Trivia: American actor Robert Conrad was a graduate of Northwestern University, spending his first few years out of school supporting himself and his family by driving a milk truck and singing in a Chicago cabaret. Conrad befriended up-and-coming actor Nick Adams during this period, and it was Adams who helped Conrad get his first Hollywood work in 1957. A few movie bit parts later, Conrad was signed for a comparative pittance by Warner Bros. studios, and in 1959 was cast as detective Tom Lopaka on the weekly adventure series Hawaiian Eye. Upon the 1963 cancellation of this series, Conrad made a handful of Spanish and American films and toured with a nightclub act in Australia and Mexico City. Cast as frontier secret agent James West in The Wild Wild West in 1965, Conrad brought home $5000 a week during the series' first season and enjoyed increasing remunerations as West remained on the air until 1969. There are those who insist that Wild Wild West would have been colorless without the co-starring presence of Ross Martin, an opinion with which Conrad has always agreed. The actor's bid to star in a 1970 series based on the venerable Nick Carter pulp stories got no further than a pilot episode, while the Jack Webb-produced 1971 Robert Conrad series The D.A. was cancelled after 13 episodes. When Roy Scheider pulled out of the 1972 adventure weekly Assignment: Vienna, Conrad stepped in--and was out, along with the rest of Assignment: Vienna, by June of 1973. Conrad had better luck with 1976's Baa Baa Black Sheep, aka Black Sheep Squadron, a popular series based on the World War II exploits of Major "Pappy" Boyington. Cast as a nurse on this series was Conrad's daughter Nancy, setting a precedent for nepotism that the actor practiced as late as his tenth TV series, 1989's Jesse Hawkes, wherein Conrad co-starred with his sons Christian and Shane. Though few of his series have survived past season one, Conrad has enjoyed success as a commercial spokesman and in the role of G. Gordon Liddy (whom the actor admired) in the 1982 TV movie Will, G. Gordon Liddy. As can be gathered from the Liddy assignment, Conrad's politics veered towards conservatism; in 1981, he and Charlton Heston were instrumental in toppling Ed Asner and his liberal contingent from power in the Screen Actors Guild. As virile and athletic as ever in the 1990s, Robert Conrad has continued to appear in action roles both on TV and in films; he has also maintained strong ties with his hometown of Chicago, and can be counted upon to show up at a moment's notice as a guest on the various all-night programs of Chicago radio personality Eddie Schwartz.

Trivia: American character actor Milton Selzer trafficked in bookish types, sometimes with an undercurrent of menace. An ineluctable TV presence, Selzer guest-starred on virtually every major program of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on Needles and Pins (1973) and The Famous Teddy Z (1989, second-billed as showbiz agent Abe Werkfinder); and on the popular spy spoof Get Smart (1965-70), he was brilliantly cast as a nervous special-weapons expert, who suffered a mild coronary every time dunderheaded Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) inadvertently destroyed Selzer's latest inventions. In films from 1959, Milton Selzer was given ample opportunity to shine as a sharkish movie mogul in Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) and as Nancy Spungen's grandfather in Sid and Nancy (1986).

Trivia: Because the two actresses tended to play the same type of overwrought roles in the mid-1950s, juvenile stars Patty McCormick and Patty Duke were sometimes mistaken for one another during this period. But once seen in her starmaking role as the homicidal preteen Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (in which she starred on Broadway in 1954 and in the film version in 1956), Patty McCormick can never be confused with anyone else. A pro from the age of four, McCormick was in films from 1951 and TV from 1953. After Bad Seed, she was second-billed as a bratty child star in the theatrical-film Kathy O' (1957) and was headlined in her own 1958 sitcom, Peck's Bad Girl. The uniqueness that characterized McCormick's appearances as a child evaporated when she reached maturity; though she was more than competent playing disturbed teenagers in films like The Miniskirt Mob (1967) and The Young Runaways (1968), these were parts that could have been played equally well by a dozen other young actresses. She acted sporadically into the 1970s and 1980s, her longest assignment being the role of Jeffrey Tambor's upwardly mobile wife on the TV sitcom The Ropers. In 1995, Patty McCormick starred in the direct-to-video Mommy, playing a grown-up edition of the murderous Rhoda from The Bad Seed.

Trivia: American character actor Louis Quinn appeared on stage, screen, radio, and television, where he is best remembered for playing Roscoe on the '60s series 77 Sunset Strip. Quinn entered the entertainment industry as a writer for Orson Welles, Milton Berle, Don MacNeill, and other radio personalities. During the '40s, Quinn hosted a few popular radio variety shows. He got his start in television writing material for Milton Berle's television show The Texaco Hour. Quinn entered films as a character actor in the '50s and made occasional screen appearances through the mid-'70s.