Trivia: The Crown Prince of TV sitcom dads, American actor Ozzie Nelson was famous as a bandleader long before television had established itself. Married to actress/singer Harriet Hilliard, Ozzie Nelson guided his orchestra through nightclub dates, radio programs, and minor films on the order of Sweethearts of the Campus (1941). He'd had speaking parts on Red Skelton's program and other radio series of the '40s, wherein he displayed a hitherto untapped gift for comic delivery. This led to the Nelsons' own weekly radio starrer in 1944, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which related the humorously fictionalized home life of a popular bandleader, his wife, and their two very young sons (Ozzie's own kids Ricky and David were impersonated by professional child actors in the first few years of the program, but eventually strong-armed Ozzie into letting them play themselves). Typical of the era were the radio show's wisecracking dialogue and musical interludes; but when Ozzie and Harriet entered television in 1952 (with the whole family along for the ride), the series opted for gentler, more realistic comedy. The year prior to the TV show's debut, Ozzie and entourage appeared in a Universal-International picture, Here Come the Nelsons, which is worth noting if only for the presence in the cast of Rock Hudson and the fact that it was directed by future Tonight Show mainstay Fred De Cordova. Here Come the Nelsons was only a modest success, but the Ozzie and Harriet TV series was an unadulterated hit, running 14 seasons (a record still unbroken for a sitcom). Though there were endless joking speculations as to what TV's Ozzie Nelson did for a living on a series, the "real" Ozzie produced, directed, edited the stories, chose the wardrobe, supervised the casting, and even designed the main "home" set to look like the real Nelson living room. Unlike his stammering, scatterbrained TV image, Ozzie was a stern and well-organized taskmaster, seeing to it that Ozzie and Harriet conformed to his image of what a good TV show should be, rather than the usual TV status quo. One of the byproducts of Ozzie and Harriet was the spectacular singing career of son Ricky Nelson, and the less spectacular but prolific directing career of Rick's brother David. By the time Ozzie and Harriet entered the '60s, Rick's then-wife Kris Nelson (daughter of sports great Tom Harmon and actress Elyse Knox, and brother of film star Mark Harmon) had joined the cast...as Rick's wife Kris. The series finally breathed its last in 1966, but workaholic Ozzie stayed busy with stage appearances and a supporting role in the very non-Ozzie and Harriet sexy film comedy The Impossible Years (1968). Cashing in on the nostalgia craze of the early '70s, Ozzie revived his series with a new title: Ozzie's Girls had Ozzie and Harriet renting out Ricky and David's old rooms to a pair of nubile female college students. Squeezed off the network schedules at the last minute, Ozzie's Girls was syndicated to local stations in 1973, but lasted only one season, as much the victim of changing tastes as inaccessible timeslots. Shortly before his death, Ozzie Nelson published his autobiography, in which he shocked many of his Bible-belt fans by revealing that he was a lifelong atheist.

Trivia: Those who know Harriet Nelson only for her two decades' worth of services as "America's Favorite TV Mom" on Ozzie and Harriet and Ozzie's Girls may be surprised to learn that she enjoyed a healthy career as a singer/actress long before network television was a commercial viability. Born Peggy Lou Snyder into a show business family, she chose the alliterative professional cognomen of Harriet Hilliard when she was hired as a vocalist by bandleader Ozzie Nelson. She was signed to an RKO Radio movie contract in 1936, and one year later married Nelson, though she remained Harriet Hilliard for the rest of her years in films. Most of her movie assignments were musicals and comedies, though she was capable of dramatic performances in such films as Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941) and The Falcon Strikes Back (1943). After several years of experience as a radio actress and singer on other people's programs (she briefly played the mother of "the mean widdle kid" on The Red Skelton Show), she and her husband Ozzie launched their own radio sitcom in 1944, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Featured on the series were the Nelson's two sons, David and Ricky Nelson (who were played by anonymous child actors until the boys insisted upon appearing as themselves). After a joint appearance in the 1952 Universal comedy Here Come the Nelsons, Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky Nelson brought their successful radio program to television, where they remained until 1966. In 1973, Ozzie and Harriet, minus their offspring (Ricky Nelson was by now a successful recording artist, while David Nelson was a TV director) tried to make the magic happen again in the syndicated sitcom Ozzie's Girls, which proved to be a failure. After the death of her husband in 1975, Harriet Hilliard occasionally made appearances in such TV productions as Once an Eagle and Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (both 1976), and on more than one occasion made nostalgic guest appearances in her established TV series persona. In addition to her own sons, Harriet Nelson was the mother-in-law of actress Kristine Harmon (sister of actor Mark Harmon) and the grandmother of actress Tracy Nelson.

