Trivia: Scion of a wealthy New York City family, Rick Jason managed to get himself expelled from eight different prep schools before finally graduating with acceptable grades from the Rhodes School. Following World War II service, Jason attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill. He was discovered for the theatre by actor/director Hume Cronyn, who cast Jason as an Ecuadorian Indian in the brief Broadway production Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. After making his movie bow in 1952's Sombrero, Jason could be seen in lightweight second-lead roles in such films as The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1955) and The Wayward Bus (1957). In 1960, he was cast as a tuxedoed secret agent on the syndicated TV series The Case of the Dangerous Robin. Two years later, he signed up for a five-season hitch as Lt. Gil Hanley on the popular TV war drama Combat. For the first time in his life, Jason found himself subjected to the fan-magazine publicity glare, raising eyebrows by marrying three women during a period of 19 months! Rick Jason's post-Combat career hasn't been quite so remarkable, with appearances in such second-echelon features as Color Me Dead (1969) and The Witch Who Came From the Sea (1976).

Trivia: Jack Hogan is a character actor and leading man best known for his work in television -- most notably as Private Kirby on the long-running 1960s series Combat! -- and in action films and dramas. Born Richard Roland Benson, Jr. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1929, he briefly studied architecture at the University of North Carolina before entering the army in 1948, which took him to stations in the Far East. After leaving the service in 1952, he decided to try his hand at acting, and received training at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and the American Theatre Wing in New York. His screen career began in 1956 with the western in Man From Del Rio, starring Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado. Two years later, he played "Guy Darrow" (sic), the film-a-clef stand-in for the notorious Depression-era bank robber Clyde Barrow in William Witney's The Bonnie Parker Story (1958), starring Dorothy Provine. And that same year, he co-starred with Michael Landon in Ted Post's The Story of Tom Dooley. Hogan appeared in episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel and Bonanza over the next few years, interspersed with occasional film work, until the series Combat! came along in 1962. Hired by director Robert Altman, who shepherded the series through its early stages, Hogan portrayed Private William Kirby in the middle of a strong cast headed by Vic Morrow and Rick Jason, and also including notable character actors Dick Peabody, Pierre Jalbert, and Conlan Carter. He still managed to stand out -- his Private William Kirby (nicknamed "Wild Man" back home) was a sometime screw-up, a skirt-chaser, and complainer, but also a top man with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and exactly the kind of soldier any sergeant would want in a tight spot. Hogan was perfect in the role, completely convincing in the action scenes, yet also the valid butt of jokes from his comrades (when one too-young recruit is being shipped home at the end of one episode and promises to be back in two years, he adds that "you guys will probably have this wrapped up by then," to which Vic Morrow's Sgt. Saunders, looking at Hogan after the boy leaves, says, "With you on our side, Kirby, it might be ten.")Following the series' cancellation, Hogan continued to work in television, on programs such as Adam-12, and also had a short-lived series called Sierra. He retired from acting in the 1980s and moved to Hawaii, where he founded a construction business, also working as casting director on Magnum, P.I. and appearing on Jake And The Fat Man. And thanks to the release of Combat! on DVD, and the series' being rerun on ME-TV, he is finding a whole new generation of fans for his work on the series in the twenty-first century.

