Trivia: Steve McQueen was the prototypical example of a new sort of movie star which emerged in the 1950s and would come to dominate the screen in the 1960s and '70s -- a cool, remote loner who knew how to use his fists without seeming like a run-of-the-mill tough guy, a thoughtful man in no way an effete intellectual, a rebel who played by his own rules and lived by his own moral code, while often succeeding on his own terms. While McQueen was one of the first notable examples of this new breed of antihero (along with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman), he was also among the most successful, and was able to succeed as an iconoclast and one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws at the same time.Terrence Steven McQueen was born in Indianapolis, IN, on March 24, 1930. In many ways, McQueen's childhood was not a happy one; his father and mother split up before his first birthday, and he was sent to live with his great uncle on a farm in Missouri. After he turned nine, McQueen's mother had married again, and he was sent to California to join her. By his teens, McQueen had developed a rebellious streak, and he began spending time with a group of juvenile delinquents; McQueen's misdeeds led his mother to send him to Boys' Republic, a California reform school. After ninth grade, McQueen left formal education behind, and after a spell wandering the country, he joined the Marine Corps in 1947. McQueen's hitch with the Leathernecks did little to change his anti-authoritarian attitude; he spent 41 days in the brig after going Absent With Out Leave for two weeks.After leaving the Marines in 1950, McQueen moved to New York City, where he held down a number of short-term jobs while trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. At the suggestion of a friend, McQueen began to look into acting, and developed an enthusiasm for the theater. In 1952, he began studying acting at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. After making an impression in a number of small off-Broadway productions, McQueen was accepted into Lee Strasberg's prestigious Actor's Studio, where he further honed his skills. In 1956, McQueen made his Broadway debut and won rave reviews when he replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead of the acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain. The same year, McQueen made his film debut, playing a bit part in Somebody Up There Likes Me alongside Paul Newman, and he married dancer Neile Adams. In 1958, after two years of stage work and television appearances, McQueen scored his first leading role in a film as Steve, a noble and rather intense teenager in the sci-fi cult item The Blob, while later that same year he scored another lead, in the television series Wanted: Dead or Alive. McQueen's moody performances as bounty hunter Josh Randall elevated him to stardom, and in 1960, he appeared in the big-budget Western The Magnificent Seven (an Americanized remake of The Seven Samurai), confirming that his new stardom shone just as brightly on the big screen. In 1961, McQueen completed his run on Wanted: Dead or Alive and concentrated on film roles, appearing in comedies (The Honeymoon Machine, Love With a Proper Stranger) as well as action roles (Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover). In 1963, McQueen starred in The Great Escape, an action-packed World War II drama whose blockbuster success confirmed his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men; McQueen also did his own daredevil motorcycle stunts in the film, reflecting his offscreen passion for motorcycle and auto racing. (McQueen would also display his enthusiasm for bikes as narrator of a documentary on dirt-bike racing, On Any Sunday).Through the end of the 1960s, McQueen starred in a long string of box-office successes, but in the early '70s, he appeared in two unexpected disappointments -- 1971's Le Mans, a racing film that failed to capture the excitement of the famed 24-hour race, and 1972's Junior Bonner, an atypically good-natured Sam Peckinpah movie that earned enthusiastic reviews but failed at the box office. Later that year, McQueen would team up again with Peckinpah for a more typical (and much more successful) action film, The Getaway, which co-starred Ali MacGraw. McQueen had divorced Neile Adams in 1971, and while shooting The Getaway, he and MacGraw (who was then married to producer Robert Evans) became romantically involved. In 1973, after MacGraw divorced Evans, she married McQueen; the marriage would last until 1977.After two more big-budget blockbusters, Papillon and The Towering Inferno, McQueen disappeared from screens for several years. In 1977, he served as both leading man and executive producer for a screen adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which fared poorly with both critics and audiences when it was finally released a year and a half after it was completed. In 1980, it seemed that McQueen was poised for a comeback when he appeared in two films -- an ambitious Western drama, Tom Horn, which McQueen co-directed without credit, and The Hunter, an action picture in which he played a modern-day bounty hunter -- and he wed for a third time, marrying model Barbara Minty in January of that year. However, McQueen's burst of activity hid the fact that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a highly virulent form of lung cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. After conventional treatment failed to stem the spread of the disease, McQueen traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he underwent therapy at an experimental cancer clinic. Despite the efforts of McQueen and his doctors, the actor died on November 7, 1980. He left behind two children, Chad McQueen, who went on to his own career as an actor, and daughter Terry McQueen, who died of cancer in 1998.

