Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma carpet layer, James Garner did stints in the Army and merchant marines before working as a model. His professional acting career began with a non-speaking part in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), in which he was also assigned to run lines with stars Lloyd Nolan, Henry Fonda, and John Hodiak. Given that talent roster, and the fact that the director was Charles Laughton, Garner managed to earn his salary and receive a crash course in acting at the same time. After a few television commercials, he was signed as a contract player by Warner Bros. in 1956. He barely had a part in his first film, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), though he was given special attention by director David Butler, who felt Garner had far more potential than the film's nominal star, Tab Hunter. Due in part to Butler's enthusiasm, Garner was cast in the Warner Bros. TV Western Maverick. The scriptwriters latched on to his gift for understated humor, and, before long, the show had as many laughs as shoot-outs. Garner was promoted to starring film roles during his Maverick run, but, by the third season, he chafed at his low salary and insisted on better treatment. The studio refused, so he walked out. Lawsuits and recriminations were exchanged, but the end result was that Garner was a free agent as of 1960. He did quite well as a freelance actor for several years, turning in commendable work in such films as Boys' Night Out (1962) and The Great Escape (1963), but was soon perceived by filmmakers as something of a less-expensive Rock Hudson, never more so than when he played Hudson-type parts opposite Doris Day in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All! (both 1963).Garner fared rather better in variations of his Maverick persona in such Westerns as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and The Skin Game (1971), but he eventually tired of eating warmed-over stew; besides, being a cowboy star had made him a walking mass of injuries and broken bones. He tried to play a more peaceable Westerner in the TV series Nichols (1971), but when audiences failed to respond, his character was killed off and replaced by his more athletic twin brother (also Garner). The actor finally shed the Maverick cloak with his long-running TV series The Rockford Files (1974-1978), in which he played a John MacDonald-esque private eye who never seemed to meet anyone capable of telling the truth. Rockford resulted in even more injuries for the increasingly battered actor, and soon he was showing up on TV talk shows telling the world about the many physical activities which he could no longer perform. Rockford ended in a spirit of recrimination, when Garner, expecting a percentage of the profits, learned that "creative bookkeeping" had resulted in the series posting none. To the public, Garner was the rough-hewn but basically affable fellow they'd seen in his fictional roles and as Mariette Hartley's partner (not husband) in a series of Polaroid commercials. However, his later film and TV-movie roles had a dark edge to them, notably his likable but mercurial pharmacist in Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his multifaceted co-starring stints with James Woods in the TV movies Promise (1986) and My Name Is Bill W. (1989). In 1994, Garner came full circle in the profitable feature film Maverick (1994), in which the title role was played by Mel Gibson. With the exception of such lower-key efforts as the noir-ish Twilight (1998) and the made-for-TV thriller Dead Silence (1997), Garner's career in the '90s found the veteran actor once again tapping into his latent ability to provoke laughs in such efforts as Space Cowboys (2000) while maintaining a successful small-screen career by returning to the role of Jim Rockford in several made-for-TV movies. He provided a voice for the popular animatedfeature Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and appeared in the comedy-drama The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Garner enjoyed a career resurgance in 2003, when he joined the cast of TV's 8 Simple Rules, acting as a sort of replacement for John Ritter, who had passed away at the beginning of the show's second season. He next appeared in The Notebook (2004), which earned Garner a Screen Actors Guild nomination and also poised him to win the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. His last on-screen role was a small supporting role in The Ultimate Gift (2007). In 2008, Garner suffered a stroke and retired acting. He died in 2014, at age 86.

Trivia: An actor of seemingly boundless range, New York-born Hector Elizondo began his career as a dancer. His initial training was at the Ballet Arts school of Carnegie Hall, from which he moved on to the Actors Studio. After several years' stage work, Elizondo made an inauspicious movie debut as "The Inspector" in the low-budget sex film The Vixens (1969). He was shown to better advantage in his next film, Hal Ashby's The Landlord (1970), which he followed up with strong character parts in such Manhattan-based productions as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and Thieves (1977). With Young Doctors in Love (1982), Elizondo began his long association with director Garry Marshall, who has since cast the actor in all of his films, in roles both sizable (Matt Dillon's dad in The Flamingo Kid [1984], the cafe owner in Frankie and Johnny [1991]), and microscopic (Overboard [1987]). Elizondo's screen roles have run the gamut from scrungy garbage scow captains to elegant concierges (Pretty Woman). In addition, he has been a regular on several mediocre television series: Popi, Freebie and the Bean, Casablanca (in the old Claude Rains role of Inspector Renault), a.k.a. Pablo, Foley Square, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, In 1994, Elizondo took on a co-starring role as a demanding chief of surgery on the popular TV medical drama Chicago Hope. Other non-Marshall highlights in his filmography include Tortilla Soup, Overboard, Necessary Roughness, and Music Within.

