Trivia: An actor indelibly associated with classic Americana given his iconic portrayals of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, tall, tousle-haired Fess Parker began life in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in nearby San Angelo, where his parents farmed peanuts and watermelons, and raised cattle. Following service in the military during WWII (where he participated in "clean-up" operations in the Philippines), Parker returned to the United States, and attended both the University of Texas and the University of California. He soon discovered a flair for acting and hit the stage in the touring company of Mister Roberts, then entered films in 1952, enjoying his first sizeable role -- a Southern-accented ballplayer -- in The Kid From Left Field (1953). It was his one-scene bit as a terrified witness to an "alien close encounter" in the 1954 horror classic Them! (1954), however, that brought Parker to the attention of Walt Disney, and somewhat ironically. Disney had considered casting a major Hollywood star as Crockett (such as Glenn Ford or Sterling Hayden), but gave up on this idea and, it is said, briefly considered future Gunsmoke headliner James Arness. Walt went to see the Arness-starrer Them! for this reason, and passed on Arness for Crockett but felt instantly convinced (and supposedly shouted out "There's our Crockett!") when Parker appeared on the screen. The actor began by portraying Crockett on ABC's Disneyland television series, and the rest is history: during the period of 1954-6, Davy Crockett mania swept through the country, first with the smash single "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," then with a blizzard of Crockett-themed merchandise aimed squarely at small children - everything from lunchboxes, to action figures, to the quintessential Davy Crockett coonskin cap.Disney and Parker parlayed the Crockett success into features in 1955 and 1956, but two years after the Crockett popularity began, it fizzled. Parker remained on the Disney lot until 1958, starring in such films as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1957), Old Yeller (1957), and Light in the Forest (1958). His relationship with Disney more or less ended, however, when he refused to appear in the studio's Native American drama Tonka (1958) (a revisionist version of Custer's Last Stand) opposite Sal Mineo - and was promptly suspended for doing so.His film stardom leveling off after 1959, Parker started a family by marrying Marcella Rinehart in 1960, with whom he had numerous children and grandchildren. He began a television comeback in 1962 with an indifferent sitcom version of the old Capra drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962). He was more successful, though, with his five-year tenure in the title role of the weekly NBC adventure-fest Daniel Boone, which lasted six seasons (1964-70), running consistently on Thursday nights from 7:30-8:30pm; at its peak, the program's popularity even topped that of Crockett. Parker signed for his last dramatic role in the 1972 Climb An Angry Mountain.In the years that followed, Parker bowed out of the limelight, and entered an entirely unrelated field: that of real estate. He became an entrepreneur in the mid-1970s, and built his holdings into a small yet phenomenally lucrative empire that included a mobile home park, luxury hotels, and a sprawling vineyard with a gift shop that sold Crockett memorabilia. Parker died of natural causes at the age of 85 in March 2010, at his home in California's Santa Ynez Valley.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn, Jeff Chandler attended that borough's Erasmus High School, the spawning ground of many top stage and film personalities. He spent two years in summer stock before serving in World War II. After the war, he became a busy radio actor, co-starring as the clueless Professor Boynton on the popular Eve Arden sitcom Our Miss Brooks. His first film appearance was a one-line bit in Columbia's Johnny O'Clock (1947). He made a better impression as an Israeli freedom fighter in Universal's Sword in the Desert (1948)--so much so that the studio's executives ordered that Chandler's role be expanded during filming. In 1950, Chandler made the first of three screen appearances as sagacious Apache chief Cochise in Broken Arrow. Though he worried that he'd be typecast in Native American parts, Chandler became a top leading man of the 1950s, his sex appeal curiously heightened by his prematurely gray hair. Shortly after completing his role in Merrill's Marauders (1962), Jeff Chandler died at age 42, the victim of blood poisoning following spinal surgery.

Trivia: Trained as a dancer, French actress Nicole Maurey entered films as an actress during the Occupation years, beginning with 1943's Blondine. Maurey gained international prominence as the embattled heroine of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950). Her first English-language film was the 1953 Bing Crosby vehicle Little Boy Lost (1953). During her busiest movie years (1955-62), Maurey shuttled between Europe and England; her most famous film in the latter country was the 1962 sci-fier Day of the Triffids. Nicole Maurey's last film to date was 1981's Chanel Solitaire.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parentage, Henry Silva supported himself with delivery jobs as he trained for an acting career with the Group Theater and the Actors Studio. Though definitely an "ethnic type," Silva's actual heritage was nebulous enough to permit him to play a wide variety of nationalities. He has successfully portrayed Mexicans, Native Americans, Italians, Japanese, and even extraterrestrials. Among Henry Silva's best-known film roles were the treacherous North Korean "houseboy" to Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the vengeful eponymous gangster in Johnny Cool (1963), and the shrewd Oriental title character in The Return of Mr. Moto (1965).