Trivia: The son of an Italian-born cabinetmaker, Bobby Darin briefly attended Hunter College, then supported himself as a singing waiter and musician at a Catskills resort. After scratching out a fitfully profitable existence as a commercial-jingle composer, Darin became a professional singer in 1956. He sent a demo record to up-and-coming record executive Don Kirschner, which resulted in a contract. Three flop singles later, Darin half-jokingly recorded a nonsense number titled "Splish Splash"--which turned out to be his first bonafide hit. Not wishing to be typed as a rock-and-roller, Darin adapted the old Kurt Weill/Bertoldt Brecht ballad "Moritat" into the top-selling "Mack the Knife"; this enabled him to break away from the onus of "teenage idol" and broaden his appeal to adults. Darin was eventually picked up by Universal Pictures to star in a series of lightweight but popular musical films, often co-starring his first wife, Sandra Dee. After turning in powerful dramatic performances in Pressure Point (1962) and Captain Newman MD (1963), Darin graduated from pop personality to serious actor; in fact, he was Oscar-nominated for his work in Newman. By the end of the 1960s, however, Darin's star was on the downgrade, and he seemed to have trouble keeping apace of changing musical tastes. Bobby Darin was in the process of making a comeback when he died at the age of 37, following open-heart surgery.

Trivia: An actor indelibly associated with classic Americana given his iconic portrayals of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, tall, tousle-haired Fess Parker began life in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in nearby San Angelo, where his parents farmed peanuts and watermelons, and raised cattle. Following service in the military during WWII (where he participated in "clean-up" operations in the Philippines), Parker returned to the United States, and attended both the University of Texas and the University of California. He soon discovered a flair for acting and hit the stage in the touring company of Mister Roberts, then entered films in 1952, enjoying his first sizeable role -- a Southern-accented ballplayer -- in The Kid From Left Field (1953). It was his one-scene bit as a terrified witness to an "alien close encounter" in the 1954 horror classic Them! (1954), however, that brought Parker to the attention of Walt Disney, and somewhat ironically. Disney had considered casting a major Hollywood star as Crockett (such as Glenn Ford or Sterling Hayden), but gave up on this idea and, it is said, briefly considered future Gunsmoke headliner James Arness. Walt went to see the Arness-starrer Them! for this reason, and passed on Arness for Crockett but felt instantly convinced (and supposedly shouted out "There's our Crockett!") when Parker appeared on the screen. The actor began by portraying Crockett on ABC's Disneyland television series, and the rest is history: during the period of 1954-6, Davy Crockett mania swept through the country, first with the smash single "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," then with a blizzard of Crockett-themed merchandise aimed squarely at small children - everything from lunchboxes, to action figures, to the quintessential Davy Crockett coonskin cap.Disney and Parker parlayed the Crockett success into features in 1955 and 1956, but two years after the Crockett popularity began, it fizzled. Parker remained on the Disney lot until 1958, starring in such films as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1957), Old Yeller (1957), and Light in the Forest (1958). His relationship with Disney more or less ended, however, when he refused to appear in the studio's Native American drama Tonka (1958) (a revisionist version of Custer's Last Stand) opposite Sal Mineo - and was promptly suspended for doing so.His film stardom leveling off after 1959, Parker started a family by marrying Marcella Rinehart in 1960, with whom he had numerous children and grandchildren. He began a television comeback in 1962 with an indifferent sitcom version of the old Capra drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962). He was more successful, though, with his five-year tenure in the title role of the weekly NBC adventure-fest Daniel Boone, which lasted six seasons (1964-70), running consistently on Thursday nights from 7:30-8:30pm; at its peak, the program's popularity even topped that of Crockett. Parker signed for his last dramatic role in the 1972 Climb An Angry Mountain.In the years that followed, Parker bowed out of the limelight, and entered an entirely unrelated field: that of real estate. He became an entrepreneur in the mid-1970s, and built his holdings into a small yet phenomenally lucrative empire that included a mobile home park, luxury hotels, and a sprawling vineyard with a gift shop that sold Crockett memorabilia. Parker died of natural causes at the age of 85 in March 2010, at his home in California's Santa Ynez Valley.

