Trivia: The son of a Jewish movie-publicist father and an Irish Catholic musical-comedy actress, Michael Landon grew up in a predominantly Protestant New Jersey neighborhood. The social pressures brought to bear on young Michael, both at home and in the schoolyard, led to an acute bedwetting problem, which he would later dramatize (very discreetly) in the 1976 TV movie The Loneliest Runner. Determined to better his lot in life, Landon excelled in high school athletics; his prowess at javelin throwing won him a scholarship at the University of Southern California, but a torn ligament during his freshman year ended his college career. Taking a series of manual labor jobs, Landon had no real direction in life until he agreed to help a friend audition for the Warners Bros. acting school. The friend didn't get the job, but Landon did, launching a career that would eventually span nearly four decades. Michael's first film lead was in the now-legendary I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), widely derided at the time but later reassessed as one of the better examples of the late-'50s "drive-in horror" genre. The actor received his first good reviews for his performance as an albino in God's Little Acre. This led to his attaining the title role in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley, which in turn was instrumental in his being cast as Little Joe Cartwright on the popular TV western Bonanza. During his fourteen-year Bonanza stint, Landon was given the opportunity to write and direct a few episodes. He carried over these newfound skills into his next TV project, Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1982 (just before Little House, Landon made his TV-movie directorial bow with It's Good to Be Alive, the biopic of baseball great Roy Campanella). Landon also oversaw two spinoff series, Little House: The New Beginning (1982-83) and Father Murphy (1984). Landon kept up his career momentum with a third long-running TV series, Highway to Heaven (1984-89) wherein the actor/producer/director/writer played guardian angel Jonathan Smith. One of the most popular TV personalities of the '70s and '80s, Landon was not universally beloved by his Hollywood contemporaries, what with his dictatorial on-set behavior and his tendency to shed his wives whenever they matured past childbearing age. Still, for every detractor, there was a friend, family member or coworker who felt that Landon was the salt of the earth. In early 1991, Landon began work on his fourth TV series, Us, when he began experiencing stomach pains. In April of that same year, the actor was informed that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. The courage and dignity with which Michael Landon lived his final months on earth resulted in a public outpouring of love, affection and support, the like of which was seldom witnessed in the cynical, self-involved '90s. Michael Landon died in his Malibu home on July 1, 1991, with his third wife Cindy at his side.

Trivia: The son of a movie stunt man, Victor French made his screen entree in westerns, where his unkempt beard and scowling countenance made him a perfect heavy. He carried over his robbin' and rustlin' activities into television, making multiple appearances on such series as Gunsmoke and Bonanza. It was former Bonanza star Michael Landon, a great friend of French's, who "humanized" the veteran screen villain with the role of farmer Isiah Edwards in the weekly TV drama Little House on the Prairie. French temporarily left Little House in 1977 to star in his own sitcom, Carter Country, in which he played an affable Southern sheriff who tried his best to accommodate the ever-changing racial relationships of the 1970s. In 1984, Landon cast French as ex-cop Michael Gordon, whose bitterness at the world was softened by the presence of a guardian angel (Landon), in the popular TV series Highway to Heaven. French directed every third episode of this series, extending his directorial activities to the Los Angeles theatre scene, where he won a Critics Circle award for his staging of 12 Angry Men. In contrast to his earlier bad-guy roles, French went out of his way in the 1980s to avoid parts that required him to exhibit cruelty or inhumanity. Victor French died in 1989, shortly after completing work on the final season of Highway to Heaven.

Trivia: The son of a stage acrobat, American actor/dancer/singer Donald O'Connor was hoofing away as a child in his family's vaudeville act. He was discovered for films in 1938's Sing, You Sinners, spending the next few years in movies usually playing "the star as a child" -- that is, cast as the younger version of the film's leading man for prologue and flashback sequences. A 1941 Universal contract led to a string of peppy medium-budget musicals with such pure-forties titles as Get Hep to Love (1941) and Are You With It? (1949); O'Connor's most frequent costar was another teenage vaudeville vet, Peggy Ryan. In 1950, O'Connor was cast in the non-dancing role of a hapless army private who can't convince anyone that a mule can talk in Francis (1950). The film was a major moneymaker, leading Universal to inaugurate a Francis series starring O'Connor, Francis the Mule, and Francis' voice, Chill Wills. O'Connor bailed out before the final film in the series, Francis in the Haunted House (1956), complaining that the mule was getting more fan mail than he was. During the Francis epics, O'Connor was loaned to MGM for what is regarded as his finest film role, happy-go-lucky Cosmo Brown in Singin' in the Rain (1952). If he'd never made another film, O'Connor would be a musical-comedy immortal solely on the basis of his Rain setpiece, the athleticly uproarious Make 'Em Laugh (1952). When the sort of musicals in which he specialized went into a Hollywood eclipse, O'Connor concentrated on TV and nightclubs, save for a few less than satisfying cinematic assignments such as The Buster Keaton Story (1957) and the Italian-made curiosity The Wonders of Alladin (1961). When O'Connor returned to films for 1965's That Funny Feeling it was in support of the musical flavor-of-the-decade Bobby Darin. In 1967, O'Connor tried his hand at a syndicated talk-variety program, where he proved excellent as usual at performing but ill at ease as an interviewer. The 1970s were a maelstrom of summer theatre appearances, club dates and an on-and-off liquor problem for O'Connor; when he resurfaced briefly in 1981's Ragtime, movie audiences breathed a sigh of satisfaction that an old friend was back and seemingly as fit as ever. One of Donald O'Connor's most high profile later day film appearance was a cameo at the beginning of Barry Levinson's Toys (1992), wherein the verteran actor supplied a much-needed chunk of solid entertainment value to an otherwise ponderous project. A year after appearing as menacing witch Baba Yaga in the 1996 family fantasy Father Frost, O'Connor made his final film appearance in the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau ocean cruise comedy Out to Sea.In late September of 2003, legendary actor Donald O'Connor died of heart failure in Calabasas, CA. He was 78.

Trivia: The youngest son of star Kirk Douglas, Eric Douglas had a short-lived film career as a film actor that spanned the mid-'80s through the early '90s. He usually played bit parts or supporting roles. After appearing in Delta Force 3: The Killing Game (1991), Douglas left acting and the following year appeared as a standup comedian.

Trivia: Blonde American leading lady Lara Parker came directly from the stage to daytime drama. Not so unusual, that: what was unusual is that Parker was not your typical long-suffering soap ingenue. She was, in fact, a witch--not a witch by disposition, but by birth, for she played glamorous 200-year-old Angelique on the Gothic serial Dark Shadows (1966-71). Lara was later more conventionally cast as Linda Vandenburg on another daytime cliffhanger, Capitol (1982-1987). Most recently, Lara Parker appeared in the 1990 TV movie The China Lake Murders.