Trivia: Robert Fuller spent his first decade in show business trying his best to avoid performing. After his film debut in 1952's Above and Beyond, Fuller studied acting with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse but never exhibited any real dedication. He tried to become a dancer but gave that up as well, determining that dancing was "sissified." Fuller rose to nominal stardom fairly rapidly in the role of Jess Harper on the popular TV western Laramie (1959-63). Once he found his niche in cowboy attire, he stuck at it in another series, Wagon Train, turning down virtually all offers for "contemporary" roles. When westerns began dying out on television in the late 1960s, Fuller worked as a voiceover actor in commercials, earning some $65,000 per year (a tidy sum in 1969). On the strength of his performance in the Burt Topper-directed motorcycle flick The Hard Ride, Fuller was cast by producer Jack Webb as chief paramedic Kelly Brackett on the weekly TVer Emergency, which ran from 1972 through 1977. In 1994, Robert Fuller was one of several former TV western stars who showed up in cameo roles in the Mel Gibson movie vehicle Maverick.

Trivia: The daughter of musicians, this sultry femme fatale of late-'50s horror flicks had been the "White Rain" girl in television commercials before entering films in James Cagney's Short Cut to Hell (1957). (Prior to that she had reportedly been an extra in Sunset Blvd. (1950) while attending U.C.L.A.) Trained as a singer, Yvette Vickers (born Van Vedder) drifted into B-movies when the Cagney film flopped and is today best remembered for the horror movies she did for Roger Corman: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), as Allison Hayes's slatternly rival, and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). In the latter, playing Bruno Ve Sota's sluttish young wife, she is dragged into an underwater cage by the title creatures despite always professing a deep fear of drowning, her visible terror apparently quite real. Vickers, who did her fair share of television and stage appearances, was at the time better known for her extracurricular activities -- including a 15-year relationship with actor Jim Hutton and an on-again/off-again affair with Cary Grant -- and for a couple of important film roles that somehow slipped away: Lana Turner's daughter in Imitation of Life (1959) and the Carroll Baker part in The Carpetbaggers (1964). In later years, she concentrated on her singing career and made frequent personal appearances to discuss her work for Corman. On a bizarre note, Vickers was found deceased at her house in May 2011 in a condition which suggested that the body had been dead but lay undiscovered for nearly a year. No cause of death was immediately disclosed.

Trivia: After a few desultory movie appearances in the mid-1930s, rotund American actor Stanley Adams came to films permanently in 1952, to re-create his stage role as the bartender in the movie version of Death of a Salesman. His busiest period was 1955-1965, when he appeared on virtually every major TV series in America. His video roles ranged from a pompous time-travelling scientist on Twilight Zone to a wisecracking witch doctor on Gilligan's Island. Shortly after completing his last film, 1976's Woman in the Rain, Stanley Adams committed suicide at the age of 62.

Trivia: Phillip Pine was a character actor whose chameleon-like presence graced the entertainment world for more than 50 years as an actor, in addition to work as a screenwriter and director. Pine was born in Hanford, CA, 1920, and made his stage debut in a play written in Portugeuse. He later worked on showboats along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and made the jump to small roles in movies in the mid-'40s, when he was in his twenties. His dark features frequently got him cast as gangsters and thugs in the early part of his career, and he moved in more prominent roles -- usually of a villainous nature -- in the 1950s.In 1954, Pine worked on-stage in See the Jaguar and The Immoralist and crossed paths with James Dean at the outset of the latter's career in New York. He played the title role in the stage version of A Stone for Danny Fisher, in a production that also featured Zero Mostel, Joe de Santis, and Susan Cabot. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the play in The New York Times, wrote that Pine turned in "a good performance. He makes the character shifty and shallow, but likable, also, like a heel who means well weakly." With very expressive eyes and a minimum of words, Pine could melt into a role and make the most of only a few seconds' screen time. His feature films included William Keighley's crime thriller The Street with No Name (1948), Robert Wise's The Set Up, Mark Robson's My Foolish Heart, and William Wellman's Battleground, all released in 1949. He was also a veteran of hundreds of television shows, from Superman ("The Case of the Talkative Dummy," "The Mystery of the Broken Statues") to The Twilight Zone to Star Trek ("The Savage Curtain"), all of them as villains of a crafty and devious nature. Pine's biggest feature film role was in Irving Lerner's 1958 thriller Murder By Contract, in which he portrayed one of a pair of hoods working with hired assassin Vince Edwards. Pine passed away in 2006 at the age of 86.