Trivia: The son of a Jewish movie-publicist father and an Irish Catholic musical-comedy actress, Michael Landon grew up in a predominantly Protestant New Jersey neighborhood. The social pressures brought to bear on young Michael, both at home and in the schoolyard, led to an acute bedwetting problem, which he would later dramatize (very discreetly) in the 1976 TV movie The Loneliest Runner. Determined to better his lot in life, Landon excelled in high school athletics; his prowess at javelin throwing won him a scholarship at the University of Southern California, but a torn ligament during his freshman year ended his college career. Taking a series of manual labor jobs, Landon had no real direction in life until he agreed to help a friend audition for the Warners Bros. acting school. The friend didn't get the job, but Landon did, launching a career that would eventually span nearly four decades. Michael's first film lead was in the now-legendary I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), widely derided at the time but later reassessed as one of the better examples of the late-'50s "drive-in horror" genre. The actor received his first good reviews for his performance as an albino in God's Little Acre. This led to his attaining the title role in 1959's The Legend of Tom Dooley, which in turn was instrumental in his being cast as Little Joe Cartwright on the popular TV western Bonanza. During his fourteen-year Bonanza stint, Landon was given the opportunity to write and direct a few episodes. He carried over these newfound skills into his next TV project, Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1982 (just before Little House, Landon made his TV-movie directorial bow with It's Good to Be Alive, the biopic of baseball great Roy Campanella). Landon also oversaw two spinoff series, Little House: The New Beginning (1982-83) and Father Murphy (1984). Landon kept up his career momentum with a third long-running TV series, Highway to Heaven (1984-89) wherein the actor/producer/director/writer played guardian angel Jonathan Smith. One of the most popular TV personalities of the '70s and '80s, Landon was not universally beloved by his Hollywood contemporaries, what with his dictatorial on-set behavior and his tendency to shed his wives whenever they matured past childbearing age. Still, for every detractor, there was a friend, family member or coworker who felt that Landon was the salt of the earth. In early 1991, Landon began work on his fourth TV series, Us, when he began experiencing stomach pains. In April of that same year, the actor was informed that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. The courage and dignity with which Michael Landon lived his final months on earth resulted in a public outpouring of love, affection and support, the like of which was seldom witnessed in the cynical, self-involved '90s. Michael Landon died in his Malibu home on July 1, 1991, with his third wife Cindy at his side.

Trivia: The son of a movie stunt man, Victor French made his screen entree in westerns, where his unkempt beard and scowling countenance made him a perfect heavy. He carried over his robbin' and rustlin' activities into television, making multiple appearances on such series as Gunsmoke and Bonanza. It was former Bonanza star Michael Landon, a great friend of French's, who "humanized" the veteran screen villain with the role of farmer Isiah Edwards in the weekly TV drama Little House on the Prairie. French temporarily left Little House in 1977 to star in his own sitcom, Carter Country, in which he played an affable Southern sheriff who tried his best to accommodate the ever-changing racial relationships of the 1970s. In 1984, Landon cast French as ex-cop Michael Gordon, whose bitterness at the world was softened by the presence of a guardian angel (Landon), in the popular TV series Highway to Heaven. French directed every third episode of this series, extending his directorial activities to the Los Angeles theatre scene, where he won a Critics Circle award for his staging of 12 Angry Men. In contrast to his earlier bad-guy roles, French went out of his way in the 1980s to avoid parts that required him to exhibit cruelty or inhumanity. Victor French died in 1989, shortly after completing work on the final season of Highway to Heaven.

Trivia: Blonde, blue-eyed supporting, character, and occasional leading actor Richard Mulligan has worked on stage, screen, and television. He made his feature-film debut in Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), but only occasionally appeared in movies through the early '70s. One of his notable roles was that of the arrogant General Custer opposite Dustin Hoffman in Arthur Penn's Western epic Little Big Man (1970). Mulligan made his first TV appearance in the telepic Pueblo (1973). His film career has encompassed a wide variety of genres, but in the late '70s, he turned primarily to comedy. On television, Mulligan is best known for playing Burt Campbell on the long-running comedy Soap (1977-1981) and for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Dr. Harry Weston on the sitcom Empty Nest (1988-1995). His older brother, Robert Mulligan, is a director.

