Trivia: Born Randolph Crane, this virile, weathered, prototypical cowboy star with a gallant manner and slight Southern accent enlisted for service in the U.S. Army during World War I at age 19. After returning home he got a degree in engineering, then joined the Pasadena Community Playhouse. While golfing, Scott met millionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes, who helped him enter films as a bit player. In the mid '30s he began landing better roles, both as a romantic lead and as a costar. Later he became a Western star, and from the late '40s to the '50s he starred exclusively in big-budget color Westerns (39 altogether). From 1950-53 he was one of the top ten box-office attractions. Later in the '50s he played the aging cowboy hero in a series of B-Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher for Ranown, an independent production company. He retired from the screen in the early '60s. Having invested in oil wells, real estate, and securities, he was worth between $50-$100 million.

Trivia: Forrest Tucker occupied an odd niche in movies -- though not an "A" movie lead, he was, nonetheless, a prominent "B" picture star and even a marquee name, who could pull audiences into theaters for certain kinds of pictures. From the early/mid-1950s on, he was a solid presence in westerns and other genre pictures. Born Forrest Meredith Tucker in Plainfield, Indiana in 1919, he was bitten by the performing bug early in life -- he made his debut in burlesque while he was still under-age. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1937, he enlisted in the United States Army, joining a cavalry unit. Tucker next headed for Hollywood, where his powerful build and six-foot-four frame and his enthusiasm were sufficient to get him a big-screen debut in The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Signed to Columbia Pictures, he mostly played anonymous tough-guy roles over the next two years, primarily in B pictures, before entering the army in 1943. Resuming his career in 1946, he started getting bigger roles on a steady basis in better pictures, and in 1948 signed with Republic Pictures. He became a mainstay of that studio's star roster, moving up to a co-starring role in Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), which also brought him into the professional orbit of John Wayne, the movie's star. Across the early/middle 1950s, Tucker starred in a brace of action/adventure films and westerns, alternating between heroes and villains, building up a significant fan base. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the company's top box-office draws. As it also turned out, Tucker's appeal was international, and he went to England in the second half of the decade to play starring roles in a handful of movies. At that time, British studios such as Hammer Films needed visiting American actors to boost the international appeal of their best productions, and Tucker fulfilled the role admirably in a trio of sci-fi/horror films: The Crawling Eye, The Cosmic Monsters, and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Part of Tucker's motivation for taking these roles, beyond the money, he later admitted, was his desire to sample the offerings of England's pubs -- Tucker was a two-fisted drinker and, in those days, was well able to handle the effects of that activity so that it never showed up on-screen. And he ran with the opportunity afforded by those three science fiction movies -- each of those films, he played a distinctly different role, in a different way, but always with a certain fundamental honesty that resonated with audiences. When he returned to Hollywood, he was cast as Beauregard Burnside in Auntie Mame (1958), which was the top-grossing movie of the year. Then stage director Morton De Costa, seeing a joyful, playful romantic huckster in Tucker (where others had mostly seen an earnest tough-guy), picked him to star as Professor Harold Hill in the touring production of The Music Man -- Tucker played that role more than 2000 times over the years that followed. He was also the star of the 1964 Broadway show Fair Game For Lovers (in a cast that included Leo Genn, Maggie Hayes, and a young Alan Alda), which closed after eight performances. The Music Man opened a new phase for Tucker's career. The wily huckster became his image, one that was picked up by Warner Bros.' television division, which cast him in the role of Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, the charmingly larcenous post-Civil War cavalry soldier at the center of the western/spoof series F-Troop. That series only ran for two seasons, but was in syndicated reruns for decades afterward, and though Tucker kept his hand in other media -- returning to The Music Man and also starring in an unsold pilot based on the movie The Flim-Flam Man (taking over the George C. Scott part), it was the part of O'Rourke with which he would be most closely identified for the rest of his life. He did occasionally take tougher roles that moved him away from the comedy in that series -- in one of the better episodes of the series Hondo, entitled "Hondo And The Judas", he played Colonel William Clark Quantrill very effectively. At the end of the decade, he returned to straight dramatic acting, most notably in the John Wayne western Chisum, in which he played primary villain Lawrence Murphy. That same year, he appeared in a challenging episode of the series Bracken's World entitled "Love It Or Leave It, Change It Or Lose It", playing "Jim Grange," a sort of film-a-clef version of John Wayne -- a World War II-era film star known for his patriotism, Grange is determined to express his political views while working alongside a young film star (portrayed by Tony Bill) who is closely associated with the anti-war movement. Tucker continued getting television work and occasional film roles, in addition to returning to the straw-hat circuit, mostly as Professor Harold Hill. None of his subsequent series lasted very long, but he was seldom out of work, despite a drinking problem that did worsen significantly during his final decade. In his final years, he had brought that under control, and was in the process of making a comeback -- there was even talk of an F-Troop revival in film form -- when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. He died in the fall of 1986 at age 67.

