Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: American actor James MacArthur was the adopted son of stage legend Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur. Despite his mother's insistence that James have a normal childhood, it was difficult not to be intoxicated by the theatre when growing up around the greatest acting and literary talent in the '40s. At age 8, young MacArthur appeared in a stock-company production of The Corn is Green. Fresh out of Harvard, MacArthur became a movie juvenile, specializing in tortured-teen roles in such films as The Young Stranger (1957) and Disney's Light in the Forest (1958). Outgrowing his somewhat charming awkwardness, MacArthur was less satisfying as a standard leading man, and by 1967 he was wasting away in pictures like The Love Ins. That same year, the pilot film for a new Jack Lord cop series, Hawaii Five-O, was screened for a test audience. The group liked the film but not the young man (Tim O'Kelly) who played Lord's assistant, deeming him too young for the part. Hawaii producer Leonard Freeman then called upon 30-year-old MacArthur, with whom Freeman had worked on the Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang 'Em High. From 1968 through 1979, MacArthur played Hawaii Five-0's detective Danny Williams, always handy whenever Jack Lord felt the need to snap "Book 'em, Danno." Though the series enriched MacArthur and made him a vital member of the Honolulu society and business world, the actor finally packed it in after 11 seasons, when it seemed as though he'd be Danno forever (the show continued for one more season). Too wealthy to care about a career at this point, James MacArthur still took an occasional role into the '80s; his most prominent post-Hawaii assignment was the 1980 TV movie Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story, in which he played a rare non-sympathetic character. MacArthur died in October 2010 of natural causes at age 72.

Trivia: Kam Fong was an actor who was best known to millions of television viewers for his portrayal of Sgt. Chin Ho Kelly on the first 10 seasons of the series Hawaii Five-O. He came from a place far away from acting, however, though very much a part of the series' later setting. Born Kam Tong Chun in Honolulu in 1918, he grew up in dire poverty, owing to a split in his family -- over his father's extramarital affair -- that led to his father's exile from the family business. His mother supported the family, in part, by making bootleg whiskey, and he spent a part of his childhood hiding her product from the police. He graduated from President William McKinley High School in 1938 and later found work as a boilermaker at the Pearl Harbor shipyard, where he witnessed the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base on December 7, 1941. He continued as a civilian defense worker through the war. In January 1944, he lost his first wife, Esther, and children Marilyn and Donald in a freak accident when two B-24 bombers collided over Honolulu and incinerated their home. He tried to drink himself to death and, failing that, came within seconds of shooting himself, until his mother interceded. In 1946, he joined the Honolulu Police Department, and later admitted that initially he hoped to be killed in the line of duty. He got his life back together over the next few years, and remarried in 1949, and had four children. He served on the police force for 16 years before retiring, and after that sold real estate, worked as a disc jockey, and started to dabble in local theater work. His name change, from Kam Tong Chun to Kam Fong Chun, initially came about when he was a young boy when a teacher misunderstood his real name.In 1966, when pre-production began on the pilot episode for Hawaii Five-O, the call went out for anyone in the island state with acting experience. At the time, Hawaii had no film facilities or movie industry, and barely any acting community, and Fong's community theater work was relevant, although he wasn't inclined to do anything about the opportunity. It was his real estate partner who signed him up for an audition without his knowledge and persuaded him to go. As soon as producer Leonard Freeman and the rest of the production crew saw him read, and then discovered he was a 16-year veteran of the Honolulu Police Department, the role of Chin Ho was his. The only request that the CBS network made was that he shorten his name, which was how he became Kam Fong. Over his 10 seasons on the series, Fong was one of the most popular members of the cast, with the public as well as his fellow actors. Audiences responded to the personal qualities that he brought to the role, particularly his serious yet gentle demeanor; and also to the verisimilitude his presence gave the series. Accounts say his technical expertise behind the scenes, and the tweaking of the scripts he helped provide, was almost as valuable as his acting. Fong was a mainstay of the cast across 10 years. By 1978, however, the now nearly 60-year-old Fong had decided to give up the grind of weekly series work. He also felt he and the writers had gone as far as they could with the Chin Ho Kelly character, who was killed off in the final episode of the season. He subsequently returned to acting in two episodes of Magnum P.I., another series shot in Hawaii, and made a run for governor of Hawaii at the end of the 1980s. In 1997, when Stephen J. Cannell tried to revive Hawaii Five-O, he got several ex-cast members back to reprise their roles, including Fong (the producer was apparently unaware that Fong's Chin Ho Kelly had been killed off in season 10, a fact that was only recalled after shooting was concluded, far too late to rewrite or re-edit his part, and the character was left in). Fong, a long-time smoker (who reportedly wanted to be buried with a cigar and three packs of cigarettes), died of lung cancer in 2002. His son Danny Chun is also an actor.