Trivia: It took the television series Seinfeld and his portrayal of Morty Seinfeld to turn Barney Martin into a pop-culture star, complete with talk-show engagements and personal appearances -- but Martin was a working actor for 40 years before that, in films and television, on Broadway, and in regional theater. Born in New York City in the early '20s, he was the son of the police official in charge of the jail facility known as the Tombs. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, with 42 missions to his credit as a navigator; he joined the police force after the war and won commendations for bravery. Martin had always shown a flair for comedy, and while a member of the police force, he was often asked to add jokes to the speeches of various deputy commissioners. In the early '50s, he began moving into professional entertainment circles, selling his jokes and also writing for Name That Tune, and then was hired as a writer on The Steve Allen Show -- it was while working on that end of the business, and with some encouragement from a new friend, Mel Brooks, that Martin became convinced that he could be as funny as most of the professional comics he was seeing in front of the cameras and on-stage. By the end of the 1950s, he was working as a stand-in for Jackie Gleason. With his hefty frame tipping the scales at well over 200 pounds even in those days, and his slightly befuddled look, he was nearly a dead-ringer for Gleason in one profile, and he ended up working on camera in various sketches. Martin's other early television performances included regular work as a "ringer" on Candid Camera, and work on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Perry Como Show, as well as straight acting performances on such dramatic shows as The Naked City, where his New York accent and mannerisms made Martin a natural. He also turned in an excruciatingly funny performance as Fats Borderman, a hapless professional hood, in the Car 54, Where Are You? episode "Toody Undercover." Martin made his first big-screen appearance in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Wrong Man, as a member of the jury -- he also showed up in uncredited appearances in such movies as Butterfield 8, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Love With the Proper Stranger. In 1968, he got his first two credited screen appearances, in Mel Brooks' The Producers, portraying Goring in "Springtime for Hitler," and playing Hank in Ralph Nelson's Charly. Most of Martin's acting, however, was on-stage, including Broadway productions of South Pacific, All American, Street Scene, How Now, Dow Jones, and Chicago; in the latter's '70s production, he originated the role of Amos Hart. He also appeared in regional theater productions of Last of the Red Hot Lovers and The Fantasticks. Martin also made occasional appearances on television, most notably on The Odd Couple, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, in such episodes as "The Jury Story" and "The Subway Story." His friendship with Randall also carried over to his being cast as a regular when the latter got his own series, The Tony Randall Show, in 1976. Martin might have gone on for the rest of his career as a character actor well known to those in his profession, doing occasional big-screen performances in features such as Stanley Donen's Movie, Movie and Steve Gordon's Arthur, but for the Seinfeld television series. After inheriting the role of Morty Seinfeld from another actor, Martin became a regular on the series, usually working in tandem with Liz Sheridan playing Morty's wife, also playing opposite Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Michael Richards, and Jerry Stiller, and always holding his own in eliciting laughs. Perhaps Martin's best single episode was the one in which his character is defeated in the election as chairman of the condominium board -- the script was filled with little digs aimed at Oliver Stone's movie Nixon, and Martin was able to bring just enough Nixon-like gravitas to his portrayal to make the whole show work.

Trivia: Supporting actress, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Lead actor Nicholas Cascone appeared on screen beginning in the late '80s.

Trivia: Eddie Quillan made his performing debut at age seven in his family's vaudeville act. By the time he was in his teens, Quillan was a consummate performer, adept at singing, dancing, and joke-spinning. He made his first film, Up and At 'Em, in 1922, but it wasn't until 1925, when he appeared in Los Angeles with his siblings in an act called "The Rising Generation," that he began his starring movie career with Mack Sennett. At first, Sennett tried to turn Quillan into a new Harry Langdon, but eventually the slight, pop-eyed, ever-grinning Quillan established himself in breezy "collegiate" roles. Leaving Sennett over a dispute concerning risqué material, Quillan made his first major feature-film appearance when he co-starred in Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929). This led to a contract at Pathé studios, where Quillan starred in such ebullient vehicles as The Sophomore (1929), Noisy Neighbors (1929), Big Money (1930), and The Tip-Off (1931). He remained a favorite in large and small roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s; he faltered only when he was miscast as master sleuth Ellery Queen in The Spanish Cape Mystery (1936). Among Quillan's more memorable credits as a supporting actor were Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Abbott and Costello's It Ain't Hay (1943). From 1948 through 1956, Quillan co-starred with Wally Vernon in a series of 16 two-reel comedies, which showed to excellent advantage the physical dexterity of both men. Quillan remained active into the 1980s on TV; from 1968 through 1971, he was a regular on the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia. In his retirement years, Eddie Quillan became a pet interview subject for film historians thanks to his ingratiating personality and uncanny total recall.