Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: The daughter of French refugees, Gigi Perreau was born within a stone's throw of Hollywood. Registered with Central Casting as an infant, 18-month-old Gigi played Eve Curie as a baby in 1942's Madame Curie, and at two played young Fanny (who grew up to be Bette Davis) in Mrs. Skeffington. As soon as she was able to talk, Gigi was being groomed by her managers as a potential Margaret O'Brien replacement. A little less mannered and more versatile than O'Brien, Gigi was at her best in such roles as Ann Blyth's irksome kid sister in My Foolish Heart (1950) an emotionally disturbed murder witness in Shadow on the Wall (1950), and a yet-to-be-born child shopping around for suitable parents in the 1950 comedy/fantasy For Heaven's Sake (1950). As her film career faded, Perreau flourished briefly as a TV leading lady, with supporting roles on the 1959 sitcom The Betty Hutton Show and the 1961 adventure weekly Follow the Sun. Adult stardom eluded her however, and by 1967 she was retired. Gigi Perreau was the sister of two other juvenile performers, Janine Perreau and Richard Miles; in the early 1960s, Perreau and brother Richard managed a popular Los Angeles art gallery.

Trivia: The son of a New York University professor of marketing, American actor James Drury spent his youth dividing his time between Manhattan and Oregon, where his mother ran a ranch. At age 8, Drury made his stage debut as King Herod-- crepe beard and all--in a Christmas production at a Greenwich Village settlement house. Sidelined by polio at age 10, Drury became a voracious reader, often acting out the characters in the books. At NYU, Drury dove full-force into acting, developing his craft to such an extent that in 1954 he was signed by MGM. His film roles were of the "other guy in the room" calibre (Forbidden Planet [1956]), so Drury's contract lapsed, after which he spent time at 20th Century-Fox in support of Pat Boone (Bernardine [1957]) and Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender [1958]). In 1958, Drury was cast by Screen Gems studios in a TV pilot film based on the Owen Wister story The Virginian. It didn't sell, but in 1962 Universal optioned the rights to The Virginian, bringing Drury in along for the ride. He spent the next nine years in The Virginian, during which time Drury's reputation for recalcitrance on the set and reluctance to reveal anything of himself in interviews earned him the soubriquet "The Garbo of the Sagebrush" (a nickname bestowed by Drury's father!) James Drury wasn't seen much after The Virginian, though he did show up on the small screen as the lead in an Emergency clone titled Firehouse, which ran on the ABC network for eight months in 1974.

Trivia: Beefy, muscular leading man Philip Carey entered films in 1951, shortly after his hitch in the Marines was up. Cutting quite a dashing figure in a 19th-century military uniform, Carey was most often cast as an American cavalry officer. In a similar vein, he appeared as Canadian-born Lt. Michael Rhodes on the 1956 TV series Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers. Curiously, he never appeared in any of director John Ford's cavalry films, though he did co-star in Ford's Mister Roberts (1955) and The Long Gray Line (1955). In 1959, Carey starred in a TV series based on Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. While no one could fault his performance in the role, the Philip Marlowe series survived but a single season. He is best known for his four subsequent TV assignments: as spokesperson for the regionally aired Granny Goose potato chips commercials, as forever-flustered Lt. Parmalee on the comedy Western Laredo (1966-1968), as narrator of the documentary series Untamed World (1968-1975), and, from 1980-2007, as eternally scheming patriarch Asa Buchanan on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. One of Philip Carey's least typical TV appearances was on a 1971 All in the Family episode, in which he played Archie Bunker's macho-man bar buddy -- who turns out to be a homosexual.

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).