Trivia: A Chicagoan from head to toe, American comedian Bob Newhart started his workaday life as a certified public accountant after flunking out of law school. As a means of breaking his job's monotony, Newhart would call his friend Ed Gallagher, and improvise low-key comedy sketches. A mutual friend of Newhart and Gallagher's, Chicago deejay Dan Sorkin, tape-recorded some of these off-the-cuff routines and played them for Warner Bros. records. Newhart suddenly found himself booked into a Houston nightclub -- his first-ever public appearance. Armed with telephone-conversation routines which delineated how Abe Lincoln would be handled by a publicity agent, or how Abner Doubleday would have fared trying to sell baseball to a modern-day novelty firm, Newhart recorded his first comedy album in 1960 -- which evidently struck a nerve with fellow white-collar workers, since it sold 1,500,000 copies. The hottest young comic on the club-and-TV circuit, Newhart was offered starring roles in situation comedies, but felt he wasn't a good enough actor to make a single character interesting week after week. Instead, he signed in 1961 for NBC's The Bob Newhart Show, a comedy-variety series which nosedived in the ratings but won an Emmy. Fearing that TV would eat up all his material within a year or so, Newhart went back to nightclubs after his one-season series was cancelled. Sharpening his acting skills in TV guest spots and in several films (his first, 1962's Hell is For Heroes, was so unnerving an experience that Bob repeatedly begged the producers to kill his character off before the fadeout), Newhart felt emboldened enough to attempt a regular TV series again in 1972. This Bob Newhart Show cast the comedian as psychologist Bob Hartley - an ideal outlet for his "button-down" style of dry humor. Six seasons and several awards later, Newhart was firmly established as a television superstar; this time around he wasn't cancelled, but ended the series on his own volition, feeling the series had exhausted its bag of tricks. Most popular sitcom personalities had come acropper trying to repeat their first success with a second series, but Newhart broke the jinx with Newhart in 1982, wherein Bob played author Dick Loudon, who on a whim decided to open a New England colonial inn. Newhart was every bit as popular as his earlier sitcom, and, like the previous show, the series ended (in 1990) principally because Newhart chose to end it. This he did with panache: Newhart's final scene suggested the entire series had been a bad dream experienced by Bob Newhart Show's Bob Hartley! A third starring sitcom, 1992's Bob, found Newhart playing a cult-figure comic book artist; alas, despite excellent scriptwork and the usual polished Newhart performance, this new series fell victim to format tinkering and poor timeslots. Over teh course of the next few decades, Newhart would frequently turn up in guest roles on shows like Murphy Brown, ER, and Desperate Housewives, and though his 1997 odd couple sitcom George & Leo failed to find its footing, he did appear in all three installments of TNT's popular fantasy trilogy The Librarian, starring Noah Wyle. Meanwhile, cameos in such films as Elf and Horrible Bosses continually offered a gentle reminder that comedy's nicest funnyman could still crack us up.

Trivia: Street-smart leading actor Harry Guardino entered films in 1952 after several years of knocking around the New York stages. The best of his early film roles was Cary Grant's comic handyman in 1958's Houseboat. Guardino worked extensively in European productions in the 1960s, playing such parts as Barabbas in 1961's King of Kings. Among Harry Guardino's many TV assignments were the title role in the 1964 New York-based series The Reporter and the "Bogart/Bond" hero on the syndicated 1971 weekly Monty Nash. He made his final film appearance in Fist of Honor (1991).