Trivia: Herbert Rudley had barely left his teens when he won a scholarship to Eva Le Galleine's Repertory Theater in the early '30s. The experienced gleaned with this organization led to Rudley's being cast in his first Broadway play, Elmer Rice's We, the People. In films since 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Rudley's best movie role was as Ira Gershwin in the 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue. He matured into character parts in the 1950s, usually playing suave villains or bristly military types. Herbert Rudley was a regular on several TV series, most prominently as Eve Arden's husband on the 1967 sitcom The Mothers-in-Law.

Trivia: Of Latin extraction, actor Frank DeKova possessed the indeterminate but sharply chiselled facial features that allowed him to play a wide range of ethnic types, from East Indian to American Indian. His first film appearance was as a gravel-voiced gangster in 1951's The Mob. He was busiest in westerns, closing out his film career with 1975's Johnny Firecloud. Frank DeKova has endeared himself to two generations of TV fans with his performance as peace-loving Hekawi Indian chief Wild Eagle on the 1960s TV sitcom F Troop.

Trivia: General purpose actor Don Megowan began his acting career in 1951 in Robert Parrish's crime thriller The Mob, playing a beefy longshoreman. Usually playing low-mentality thugs, he made several fleeting appearances in Westerns and crime dramas. Larger roles came his way in Disney productions as Colonel Billy Travis in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955) and as Marion A. Ross in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and starting in the second half of 1950s he also became a familiar figure to fans of horror and science fiction -- although pretty much unrecognizable, Megowan played the title role of the land-bound Gill Man in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and that same year was the star -- this time as the hero, the sheriff trying to understand a series of seemingly random, grisly killings -- in Fred F. Sears' The Werewolf; and in 1962, he was the lead in Wesley Barry's The Creation Of The Humanoids, a script that gave Megowan the largest amount of dialogue of his whole career . On television, Megowan was seen as Captain Huckabee on the 1961 syndicated adventure series The Beachcomber, replacing Adam West, who had been cast in the role in the pilot episode. And he later played Lucille Ball's boyfriend, whose indisposition gets her Lucy Carmichael involved in stuntman work, on The Lucy Show. One of the actor's more enjoyable assignments during the '70s was as the gum-chewing desperado in Mel Brooks' Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Megowan died of throat cancer in 1981.

Trivia: Leo Gordon cut one of the toughest, meanest, and most memorable figures on the screen of any character actor of his generation -- and he came by some of that tough-guy image naturally, having done time in prison for armed robbery. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, and with muscles to match, Gordon was an implicitly imposing screen presence, and most often played villains, although when he did play someone on the side of the angels he was equally memorable. Early in his adult life, Gordon did, indeed, serve a term at San Quentin for armed robbery; but after his release he studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and was a working actor by the early 1950's. His first credited screen appearance (as Leo V. Gordon) was on television, in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of "The Blue And White Lamp", with Frank Albertson and Earl Rowe, in 1952. His early feature film appearances included roles in China Venture (1953) and Gun Fury (1953), the latter marking the start of his long association with westerns, which was solidified with his villainous portrayal in the John Wayne vehicle Hondo (1953). It was in Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), which was shot at San Quentin, that a lot of mainstream filmgoers discovered precisely how fearsome Gordon could be, in the role of "Crazy Mike Carnie." One of the most intimidating members of a cast that was overflowing with tough guys (and which used real cons as extras), Gordon's career was made after that. Movie work just exploded for the actor, and he was in dozens of pictures a year over the next few years, as well as working in a lot of better television shows, and he also earned a regular spot in the series Circus Boy, as Hank Miller. More typical, however, was his work in the second episode of the western series Bonanza, "Death on Sun Mountain", in which he played a murderous profiteer in Virginia City's boomtown days. Once in a while, directors triped to tap other sides of his screen persona, as in the western Black Patch (1957). And at the start of the next decade, Gordon got one of his rare (and best) non-villain parts in a movie when Roger Corman cast him in The Intruder (1962), in the role of Sam Griffin, an onlooker who takes it upon himself to break up a race riot in a small southern town torn by court-ordered school integration. But a year later, he was back in his usual villain mold -- and as good as ever at it -- in McLintock!; in one of the most famous scenes of his career, he played the angry homesteader whose attempt to lynch a Native American leads to a head-to-head battle with John Wayne, bringing about an extended fight featuring the whole cast in a huge mud-pit. Gordon was still very busy as an actor and sometime writer well into the 1980's and early 1990's. He played General Omar Bradley in the mini-series War And Remembrance, and made his final screen appearance as Wyatt Earp in the made-for-television vehicle The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies. He passed away in 2000 of natural causes.