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: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: Supporting actor Kent McCord is best known for co-starring in the long-running series Adam-12 (1968-1975). McCord made his film debut in the made-for-television movie The Outsider (1967). Following the demise of Adam-12, McCord continued appearing in TV films and in low-budget features such as Unsub (1985) and Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993).

Trivia: Sultry blues vocalist Julie London began her film career long before she achieved fame as a recording artist. In 1945, 18-year-old London was selected to play a bargain-basement jungle princess, appearing opposite a gorilla in the PRC cheapie Nabonga. She was pretty bad, but no worse than the film itself. By the time she was cast as a sexy teenager in The Red House (1947), her acting had improved immensely, and by the time she played the female lead in the 1951 programmer The Fat Man, it looked as though she actually had a future in films. Still, London's greatest claim to fame was her long string of hit records ("Cry Me a River" et. al.) of the 1950s; many male admirers bought her albums simply to gaze upon her come-hither countenance on the dust jacket. Her status as every red-blooded American boy's wish dream was gently lampooned in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which she appears as a spectral vision who transfixes a wistful Tom Ewell. Her best dramatic film appearances of this period include her leading-lady gigs in Voice in the Mirror (1958) and Man of the West (1958). From 1945 through 1955, Julie London was the wife of actor/producer Jack Webb; years after the divorce, London played Nurse Dixie McCall on the popular Jack Webb-produced TV series Emergency, in which she co-starred with her second husband, actor/jazz musician Bobby Troup.

Trivia: Chanin Hale never really made it in movies, apart from a relative handful in the mid-'60s in which she played prominent supporting roles. But on television as a wholesome-yet-voluptuous blonde, she was a memorable guest star and supporting player for years on programs as diverse as Dragnet and The Red Skelton Show. She was born Marilyn Victoria Chanine Hale Harvey in Dayton, OH, and survived a desperately unhappy childhood in a broken home from where even her adopted younger sister was given up. (According to Hale in a 1969 interview, her sister returned to the orphanage when her parents separated). Hale took her mother's family name. She was a creative and very athletic girl, winning art awards and was very competitive in sports. She was bitten by the performing bug while still in school. After graduating from high school and working as a secretary, she decided to do something about pursuing acting. Some limited work in student and community theater helped, along with dancing and singing lessons, but she felt out of place and somehow "off balance" when it came to performing, until one day she dyed her red hair platinum blonde and suddenly recognized herself. She joined the Dayton Y Players and gained experience in everything from Greek tragedy to low comedy, and enjoyed a taste of success in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun. A move to New York in 1955, at age 18, put her in position to be discovered. During her first six years, she toured in the revue High Time, performed in The Gazebo (with William Bendix), Come Blow Your Horn, and Bus Stop in regional theater. She also worked as a cocktail waitress at the Gaslight Club (a pre-Playboy club institution for the well-heeled man about town), fending off advances from the patrons (and from her employers) when she worked as a stenographer. She also did Annie Get Your Gun on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and sang at Manhattan's #1 Fifth Avenue, eventually landinga role in Little Mary Sunshine, playing a flirtatious character named Twinkle. Hale also started doing television, playing secretaries, corpses, and everything in between. Her big break came from television in 1963 when she went to Los Angeles to appear in a comedy production at U.C.L.A. and was discovered by Jack Albertson, who offered her an introduction to Red Skelton. The veteran comic was always on the lookout for women with pantomime skills for his show, and after meeting Hale and seeing her work, immediately put her onto his weekly comedy variety show in the pantomime segment. She worked for him as a semi-regular for the next seven years. She also managed to appear in a handful of subsequent feature films, among them Gunn, Synanon, Will Penny, and The Night They Raided Minsky's, and in numerous dramatic television series. The most notable among them was the '60s revival of Dragnet on which she did three episodes -- in one, playing the seductive hostess for a crooked gambling ring, she came convincingly close to melting Jack Webb's by-the-book persona as Sgt. Joe Friday; watching the show today, Hale came off like the '60s answer to Gloria Grahame, and she may have had as good a career if only films were being made that included partly fallen-but-redeemable women in their casts of characters, but it was mostly Anne Francis and, on the much older side, Ava Gardner getting those parts. Hale's other television work includes appearances on Death Valley Days, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Hey Landlord, Hondo, The Donna Reed Show, The Danny Kaye Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Dating Game, and Girl Talk (the latter two as herself, out-of-character), as well as television productions of Brigadoon and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Hale was also a regular supporter of the USO and did tours of Vietnam and other overseas locations where American troops were stationed for more than a decade, well into the late '60s, working with John Welsh and John Malpezz on one tour. Indeed, she was one of the last fabulously successful pinups. In early 1969, a quarter century after the heyday of the pinup, when a picture of Hale in a homemade costume as "Eve" appeared in the New York Daily News, it generated so many requests from soldiers overseas that thousands of 8x10s had to be printed up and mailed. She continued working into the '70s on series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Adam-12, and Marcus Welby, M.D.

