Trivia: Tall (6'7"), sturdily built Clint Walker held down a number of macho jobs ranging from sheet metal worker to nightclub bouncer before settling on acting as a profession. Disregarding a slightly embarrassing appearance as a faux Tarzan in the 1954 Bowery Boys opus Jungle Gents (in which he was billed as Jett Norman!), Walker's official film debut was a tiny role in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). He signed with Warner Bros. in 1957, where he starred in the long-running Western TV series Cheyenne. During his Warners tenure, Walker spent as much time offscreen as on due to artistic differences and salary disputes. After Cheyenne left the air in 1963, Walker continued to appear in rugged action efforts like None but the Brave (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The White Buffalo (1976). Clint Walker's attempt to reclaim his earlier TV prominence resulted in the very short-lived 1975 series Kodiak.

Trivia: Radiantly beautiful blonde actress Virginia Mayo was a chorus dancer when she began her film career as a bit player in 1942. She rose to face as Danny Kaye's leading lady in a series of splashy Technicolor musicals produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Though never regarded as a great actress, she was disturbingly convincing as Dana Andrews' faithless wife in Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and as James Cagney's sluttish gun moll in White Heat (1949). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Mayo was one of the most popular female stars at Warner Bros., appearing in musicals, melodramas and westerns. Many of her characters were so outre that one wonders whether Mayo was having some sport with us: her turn as Jack Palance's paramour in The Silver Chalice (1955) and as Cleopatra in the guilty pleasure The Story of Mankind (1957) immediately come to mind. And it is Mayo who, in Warners' King Richard and the Crusaders (1955), utters the immortal high-camp line "Fight, fight, fight! That's all you ever do, Dick Plantagenet!" When her film career faltered in the 1960s, Mayo turned to stage work on the touring-company and dinner-theatre circuit; more recently, she has been a frequent interview subject on TV documentaries dealing with the old Hollywood studio system. Virginia Mayo is the widow of actor Michael O'Shea.

Trivia: The son of actor Robert Keith (1896-1966), Brian Keith made his first film appearance in 1924's Pied Piper Malone, when he was well-below the age of consent. During the war years, Keith served in the Marines, winning a Navy Air Medal; after cessation of hostilities, he began his acting career in earnest. At first billing himself as Robert Keith Jr., he made his 1946 Broadway debut in Heyday, then enjoyed a longer run as Mannion in Mister Roberts (1948), which featured his father as "Doc." His film career proper began in 1952; for the rest of the decade, Keith played good guys, irascible sidekicks and cold-blooded heavies with equal aplomb. Beginning with Ten Who Dared (1959), Keith became an unofficial "regular" in Disney Films, his performances alternately subtle (The Parent Trap) and bombastic. Of his 1970s film efforts, Keith was seen to best advantage as Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion (1975). In television since the medium was born, Keith has starred in several weekly series, including The Crusader (1955-56), The Little People (aka The Brian Keith Show, 1972-74) and Lew Archer (1975). His longest-running and perhaps best-known TV endeavors were Family Affair (1966-71), in which he played the uncharacteristically subdued "Uncle Bill" and the detective series Hardcastle & McCormick (1983-86). His most fascinating TV project was the 13-week The Westerner (1960), created by Sam Peckinpah, in which he played an illiterate cowpoke with an itchy trigger finger. Keith's personal favorite of all his roles is not to be found in his film or TV output; it is the title character in Hugh Leonard's stage play Da. Plagued by emphysema and lung cancer while apparently still reeling emotionally from the suicide of his daughter Daisy, 75-year-old Brian Keith was found dead of a gunshot wound by family members in his Malibu home. Police ruled the death a suicide. Just prior to his death, Keith had completed a supporting role in the TNT miniseries Rough Riders.

Trivia: American juvenile actor Richard Eyer wasn't a "child star" per se; instead he was a natural, convincing young character lead, much like Elisha Wood in the 1990s. From 1954 through 1958, Eyer was prominently cast in such major features as The Desperate Hours (1955, as Fredric March's dangerously impulsive son) and Friendly Persuasion (1956). Habitues of Saturday matinees of the 1950s are most familiar with Eyer's work in two enjoyable fantasy films. In The Invisible Boy (1957), Richard Eyer plays the title role, sharing screen space with Robby the Robot; and in The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad (1958), his last film, Eyer was the metallic-voiced Baronni the Genie.

Trivia: Actor Michael Dante was first seen in a secondary role in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). A bit too "threatening" for romantic leads, Dante was more effectively cast in antagonistic roles, notably Chief Crazy Horse in the 1967 TV series Custer and the 1990 theatrical feature Crazy Horse and Custer: The Untold Story. Even when ostensibly cast as a good guy in Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1965), he turned out to be a heel in the film's final scenes. Star Trek devotees will recall Michael Dante as Maab in the 1967 episode "Friday's Child."

Trivia: American actor Russ Conway was most at home in the raincoat of a detective or the uniform of a military officer. Making his movie bow in 1948, Conway worked in TV and films throughout the '50s and '60s. Some of his films include Larceny (1948), My Six Convicts (1952), Love Me Tender (1956) (as Ed Galt, in support of Elvis Presley) Fort Dobbs (1958) and Our Man Flint (1966). TV series featuring Conway in guest spots included The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters and Petticoat Junction. Russ Conway settled down in 1959 to play Lieutenant Pete Kyle on David Janssen's private eye TV weekly Richard Diamond.