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: A New York-based radio actor from childhood, Conrad Janis was 16 when he made his first Broadway appearance in Junior Miss. Janis went on to star in the 1945 film comedy Snafu then played supporting roles in such 20th Century-Fox productions as Margie (1946) and The Brasher Doubloon (1947, as a teenaged murderer). His subsequent Broadway credits include The Brass Ring (for which he won a Theatre World Award), Time Out for Ginger and Visit to a Small Planet. Premature baldness compelled him to switch from leading-man assignments to character roles. A veteran of some 350 TV appearances, Janis was seen on a regular weekly basis as Otto Palindrome on the 1978 sci-fi spoof Quark, and as Mindy McConnell's dad Fred on the Robin Williams sitcom Mork and Mindy. Dropped from M & M after the 1978-79 season when the producers decided to retool the program, Janis was rehired in 1980, this time at a much heftier salary. Though justifiably proud of his acting accomplishments, Janis reportedly is prouder still of his activities as a jazz musician, fronting such prestigious musical aggregations as The Tailgaters and the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band (this latter group served as the subject of a lively PBS documentary). In addition, Janis is the owner operator of a prominent avant-garde art gallery, and is in charge of his own production company, MiraCom. In 1994, Conrad Janis made his film directorial bow with The Feminine Touch.

Trivia: Disdaining the "surfer" mentality of his California boyhood friends, Anthony Zerbe chose to head to New York to become an actor. He studied with Stella Adler and worked off-Broadway before achieving success in the mid-'60s. He made his film debut in 1967's Will Penny, after which he settled into a series of sharkish, saturnine villainous portrayals. An adherent of EST training, Zerbe preferred to work with people who allowed him "space" to develop a characterization; one such person was David Janssen, with whom Zerbe appeared on the mid-'70s TV series Harry O (in which he won an Emmy award for his portrayal of Lieutenant Trench). Active on-stage and in films and television into the 1990s, Anthony Zerbe has contributed some unforgettable acting moments to the big screen, notably as the shadow-enshrouded leper in 1971's Papillon and the "blowed up real good" secondary villain in the 1989 James Bond opus License to Kill.

Trivia: Tom Kindle spent most of his career playing character roles on-stage and on television, but he also made a few feature films, beginning with Super Van (1977). Kindle turned to acting following military service in Vietnam and graduation from the University of North Carolina. He launched his career in New York landing in such mid-'70s off-Broadway plays as The Soldier. Kindle started showing up on television in the early '70s beginning with a guest appearance on M*A*S*H in 1972. Other shows on which he has appeared include Highway to Heaven, Simon and Simon, Designing Women, and Mork and Mindy. Other film credits include a few made-for-television efforts such as Badge of an Assassin (1985). Kindle made his final film appearance in The Rocketeer (1991).