Trivia: A radio and stage actress since early childhood, Mala Powers made her first film appearance at age 11 in the 1942 Dead End Kids opus Tough As They Come. After attending U.C.L.A., she was discovered by filmmaker/actress Ida Lupino who starred Powers in her 1950 film Outrage. That same year, Stanley Kramer signed Powers to star opposite Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac. Though critical reviews for the film were mixed, Powers was praised for her beauty, sensitivity, and naturalness in portraying Cyrano's great love, Roxanne. It remains her best-known role. Her promising career was nipped in the bud the following year by a life-threatening illness. Following her recovery, Powers had difficulty obtaining production insurance and this in turn made it difficult for her to appear in A-features. As a result, she spent the majority of her subsequent career appearing in low-budget Westerns and adventure films. She died of complications from leukemia, at age 76, in early June 2007.

Trivia: Though descended from a highly respected family of Irish politicians and civil servants, actor J. Carroll Naish played every sort of nationality except Irish during his long career. Naish joined the Navy at age sixteen, and spent the next decade travelling all over the world, absorbing the languages, dialects and customs of several nations. Drifting from job to job while stranded in California, Naish began picking up extra work in Hollywood films. The acting bug took hold, and Naish made his stage debut in a 1926 touring company of The Shanghai Gesture. Within five years he was a well-established member of the theatrical community (the legendary actress Mrs. Leslie Carter was the godmother of Naish's daughter). Naish thrived during the early days of talking pictures thanks to his expertise in a limitless variety of foreign dialects. At various times he was seen as Chinese, Japanese, a Frenchman, a South Seas Islander, Portuguese, an Italian, a German, and a Native American (he played Sitting Bull in the 1954 film of the same name). Many of his assignments were villainous in nature (he was a gangster boss in virtually every Paramount "B" of the late 1930s), though his two Oscar nominations were for sympathetic roles: the tragic Italian POW in Sahara (1943) and the indigent Mexican father of a deceased war hero in A Medal For Benny (1954). Naish continued to flourish on radio and television, at one point playing both a priest and a rabbi on the same anthology series. He starred in both the radio and TV versions of the melting-pot sitcom "Life with Luigi," essayed the title role in 39 episodes of "The New Adventures of Charlie Chan" (1957), and played a comedy Indian on the 1960 sitcom "Guestward Ho." Illness forced him to retire in 1969, but J. Carroll Naish was cajoled back before the cameras by quickie producer Al Adamson for the 1970 ultracheapie Dracula vs. Frankenstein; even weighed down by bad false teeth, coke-bottle glasses and a wheelchair, Naish managed to act the rest of the cast right off the screen.

Trivia: Intending to become a dentist like his father, American actor Edgar Buchanan wound up with grades so bad in college that he was compelled to take an "easy" course to improve his average. Buchanan chose a course in play interpretation, and after listening to a few recitations of Shakespeare he was stagestruck. After completing dental school, Buchanan plied his oral surgery skills in the summertime, devoting the fall, winter and spring months to acting in stock companies and at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. He was given a screen test by Warner Bros. studios in 1940, received several bit roles, then worked himself up to supporting parts upon transferring to Columbia Pictures. Though still comparatively youthful, Buchanan specialized in grizzled old westerners, with a propensity towards villainy or at least larceny. The actor worked at every major studio (and not a few minor ones) over the next few years, still holding onto his dentist's license just in case he needed something to fall back on. Though he preferred movie work to the hurried pace of TV filming, Buchanan was quite busy in television's first decade, costarring with William Boyd on the immensely popular Hopalong Cassidy series, then receiving a starring series of his own, Judge Roy Bean, in 1954. Buchanan became an international success in 1963 thanks to his regular role as the lovably lazy Uncle Joe Carson on the classic sitcom Petticoat Junction, which ran until 1970. After that, the actor experienced a considerably shorter run on the adventure series Cade's County, which starred Buchanan's close friend Glenn Ford. Buchanan's last movie role was in Benji (1974), which reunited him with the titular doggie star, who had first appeared as the family mutt on Petticoat Junction.