Trivia: James Coburn was an actor whose style allowed him to comfortably embrace drama, action, and comedy roles, and many of his best-known performances found him blending elements of all these styles in roles that overflowed with charisma and a natural charm. Born in Laurel, NE, on August 31, 1928, Coburn relocated to California as a young man, and first developed an interest in acting while studying at Los Angeles City College. After appearing in several student productions, he decided to take a stab at acting as a profession, and enrolled in the theater department at U.C.L.A. Coburn earned his first notable reviews in an adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, staged at Los Angeles' La Jolla Playhouse, which starred Vincent Price. In the early '50s, Coburn moved to New York City, where he studied acting with Stella Adler, and began working in commercials and live television. In 1958, Coburn won a recurring role on a Western TV series called Bronco, and scored his first film role the following year in Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome, starring Randolph Scott. For a while, Coburn seemed to find himself typecast as a heavy in Westerns, most notably in The Magnificent Seven, and later starred in two action-oriented TV series, Klondike (which ran for 18 weeks between 1960 and 1961) and Acapulco (which lasted a mere eight weeks in 1961). However, after a strong showing in the war drama Hell Is for Heroes, Coburn finally got to play a big-screen hero as part of the ensemble cast of 1963's The Great Escape. In 1964, Coburn got a chance to show his flair for comedy in The Americanization of Emily, and in 1965 he appeared in Major Dundee, the first of several films he would make with iconoclastic director Sam Peckinpah. In 1966, Coburn finally hit full-fledged stardom in Our Man Flint, a flashy satiric comedy which put an American spin on the James Bond-style superspy films of the period. Coburn's deft blend of comic cheek and action heroics as Derek Flint made the film a major box-office success, and in 1967 he appeared in a sequel, In Like Flint, as well as two similar action comedies, Duffy and the cult film The President's Analyst (the latter of which Coburn helped produce). Moving back and forth between comedies (Candy, Harry in Your Pocket), Westerns (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), and dramas (The Last of Shelia, Cross of Iron), Coburn was in high demand through much of the 1970s. He also dabbled in screenwriting (he penned a script for his friend Bruce Lee which was filmed after Lee's death as Circle of Iron, starring David Carradine) and directing (he directed an episode of the TV series The Rockford Files, as well as handling second-unit work on Sam Peckinpah's Convoy). By the end of the decade, however, his box-office allure was not what it once was, although he remained a potent draw in Japan. Coburn remained busy in the 1980s, with supporting roles in theatrical films, larger roles in television projects, and voice-over work for documentaries. In 1979, Coburn was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and in the mid-'80s, when his illness failed to respond to conventional treatment, he began to cut back on his work schedule. But in the 1990s, a holistic therapist was able to treat Coburn using nutritional supplements, and he began appearing onscreen with greater frequency (he also appeared in a series of instructional videos on gambling strategies, one of Coburn's passions). He won a 1999 Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his intense portrayal of an abusive father in Paul Schrader's film Affliction, and the award kick-started Coburn's career. He would work on more than a dozen projects over the next two years, but Coburn then succumbed to a heart attack in 2002. Coburn was survived by two children, James H. Coburn IV and Lisa Coburn, his former spouse Beverly Kelly, and Paula Murad, his wife at the time of his death.

Trivia: The son of an English-immigrant clothier, Mike Kellin decided to become an actor in the second grade, after watching a school production of A Christmas Carol. The restless Kellin briefly attended three colleges before serving in the Navy in World War II. After flunking out of Yale Drama School, Kellin headed to New York, where he studied acting under Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler. Denied leading-man assignments because of what he described as his "lived-in face," Kellin's big Broadway break came in the role of the abrasive sergeant in the 1949 Broadway comedy At War with the Army; he would reprise his role in the 1950 film version, which starred Martin and Lewis. Kellin went on to win the Tony award for his performance in the 1956 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Pipe Dream. In 1960, Kellin was cast as slovenly Chief Mate McCarthy in The Wackiest Ship in the Army; when this film was adapted into a TV series in 1965, Kellin came along for the ride in substantially the same role, though the character was rechristened as Chief Petty Officer Willie Miller. Mike Kellin's most celebrated movie appearance was his Oscar-nominated role as the father of the imprisoned protagonist in Midnight Express (1978).

