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: A graduate of Northwestern University, actor James Olson did stage work in and around Chicago before his 1956 film bow in The Sharkfighters. Angular and sandy-haired, Olson was well suited to classical stage roles. In films and on television, it was his lot to portray a long line of understanding husbands, doubting doctors, mystery killers and corporate bigwigs. James Olson garnered some of his best reviews for his performance as Joanne Woodward's autumn romance in Rachel, Rachel (1967), under the direction of Paul Newman.

Trivia: Born Dawn Bethel, North began dancing professionally at age 10 and, during her teens, modeled and danced in clubs and for film loops; meanwhile, she got married at 15 and soon had a child. She got bit roles in a couple of films, and in 1953 gained Hollywood's attention with a wild dance performance in the Broadway musical Hazel Flagg. North reprised her role in the play's screen version, Living It Up (1954), with Martin and Lewis. Soon thereafter she was signed to a film contract by Fox, which tried to make her into a '50s-style platinum blond "sexpot" and potential replacement for Marilyn Monroe; the studio mounted a big publicity campaign and starred her in several light productions. She proved herself to be a skilled comedian and dancer and a reasonably good actress. However, within a few years other actresses usurped her "dumb blond" roles, and after 1958 she disappeared from the screen for almost a decade. She went on to perform in stock, on the road, and on TV. Gradually, she developed a reputation as a serious actress, an unprecedented transformation of performing personas for an actress of her generation. In the late '60s she began appearing regularly in films in character roles, and she sustained a busy screen and TV career through the '90s.