Trivia: Six-foot granite-jawed Anthony Eisley came into his own as a leading man on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before switching to more demanding and complex character and supporting roles. The son of a corporate executive, he was born Frederick Glendinning Eisley in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He spent most of his childhood moving with his family as his father's various positions took them from city to city, every few years. He was bitten by the acting bug early in life, but had no serious was of pursuing a career in the field until he joined a stock company in Pennsylvania. He began getting theater roles after that and by the early 1950s had begun working in television and feature films, the latter usually uncredited, under the name Fred Eisley -- this also included his first series work, in Bonino (1953), starring Ezio Pinza and a young Van Dyke Parks. While his theater work included such prime fare as Mister Roberts and Picnic, when it came to movies and television he was in every kind of production there was, from independent, syndicated TV series such as Racket Squad to high-profile movies like The Young Philadelphians, and Eisley broke through to star billing in the Roger Corman-directed horror film The Wasp Woman (1960) (working opposite Susan Cabot in the title role). Around that same time he took the role of John Cassiano in Pete Kelly's Blues (1959), a short-lived TV series directed and produced by Jack Webb. It was after being seen in a stage production of Who Was That Lady that Eisley was cast as Tracy Steele, the tough ex-cop turned private detective in the series Hawaiian Eye. It was also with that series that he became Anthony Eisley. Following the three-year run of that series, Eisley resumed work as a journeyman actor, but the array of roles that he took on improved exponentially -- in one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, entitled "The Lady And The Tiger And The Lawyer", he guested as a seemingly affable, attractive new neighbor of the Petries who admits, in the end, that he has a problem with spousal abuse that prevents him from choosing either of the women they've aimed at him at a possible match; and in Samuel Fuller's groundbreaking film drama The Naked Kiss, he plays a hard-nosed cop who uncovers a sinister, deeply troubling side to his city's much-publicized children's hospital and the people behind it. Eisley appeared in dozens of television series and movies over the ensuing three decades, always giving 100% of himself even when the budget and the production were lacking (see The Navy Vs. The Night Monsters . . . .. But on the sets of television shows, especially, where the quality was there, his work was without peer -- that was one reason that Jack Webb, who had used him in Pete Kelly's Blues, made Eisley a part of his stock company, using him in six episodes of Dragnet in the 1960s. Those shows are especially fascinating to watch for the quiet intensity of his performances -- he mostly played morally-compromised character, including a man plotting the murder-for-hire of his wife, an affable but corrupt police lieutenant, and career criminal who thinks (incorrectly) that he has outsmarted the detectives who are questioning him. Eisley's credits, in keeping with his image from Hawaiian Eye, were heavily concentrated in series devoted to law enforcement. He continued working through the 1990s, and died of heart failure in 2003, at the age of 78.

Trivia: Rip Torn may qualify as a "character actor" in the broadest sense of the term -- he typically fleshes out variations on the same role again and again, typecast as genially earthy, volatile, and loudmouthed good old boys. But, love him or hate him, Torn's roles over the course of more than half a century are distinct and pronounced enough to have elevated him above many of his contemporaries, into a veritable staple of American cinematic pop culture.Born Elmore Rual Torn, Jr. in Temple, TX, on February 6, 1931, and nicknamed "Rip" by his father, Torn attended Texas A&M as an undergraduate and studied animal husbandry. He intended to establish himself as a rancher after graduation, but first opted to pursue an acting career as a means to buy a ranch, mistakenly believing that he would hit Hollywood and achieve instant stardom. Instead, Torn scrounged around Los Angeles for several years as a dishwasher and short-order cook, but continued to pursue acting in his off time. Torn's persistence paid off, and he eventually landed several bit parts in movies and television series. He moved to Manhattan in the late '50s, where he formally studied acting under Lee Strasberg and danced under the aegis of Martha Graham; a wealth of movie roles followed over the next several decades, beginning with that of Brick in Actors Studio associate Elia Kazan's controversial classic Baby Doll (1956, with a script by Tennessee Williams) and, a few years later, the role of Finley in another Williams drama, the Richard Brooks-directed Sweet Bird of Youth (for which Torn received a great deal of notoriety). Additional supporting roles throughout the late '60s and early '70s included Slade in Norman Jewison's The Cincinnati Kid (1965), I.H. Chanticleer in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now (1966), and Sgt. Honeywell in Cornel Wilde's Beach Red (1967).In the late '60s, two key (albeit temporary) shifts occurred in Torn's