Trivia: Veteran TV actor Jerry Douglas began his career on-screen in the early '60s, appearing on a multitude of shows like Mission: Impossible and Bonanza while supporting his family with a day job as an insurance salesman. He would sustain his career on these singular and often memorable appearances for over two decades before joining the cast of the daytime soap The Young and the Restless in 1985, playing patriarch John Abbott. He would remain with the show until 2008.

Trivia: The son of a New Zealand marine commander, actor Nicolas Coster was born in London. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, then moved to New York, where he studied at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. A businesslike type best suited to executive roles, Coster has spent most of his time in TV daytime drama: Young Dr. Malone, Secret Storm, As the World Turns, Somerset, Another World, One Life to Live, All My Children and Santa Barbara. Even his first prime-time stint was the weekly soap opera Our Private World (1965). Coster's film credits include All the President's Men (1976), Reds (1981), and Betsy's Wedding (1991); he has also done stage and commercial voiceover work. An avid scuba diver, Nicolas Coster is licensed as a U.S. Coast Guard skipper in his off-hours.

Trivia: When asked why he decided upon becoming an actor, Joe Santos tended to trot out the tried-and-true rationale "because I failed at everything else." While attending Fordham University, Santos excelled at football, but lost interest in the sport after a few semi-pro years. By the time he was 30, Santos had been remarkably unsuccessful in a variety of vocations, including railroad worker, tree cutter, automobile importer and tavern owner. While working a construction job in New York, Santos was invited by a friend to sit in on an acting class. This seemed like an easy way to make a living, so Santos began making the audition rounds, almost immediately landing a good part on a TV soap opera. This gig unfortunately led nowhere, and for the next year or so Santos drove a cab for 10 to 11 hours a day. The novice actor's first big break was a part in the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park, which he received at the recommendation of the film's star (and Santos' frequent softball partner) Al Pacino. With the plum part of Sergeant Cruz in the four-part TV drama The Blue Knight (1973), Santos inaugurated a fruitful, still-thriving career in "cop" roles, the best and longest-lasting of which was detective Dennis Becker on the James Garner series The Rockford Files (1974-80). Joe Santos' other series-TV credits include the top-billed part of deadbeat dad Norman Davis in Me and Maxx (1980), Hispanic nightclub comic Paul Rodriguez' disapproving father in AKA Pablo (1984), and Lieutenant Frank Harper in the 1985-86 episodes of Hardcastle and McCormick. One of his final roles was a recurring gig on The Sopranos. Santos died in 2016, at age 84.

Trivia: Born in New York City while his father Noah Beery Sr. was appearing on-stage, Noah Beery Jr. was given his lifelong nickname, "Pidge," by Josie Cohan, sister of George M. Cohan "I was born in the business," Pidge Beery observed some 63 years later. "I couldn't have gotten out of it if I wanted to." In 1920, the younger Beery made his first screen appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro (1920), which co-starred dad Noah as Sergeant Garcia. Thanks to a zoning mistake, Pidge attended the Hollywood School for Girls (his fellow "girls" included Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Jesse Lasky Jr.), then relocated with his family to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, miles from Tinseltown. While some kids might have chafed at such isolation, Pidge loved the wide open spaces, and upon attaining manhood emulated his father by living as far away from Hollywood as possible. After attending military school, Pidge pursued film acting in earnest, appearing mostly in serials and Westerns, sometimes as the hero, but usually as the hero's bucolic sidekick. His more notable screen credits of the 1930s and '40s include Of Mice and Men (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (again 1939, this time as the obligatory doomed-from-the-start airplane pilot), Sergeant York (1941), We've Never Been Licked (1943), and Red River (1948). He also starred in a group of rustic 45-minute comedies produced by Hal Roach in the early '40s, and was featured in several popular B-Western series; one of these starred Buck Jones, whose daughter Maxine became Pidge's first wife. Perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, Beery appeared with his camera-hogging uncle Wallace Beery only once, in 1940's 20 Mule Team. Children of the 1950s will remember Pidge as Joey the Clown on the weekly TV series Circus Boy (1956), while the more TV-addicted may recall Beery's obscure syndicated travelogue series, co-starring himself and his sons. The 1960s found Pidge featured in such A-list films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and as a regular on the series Riverboat and Hondo. He kicked off the 1970s in the role of Michael J. Pollard's dad (there was a resemblance) in Little Fauss and Big Halsey. Though Beery was first choice for the part of James Garner's father on the TV detective series The Rockford Files, Pidge was committed to the 1973 James Franciscus starrer Doc Elliot, so the Rockford producers went with actor Robert Donley in the pilot episode. By the time The Rockford Files was picked up on a weekly basis, Doc Elliot had tanked, thus Donley was dropped in favor of Beery, who stayed with the role until the series' cancellation in 1978. Pidge's weekly-TV manifest in the 1980s included Quest (1981) and The Yellow Rose (1983). After a brief illness, Noah Beery Jr. died at his Tehachapi, CA, ranch at the age of 81.

Trivia: American actor Marland Proctor played supporting roles in a number of '70s exploitation films such as Chrome and Hot Leather. He got his start on-stage in the early '60s playing off-Broadway and in California. Proctor also appeared frequently on television.