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: Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, Joan Fontaine began her acting career in her late teens with various West Coast stage companies under the name Joan Burfield. She also used that name when she made her 1935 feature film debut in No More Ladies, in which she had a minor role. The daughter of '40s actress Lilian Fontaine, she returned to the screen as Joan Fontaine after two more years of stage work, although appearing primarily in B-movies. Two exceptions were A Damsel in Distress (1937) opposite Fred Astaire and Gunga Din (1939) with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Her career took off in the early '40s due largely to leads in two Alfred Hitchcock films. Fontaine received Best Actress Oscar nominations for her work in the director's Rebecca (1940) and The Constant Nymph (1943), and won an Oscar for her performance in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). She starred in many subsequent films, at first playing innocent, well-bred types, but later maturing into roles as sophisticated, worldly, often hot-headed or maliciously calculating women. Appearing in few films after 1958, Fontaine was also a licensed pilot, champion balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, expert golfer, licensed interior decorator, and Cordon Bleu cook. The sister of actress Olivia de Havilland (with whom she supposedly had many feuds), the first three of Fontaine's four husbands were actor Brian Aherne, producer William Dozier, and producer/screenwriter Collier Young. She published an autobiography, No Bed of Roses, in 1978 and made two rare TV movie and miniseries appearances in 1986. Joan Fontaine's final big-screen appearance was the intelligent British horror/drama The Devil's Own; her last TV work was in the 1994 production Good King Wenceslas. She died in 2013 at age 96.

Trivia: Born Albert Hedison, David Hedison billed himself as Al Hedison when he signed his 20th Century-Fox contract in 1958. He was still Al when he starred in his best-known film, The Fly, as the unfortunate researcher who ends up as lunch for a slavering spider ("Hellllp meeeeee"). By 1959, he was David Hedison, both as leading man of the 17-episode TV series Five Fingers and as romantic lead of still another fantasy film, The Lost World (1960). In 1964, Hedison worked off his Fox contract in the role of Captain Lee Crane in the weekly TVer Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-67). The most amusing episode of that Irwin Allen production was a 1963 entry which utilized generous stock footage from Lost World, with Hedison "out of uniform" so that he could match shots of himself lensed three years earlier. In the last three decades, David Hedison has co-starred in numerous made-for-TV movies, and has been seen on two television soap operas: the daytime Another World and the nighttime The Colbys.

Trivia: A graduate of the ABC daytime drama All My Children, Richard Hatch managed to get off on the wrong foot with critics and audiences alike with his first starring prime-time TV role. In 1976, Hatch replaced Michael Douglas on the long-running cop series The Streets of San Francisco. Before the ink was dry on the contract, Hatch was issuing public complaints about the shortcomings of his character, inspector Dan Robbins. This might have been excused as the youthful hubris, but then Hatch took his beloved co-star Karl Malden to task for giving him acting advice on the set. Not altogether surprisingly, Hatch was the subject of fewer and fewer interviews and articles after Streets was cancelled in 1977. He tried to attain film stardom, but things like Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1980) were enough to scuttle anyone's career. Luckily, Richard Hatch was able to garner a fan following with his role as Apollo on the 1979 sci-fi series Battlestar Gallactica; he also delivered a superb performance as Jan of Jan and Dean in the 1978 TV biopic Dead Man's Curve. Hatch later joined the Battlestar Galactica remake, playing the recurring role of terrorist-turned-politician Tom Zarek. Hatch died in 2017, at age 71.

Trivia: American stage leading man Linden Chiles made his first film appearance as Randy in the 1961 adaptation of William Faulkner's Sanctuary. When time came for Chiles to settle into character roles, he was most often cast as a businessman -- honest and otherwise -- and suburban father. His TV-series work includes the role of Chief Officer Steve Kirland in Convoy (1965) and the title character's dad in James at 15 (1978). Linden Chiles also spent several years as Edward Nichols on the NBC daytime drama Santa Barbara (1984-1992).