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: 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.

Trivia: Already a character player in his 30s, American actor Robert Cornwaithe was frequently called upon to play scientific and learned types in such films as War of the Worlds (1953) and The Forbin Project (1971). He was also busy on TV, portraying lawyers, officials and the like on such series as The Andy Griffith Show, Batman (in the "Archer" episode with Art Carney), Gidget, Laverne and Shirley and The Munsters. Cornwaithe earned his niche in the Science Fiction Film Hall of Fame for his performance in The Thing (1951); grayed up, bearded, and looking suspiciously Russian, the actor played the foolhardy Professor Carrington, whose insipidly idealistic efforts to communicate with the extraterrestrial "Thing" nearly gets him killed. In honor of this performance, Robert Cornwaithe was cast as a similar well-meaning scientist in "Mant," the giant-insect film within a film in Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), wherein Cornwaithe shared screen time with two equally uncredited horror-film icons, William Schallert and Kevin McCarthy.

Trivia: Austrian supporting actor Horst Ebersberg, played Germans in Hollywood films and on television shows during the 1960s.

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: French character actor Jean Del Val was a regular in American films from at least 1927. In the early days of the talkies, he offered his services as translator and vocal coach for the French-language versions of American films. Many of his later roles were fleeting but memorable: he's the French aviator in Block-Heads (1938) who rescues over-aged doughboy Stan Laurel from the trenches ("Why, you blockhead. Ze war's been over for twenty years!") and the French radio announcer who opens Casablanca (1942) by spreading the news of the murder of two German couriers carrying letters of transit. He enjoyed a larger role in Columbia's So Dark the Night (1946), a film seemingly conceived as a showcase for the best of Hollywood's foreign-accented bit players. Active in films until the 1960s, Jean del Val played a crucial non-speaking role in Fantastic Voyage (1966): he's the comatose scientist whose arterial system and brain are explored by the miniaturized heroes.