Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma carpet layer, James Garner did stints in the Army and merchant marines before working as a model. His professional acting career began with a non-speaking part in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), in which he was also assigned to run lines with stars Lloyd Nolan, Henry Fonda, and John Hodiak. Given that talent roster, and the fact that the director was Charles Laughton, Garner managed to earn his salary and receive a crash course in acting at the same time. After a few television commercials, he was signed as a contract player by Warner Bros. in 1956. He barely had a part in his first film, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), though he was given special attention by director David Butler, who felt Garner had far more potential than the film's nominal star, Tab Hunter. Due in part to Butler's enthusiasm, Garner was cast in the Warner Bros. TV Western Maverick. The scriptwriters latched on to his gift for understated humor, and, before long, the show had as many laughs as shoot-outs. Garner was promoted to starring film roles during his Maverick run, but, by the third season, he chafed at his low salary and insisted on better treatment. The studio refused, so he walked out. Lawsuits and recriminations were exchanged, but the end result was that Garner was a free agent as of 1960. He did quite well as a freelance actor for several years, turning in commendable work in such films as Boys' Night Out (1962) and The Great Escape (1963), but was soon perceived by filmmakers as something of a less-expensive Rock Hudson, never more so than when he played Hudson-type parts opposite Doris Day in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All! (both 1963).Garner fared rather better in variations of his Maverick persona in such Westerns as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and The Skin Game (1971), but he eventually tired of eating warmed-over stew; besides, being a cowboy star had made him a walking mass of injuries and broken bones. He tried to play a more peaceable Westerner in the TV series Nichols (1971), but when audiences failed to respond, his character was killed off and replaced by his more athletic twin brother (also Garner). The actor finally shed the Maverick cloak with his long-running TV series The Rockford Files (1974-1978), in which he played a John MacDonald-esque private eye who never seemed to meet anyone capable of telling the truth. Rockford resulted in even more injuries for the increasingly battered actor, and soon he was showing up on TV talk shows telling the world about the many physical activities which he could no longer perform. Rockford ended in a spirit of recrimination, when Garner, expecting a percentage of the profits, learned that "creative bookkeeping" had resulted in the series posting none. To the public, Garner was the rough-hewn but basically affable fellow they'd seen in his fictional roles and as Mariette Hartley's partner (not husband) in a series of Polaroid commercials. However, his later film and TV-movie roles had a dark edge to them, notably his likable but mercurial pharmacist in Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his multifaceted co-starring stints with James Woods in the TV movies Promise (1986) and My Name Is Bill W. (1989). In 1994, Garner came full circle in the profitable feature film Maverick (1994), in which the title role was played by Mel Gibson. With the exception of such lower-key efforts as the noir-ish Twilight (1998) and the made-for-TV thriller Dead Silence (1997), Garner's career in the '90s found the veteran actor once again tapping into his latent ability to provoke laughs in such efforts as Space Cowboys (2000) while maintaining a successful small-screen career by returning to the role of Jim Rockford in several made-for-TV movies. He provided a voice for the popular animatedfeature Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and appeared in the comedy-drama The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Garner enjoyed a career resurgance in 2003, when he joined the cast of TV's 8 Simple Rules, acting as a sort of replacement for John Ritter, who had passed away at the beginning of the show's second season. He next appeared in The Notebook (2004), which earned Garner a Screen Actors Guild nomination and also poised him to win the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. His last on-screen role was a small supporting role in The Ultimate Gift (2007). In 2008, Garner suffered a stroke and retired acting. He died in 2014, at age 86.

Trivia: While attending the medical school of Columbia University, Gerald Mohr was offered an opportunity to audition as a radio announcer. The upshot of this was a job at CBS as the network's youngest reporter. He moved to the Broadway stage upon landing a role in The Petrified Forest. Shortly afterward, he became a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He was chosen on the basis of his voice alone for his first film role as a heavily disguised phony mystic in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939). Following wartime service, the dark, roguish Mohr was selected to play thief-turned-sleuth the Lone Wolf in Columbia's B-picture series of the same name. His detective activities spilled over into radio, where Mohr starred as Philip Marlowe, and TV, where in 1954 he was cast as Bogart-like café owner Chris Storm on the final season of the syndicated Foreign Intrigue. Gerald Mohr died at the age of 54, shortly after playing a crooked gambler in Funny Girl (1968).

Trivia: Loyola University grad Paul Picerni became an actor at a time when Arrow-collar leading men were giving way to blue-collar realistic types. Picerni never seemed too comfortable with his leading assignments in such films as House of Wax (1953); he appeared more at ease in down-to-earth supporting roles. His latter-day reputation rests on his four-year run as a federal agent on the slam-bang TV series The Untouchables. Paul Picerni is the brother of stunt man and stunt coordinator Charles Picerni.