Trivia: The oldest son of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and songstress Harriet Hilliard Nelson, David Nelson was famous before ever making his professional debut. David and his brother Ricky both "appeared" on their parent's radio sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, albeit portrayed by professional child actors. The boys bugged O and H until their parents relented and allowed David and Ricky to costar in person on the radio series. When Ozzie and Harriet shifted to TV in 1952, the boys went along for the ride. Ricky unexpectedly became a teen idol in the late '50s, while David more or less played "straight" for the rest of the family. Except for a good supporting role as a homicidal trapeze artist in 1959's The Big Circus, David's acting career was colorless enough to encourage him to seek some other form of creative expression (though he'd later occasionally accept guest-star cameos in such projects as 1991's Cry Baby). In the early '60s, he turned to directing, first for the Nelson Family series, and then for several other TV situation comedies. David Nelson worked steadily but unspectacularly as a producer/director in the years to follow: in the early '80s he directed three theatrical films, the most prominent of which was the 1981 George Kennedy starrer The Rare Breed. Nelson, the last surviving member of his family, died of complications from colon cancer at age 74 in January 2011.

Trivia: The famous offspring of actors Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard Nelson, Rick Nelson (born Eric Hilliard Nelson) began performing on his parents' radio show when he was only four. When Ozzie and Harriet moved to television in 1952, Rick went with them and while on the show, grew up to become a teen idol, loved not only as an actor but also as a rock & roll singer who racked up hits with such singles as "Hello Mary Lou," "Travelin' Man," and "Garden Party" (his biggest and last big hit). Nelson made his feature-film debut in A Story of Three Loves. He earned critical acclaim as a cocky young gunfighter in Rio Bravo (1959) starring opposite John Wayne and Dean Martin. He continued appearing in films, in concert, and on television through the early '80s. Nelson, the father of actress Tracy Nelson and twin pop stars Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, died in a plane crash along with his fiancée and his band on New Year's Eve 1985.

Trivia: Born into a family of travelling show folk, Lyle Talbot toured the hinterlands as a teen-aged magician. Talbot went on to work as a regional stock-company actor, pausing long enough in Memphis to form his own troupe, the Talbot Players. Like many other barnstorming performers of the 1920s, Talbot headed to Hollywood during the early-talkie era. Blessed with slick, lounge-lizard good looks, he started out as a utility lead at Warner Bros. Talbot worked steadily throughout the 1930s, playing heroes in B pictures and supporting parts in A pictures. During a loanout to Monogram Pictures in 1932, he was afforded an opportunity to co-star with Ginger Rogers in a brace of entertaining mysteries, The 13th Guest and The Shriek and the Night, which were still making the double-feature rounds into the 1940s. In 1935, Talbot and 23 other film players organized the Screen Actors Guild; to the end of his days, he could be counted upon to proudly display his SAG Card #4 at the drop of a hat. As his hairline receded and his girth widened, Talbot became one of Hollywood's busiest villains. He worked extensively in serials, playing characters on both sides of the law; in 1949 alone, he could be seen as above-suspicion Commissioner Gordon in Batman and Robin and as duplicitous Lex Luthor in Atom Man Vs. Superman. He remained in harness in the 1950s, appearing on Broadway and television. Two of his better-known assignments from this period were Joe Randolph on TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and as Bob Cummings' lascivious Air Force buddy Paul Fonda on Love That Bob. Seemingly willing to work for anyone who met his price, Talbot had no qualms about appearing in the dregs of cheapo horror films of the fifties. He was prominently cast in two of the estimable Edward D. Wood's "classics," Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan Nine From Outer Space (1955). When asked what it was like to work for the gloriously untalented Wood, Talbot would recall with amusement that the director never failed to pay him up front for each day's work with a handful of stained, crinkly ten-dollar bills. Though he made his last film in 1960, Lyle Talbot continued touring in theatrical productions well into the late 1970s, regaling local talk-show hosts with his bottomless reserve of anecdotes from his three decades in Hollywood.

Trivia: Character actor Don Defore was the son of an Iowa-based locomotive engineer. His first taste of acting came while appearing in church plays directed by his mother. Defore briefly thought of becoming an attorney, but gave up a scholarship to the University of Iowa to study at the Pasadena Playhouse. He began appearing in films in 1937 and in professional theatre in 1938, billed under his given name of Deforest. Defore's career turning point was the Broadway play The Male Animal, in which he played a thickheaded college football player; he repeated the role in the 1942 film version, and later played a larger part in the 1952 remake She's Working Her Way Through College. In most of his film assignments, Defore was cast as the good-natured urbanized "rube" who didn't get the girl. For several years in the 1950s, Defore played "Thorny" Thornberry, the Nelson family's well-meaning next door neighbor, on TV's Ozzie and Harriet. Don Defore's best-known TV role was George Baxter on the Shirley Booth sitcom Hazel (1961-65).

