Trivia: A football star at Eastern Kentucky State College, Lee Majors came to Los Angeles armed with a physical education degree and possessed with a vague desire to break into films. He worked as a park recreation director for the City of Los Angeles before entering show business in 1963. Majors was promoted as "the New James Dean," though he personally aspired to become a new Steve McQueen or Paul Newman (he also retained his permit to work as a recreation director, just in case the world wasn't holding its breath for a new Dean, McQueen or Newman). Majors achieved stardom on his own merits in a variety of television series, the most recent of which was 1992's Raven. His best-known TV roles included Heath Barkley on The Big Valley (1965-69), bionic Steve Austin on The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-78) and stunt man Colt Seavers on The Fall Guy (1981-86). In addition, he has headlined a number of made-for-TV movies, essaying the old Gary Cooper part in the 1991 sequel to High Noon and portraying U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in a 1976 biopic. Majors would continue to act in the decades to come, memorably appearing in Big Fat Liar and on The Game. For several years, Lee Majors was married to actress Farrah Fawcett.

Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from Zapped! (1982).

Trivia: A pretty, conservative-looking redhead, Cassandra Peterson made a name for herself in sexy, extroverted roles. Her first film, 1973's Working Stiff, offered a rare glimpse of Cassandra el buffo; afterwards, she preferred to tease her audience with provocative costuming. Throughout the 1980s, she could be glimpsed in such comedy cameo roles as "Biker Mama" in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985). Cassandra climbed to cult status in the early 1980s when she donned the black wig, vampiric makeup and tight floor-length gowns of "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark." As hostess of the weekly horror-flick series Elvira's Movie Macabre, Ms. Peterson offset her spooky sensuality with a steady stream of raunchy one-liners and horrendous puns. The popularity of the Elvira persona peaked around 1988 (a feature film based on the character took a nosedive at the box office), but Cassandra Peterson continued to make personal appearances as the Mistress of the Dark into the late 1990s.

Trivia: Had he been in Hollywood in the 1930s or 1940s, Vincent Schiavelli's Halloween-mask countenance, shock of unkempt hair and baleful voice might have permanently consigned him to minor roles in horror or gangster pictures. As it happened, Schiavelli became an actor during the 1960s, a period when, thanks to unpretty stars like Elliott Gould and Dustin Hoffman, homeliness opened more career doors than it closed. After several seasons' worth of stage experience, Schiavelli made his first film appearance in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971) playing a pot-smoking support group leader by the name of...Schiavelli. He would work with Forman again on several occasions, most memorably as Salieri's(F. Murray Abraham) phlegmatic valet in the opening scenes of Amadeus (1984). In 1972, Schiavelli played his first regular TV-series role, gay set designer Peter Panama in The Corner Bar. Fourteen years later, he could be seen as oddball science teacher Hector Vargas in the weekly sitcom Fast Times, repeating his role from the 1982 theatrical feature Fast Times at Ridgemont High. One of his best-known screen roles was the ill-tempered Subway Ghost, who teaches newly dead Patrick Swayze how to move solid objects with sheer "hate power" in the 1990 blockbuster Ghost. Tim Conway fans are most familiar with Schiavelli through his appearances as Conway's dull-witted assistant in the popular Dorf videocassettes. Previously married to actress Allyce Beasley, the couple would part ways in 1988 and Schiavelli would subsequently wed Carol Mukhalian.

Trivia: Raw-boned blonde leading man Doug McClure came to films in 1957, but it was television that made him a star. He played secondary roles on such MCA series as The Overland Trail (1960) and Checkmate (1961-62) before striking paydirt as Trampas on the long-running (1962-71) western series The Virginian. During his first flush of stardom, McClure played leads in two Universal remakes, Beau Geste (1966) and The King's Pirate (the 1967 remake of Errol Flynn's Against All Flags). He also dashed through a trio of British-filmed Edgar Rice Burroughs derivations, The Land That Time Forgot (1974), At the Earth's Core (1976) and The People That Time Forgot (1977). He perpetuated his athletic, devil-may-care image into his brief 1975 TVer, Search (1975). In the late 1980s, Doug McClure reemerged as an agreeable comic actor, playing an Eastwoodish movie-star-cum-small-town-mayor in the syndicated sitcom Out of This World (1987-88).

Trivia: Ian Wolfe was determined to become an actor even as a youth in his hometown of Canton, IL. His Broadway debut was in the warhorse Lionel Barrymore vehicle The Claw. While acting with Katherine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1934, Wolfe was spotted by MGM producer Irving Thalberg, who brought the actor to Hollywood to re-create his Barretts role. Though not yet 40, Wolfe had the receding hairline and lined features necessary for aged character roles. By his own count, Wolfe appeared in over 200 films, often uncredited assignments in the roles of judges, attorneys, butlers, and shopkeepers. Some of his best screen moments occurred in producer Val Lewton's Bedlam (1946), wherein Wolfe played an 18th century scientist confined to a mental asylum for proposing the invention of motion pictures. Because his actual age was difficult to pinpoint, Wolfe kept working into the 1990s (and his nineties); he was a particular favorite of TV's MTM productions, appearing on such sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and Rhoda. Co-workers during this period noted affectionately that, despite his many years as a professional, Wolfe was always seized with "stage fright" just before walking on the set. Though often cast in timid roles, Ian Wolfe was quite outspoken and fiercely defensive of his craft; when asked what he thought of certain method actors who insist upon playing extensions of "themselves," Wolfe snapped that he became an actor to pretend to be other people.

Trivia: Supporting actor, onscreen from the '80s.