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

Trivia: Primarily a television actor, six-foot, six-inch tall Dick Peabody will be best remembered for his portrayal of Littlejohn, an enormous and innocent farmhand, on the TV series Combat that aired in the 1960s. Peabody's contributions to film were not as great, with only a handful of appearances. In late 1999, Peabody died from prostate cancer, at the age of 74.

Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: Peter Duryea was the son of veteran leading man and character actor Dan Duryea. Despite being born into the entertainment industry, the younger Duryea only worked in a handful of feature films and appeared in fewer than two-dozen network series. With his all-American good looks, Peter Duryea was a natural at playing wide-eyed innocents, but he also had considerable acting ability to go with the pretty-boy appearance -- the result was his ability at portraying evil of the most visceral and calculating sort. Thus, Gene Roddenberry chose him to play Jose Tyler, the junior bridge officer on the starship Enterprise, in "The Cage," the 1964 pilot for Star Trek, a role that wasn't picked up until the subsequent series went into production two years later. Jack Webb got even more impressive results, however, by casting Duryea in villainous roles in a string of Dragnet episodes, most notably a show entitled "The Fielder Militia," in which Duryea portrayed an eager-beaver member of an armed and dangerous right-wing paramilitary group. During this same period, he was portraying far more benign older teenage and college student roles on series such as Family Affair. In feature films, Duryea's work was limited to large roles in low-budget movies such as Catalina Caper, and small roles in major films such as The Carpetbaggers. In contrast to his father's decades of work in film and television, the younger Duryea ceased working onscreen in the early '70s. His appearance in the Star Trek pilot (which was later re-cut into a two-part episode of the actual series) ensures that he is represented on home video and DVD in the 21st century.