Trivia: American actor Milton Frome made an unlikely film debut as the cowboy star of Grand National's Ride 'Em Cowgirl (1939)--unlikely in that the tall, bald actor spent the rest of his career playing nervous corporate types and "second bananas" for some of show business' greatest clowns. After touring with the USO during World War II, the vaudeville-trained Frome was an early arrival on the television scene: he worked as a straight man and foil on Milton Berle's variety series, and also functioned as the hapless target of the antics of Martin and Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour. The actor was also busy in live and filmed detective and action series (he frequently appeared in Superman with his good friend George Reeves) as well as in two-reel comedies with The Three Stooges. After Jerry Lewis broke away from Dean Martin, Frome continued to function as one of Lewis' stock company in such films as The Delicate Delinquent (1957), The Nutty Professor (1963) and Disorderly Orderly (1964). TV sitcom buffs remember Milton Frome best as Lawrence Chapman, the hapless mogul who ran a film studio owned by rustic millionaire Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Some actors and actresses remain forever associated with one memorable role that outshines all others; that is particularly true of beautiful and glamorous Deidre Hall, better known as Dr. Marlena Evans on the NBC daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives -- a part that Hall held for years. A native of Milwaukee, WI, Hall was born in the autumn of 1947 as an identical twin, and raised by her parents (a postal worker father and a high-school secretary mother) in Lake Worth, FL. She experienced her first brush with fame by vying for -- and winning -- the title of Junior Orange Bowl Queen at age 12, and subsequently attended a local junior college before moving to Los Angeles and kick-starting a modeling and acting career. Hall made her first several dramatic appearances as a television guest star, on episodes of such programs as Adam-12 and The Streets of San Francisco, then landed the lead role of ElectraWoman on the Saturday-morning children's program ElectraWoman and DynaGirl.It was Days, however, that brought Hall her broadest recognition; producers enlisted her to play Evans in 1976, and she remained with the program until 1987, when she temporarily withdrew from the part to focus all of her attentions on a much different prime-time role: Jesse Witherspoon, a widow raising several children with the assist of her lovable and slightly cantankerous father-in-law (Wilford Brimley), on the Sunday-night family-oriented drama Our House. That series lasted two seasons, and in the years that followed, Hall focused her energies solely on prime-time work, in telemovies such as Take My Daughters, Please (1988) and Perry Mason: The Case of the All-Star Assassin (1989). By 1991, however, Hall opted to re-join Days of Our Lives with a much-publicized return of Dr. Marlena Evans, and remained with the iconic series over the ensuing decades.Off-camera, Hall made headlines as the mother of two children born to a surrogate, experiences dramatized for viewers when she played herself in the ABC made-for-television feature Never Say Never: The Deidre Hall Story (1995). Hall received numerous laurels over the years for her acting work, including Soap Opera Digest awards and multiple Emmy nominations.