Trivia: Rough-hewn American leading man Richard Boone was thrust into the cold cruel world when he was expelled from Stanford University, for a minor infraction. He worked as a oil-field laborer, boxer, painter and free-lance writer before settling upon acting as a profession. After serving in World War II, Boone used his GI Bill to finance his theatrical training at the Actors' Studio, making his belated Broadway debut at age 31, playing Jason in Judith Anderson's production of Medea. Signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1951, Boone was given good billing in his first feature, Halls of Montezuma; among his Fox assignments was the brief but telling role of Pontius Pilate in The Robe (1953). Boone launched the TV-star phase of his career in the weekly semi-anthology Medic, playing Dr. Konrad Steiner. From 1957 through 1963, Boone portrayed Paladin, erudite western soldier of fortune, on the popular western series Have Gun, Will Travel. He directed several episodes of this series. Boone tackled a daring TV assignment in 1963, when in collaboration with playwright Clifford Odets, he appeared in the TV anthology series The Richard Boone Show. Unique among filmed dramatic programs, Boone's series featured a cast of eleven regulars (including Harry Morgan, Robert Blake, Jeanette Nolan, Bethel Leslie and Boone himself), who appeared in repertory, essaying different parts of varying sizes each week. The Richard Boone Show failed to catch on, and Boone went back to films. In 1972 he starred in another western series, this one produced by his old friend Jack Webb: Hec Ramsey, the saga of an old-fashioned sheriff coping with an increasingly industrialized West. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador. Richard Boone died at age 65 of throat cancer.

Trivia: The scion of a wealthy Detroit family, William Talman would later claim that he learned to "champion the underdog" while a member of his Episcopal church boxing team. In his 20s, Talman became an evangelist for the Moral Re-Armament Movement, and later made at stab at studying law. He drifted to New York, where, through the intervention of an actor friend of his father, he began picking up small stage roles. After extensive experience in New York and in the touring company of Of Mice and Men, Talman moved to Hollywood, where in 1949 he played his first important screen role as a gangster in Red, Hot and Blue (1949). At his best when his characters were at their worst, Talman developed into one of Tinseltown's most fearsome screen villains, never more so than when he played a psycho killer who slept with one eye open in the noir classic The Hitchhiker (1955). In 1957, Talman was cast as Hamilton Burger, the perennially losing District Attorney on the popular TV weekly Perry Mason. He remained with the series until March of 1960, when he was arrested for throwing a wild party where vast quantities of illegal substances were consumed. The Perry Mason producers had every intention of firing Talman from the series, but he was reinstated thanks to the loyal intervention of his co-stars -- particularly Raymond Burr, who threatened to quit the show if Talman wasn't given a second chance. William Talman was last seen on TV in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements; these spots were run posthumously, at Talman's request, following his death from lung cancer at the age of 53.

Trivia: Forceful African American leading man Ivan Dixon first commanded notice from theatergoers for his performance in the 1957 Broadway play The Cave Dwellers. He entered films as Sidney Poiter's double and stand-in with Something of Value (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958), ultimately sharing scenes with Poitier in Porgy and Bess (1959) and Raisin in the Sun (1961). In 1964's Nothing But a Man, Dixon starred as Duff Anderson, an irresponsible Alabama railroad worker whose late-blooming maturity forms the nucleus of the film. Dixon's TV work includes the role of Kinchloe on the POW sitcom Hogan's Heroes and his Emmy-nominated starring role on the 1967 dramatic special The Private War of Olly Winter. In his later years, Ivan Dixon remained active as a director and a performer: he helmed the theatrical features Trouble Man (1972) and The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1992), such TV movies as Love is Not Enough and Percy and Thunder, and several episodes of the TV adventure series Hawaiian Heat (1984). Dixon died at age 76 in March 2008.

Trivia: A staple of Western-themed films and television series, veteran character actor Rayford Barnes began his onscreen career with John Wayne in Hondo, and in recent years appeared on television in Walker, Texas Ranger and ER. After beginning his career in New York training with Stella Adler and the Neighborhood Playhouse, Barnes moved to San Francisco to open his own theater, and later relocated to San Francisco, where he landed his role in Hondo. A veteran of WWII, Barnes made regular appearances on such TV series as Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Little House on the Prairie while concurrently appearing in Westerns like The Wild Bunch and The Hunting Party. Rayford Barnes died on November 11, 2000, at St. Andrews Medical Center in Santa Monica, CA. He was 80.