Trivia: Balding, long-necked character actor Frank Cady was a stage actor of long standing when he moved into films in 1947. He was usually cast as a quiet, unassuming small town professional man, most memorably as the long-suffering husband of the grief-stricken alcoholic Mrs. Daigle (Eileen Heckart) in The Bad Seed (1957). A busy television actor, he spent much of the 1950s on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet as Ozzie Nelson's neighbor Doc Willard. The "TV Generation" of the 1960s knows Cady best as philosophical storekeeper Sam Drucker on the bucolic sitcoms Petticoat Junction (1963-1970) and Green Acres (1965-1971). Whenever he wanted to briefly escape series television and recharge his theatrical batteries, Frank Cady appeared with the repertory company at the prestigious Mark Taper's Forum.

Trivia: A leading light of network radio in the 1940s and 1950s, actor Parley Baer appeared on virtually every major program emanating from Los Angeles. Baer is most closely associated with the radio version of Gunsmoke, in which, from 1955 to 1961, he played Dodge City deputy Chester Proudfoot. Those who worked on Gunsmoke have had nothing but the kindest words for Baer, who endeared himself to his colleagues via his dedication, professionalism, and weekly purchase of donuts for the rehearsal sessions. The jowly, prematurely balding Baer began free-lancing in films around 1949. He played a number of small parts at 20th Century-Fox (his largest, and least typical, was the Nazi sergeant in 1957's The Young Lions), and later showed up in such films as Warner Bros.' Gypsy (1963) and Universal's Counterpoint (1993). On television, Baer portrayed Darby on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Mayor Stoner on The Andy Griffith Show (1962-63 season) and Mr. Hamble on the 1966 Red Buttons sitcom The Double Life of Henry Phyfe. Active into the 1990s--he was seen as the Senate Majority Leader in 1993's Dave--Parley Baer is most familiar to the public as the voice of commercialdom's Keebler Elf.

Trivia: Tall, muscular Gordon Jones played heroes, villains, comic-relief second bananas, and just about everything in between, in a screen career lasting almost 30 years -- not bad for a fellow who, eight years into that career, admitted to a reporter that he was still learning about acting. Born in 1911, Jones came to movies in his early twenties, not out of any aspirations as an actor but on the basis of his good looks and athletic build. The brawny Iowa-born Jones was well known as a top student athlete and star football guard ("Bull" Jones) at U.C.L.A., and had also played a few seasons of professional football. Jones started doing movie work for the easy money, and got serious about acting when he found that he liked it; he soon began downplaying his football background so that casting agents would take him more seriously. Jones started out playing small roles in Wesley Ruggles' and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Monkey's Paw and Sidney Lanfield's Red Salute, and by 1937, he had moved on to a contract at RKO. His biggest screen role in terms of billing came in 1940, in the Universal serial The Green Hornet, where he portrayed publisher Britt Reid, the alter ego of the masked hero of the title; Jones also played the Hornet, but when he was in that guise, he was redubbed with the voice of the era's more familiar radio Green Hornet, Al Hodge. Jones had gained some stage experience, particularly in comedy, during the late '30s, and this stood him in good stead when he auditioned for a role in Max Gordon's Broadway adaptation My Sister Eileen while on a visit to New York; the "rambling wreck from Georgia Tech" (billed as the Wreck in the original program) was the role of a lifetime, giving Jones the chance to play exactly what he was, a lovable big lug. He was good enough in the part to repeat it in Alexander Hall's 1942 movie version, produced by Columbia Pictures. Jones wasn't able to follow up on his success in the film, however, due to the outbreak of the Second World War. The actor held a reserve commission in the army and he was called into the service very soon after finishing work on the movie. In contrast to some actors, however (such as Ronald Reagan, who felt war service had damaged his career and resented it deeply), Jones never complained and, indeed, was very active for the next 20 years of his life in encouraging college students to consider the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). One of his other key roles during 1942 was as Alabama Smith, John Carroll's slightly dim-witted but good-natured sidekick, in Flying Tigers (1943), a John Wayne-starring vehicle that was one of the most popular action films of the war. This picture began Jones' 20-year onscreen association with Wayne, who was also (perhaps not coincidentally) a former football player from U.C.L.A. After resuming his acting career in the late '40s, Jones appeared in prominent roles in the John Wayne features Big Jim McLain and Island in the Sky. By the end of the 1940s, Jones had aged into a somewhat beefier screen presence and into very physical character roles. He would no longer have been considered a leading man, even in serials, but he had developed a very good, slightly over-the-top comic villain persona, strongly reminiscent of Nat Pendleton, Joseph Sawyer, or William Bendix. All of these attributes meshed well with the work of the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello; Jones' association with the duo began in The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947) with the role of the film's heavy, Jake Frame. During the early '50s, when they began their television series The Abbott & Costello Show, Jones was cast as Mike the cop, the hulking, loud-voiced antagonist to the roly-poly Costello (and, thus, succeeded Pendleton, Sawyer, and Bendix, who had played tough, burly foils to the duo in the movies Buck Privates, Buck Privates Come Home, The Naughty Nineties, and Who Done It). The program was only in production for two seasons, but was rerun regularly into the 1980s and became available on DVD in the 21st century, and, thus, has ensured Jones a permanent place in American popular culture. He remained busy in films and on television throughout the 1950s, in pictures as different as the sci-fi chiller The Monster That Challenged the World and the Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh sex comedy The Perfect Furlough, and on series ranging from The Real McCoys to The Rifleman. Jones also appeared in two very successful Disney movies during the early '60s, The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, portraying harried school coaches in both pictures. He returned to the John Wayne stock company portraying Douglas, the bureaucrat antagonist to Wayne's G.W. McLintock in the Western comedy McLintock, in the spring of 1963. Jones succumbed to a heart attack on June 20, 1963, five months before the release of that movie. He is remembered, however, by millions of Abbott and Costello and John Wayne fans, and also for his work in serials, and he is given a special mention -- in connection with The Green Hornet -- on the home page of the town of his birth, Alden, IA.