career. First, he went counterculture (and arthouse) with an unofficial trilogy of experimental roles. In the most pronounced -- Joe Glazer in Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart (1969, opposite Andy Warhol regular Sally Kirkland) -- Torn plays a nutty psychiatrist who specializes in female neuroses and decides to film all of his sessions, then his own mental breakdown. (Ginsberg films all of the action as reflected in a mirror.) The X-rated picture -- which features graphic sequences of Kirkland performing fellatio on Torn -- was (and is still) widely derided as spectacularly bad. Variety hit the proverbial nail on the head in 1969 when it concluded, "The problem with Coming Apart is that while it suggests some interesting ideas, it can't deliver any of them in cogent form....The results are not satisfactory." Neither are the second or third installments in Torn's "experimental" phase: roles in the first and third features directed by literary giant Norman Mailer, Beyond the Law (1967) and Maidstone (1970). Of Law -- an improvisational, comic piece set in a precinct house (with Torn as a character called Popcorn), The Motion Picture Guide sneered, "Barney Miller may have been inspired by this movie," and Roger Ebert declared it unintentionally funny, but those were the kindest reactions. Maidstone -- a fragmented, barely coherent drama -- stars only Mailer, as a politician-cum-film director, and Torn. This partially improvised picture became notorious for an on-camera sequence in which Torn (playing Mailer's half-brother) attacks Mailer with a hammer (allegedly for real), sans forewarning, bloodying up the author's face while the actress playing his wife screams in the background. Some wrote the scene off as a fake, but many others dissented. Variety observed in 1970: "[Torn] states he had to do it to make his character real and for the film. But he claims he pulled the hammer and had never drawn blood before while acting. The Mailer character is furious and vindictive. Mailer would not disclose whether it was real or not, but it did look ferociously authentic...."The second "shift" of Torn's career in the early '70s yielded infinitely greater success: a pair of rare leads in A-list features. He played Henry Miller opposite Ellen Burstyn in Joe Strick's marvelous, picaresque adaptation of that author's novel, Tropic of Cancer, and the abusive, booze and pill-addled country singer Maury Dann in Daryl Duke's harrowing drama Payday (1973). The pictures opened to generally spectacular reviews and raves over Torn's portrayals; Variety, for one, termed his performance in the Duke picture "excellent."While these lead roles showcased limitless dramatic ability, they unfortunately marked exceptions to the rule, and for the remainder of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, Torn contented himself with an endless (albeit impressive) array of colorful supporting turns -- dozens of them. High points include Nathan Bryce in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); Dr. George in Coma (1978); the boozing, hell-raising, and philandering Senator Kittner in Jerry Schatzberg's The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979); longhaired record producer Walter Fox in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony (1980); the pirate-like Scully in Carl Reiner's Summer Rental (1985); Buford Pope in Robert Benton's sex farce Nadine (1987); the none-too-gifted afterlife attorney Bob Diamond in Albert Brooks' fantasy Defending Your Life (1991); Zed in Men in Black (1997); acid-mouthed coach Patches O'Houlihan in the Ben Stiller comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004); and King Louis XV in Sofia Coppola's much-ballyhooed tertiary directorial outing, Marie Antoinette (2006). His low point undoubtedly arrived in 2001, when he played Tom Green's father, Jim Brody, in the controversial comedian's yuck-fest Freddy Got Fingered (2001). (A very low point; the film's comic highlight has Torn being showered with fake elephant ejaculate.)In addition to his film work, Torn made a series of critically acclaimed contributions to the small screen throughout the '80s and '90s, most vividly as Artie on HBO's Larry Sanders Show, for which he gleaned two Cable Ace awards, three Emmy nominations, and an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Torn did direct one feature, the 1988 Whoopi Goldberg vehicle The Telephone, which opened and immediately closed to devastating critical reviews and dismal box office.Torn was married to actress Ann Wedgeworth from 1956 until their divorce in 1961 and Geraldine Page from 1961 until her death in 1987, and is currently married to actress Amy Wright. He is the cousin of actress Sissy Spacek.

Trivia: He debuted onscreen in The Blackbord Jungle (1955) as a sadistic high school student, and after several years he moved up to starring roles. He often played vicious bad guys. He starred in the '60s TV series Combat. In the mid '60s he directed several off-Broadway plays and a couple of short films, then directed, co-produced, and co-wrote the film Deathwatch (1966), adapted from a Jean Genet play; after directing another feature he returned to acting, having gone eight years between screen roles. In 1982 he was killed by the blades of a helicopter while filming an action sequence in the film Twilight Zone: The Movie. He was the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.