Trivia: The younger brother of former child star Darryl Hickman, Dwayne Hickman was himself a professional actor from the age of 10. Dwayne's early film roles were essentially bits; one of his first worthwhile assignments was a 1950 episode of TV's The Lone Ranger, in which he played a young orphan who grew up to be a character played by his older brother. After guesting on such series as The Stu Erwin Show, Hickman was cast as Bob Cummings' girl-happy nephew Chuck on the popular sitcom Love That Bob (1954-58). Claiming to have no natural talent, Hickman has insisted that he learned everything he knows about comic acting from Cummings, whom he admired to the point of idolatry. In 1958, he landed his first major screen role, playing a small-town Brando wannabe in Rally Round the Flag Boys. Max Shulman, author of the novel upon which the film was based, was impressed by Hickman, and recommended that the actor be starred in another Shulman adaptation, the weekly TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. During the Dobie run, Hickman briefly enjoyed Top-40 radio airplay with his recording of the folk-song parody "I'm a Lover, Not a Fighter." When Dobie Gillis folded in 1963, Hickman returned to feature films, offering comedy support to Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (1965) and Frankie Avalon in The Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1966). Temporarily retiring from acting in 1970, Hickman worked as a publicist, and later as entertainment director of Las Vegas' Landmark Hotel. In 1977, he followed brother Darryl's lead by joining the production staff at CBS television. Hickman served as CBS' executive in charge of daytime programming, and as supervisor of the network's comedy series. Every so often, he'd accept an acting role, and on two occasions revived his Dobie Gillis characterization for a brace of "retro" TV movies. In 1994, Dwayne Hickman and his wife Joan collaborated on his autobiography, Forever Dobie.

Trivia: Before becoming a comic actor, Bob Denver had previously worked as an athletic coach and history and math teacher at Corpus Christi Children's School of Pacific Palisades, CA. The puckish Denver first gained popularity when, at age 24, he played half-baked hipster Maynard G. Krebs on TV's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Before the first season was over, after completing only four episodes, "Maynard" would leave Dobie Gillis when he was drafted into the Army. This contingency was written into the Gillis series by having Maynard answer Uncle Sam's call to arms, and then by having Maynard return to the show after Denver was classified 4-F due to a neck injury. When Dobie Gillis was canceled in 1963, Denver let it be known that he was available for non-beatnik parts, only to be immediately cast as a young bongo-playing bohemian in the theatrical feature Take Her, She's Mine. The following year, Denver was finally able to shake the Maynard image when Jerry Van Dyke turned down the opportunity to play the lead in the simplistic sitcom Gilligan's Island. Denver stepped into the role of eternally bumbling castaway Gilligan, making it firmly and uniquely his own for the next three years.Denver's first post-Gilligan's Island project was the unsuccessful Phyllis Diller film vehicle Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady? (1968). In 1968, he was back to the weekly sitcom fold as cabdriver Rufus Butterworth, best pal and business partner of restaurateur Bert Gamus (Herb Edelman), on The Good Guys. This show ended after two seasons, whereupon Denver scored a personal and professional triumph as Woody Allen's replacement in the long-running Broadway comedy Play It Again, Sam. With Gilligan's Island attaining cult status in the early '70s, it was only natural that Denver cash in on the phenomenon, first as star of the Gilligan-like syndicated sitcom Dusty's Trail (1974), then as cohort to Chuck McCann on another "castaway comedy," the 1975 Saturday-morning kiddie show Far out Space Nuts. He also provided the voice to his animated likeness on a brace of cartoon series, The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974-1976) and Gilligan's Planet (1980), and reprised Gilligan in the flesh in a trio of made-for-TV features based on the original series. He also revived Maynard G. Krebs, older but no wiser, in a pair of abortive Dobie Gillis revival pilots.

Trivia: Heavy-built major star of the silent era, Bushman was once known as "the handsomest man in the world." He began acting with stock companies while still a boy, remaining a stage actor until he entered film in 1911, beginning with the Essanay company in Chicago. At one time a sculpter's model, Bushman had a beautiful physique which, combined with his handsome looks, soon propelled him to stardom in pre '20s silents; he rushed from one movie set to another, playing romantic leads in scores of films and becoming immensely popular with female viewers. His popularity took a nose-dive, however, after it was revealed that he had been secretly married to actress Beverly Bayne, his costar in many films including Romeo and Juliet (1916). He continued to perform in numerous films, leading up to his most famous role as the Roman Massala (Ramon Novarro's screen rival) in the silent Ben-Hur (1926). During the silent era he made more than a million dollars a year, but his fortune was entirely lost in the Crash of 1929. By the early '30s his film career was all but over, though he rebuilt himself financially by becoming a star of radio soap operas. After 1930 he appeared in films only sporadically, though some of his roles were still of interest. His last appearance was in a schlocky low-budget '60s production, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966, the year of his death).

