956); one year later, he was shown to better advantage re-creating his stage role in the filmization of Michael Gazzo's play A Hatful of Rain (1957). For many children of the '70s, Gerald O'Loughlin will always be the tough-but-tender Lt. Ryker on the long-running cop series The Rookies. Even in his subsequent TV series assignments (Automan [1983-1984], Our House [1986]) one half expected O'Loughlin to drop character and start barking out "Hey! Danko." Gerald O'Loughlin was married to casting director Meryl Abeles.

Trivia: Avery was a versatile American character actor onscreen from 1956, beginning with The Harder They Fall.

Trivia: From his first film appearance in 1946 until his retirement sometime in the late 1960s, the wizened, rusty-voiced actor William Fawcett specialized in cantankerous farmers, grizzled old prospectors and Scroogelike millionaires. He worked frequently at Columbia, appearing in that studio's quota of "B" westerns and Arabian Nights quickies, as well as such serials as The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), in which he played the juicy bad-guy role of Merlin the Magician. Though occasionally seen in sizeable parts in "A" pictures--he played Andy Griffith's septuagenarian father in No Time For Sergeants (1957)--Fawcett's appearances in big-budgeters frequently went unbilled, as witness The Music Man (1962) and What a Way to Go (1964). Baby boomers will fondly recall William Fawcett as ranch-hand Pete ("who cut his teeth on a brandin' iron") in the Saturday-morning TV series Fury (1956-60).

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.