Trivia: French character actor Louis Mercier was in American films from 1929's Tiger Rose until well into the 1970s. Mercier was particularly busy at 20th Century-Fox's "B"-picture unit in the 1930s and 1940s, usually cast as detectives and magistrates. He can be seen fleetingly in Casablanca (1942) as a smuggler in the first "Rick's Café Americain" sequence. Louis Mercier's later credits include An Affair to Remember (1957, in which he was given a character name--a rarity for him), The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and Darling Lili (1970).

Trivia: William D. Gordon got his start writing for radio programs like "The Cisco Kid," "The Tommy Dorsey Show" and "Count of Monte Cristo" during the mid-1930s. In 1939, Gordon began directing early, early television shows for the Mutual Don Lee Network, California and continued working in television and radio in various capacities, including director, producer, announcer, and actor through the early 1950s. He began writing teleplays for the series Maverick and Riverboat in 1959. He continued writing for television nighttime dramas and daytime series through the early 1980s. Gordon also directed Queen for a Day and helped produce, write and edit the television series CHiPs with James Doherty from 1977 to 1982. Upon retirement, Gordon began writing novels about the Civil War.

Trivia: Craggy character actor Roy Engel made his first film appearance in the 1949 noir classic D.O.A. He quickly established himself as a regular in such science fiction films as The Flying Saucer (1950), Man From Planet X (1951), and The Colossus of New York (1958). When not dealing with extraterrestrials, he could be seen playing sheriffs, bartenders, and the like in such Westerns as Three Violent People (1955) and Tribute to a Bad Man (1956). Among Roy Engel's last films was Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) which combined elements of both sci-fi and Westerns.

Trivia: Michigan-born Jack Perrin moved to California with his family in the early 1900s. Perrin launched his film career in 1914 as a bit player and extra, working his way up to leading roles by 1917. After serving on a submarine in WWI, he resumed his movie work, attaining stardom in the 1919 Universal serial Lion Man. Handsome and athletic, Perrin became a popular Western star in the 1920s. Throughout the silent era, he worked for most of the major Western units (Universal, Pathe, First National) and not a few of the minor ones (Rayart, Mascot). In 1929, he was starred in the first all-talkie B-Western, Overland Bound. Perrin spent the early '30s laboring away for such Poverty Row concerns as Aywon and Big Four, where, despite shabby production values and substandard sound recording, he and his "wonder horse" Starlight remained Saturday-matinee favorites. He also briefly co-starred with Ben Corbett in a series of three-reel Westerns, released under the blanket title Bud and Ben. After his final starring series for producer William Berke in 1936, Perrin settled into character roles, both large (Davy Crockett in the 1937 serial The Painted Stallion) and small (the prison guard who escorts James Cagney to the hot seat in 1938's Angels With Dirty Faces). In 1956, Jack Perrin, together with several other former B-Western favorites, rode alongside Col. Tim McCoy in the "Cavalry rescue" sequence in Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

Trivia: American actor John Hubbard was active as a choir boy in his home town of East Chicago, and upon becoming a teenager extended his performing activities to acting lessons at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Declining movie offers until he'd finished his courses, Hubbard was signed by Paramount Pictures in 1937. Few decent roles came his way, and Hubbard's contract was sold to MGM in 1938, where he was cast in a telling role opposite Luise Rainer in Dramatic School (1938), a film that featured such other up-and-comers as Dick Haymes, Ann Rutherford, Lana Turner and Hans Conried. Also in 1938, Hubbard signed a four-picture contract producer Hal Roach; it was Roach who spotted and fully utilized Hubbard's gifts for offbeat comedy in such films as The Housekeeper's Daughter (1938), Road Show (1941) and Turnabout (1940) - the latter film featuring Hubbard as the world's first pregnant man! B-film buffs consider Hubbard's tricky dramatic performance as a murder suspect in Republic's Whispering Footsteps (1943) as his best, but it was back to comedy shortly afterwards, often in supporting roles (he fended off the comic thrusts of Abbott and Costello in Mexican Hayride [1948]). Good parts weren't plentiful in the '50s, so Hubbard exercised the usual prerogative of actors "between pictures" by selling automobiles, and later managing a restaurant. On TV, Hubbard supported the star of The Mickey Rooney Show (1954) and played Col. U. Charles Parker on the 1962 military sitcom Don't Call Me Charlie. Film work was less satisfying during this period, and in fact Hubbard found himself minus screen credit for a potentially good role in 1964's Fate is the Hunter. Comfortably off if not world-famous, John Hubbard retired from movies and his various "civilian" jobs after a character role in Disney's Herbie Rides Again (1973).