Trivia: The face of American actor Myron Healey was not in and of itself villainous. But whenever Healey narrowed his eyes and widened that countenance into a you-know-what-eating grin and exposed those pointed ivories, the audience knew that he was about to rob a bank, hold up a stagecoach, or burn out a homesteader, which he did with regularity after entering films in the postwar years. Still, Healey could temper his villainy with a marvelous sense of humor: for example, his hilarious adlibs while appearing in stock badguy roles in such TV series as Annie Oakley and Gene Autry. With 1949's Colorado Ambush Healey broadened his talents to include screenwriting. Usually heading the supporting cast, Myron Healey was awarded a bonafide lead role in the 1962 horror film Varan the Unbelievable (a Japanese film, with scattered English-language sequences), though even here he seemed poised to stab the titular monster in the back at any moment.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: Baby boomers will recall silver-maned actor William Forrest as Major Swanson, the brusque but fair-minded commander of Fort Apache in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. This character was but one of many military officers portrayed by the prolific Forrest since the late 1930s. Most of his film appearances were fleeting, and few were billed, but Forrest managed to pack more authority into 30 seconds' film time than many bigger stars were able to manage in an hour and a half. Outside of Rin Tin Tin, William Forrest is probably most familiar as the sinister fifth-columnist Martin Crane in the 1943 Republic serial The Masked Marvel.

Trivia: Had he been born a decade earlier, American actor Denver Pyle might well have joined the ranks of western-movie comedy sidekicks. Instead, Pyle, a Colorado farm boy, opted for studying law, working his way through school by playing drums in a dance band. Suddenly one day, Pyle became disenchanted with law and returned to his family farm, with nary an idea what he wanted to do with his life. Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma, he moved on to the shrimp boats of Galveston, Texas. A short stint as a page at NBC radio studios in 1940 didn't immediately lead to a showbiz career, as it has for so many others; instead, Pyle was inspired to perform by a mute oilfield coworker who was able to convey his thought with body language. Studying under such masters as Michael Chekhov and Maria Ouspenskaya, Pyle was able to achieve small movie and TV roles. He worked frequently on the western series of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry; not yet bearded and grizzled, Pyle was often seen as deputies, farmers and cattle rustlers. When his hair turned prematurely grey in his early '30s, Pyle graduated to banker, sheriff and judge roles in theatrical westerns -- though never of the comic variety. He also was a regular on two TV series, Code 3 (1956) and Tammy (1966). But his real breakthrough role didn't happen until 1967, when Pyle was cast as the taciturn sheriff in Bonnie and Clyde who is kidnapped and humilated by the robbers -- and then shows up at the end of the film to supervise the bloody machine-gun deaths of B&C. This virtually nonspeaking role won worldwide fame for Pyle, as well as verbal and physical assalts from the LA hippie community who regarded Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes! From this point forward, Denver Pyle's billing, roles and salary were vastly improved -- and his screen image was softened and humanized by a full, bushy beard. Returning to TV, Pyle played the star's father on The Doris Day Show (1968-73); was Mad Jack, the costar/narrator of Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978-80); and best of all, spent six years (1979-85) as Uncle Jesse Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. Looking stockier but otherwise unchanged, Denver Pyle was briefly seen in the 1994 hit Maverick, playing an elegantly dishonest cardshark who jauntily doffs his hat as he's dumped off of a riverboat. Pyle died of lung cancer at Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center at age 77.

Trivia: American actor Trevor Bardette could truly say that he died for a living. In the course of a film career spanning three decades, the mustachioed, granite-featured Bardette was "killed off" over 40 times as a screen villain. Entering movies in 1936 after abandoning a planned mechanical engineering career for the Broadway stage, Bardette was most often seen as a rustler, gangster, wartime collaborator and murderous backwoodsman. His screen skullduggery carried over into TV; one of Bardette's best remembered video performances was as a "human bomb" on an early episode of Superman. Perhaps being something of a reprobate came naturally to Trevor Bardette -- or so he himself would claim in later years when relating a story of how, as a child, he'd won ten dollars writing an essay on "the evils of tobacco," only to be caught smoking behind the barn shortly afterward.

Trivia: Though seemingly born with a battered bulldog countenance and a rattly voice best suited to such lines as "We don't like you kind around these parts, stranger," tough-guy character actor Kenneth Tobey was originally groomed for gormless leading man roles when he came to Hollywood in 1949. Possessing too much roughhewn authority to be wasted in romantic leads, Tobey was best served in military roles. One of these was the no-nonsense but likeable Capt. Patrick Hendrey in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, a role that typed him in films of a "fantastic" nature for several years thereafter. From 1956 through 1958, Tobey co-starred with Craig Hill on the popular syndicated TV adventure series Whirlybirds; up to that time, televiewers were most familiar with Tobey as Jim Bowie in the ratings-busting Davy Crockett miniseries. Though often consigned by Hollywood's typecasting system to workaday villain roles, Kenneth Tobey has not be forgotten by filmmakers who grew up watching his horror-flick endeavors of the 1950s; he has been afforded key cameo roles in such latter-day shockers as Strange Invaders (1983) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and in 1985 he reprised his Thing From Another World character in The Attack of the B-Movie Monsters.