Trivia: American actress Yvonne Craig trained for a ballet career from age 10 onward. While in high school, Yvonne was accepted by George Balanchine for the School of American Ballet, but she chose instead to tour with the Ballet Russe. Stopping over in Los Angeles, Ms. Craig was approached by a producer asking if she'd like to be in movies. She turned him down, but was more responsive to Hollywood after she later broke her contract with the Ballet Russe. Yvonne's first film was The Young Land (1957), but it remained on the shelf for two years, thus Eighteen and Anxious (1957) was the moviegoers' first introduction to the actress. The Young Land earned Yvonne a contract with Columbia pictures, where because of her exotic looks and flowing black hair she was cast in teen-aged "femme fatale" roles, such as the seductress in The Gene Krupa Story (1960) (though quite thin, she was actually larger than her frail Krupa co-star Sal Mineo, which caused a minor crisis when the script called for Mineo to hold Yvonne in his arms). Amidst movie assignments of off-and-on quality, Yvonne tested for West Side Story, but lost out to Natalie Wood. She did, however, hold the distinction of appearing with Elvis Presley twice in It Happened at the World's Fair (1962) and Kissin' Cousins (1964). In 1967, Yvonne was called upon to replace an incapacitated Mary Ann Mobley as Batgirl (aka Barbara Gordon) on the once-popular TV series Batman. Ms. Craig did her best in a sketchily written part, and was proud of the fact that she handled her motorcycle-riding scenes without a double, but Batman was on its last legs, and was cancelled in early 1968. When acting roles became repetitive--and few and far between--Yvonne drifted out of show business, making her last film in 1971. She co-produced industrial shows for a time, then went into the real estate business, where she did quite well for herself. Though she did appear (at the producer's request) in a low-budget video film in 1991, Yvonne Craig elected not to play the Hollywood Game anymore, and was content to limit her public appearance to film-fan conventions and Batman retrospectives. In 2009, she returned to show business, voicing a character in the animated Olivia series. Craig died in 2015, at age 78.

Trivia: Raw-boned blonde leading man Doug McClure came to films in 1957, but it was television that made him a star. He played secondary roles on such MCA series as The Overland Trail (1960) and Checkmate (1961-62) before striking paydirt as Trampas on the long-running (1962-71) western series The Virginian. During his first flush of stardom, McClure played leads in two Universal remakes, Beau Geste (1966) and The King's Pirate (the 1967 remake of Errol Flynn's Against All Flags). He also dashed through a trio of British-filmed Edgar Rice Burroughs derivations, The Land That Time Forgot (1974), At the Earth's Core (1976) and The People That Time Forgot (1977). He perpetuated his athletic, devil-may-care image into his brief 1975 TVer, Search (1975). In the late 1980s, Doug McClure reemerged as an agreeable comic actor, playing an Eastwoodish movie-star-cum-small-town-mayor in the syndicated sitcom Out of This World (1987-88).

Trivia: The son of the Los Angeles Times' drama editor, William Schallert was, along with Sydney Chaplin, one of the co-founders of Hollywood's highly regarded Circle Theatre troupe. Sent to Great Britain on a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theatre, Schallert guest-lectured at Oxford on several occasion before heading home. A character actor of almost intimidating versatility, Schallert began his long film and TV career in 1951. While he appeared in films of every variety, Schallert was most closely associated with the many doctors (mad or otherwise), lab technicians and scientific experts that he played in such science fiction endeavors as The Man From Planet X (1951), Gog (1954), Them! (1954) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Monolith Monsters (1959). Director Joe Dante paid homage to Schallert's prolific horror-flick work by casting the actor in his Matinee, where he played yet another dabbler in Things Man Is Not Meant to Know in the film-within-a-film "Mant." Schallert's hundreds television credits could fill a book in themselves; the Nickelodeon cable network once tried to put together a montage of the actor's guest star appearances, touching only the tip of the iceberg. He was a regular on such series as Dobie Gillis (as literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit, who always dismissed his class as though announcing the beginning of the Indy 500), Get Smart (as a senile 97-year-old Navy admiral), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (as Nancy's attorney father) The New Gidget (as Gidget's professor father) The Nancy Walker Show, Little Women and Santa Barbara. His most famous TV role was as Patty Lane's ever-patient newspaper-editor dad on The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963 through 1966; over twenty years later, Mr. Schallert and Ms. Duke were touchingly reunited--again as father and daughter--on an episode of The Torkelsons (1991-92). William Schallert once served as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a position later held...by Patty Duke. Shallert continued acting until the early 2010s; he died in 2016, at age 93.

Trivia: American actor Steve Franken was the son of a Hollywood press agent, thus he grew up discoursing in the highly stylized trade-magazine lingo that every show-business functionary was required to learn in the '40s and '50s. Sustaining himself as a stage actor in 1960, Franken was appearing in a Los Angeles production of Say Darling when he was spotted by Rod Amateau, producer-director of the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis. Amateau was looking for someone to play the insufferable rich-boy nemesis of Dobie, a role recently vacated by Warren Beatty. Thus Franken's first assignment on a Hollywood soundstage was in the role of Chatsworth Osborne Jr., snotty young millionaire overachiever (the character had been called "Milton Armitage" when Beatty played it). The character's trademark was a pained look of condescension, which Franken attributed to an ulcer that he'd suffered since the age of 14, when his mother died. Not really a regular on Dobie Gillis, Franken found himself at the unemployment office between his "Chatsworth" stints, and understandably grew to resent the character he played so well. When he did receive an outside job, it was generally as a Chatsworth type, so when Dobie Gillis ended its run in 1963, Franken sought out as many villainous roles as possible--after another "rich buddy" stint on the short-lived series Tom, Dick and Mary. Some of the actor's best work can be caught in reruns of such '60s TV series as Perry Mason and The Wild Wild West. Still, Franken didn't work as often as he should, and it was his contention that Dobie Gillis had all but ruined his career. Steve Franken persevered into the '70s and '80s, notably as an actor/director on the popular religious TV anthology Insight, with frequent appearances on the Jerry Lewis Telethons and in occasional character roles in such films as Westworld (1973).