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: Dynamic African-American actor Moses Gunn was one of the founders of the Negro Ensemble Company. Educated at Tennessee State and the University of Kansas, Gunn made his first New York appearance in a 1961 production of Measure for Measure; he remained active on the off-Broadway scene throughout his career, winning several Obie awards. His 1962 Broadway debut came by way of Jean Genet's The Blacks, which served to introduce many of the powerful black acting talents of the era. In films dating from 1964's Nothing But a Man, Gunn is best-remembered for his portrayal of gangster Bumpy Jonas in the first two Shaft films, and for his brief but telling cameo as Booker T. Washington in Ragtime, a performance which won him an NAACP Image award. On series television, Gunn was top-billed as Jebediah Nightlinger in The Cowboys (1972), played boxing trainer George Beifus in The Contender (1980), was featured as miner Moses Gage in Father Murphy (1981-84) and chewed the scenery as the epigrammatical "Old Man" in A Man Called Hawk (1989). He also played Carl Dixon, the man who married Florida Evans (Esther Rolle) after a whirlwind courtship during the 1976-77 season of Good Times. In 1977, Moses Gunn received an Emmy nomination for his appearance as tribal chieftain Kintango in the groundbreaking miniseries Roots.

Trivia: Actor Keenan Wynn was the son of legendary comedian Ed Wynn and actress Hilda Keenan, and grandson of stage luminary Frank Keenan. After attending St. John's Military Academy, Wynn obtained his few professional theatrical jobs with the Maine Stock Company. After overcoming the "Ed Wynn's Son" onus (his father arranged his first job, with the understanding that Keenan would be on his own after that), Wynn developed into a fine comic and dramatic actor on his own in several Broadway plays and on radio. He was signed to an MGM contract in 1942, scoring a personal and professional success as the sarcastic sergeant in 1944's See Here Private Hargrove (1944). Wynn's newfound popularity as a supporting actor aroused a bit of jealousy from his father, who underwent professional doldrums in the 1940s; father and son grew closer in the 1950s when Ed, launching a second career as a dramatic actor, often turned to his son for moral support and professional advice. Wynn's film career flourished into the 1960s and 1970s, during which time he frequently appeared in such Disney films as The Absent-Minded Professor (1960) and The Love Bug (1968) as apoplectic villain Alonso Hawk. Wynn also starred in such TV series as Troubleshooters and Dallas. Encroaching deafness and a drinking problem plagued Wynn in his final years, but he always delivered the goods onscreen. Wynn was the father of writer/director Tracy Keenan Wynn and writer/actor Edmund Keenan (Ned) Wynn.