Trivia: Phillip Pine was a character actor whose chameleon-like presence graced the entertainment world for more than 50 years as an actor, in addition to work as a screenwriter and director. Pine was born in Hanford, CA, 1920, and made his stage debut in a play written in Portugeuse. He later worked on showboats along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and made the jump to small roles in movies in the mid-'40s, when he was in his twenties. His dark features frequently got him cast as gangsters and thugs in the early part of his career, and he moved in more prominent roles -- usually of a villainous nature -- in the 1950s.In 1954, Pine worked on-stage in See the Jaguar and The Immoralist and crossed paths with James Dean at the outset of the latter's career in New York. He played the title role in the stage version of A Stone for Danny Fisher, in a production that also featured Zero Mostel, Joe de Santis, and Susan Cabot. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the play in The New York Times, wrote that Pine turned in "a good performance. He makes the character shifty and shallow, but likable, also, like a heel who means well weakly." With very expressive eyes and a minimum of words, Pine could melt into a role and make the most of only a few seconds' screen time. His feature films included William Keighley's crime thriller The Street with No Name (1948), Robert Wise's The Set Up, Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart, and William Wellman's Battleground, all released in 1949. He was also a veteran of hundreds of television shows, from Superman ("The Case of the Talkative Dummy," "The Mystery of the Broken Statues") to The Twilight Zone to Star Trek ("The Savage Curtain"), all of them as villains of a crafty and devious nature. Pine's biggest feature film role was in Irving Lerner's 1958 thriller Murder By Contract, in which he portrayed one of a pair of hoods working with hired assassin Vince Edwards. Pine passed away in 2006 at the age of 86.

Trivia: American actor Jackie Coogan belonged to a family of vaudevillians. At age four Coogan was already a stage attraction performing with his father when he caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, who immediately hired him (and his father as well). After giving him a bit part in the short A Day's Pleasure (1919), he made Coogan his co-star in the masterpiece The Kid (1921). This launched Coogan's film career and he went on to become one of the highest paid film actors of the day. Movie audiences worldwide doted on him, but his career as a child star petered out when he was 13 and too old to be "cute." In 1935 when his mother and stepfather refused to let him have the $4 million that he had amassed during his child acting days, he filed suit against them. When the settlement finally came, he received a mere $126,000., but the legal fight brought attention to such abuses, and resulted in the "California Child Actor's Bill" also known as the "Coogan Act" which protected the earnings of child actors. He was married to Betty Grable for 3 years, and to three other showgirls in succession afterwards. During his adulthood, he occasionally appeared in films playing character roles and worked frequently in television, most notably as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series. He died on March 1, 1984.

Trivia: The great-grandson of a famous and influential 19th century Minnesota senator, actor William Windom was born in New York, briefly raised in Virginia, and attended prep school in Connecticut. During World War II, Windom was drafted into the army, which acknowledged his above-the-norm intelligence by bankrolling his adult education at several colleges. It was during his military career that Windom developed a taste for the theater, acting in an all-serviceman production of Richard III directed by Richard Whorf. Windom went on to appear in 18 Broadway plays before making his film debut as the prosecuting attorney in To Kill a Mockingbird. He gained TV fame as the co-star of the popular 1960s sitcom The Farmer's Daughter and as the James Thurber-ish lead of the weekly 1969 series My World and Welcome to It. Though often cast in conservative, mild-mannered roles, Windom's offscreen persona was that of a much-married, Hemingway-esque adventurer. William Windom was seen in the recurring role of crusty Dr. Seth Haslett on the Angela Lansbury TV series Murder She Wrote.