Trivia: The aptly nicknamed Chubby Johnson didn't give up his journalism career for the movies until he was nearly 50. After a brief tenure as comical sidekick to Republic cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane, Johnson became a freelance character actor, appearing opposite practically everyone from Randolph Scott to Ronald Reagan to Will Rogers Jr. Extremely active on television, he was seen on a regular basis as Concho in the 1963 TV Western Temple Houston. Chubby Johnson remained in films until 1969.

Trivia: A favorite of producer/director Jack Webb, character actor Ralph Moody was a familiar face to viewers of Dragnet in both its 1950s and 1960s incarnations -- but that would be an unfair (as well as inaccurate) way to describe an actor who amassed hundreds of film and television appearances in barely 20 years of movie and television work. Born in St. Louis, MO, in 1886, Moody didn't make his screen debut until 1948, with a small role in Man Eaters of Kumaon. Already in his sixties, he always looked older than he was, and his craggy features could also impart a fierceness that made him threatening. Although Moody was known for playing kindly or crotchety old men, he occasionally brought that fierceness to bear, as in the Adventures of Superman episode "Test of a Warrior", in which he played the sinister medicine man Okatee. But in between that and dozens of other one-off television assignments, Moody also managed to work in scenes as the coffin-boat skipper in Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street and one of the rescue workers in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. Moody was one of those actors who could work quickly and milk a line or a scene for all its emotional worth. What's more, he could do it without over-emoting. He was the kind of character player that directors and producers in budget-conscious television of the 1950s needed. In an episode of Circus Boy, he played a touching scene with a young Micky Dolenz, as an aging railroad engineer introducing the boy to the world of locomotives and trains. After that, Moody got called back to do three more episodes. But it was Jack Webb who really put him to work in Dragnet and many of his other productions, in radio and feature films as well as television. His more memorable appearances on Dragnet included "The Big Producer", as a once-famous movie producer who is reduced to selling pornographic pictures to high-school students, and "The Hammer", from the 1967 revival of the series, in which he portrayed the neighbor of a murder victim. Moody continued working regularly in television until a year before his death in 1971, at age 84. His final appearance was in the Night Gallery episode "The Little Black Bag".

Trivia: Character actor Holly Bane (who sometimes billed himself as Michael Ragan) specialized in playing bad guys in low-budget Westerns and serials. He made his first film appearance in Wake Island (1942), then appeared frequently in films through 1966, when he worked opposite Elvis Presley in Gunpoint. In the 1970s, Bane became a makeup director and worked on such television series as Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter.

Trivia: American actor Dennis Moore made his first stage appearance with a Texas stock company in 1932. If his official bio is to be believed, Moore was 18 at the time, casting some doubt over his claim of having been a commercial pilot before inaugurating his acting career. Whatever the case, it is a matter of record that Moore entered films in 1936 when he was discovered by a Columbia Pictures talent scout. Two years later, he made the first of his many Westerns at Republic Pictures. In his earliest sagebrush appearances, he was a bit player, stunt man, or villain; in 1940, he attained his first cowboy leading role in The Man From Tascosa, though he would continue to take bad-guy parts (notably as a serial killer in the East Side Kids' 1941 feature Spooks Run Wild) even after his good-guy debut. In 1943, Moore joined Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Max Terhune as a member of the Range Busters in the Monogram Western series of the same name. Until his retirement from films in 1957, Moore alternated between Westerns and such serials as The Purple Monster Strikes (1945). Dennis Moore owns the distinction of starring in the last serial ever made by Republic, King of the Carnival (1956), and the last serial ever made in Hollywood, Columbia's Blazing the Overland Trail (1956).

Trivia: American general purpose actor Arthur Space was active in films from 1940. Tall, tweedy, and usually sporting a mustache, Space played just about every kind of supporting role, from Western banker to big-city detective to jewel thief. One of his largest film roles was as the delightfully eccentric inventor Alva P. Hartley in the 1944 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Big Noise. As busy on television as in films, Arthur Space was seen on a weekly basis as Herbert Brown, the father of horse-loving teenager Velvet Brown, in the TV series National Velvet (1960-1961).

Trivia: American stunt man Henry Wills made his first recorded film appearances around 1940. Wills has shown up in scores of westerns, often in utility roles as stagecoach drivers and villainous henchmen. He commandeered chariots in several Biblical epics, including Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Henry Wills also served as stunt coordinator for such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Beastmaster (1982).