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: Robert Dowdell is mostly remembered on television for his portrayal of Lt. Commander Chip Morton, the executive officer of the submarine Seaview on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea for four seasons (1964-1968). During the late '50s and early '60s, however, Robert Dowdell was one of the busier and more promising up-and-coming actors on stage and television, with appearances onstage opposite performers such as Joanne Woodward, and on the small screen starring with the likes of Richard Burton. Born in Park Ridge, IL, Dowdell grew up in Chicago and set his sights on an acting career while attending Parker High School. He attended Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago before the army interrupted his studies, and later, after a number of jobs (including railroad brakeman and auto assembly line worker), he got his first break when he landed the lead role in an off-Broadway production of The Dybbuk. The latter experience brought to light his utter lack of professional training, and led to Dowdell's studying with renowned acting coach Wyn Handman, which resulted in his being cast in a small role in Time Limit, a Broadway drama set in the aftermath of the Korean War. It was after meeting producer/author Leslie Stevens that Dowdell was cast in Stevens' play The Lovers, working alongside Hurd Hatfield and a young Joanne Woodward. The play's director, Arthur Penn, in turn brought Dowdell to television when he began directing Studio One. He was back on Broadway in Love Me a Little, starring opposite Susan Kohner, and he followed this with a role in the John Frankenheimer-directed play The Midnight Sun. That led to Dowdell's appearance with Richard Burton in Frankenheimer's television presentation of The Fifth Column on CBS/Buick Electra Playhouse. Dowdell also worked with Buddy Hackett on Broadway in Viva Madison Avenue and portrayed the role of the German tutor in the road company production of Five Finger Exercise, starring Jessica Tandy. It was during the Los Angeles engagement of the latter show that he was offered a co-starring role of Cody Bristol on Stoney Burke, which was being produced by Leslie Stevens. It lasted one season but led to his being cast in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which kept him working for four seasons. Although many of the episodes didn't give Dowdell too much to do beyond relaying orders from other characters, the series' first two seasons allowed him some acting leeway that showed a real talent present beneath the bland dialogue and increasingly childish plots; and there were at least two programs in each of the last two seasons in which Chip Morton actually had scenes by himself or one-on-one with whatever force, alien or Earth-spawned, was threatening the ship. In the years since its cancellation, Dowdell has done some theatrical and film work, and reappeared on television occasionally, as recently as the mid-'90s.

Trivia: Bruce MacLeish Dern is the scion of a distinguished family of politicians and men of letters that includes his uncle, the distinguished poet/playwright Archibald MacLeish. After a prestigious education at New Trier High and Choate Preparatory, Dern enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, only to drop out abruptly in favor of Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. With his phlegmatic voice and schoolyard-bully countenance, he was not considered a likely candidate for stardom, and was often treated derisively by his fellow students. In 1958, he made his first Broadway appearance in A Touch of the Poet. Two years later, he was hired by director Elia Kazan to play a bit role in the 20th Century Fox production Wild River. He was a bit more prominent on TV, appearing regularly as E.J. Stocker in the contemporary Western series Stoney Burke. A favorite of Alfred Hitchcock, Dern was prominently cast in a handful of the director's TV-anthology episodes, and as the unfortunate sailor in the flashback sequences of the feature film Marnie (1964). During this period, Dern played as many victims as victimizers; he was just as memorable being hacked to death by Victor Buono in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965) as he was while attempting to rape Linda Evans on TV's The Big Valley. Through the auspices of his close friend Jack Nicholson, Dern showed up in several Roger Corman productions of the mid-'60s, reaching a high point as Peter Fonda's "guide" through LSD-land in The Trip (1967). The actor's ever-increasing fan following amongst disenfranchised younger filmgoers shot up dramatically when he gunned down Establishment icon John Wayne in The Cowboys (1971). After scoring a critical hit with his supporting part in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Dern began attaining leading roles in such films as Silent Running (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), The Great Gatsby (1974), and Smile (1975). In 1976, he returned to the Hitchcock fold, this time with top billing, in Family Plot. Previously honored with a National Society of Film Critics award for his work in the Jack Nicholson-directed Drive, He Said (1970), Dern received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of an unhinged Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), in which he co-starred with one-time Actors' Studio colleague (and former classroom tormentor) Jane Fonda. He followed this triumph with a return to Broadway in the 1979 production Strangers. In 1982, Dern won the Berlin Film Festival Best Actor prize for That Championship Season. He then devoted several years to stage and TV work, returning to features in the strenuous role of a middle-aged long distance runner in On the Edge (1986).After a humorous turn in the 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The 'Burbs, Dern dropped beneath the radar for much of the '90s. He would appear in cult favorites like Mulholland Falls and the Walter Hill Yojimbo re-make Last Man Standing (both 1996), as well as The Haunting (1999) and All the Pretty Horses (2000). As the 2000's unfolded, Dern would continue to act, apperaing most notably in film like Monster and Django Unchained.Formerly married to actress Diane Ladd, Bruce Dern is the father of actress Laura Dern.

Trivia: Lanky, laconic actor Warren Oates made his first stage appearance in a student play at the University of Louisville. Moving to New York in 1954, Oates took a variety of jobs to sustain himself, including a "stunt tester" for the TV audience-participation series Beat the Clock (one of Oates' predecessors in this endeavor was James Dean). He worked in live New York-based TV dramas before moving to Hollywood in 1957, where thanks to such Western TV series as Have Gun Will Travel, he established himself as a brooding villain. One of his rare opportunities to exhibit anything other than menace was his semicomic supporting role on the 1962 Jack Lord TV weekly Stoney Burke. One of director Sam Peckinpah's favorite actors, Oates was well served with meaty roles in such Peckinpah films as Ride the High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), and, best of all, The Wild Bunch (1969). With his remarkable performance as an ageing hot rodder in 1971's Two-Lane Blacktop, Oates began a fruitful association with director Monte Hellman, who provided Oates with his best-ever film assignments in Cockfighter (1974) and China 9 Liberty 37 (1982). Shortly after completing work on Blue Thunder (1982), Warren Oates' long-overdue rising stardom came to a tragic halt as a result of a sudden, fatal heart attack.