Trivia: Actor/director/producer William Conrad started his professional career as a musician. After World War II service, he began building his reputation in films and on Hollywood-based radio programs. Due to his bulk and shifty-eyed appearance, he was cast in films as nasty heavies, notably in The Killers (1946) (his first film), Sorry Wrong Number (1948) and The Long Wait (1954). On radio, the versatile Conrad was a fixture on such moody anthologies as Escape and Suspense; he also worked frequently with Jack "Dragnet" Webb during this period, and as late as 1959 was ingesting the scenery in the Webb-directed film 30. Conrads most celebrated radio role was as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, which he played from 1952 through 1961 (the TV Gunsmoke, of course, went to James Arness, who physically matched the character that the portly Conrad had shaped aurally). In the late 1950s, Conrad went into the production end of the business at Warner Bros., keeping his hand in as a performer by providing the hilariously strident narration of the cartoon series Rocky and His Friends and its sequel The Bullwinkle Show. During the early 1960s, Conrad also directed such films as Two on a Guillotine (1964) and Brainstorm (1965). Easing back into acting in the early 1970s, Conrad enjoyed a lengthy run as the title character in the detective series Cannon (1971-76), then all too briefly starred as a more famous corpulent crime solver on the weekly Nero Wolfe. Conrad's final TV series was as one-half of Jake and the Fatman (Joe Penny was Jake), a crime show which ran from 1987 through 1991.

Trivia: Tom Skerritt is probably the best-known actor whose name is never remembered. A rugged "outdoors" type, Skerritt briefly attended Wayne State University and UCLA before making his film bow in War Hunt (1962). His subsequent film and TV roles were sizeable, but so adept was Skerritt at immersing himself in his character that he seemed to have no tangible, recurrent personality of his own. Billed second as "Duke" in the original M*A*S*H* (1970), Skerritt did his usual finely-honed job, but audiences of the time preferred the demonstrative, mannered acting technique of Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall; significantly, Skerritt's character was not carried over into the even more unsubtle M*A*S*H TV series. Finally, in 1980, Skerritt began to attain a following with his authoritative performance in Alien. Since that time, there's been no stopping him. He posed in a popular series of "Guess?" Jeans ads, appeared as a 1987-88 regular on "Cheers," starred in 1992's A River Runs Through It (directed by his long-ago War Hunt costar Robert Redford), and won a 1994 Emmy for his work on the TV series "Picket Fences."Skerritt would continue to work at a remarkable pace, usually appearing in several projects a year. From 1999's family drama The Other Sister to 2003's war thriller Tears of the Sun, the actor could be spotted by fans of seemingly every area of film throughout the 90's and 2000's. In 2006, he took a recurring role in the hit primetime drama Brothers and Sisters, and in 2008 he signed on for the redneck comedy Beer for my Horses. He went on to appear in Whiteout, Multiple Sarcasms, and he made a cameo as himself in the R rated talking teddy bear movie Ted.

Trivia: John Marley's craggy face, cement-mixer voice and shock of white hair were familiar to stagegoers from the 1930s onward. Marley started out as one-half of a comedy team, but soon found that his true metier was drama. In films on an infrequent basis since 1941, Marley stepped up his moviemaking activities in the mid-1960s, playing such sizeable roles as Jane Fonda's father in Cat Ballou (1965). He won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance as a miserable middle-aged husband in John Cassavetes' Faces (1968), and was Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Ali MacGraw's blue-collar dad in Love Story. Arguably Marley's most unforgettable assignment was The Godfather (1972), in which, as movie mogul Lou Woltz, he wakes up to find himself sharing his bed with a horse's head. John Marley's television work included a regular role on the obscure NBC daytime drama Three Steps to Heaven.

Trivia: The possessor of a BA from Tulane University and an MA from Boston University, Paul Michael Glaser first appeared on a New York stage in Joseph Papp's 1968 production of Rockabye Hamlet.. Billed in the early stages of his career as Michael Glaser, he was featured on Broadway in The Man in the Glass Booth, in such films as Fiddler on the Roof (1971, as Perchik) and Butterflies are Free (1972) and on the TV soap operas Love is Many Splendored Thing and Love of Life. He reverted to his three-barreled name when cast as Detective David Starsky, one of two hotshot young police officers who jetted around an unnamed crime-ridden municipality in their bright red 1974 Ford Torino and attempted to wipe the streets clean of the criminal element, on the long-running (1975-79) TV cop series Starsky and Hutch. After 1984, Glaser cut back sharply on his acting appearances to concentrate on directing such TV movies as Amazons and such theatrical features as The Running Man (1987), The Air Up There (1994) and Kazaam (1996), and episodes of series programs including The Agency, Judging Amy, Third Watch and Las Vegas. In 2003, Glaser landed a small role opposite Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in Nancy Meyers's romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give. The following year, Warners released a tongue-in-cheek big screen cinematization of Starsky in which Ben Stiller played the character of David and Owen Wilson played his partner, Detective Ken Hutchinson. Glaser and longtime series co-star David Soul made cameo appearances at the end of the film, billed respectively as The Old Starsky and The Old Hutch. In the late 1980s Glaser's life was torn apart by the most appalling of tragedies. As the result of a contaminated blood transfusion, his wife Elizabeth and their two children were infected with the HIV virus, and in 1988, their daughter Ariel died at age seven. Subsequently, Paul and Elizabeth became the most adamant, tireless, and omnipresent AIDS awareness activists in any profession. In 1988 the two helped found the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Sadly, Elizabeth died in December of 1994. Since then, the Elizabeth Glaser Scientists Award was established to fund research into the AIDS virus. Glaser subsequently remarried producer/writer Tracy Barone in 1996; after a little over a decade together, the two filed for divorce.

Trivia: From the '50s through the '80s, American actress Maxine Stuart played character parts ranging from maternal to hard-bitten. Among Stuart's many films were Winning (969), Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) and Coast to Coast (1980). Her TV soap opera assignments included The Edge of Night, as Grace O'Leary; The Young Marrieds (a briefie from 1964) as Mrs. Korman; and General Hospital, as Mrs. Baldwyn. Occasionally breaking into prime-time, Ms. Stuart was co-featured on Room for One More (1962) as the wife of "funny neighbor" Jack Albertson; on Slattery's People (1965), as secretary to politician Richard Crenna; and on Hail to the Chief (1985) as the swinging mother of American president Patty Duke. Twilight Zone addicts best remember Maxine Stuart for a role in which her face never appeared: the bandaged plastic-surgery patient in the 1960 episode "The Eye of the Beholder."