Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Trivia: A graduate of Santa Monica Junior College, Jack Elam spent the immediate post-World War II years as an accountant, numbering several important Hollywood stars among his clients. Already blind in one eye from a childhood fight, Elam was in danger of losing the sight in his other eye as a result of his demanding profession. Several of his show business friends suggested that Elam give acting a try; Elam would be a natural as a villain. A natural he was, and throughout the 1950s Elam cemented his reputation as one of the meanest-looking and most reliable "heavies" in the movies. Few of his screen roles gave him the opportunity to display his natural wit and sense of comic timing, but inklings of these skills were evident in his first regular TV series assignments: The Dakotas and Temple Houston, both 1963. In 1967, Elam was given his first all-out comedy role in Support Your Local Sheriff, after which he found his villainous assignments dwindling and his comic jobs increasing. Elam starred as the patriarch of an itinerant Southwestern family in the 1974 TV series The Texas Wheelers (his sons were played by Gary Busey and Mark Hamill), and in 1979 he played a benign Frankenstein-monster type in the weekly horror spoof Struck By Lightning. Later TV series in the Elam manifest included Detective in the House (1985) and Easy Street (1987). Of course Elam would also crack up audiences in the 1980s with his roles in Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II. Though well established as a comic actor, Elam would never completely abandon the western genre that had sustained him in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1993, a proud Elam was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Two short years later the longitme star would essay his final screen role in the made for television western Bonanza: Under Attack.

Trivia: Italian actor Cesare Danova came to prominence in such post-war European films as La Figlia del Capitano (1947) and Don Giovanni (1955), playing the title role in the latter film. In the American-made Man Who Understood Women (1959), Danova managed to be both funny and menacing as a murderous cuckolded husband. Few of his American films took full advantage of Danova's talents, tending to cast him as a "typical" hot-blooded Mediterranean, but there have been a few rewarding assignments along the way. As Appolodorus in the budget-busting Cleopatra (1963), Danova was one of the few actors whose part wasn't cut to nothing in order to favor the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton combo. Danova was one of the stars of the TV pilot-cum-theatrical movie Chamber of Horrors (1966), and he enjoyed a season's worth of regular TV work as Actor (that was the character's name, not the designation) on the weekly Dirty Dozen rip-off Garrison's Gorillas (1967). In the '70s and '80s, Danova seemed to take turns with Anthony Quinn in portraying Onassis-like Greek tycoons and Mafia bosses; in the latter capacity Danova was hilarious as Carmine DePasto in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). In the early years of the '80s, Danova could be seen as a regular on the ABC television daytime drama Ryan's Hope. Cesare Danova died suddenly during a 1992 meeting of the Motion Picture Academy's Foreign Film Committee.

Trivia: Character actor Bill Quinn specialized in playing wise or fatherly roles on stage, screen, and television. A native of New York City, Quinn was five when he became a professional vaudevillian. After many years on stage, he joined Orson Welles' Mercury Playhouse radio troupe. Quinn made his film debut with a small supporting role in the circus drama The Flying Fontaines (1959). His film career continued steadily through the mid-'70s, then slowed down to about a film every two or three years. He made his final big-screen appearance playing the father of Dr. McCoy in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. He appeared numerous times on television. Between 1958 and 1963, he played bartender Sweeney on The Rifleman and in All in the Family and its spin-off, Archie Bunker's Place, Quinn played barfly Mr. Van Ranesleer. His other TV credits include guest star appearances in series, miniseries, and made-for-TV movies.

Trivia: A New Mexican of Native American extraction, actor Glenn Strange held down several rough-and-tumble jobs, from deputy sheriff to rodeo rider, before settling on a singing career. He made his radio bow on Los Angeles station KNX (the CBS-owned affiliate) as a member of the Arizona Wranglers singing group. Thanks to his husky physique and plug-ugly features, Strange had no trouble finding work as a stuntman/villain in western films and serials. He also displayed a flair for comedy as the sidekick to singing cowboy Dick Foran in a series of B-sagebrushers of the late '30s. During the war years, Strange became something of a bargain-basement Lon Chaney Jr., playing homicidal halfwits in a handful of horror pictures made at PRC and other low-budget studios. These appearances led to his being cast as the Frankenstein monster in the 1944 Universal programmer House of Frankenstein; he was coached in this role by the "creature" from the original 1931 Frankenstein, Boris Karloff. Given very little to do in House of Frankenstein and the 1945 sequel House of Dracula other than stalk around with arms outstretched at fadeout time, Strange brought none of the depth and pathos to the role that distinguished Karloff's appearances. Strange was shown to better advantage in his last appearance as The Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) where he convincingly menaced the eternally frightened Lou Costello and even indulged in a couple of time-honored "scare" routines, while still remaining in character (Some scenes had to be reshot because Strange couldn't stop laughing at Costello's antics; towards the end of shooting, Strange broke his ankle and had to be replaced in a few shots by Lon Chaney Jr., who was costarring in the film as the Wolf Man). Though typecast as heavies in both movies and television -- he played the hissable Butch Cavendish in the Lone Ranger TV pilot -- Strange was well known throughout Hollywood as a genuine nice guy and solid family man. Glenn Strange's last engagement of note was his 11-year run (1962-73) as Sam, the Long Branch bartender on TV's Gunsmoke.

Trivia: Bald, hook-nosed character actor John Harmon launched his film career in 1939. Harmon's screen assignments ranged from shifty-eyed gangsters, rural law enforcement officials and hen-pecked husbands. He was seen in films as diverse as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and the "B" horror flick Monster of Piedra Blancas. Star Trek fans will remember John Harmon for his supporting role in the 1967 episode "City on the Edge of Forever."

Trivia: An economics major at the Brown University and the University of Chicago, cadaverous character actor John Dierkes spent the 1930s as an ad-copy writer and as head of an independent polling service. After serving with the Red Cross in World War II, Dierkes worked for the U.S. Treasury; it was in this capacity that he was sent to Hollywood in 1946 to act as technical advisor for MGM's To the Ends of the Earth. A talent scout for Orson Welles spotted Dierkes and convinced him to audition for the part of Ross in Welles' upcoming film version of MacBeth. Dierkes won the part, and remained in Hollywood for the next two decades. He went on to critical acclaim as the Tall Soldier in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), topping this assignment with his best screen role, that of "Morgan" in George Stevens' Shane (1953). Suffering from emphysema, John Dierkes gradually cut down on his film and TV appearances in the 1970s; he was last seen in a fleeting role in the Stanley Kramer production Oklahoma Crude (1973).