Trivia: Former model Joan Hackett diligently studied acting under Lee Strasberg; proof that her diligence paid off was her critically acclaimed performance in the 1961 Broadway production Call Me By My Rightful Name. A versatile actress who successfully combined brains with beauty (not always the case with ingenues of the 1960s), Hackett made her film debut in 1966's The Group. Perhaps her best film performance was as the lonely frontier wife who is briefly attracted to drifter Charlton Heston in Will Penny (1968). Hackett's TV work included recurring roles on the dramatic weekly The Defenders in the early 1960s and the situation comedy Another Day in 1978. Ravaged by cancer in her last months, Hackett could take some small comfort in the knowledge that her penultimate movie appearance in Only When I Laugh (1981) had won her a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. Joan Hackett was at one time the wife of actor Richard Mulligan.

Trivia: Comedienne/singer Muriel Landers had a 20 year career in television and movies, the most memorable aspects of which were built around the mixture of her plump physique, sexy voice, and seemingly boundless energy. Born in Chicago in 1921, she made her small-screen performing debut in 1950, surprisingly -- given her subsequent established flair for comedy -- in a pair of dramas on the anthology series The Clock and Lux Video Theater. In the years immediately following, she would exploit her gifts for humor working on the big screen with the Three Stooges (#"Sweet And Hot") and on series such as Make Room For Daddy and The Jack Benny Program, as well as one Bob Hope special. Her girth was, of course, a frequent source of humor surrounding her performances -- she could have been the Totie Fields or the Wendie Jo Sperber of her era -- but Landers carried it well, and could look extremely attractive, and also had a sultry singing voice that she used on occasion to great effect. Jules White, the producer/director in charge of Columbia Pictures' B-movie unit, even proposed a new line of short subjects built around Landers, to be called "Girlie Whirls," but ended the project after a single such effort and, instead, put her to work alongside the Three Stooges. Landers continued performing until the start of the 1970s, when ill-health, caused by hyper-tension, forced her retirement. She passed away in 1977 age 55.

Trivia: The son of a London shopkeeper, Barry Morse enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at age 15. Upon graduation, Morse spent four years in provincial repertory, playing (by his own count) some 300 roles. In 1942 he made his first film appearance in Will Hays's The Goose Steps Out. Firmly established in London theatrical circles by 1951, he starred in an early BBC telecast of Hamlet--then left for Canada, where he would spend the next decade. Dubbed "the Laurence Olivier of Canada" by more than one admirer, Morse appeared with regularity on the CBC, occasionally producing and directing as well. He began dividing his time between Toronto and Hollywood in 1959, showing up in such American TV anthologies as Playhouse 90 and The Twilight Zone. In 1963, he was hired by producer Quinn Martin to play the diligent Lieutenant Girard in the popular weekly series The Fugitive. Morse's post-Fugitive television work includes two weekly series, The Adventurer (1974) and Space: 1999 (1975-77), and any number of specials and miniseries. Barry Morse's best performances of the past two decades include his interpretation of Menachem Begin in the American miniseries Sadat (1980) and his hilarious turn as a numbskull American president (who happens to be a former movie actor!) in the London Weekend Television black comedy Whoops Apocalypse (1982). Morse died in February 2008 at age 89.

Trivia: American stage and film actor Phillip Coolidge made his first film, Boomerang, in 1948. Since much of the film was shot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the New York-based actor didn't have to relocate to Hollywood for his brief assignment. Later film roles for Coolidge were on a par with his self-protective small-town mayor in Inherit the Wind (1960)--neither heroic nor villainous, but all too human. Seldom a leading character, Coolidge was always a reassuring presence in the supporting cast, be it as William Windom's brother on the 1960s TV series The Farmer's Daughter or in the teeny-tiny role of closet alcoholic Simon Stimson in the original 1938 Broadway production of Our Town. Phillip Coolidge's best and most recognizable film role was Ollie Higgins, the scheming silent-movie-theatre manager who literally scares his wife to death (and gets a suitable comeuppance) in William Castle's gimmicky thriller The Tingler (1959).