Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: American actor James MacArthur was the adopted son of stage legend Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur. Despite his mother's insistence that James have a normal childhood, it was difficult not to be intoxicated by the theatre when growing up around the greatest acting and literary talent in the '40s. At age 8, young MacArthur appeared in a stock-company production of The Corn is Green. Fresh out of Harvard, MacArthur became a movie juvenile, specializing in tortured-teen roles in such films as The Young Stranger (1957) and Disney's Light in the Forest (1958). Outgrowing his somewhat charming awkwardness, MacArthur was less satisfying as a standard leading man, and by 1967 he was wasting away in pictures like The Love Ins. That same year, the pilot film for a new Jack Lord cop series, Hawaii Five-O, was screened for a test audience. The group liked the film but not the young man (Tim O'Kelly) who played Lord's assistant, deeming him too young for the part. Hawaii producer Leonard Freeman then called upon 30-year-old MacArthur, with whom Freeman had worked on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang 'Em High. From 1968 through 1979, MacArthur played Hawaii Five-0's detective Danny Williams, always handy whenever Jack Lord felt the need to snap "Book 'em, Danno." Though the series enriched MacArthur and made him a vital member of the Honolulu society and business world, the actor finally packed it in after 11 seasons, when it seemed as though he'd be Danno forever (the show continued for one more season). Too wealthy to care about a career at this point, James MacArthur still took an occasional role into the '80s; his most prominent post-Hawaii assignment was the 1980 TV movie Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story, in which he played a rare non-sympathetic character. MacArthur died in October 2010 of natural causes at age 72.

Trivia: Born in Japan to American parents (her father was a career officer in the Air Force), brunette leading lady Victoria Principal spent her teen years in Florida, where she was elected Miss Miami in 1969. While studying acting at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Principal became romantically involved with a much-older British financier named Bernard Cornfield. Thanks to Cornfield's show-business connections, Principal was able to meet enough of the "right people" to begin a movie career in 1971. After appearing without distinction in such films as Earthquake (1971) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), she tried to give her flagging career a shot in the arm by posing nude in Playboy magazine. She then quit acting for nearly three years, becoming a talent agent for other actors, all the while seeking out the right "comeback" vehicle for herself. In 1978 she found that vehicle when she was cast as Pamela Barnes Ewing on the internationally popular TV serial Dallas. During her early Dallas years, she briefly pursued a singing career in the company of her then-boyfriend Andy Gibb. This came to naught, but Principal's other business enterprises -- her clothing and cosmetic lines, her self-help books The Body Principal (1983), The Beauty Principal (1984) and The Diet Principal (1987) -- made her a millionaire many times over. Since leaving Dallas in 1987, Principal has, through an unbeatable combination of talent and persistence, transformed herself into the Queen of Made-for-TV Movies, far outflanking such possible competitors as Cheryl Ladd and Jane Seymour. Those credits include Sparks: The Price of Passion, River of Rage, Dancing in the Dark, and Love In Another Town.

Trivia: Along with such colleagues as William Conrad, John Dehner, Vic Perrin, Sam Edwards, Barney Phillips, and Virginia Gregg, bald-pated American character actor Lawrence Dobkin was one of the mainstays of network radio in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Dobkin began popping up in films in 1949, playing any number of doctors, lawyers, attachés, military officials, and desk sergeants. Most of his parts were fleeting, many were unbilled: he can be seen as a soft-spoken rabbi in Angels in the Outfield (1951), one of the three psychiatrists baffled by alien visitor Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), an angered citizen of Rome in Julius Caesar (1953), and so on. Enjoying larger roles on TV, Dobkin was generally cast as a scheming villain (e.g., Dutch Schultz on The Untouchables). One of his showiest assignments was as the demented Gregory Praxas, horror film star turned mass murderer, in the 1972 pilot film for Streets of San Francisco. From the early '60s onward, Dobkin was busier as a writer and director than as an actor. He amassed a respectable list of TV directorial credits, as well as one theatrical feature, Sixteen (1972). Habitués of "speculation" docudramas of the 1970s and 1980s will recognize Lawrence Dobkin as the bearded, avuncular narrator of many of these efforts; he also appeared as Pontius Pilate in the speculative 1979 four-waller In Search of Historic Jesus.

Trivia: Poor George Lazenby achieved a negative fame for most of his career as The Man Who Would Be James Bond. The son of an Australian railway worker, Lazenby's first paying job was as an auto mechanic. He worked his way up to car salesman before exploiting his good looks as a male model in England. When Sean Connery briefly left the James Bond film series in 1967, producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli decided to invent a "new" Connery, and Lazenby was selected to portray 007 in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Although his performance was by no means as bad as some critics have claimed -- in fact, time has been kind to his no-nonsense interpretation of the character -- Lazenby invited reams of bad press when he spoke ill of his highly respected leading lady Diana Rigg. While Secret Service earned nine million dollars (less than its predecessors, but still a success), Lazenby's future career as James Bond was scuttled when Sean Connery agreed to return to the fold in Diamonds Are Forever in 1970. Lazenby has continued to appear in films ever since, albeit often in a campy manner alluding to his failure to capitalize on his brief Bond fame. From 1984 to 1985, Lazenby was a regular on the American syndicated TV soap opera Rituals.

Trivia: Tall leading man Barry Bostwick began his professional acting career while still a sophomore at the United States International University School of Performing Arts in San Diego; his first stage gig was opposite Walter Pidgeon in Take Her, She's Mine. Completing his training at the New York University Graduate School of the Arts, Bostwick made his Broadway bow in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. He went on to play Danny Zuko in the smash-hit musical Grease, and in 1978 won a Tony Award for his work in The Robber Bridegroom. In films from 1971, Bostwick is best known for his calculatedly cloddish portrayal of Brad Majors in the midnight-movie perennial The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Equally enjoyable was his characterization of the aspiring songwriter ("It Just Shows to Go Ya") who agrees to write an entire Broadway musical in 24 hours in the 1979 spoof Movie, Movie. Barry Bostwick has also excelled on television, playing movie idol John Gilbert in Garson Kanin's The Silent Lovers (1980) and George Washington in two mid-'80s miniseries based on the life of the first U.S. president. He continued to work steadily on the big and small screen in projects such as the miniseries War & Remembrance and its sequel, Challenger, Praying Mantis, and Weekend at Bernie's II. At the beginning of the 21st century he appeared in The Skulls 3 as well as other productions including Hannah Montana: The Movie. In 2012 he appeared in the action comedy FDR: American Badass!