Trivia: What do actors Gig Young, Anne Shirley, and L.Q. Jones have in common? All of them lifted their show-biz names from characters they'd portrayed on screen. In 1955, University of Texas alumnus Justice McQueen made his film debut in Battle Cry, playing a laconic lieutenant named L.Q. Jones. McQueen liked his character so much that he remained L.Q. Jones offscreen ever after (though he never made it legal, still listing himself as Justice Ellis McQueen in the 1995 edition of Who's Who). A natural for westerns both vocally and physically, Jones played supporting roles in several big-screen oaters, and was seen on TV as Smitty on Cheyenne (1955-58) and as Belden on The Virginian (1964-67). Jones gained a measure of prominence in the films of Sam Peckinpah, notably Ride the High Country (1961) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Turning to the production side of the business in the early 1970s, L. Q. Jones produced and co-starred in the 1971 film Brotherhood of Satan; he also co-produced, directed, adapted and played a cameo (as a porn-movie actor!) in the fascinating 1975 cinemazation of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog, a tour de force that won Jones a Hugo Award from America's science fiction writers.

Trivia: A top athlete at Brown University, Don Haggerty performed military service and did stage work before his movie-acting debut in 1947. Free-lancing, Haggerty put in time at virtually every studio from Republic to MGM, playing roles of varying sizes in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) The Asphalt Jungle (1951), Angels in the Outfield (1951) and The Narrow Margin (1952). Most often, he was cast as a big-city detective or rugged westerner. During the first (1955-56) season of TV's The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Haggerty showed up semi-regularly as Marsh Murdock. Don Haggerty was the father of Grizzly Adams star Dan Haggerty.

Trivia: A graduate of St. Peter's College, Nick Adams made his screen-acting bow at age 20 with a bit in Somebody Loves Me (1952). Signed at Warner Bros. in 1955, Adams appeared with James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. An inveterate offscreen prankster, Adams enjoyed making Dean laugh by doing on-target impersonations of his co-stars; this talent came in handy when Adams was called upon to dub in several of James Dean's lines in Giant after Dean's fatal car accident. The best of Adams' 1950s movie assignments included the role of Andy Griffith's nerdish air force buddy in No Time for Sergeants (1957) and the would-be seducer of Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959). In 1959, Adams was cast as ex-Confederate soldier Johnny Yuma on the popular TV western The Rebel; less successful was his 1962 starring series Saints and Sinners. After an Oscar nomination for his performance as a surly murder suspect in Twilight of Honor (1963), Adams' career went into an eclipse. Nick Adams died in 1968, the result of an overdose of prescription drugs.

Trivia: Apparently none of the studios in Hollywood cared if French-born director Louis Gasnier's work was consistently mediocre. For one thing, he had an excellent professional background: working at the Paris-based Pathé studios in 1905, he helped bring comedian Max Linder to prominence (though it's likely that Linder directed himself). Also, Gasnier had an excellent ability to spot talent, discovering leading French actor Jules Berry and American serial queen Pearl White. In charge of Pathé's American offices in 1914, Gasnier directed White's immortal The Perils of Pauline (1914); the results have prompted one influential film historian to tag Gasnier's direction as "appalling beyond belief." The director did a better job with the second White serial The Exploits of Elaine (1915) but still missed several opportunities to heighten tension through his lackadaisical pacing and staging. Throughout the '20s, Gasnier directed several major feature films, which nearly always drew praise for the stars and writing, but never for the directing (one fan wrote to a trade magazine complaining that Gasnier handled his actors like "wax dummies"). When talkies arrived, Gasnier's difficulties in grasping the English language relegated him to poverty-row productions. One glance at Gasnier's low-budget "masterpiece" Reefer Madness (1935) shows that the director's technique had not progressed one iota since the declamatory days of Max Linder. Louis Gasnier retired in 1942; subsequent records are hazy, and it isn't clear whether he died in 1948 or several years thereafter.

Trivia: Chuck Hicks was both a character actor and a stunt man who worked in feature films, television and television commercials. He later became a stunt coordinator and an instructor.