Trivia: Only a handful of American actors can lay claim to A-list popularity on the big and small screen in multiple decades, and even fewer have matched the good-natured, easygoing charm of John Forsythe. In lead or supporting roles, playing his standard everyman protagonist, or occasionally cutting against type to portray nasty villains, Forsythe is one to whom generations of viewers naturally gravitated, like a reliable old friend.The oldest son of a factory worker, John Lincoln Freund was born into inauspicious circumstances, in the middle-class community of Penns Grove, NJ, on January 29, 1918. Raised in Brooklyn, NY, while his father did business on Wall Street during the Great Depression, John graduated from high school two years earlier than most, at age 16, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating two years later. A longtime worshiper of baseball, he almost immediately landed a highly coveted job as the Dodgers announcer at Ebbets Field after leaving UNC, but his father noticed his eldest's dramatic abilities and encouraged the boy to branch out into acting. Freund followed suit, making his Broadway bow in 1942 and latching on to a hit when cast in Moss Hart's 1943 production Winged Victory. He later moved to sunny Southern California, where he took the stage name John Forsythe, became a bit player for Warners, and landed supporting roles in several movies, including the heavily lauded WWII vehicle Destination Tokyo (1943) and the same year's Northern Pursuit. Meanwhile, he met and married actress Parker McCormick, by whom he had a son, Dall. Their troubled union lasted only a year.Around the time of the divorce, Forsythe put his career on the shelf and headed off to military service in Europe, where he worked as a speech pathologist in a hospital, helping to recuperate wounded soldiers who were having difficulty with articulation. Before the end of 1943, Forsythe's enlistment wrapped. That same year, Forsythe met stage actress Julie Warren, who became his second wife; the couple raised two daughters. He helped found The Actors Studio in the early '50s, at the time a hotbed of exciting young screen talent that included Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Richard Egan, and a 14-year-old prodigy from Great Britain named Joan Collins, with whom Forsythe would team up years later on Dynasty. Meanwhile, he appeared in two high-profile Broadway productions, Teahouse of the August Moon and Mister Roberts, both well on their way to becoming A-budget Hollywood films.The late '50s were an exciting period for Forsythe; he landed one of his most prominent big-screen spots -- as artist Sam Marlowe in Alfred Hitchcock's eccentric cult comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955) -- and, two years later, reeled in one of the most enduring small-screen roles of his career, as the titular uncle Bentley Gregg on the CBS/NBC/ABC series Bachelor Father. The cast included Noreen Corcoran, Sammee Tong, and Bernadette Withers; the ratings shot up and gave the series a five-year run. Scattered movie roles followed throughout the '60s, including Kitten with a Whip (1964) and In Cold Blood (1967), as well as the television series The John Forsythe Show (1965-1966) and To Rome with Love (1969-1971), but it would be another decade or so before Forsythe fully re-entered the public eye. In the early '70s, Forsythe began a periodic association with TV mogul Aaron Spelling, which yielded multiple telemovies (Cry Panic [1974], Cruise into Terror [1978]), and the two series for which the actor is best known. For the first, Spelling cast Forsythe in a prominent voice-only role -- that of Charlie Townsend, the reclusive head of a female detective agency, in Charlie's Angels (1976-1981). With sex symbols Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, and especially Farrah Fawcett-Majors as the leads, the program invented "jiggle TV" and became a ratings smash. Spelling didn't forget the favor that Forsythe had done for him; seven months before Angels ended, he spun around and made the actor one of the three stars (alongside Joan Collins and Linda Evans) of Dynasty, a prime-time ABC soaper about oil zillionaire Blake Carrington (Forsythe), his ennui-ridden current wife, Krystle (Evans), and his shameless, ever-scheming ex-wife, Alexis (Joan Collins). Ratings shot through the roof and turned Dynasty into a Wednesday-night American institution.Meanwhile, Forsythe continued intermittent film appearances. He shocked just about everybody with his blackly comic portrayal of a judge with the morals of an alley cat in Norman Jewison's blithe satire ...And Justice for All, and contributed a memorably disgusting cameo to Richard Donner's overbaked Scrooged (1988). In the early 2000s, director McG brought him back for the two big-screen versions of Charlie's Angels, for which he reportedly received five million dollars.Hollywood insiders regarded Forsythe himself as one of Hollywood's few genuine "nice guys." A dedicated worker who respected his craft, he always refused to take himself too seriously, issuing such self-deprecating statements as "Being a 64-year-old sex symbol is a hell of a weight to carry." Forsythe entered semi-retirement following the death of his second wife, Julie, in 1994. He married for the third time, to Nicole Carter, in 2002. Following a year-long struggle with cancer, Forsythe died of pneumonia at age 92 in early April 2010.

Trivia: A Broadway actor since 1931, Philip Ober first appeared before the cameras in 1951, when he was invited by actor/director Mel Ferrer to play a supporting role in The Secret Fury (1951). Adept at portraying executive types who seemed to be up to something shady, Ober was often as not cast as a corporate villain. His most famous film role was in the 1953 Oscar-winner From Here to Eternity as the hateful Army officer who, while his wife, Deborah Kerr, carries on an affair with Burt Lancaster, tries to strongarm Montgomery Clift into entering a boxing competition. Ober voluntarily gave up his acting career in the mid-'60s when he joined the U.S. Consular Service in Mexico. Married three times, Philip Ober was the former husband of I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance.

Trivia: Authoritative, sandy-haired character actor Willis Bouchey abandoned a busy Broadway career in 1951 to try his luck in films. Bouchey's striking resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower enabled him to play roles calling for quick decisiveness and unquestioned leadership; he even showed up as the President of the United States in 1952's Red Planet Mars, one year before the "real" Ike ascended to that office. The actor's many judge, executive, military, and town-marshal characterizations could also convey weakness and vacillation, but for the most part there was no question who was in charge when Bouchey was on the scene. A loyal and steadfast member of the John Ford stock company, Willis Bouchey was seen in such Ford productions as The Long Gray Line (1955), The Last Hurrah (1958), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1962).

Trivia: American actor John Fiedler did his first professional work in his native Wisconsin. Fiedler's many Broadway appearances included the 1960 play A Raisin in the Sun, in which he was the only Caucasian in a virtually all-black cast. His first film role was as the supplicative Juror No. 2 in Twelve Angry Men (1957). Fiedler's stock in trade was the meek-looking soul who compensated for his demeanor with a nasty temper or sadistic streak. In this capacity, he was often seen as vindictive school principals, obstreperous civil servants or combative psychiatric patients (vide TV's The Bob Newhart Show). Incredibly prolific in films and on television, John Fiedler's best-known role was Vinnie, Oscar Madison's card-playing crony in both the stage and screen versions of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.

Trivia: In films from 1935 to 1964, American character actor William "Billy" Newell was nearly always seen with his hat tilted backward and with a spent cigarette or wad of gum in his mouth. This is because Newell was usually cast as a wise-lipped reporter or news photographer. One of his largest assignments in this vein was as news-hound Speed Martin in the 1940 Republic serial Mysterious Dr. Satan. William Newell also essayed countless functional bit roles, such as the liquor-store proprietor in the 1945 Oscar-winner The Lost Weekend. Hal Erickson, Rovi

Trivia: Actor Rusty Lane appeared in films from the mid '40s through the mid '60s.