Trivia: James Stacy had passed the quarter-century mark before deciding upon an acting career. In 1956, Stacy's James Dean-ish handsomeness landed him a part in a Pepsi-Cola commercial. Afterward, Stacy put together a portfolio and started making the casting rounds. Unfortunately, his difficult attitude managed to get him fired from his first film role in South Pacific (1958), and had his lines taken away from him in Sayonara (1957). His recurring appearances as Fred on TV's The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet started the ball rolling again, and by 1965 Stacy was Columbia Pictures' answer to Frankie Avalon, starring in such Beach Party rip-offs as A Swingin' Summer and Winter a Go Go. He also found time to marry actress Connie Stevens, only to lose her to singer Eddie Fisher. Stacy's second wife was Kim Darby. From 1968 through 1971, Stacy starred on the TV western Lancer. Two years after the series' cancellation, he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, which cost him his left arm and leg. Courageously refusing to retire, he began appearing in roles specially written to accommodate his handicap. His comeback film was the 1975 Kirk Douglas western Posse, in which he was cast in the nonambulatory role of newspaper editor Hellman. In 1977, he starred in the TV-movie Just a Little Inconvenience, playing a double-amputee Vietnam veteran. And in Disney's 1982 fantasy film Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stacy plays a crippled, embittered bartender, who makes the mistake of his life when he wishes to be "whole" again. His last regular TV role was Rogosheske in the weekly cop series Wiseguy. In 1996, once he was retired from acting, he served a six-year prison sentence after pleading no contest to the molestation of a minor (Stacy's erratic behavior around his arrest negated the hope of only getting probation for the incident). He was released in 2001 and resumed his life as a private citizen. Stacy died in 2016.

Trivia: A former ventriloquist and radio deejay, bespectacled character-actor Joe Flynn was a professional even before he graduated from Northwestern University. He made his first film appearance as a priest in the Bob Hope comedy The Seven Little Foys (1955) then spent several years in uncredited roles before building up a reputation as a reliable comic foil on television. He was one of the regulars on the first season of The Joey Bishop Show (1961), but left early on, reportedly because he was stealing too many scenes from star Bishop. From 1962 through 1966, Flynn played the irascible Captain Binghamton on the TV sitcom McHale's Navy (1962) and also starred in two theatrical films spun off from the series. In the early 1970s, Flynn spearheaded a movement on behalf of the Screen Actors' Guild for more equitable distribution of TV residual payments. Shortly after completing his voiceover work in the Disney animated feature The Rescuers, 50-year-old Joe Flynn died of a heart attack.

Trivia: Was raised in Simi Valley, California.Started modeling and acting at age 12 and booked her first television role at age 17.Met husband Lee DeWyze in October 2010, on the set of his music video "Sweet Serendipity."Got engaged to now husband Lee DeWyze after just eight months of dating.Is featured in a 2013 national commercial for McDonalds.Best known for her work in Baby Daddy, Code Black and Couples Retreat (2009).

Trivia: American actor Ivan Bonar was a versatile and highly competent supporting actor who worked on stage, screen, and television.