Trivia: American actor James Arness had an unremarkable Minneapolis childhood, but his wartime experiences shattered that normality - literally. During the battle of Anzio, Arness' right leg was peppered with machine gun bullets, and when the bones were set they didn't mend properly, leaving him with a slight but permanent limp. The trauma of the experience mellowed into aimlessness after the war. Arness became a "beach bum," lived out of his car, and worked intermittently as a salesman and carpenter. Acting was treated equally lackadaisically, but by 1947 Arness had managed to break into Hollywood on the basis of his rugged good looks and his 6'6" frame. Few of his screen roles were memorable, though one has become an object of cult worship: Arness was cast as the menacingly glowing space alien, described by one character as "an intellectual carrot," in The Thing (1951). For a time it looked as though Arness would continue to flounder in supporting roles, while his younger brother, actor Peter Graves, seemed destined for stardom. John Wayne took a liking to Arness when the latter was cast in Wayne's Big Jim McLain (1953). Wayne took it upon himself to line up work for Arness, becoming one of the withdrawn young actor's few friends. In 1955, Wayne was offered the role of Matt Dillon in the TV version of the popular radio series Gunsmoke. Wayne turned it down but recommended that Arness be cast and even went so far as to introduce him to the nation's viewers in a specially filmed prologue to the first Gunsmoke episode. Truth be told, Arness wasn't any keener than Wayne to be tied down to a weekly series, and as each season ended he'd make noises indicating he planned to leave. This game went on for each of the 20 seasons that Gunsmoke was on the air, the annual result being a bigger salary for Arness, more creative control over the program (it was being produced by his own company within a few years) and a sizeable chunk of the profits and residuals. When Gunsmoke finally left the air in 1975, Arness was the only one of the original four principals (including Amanda Blake, Milburn Stone and Dennis Weaver) still appearing on the series. Arness made plans to take it easy after his two-decade Gunsmoke hitch, but was lured back to the tube for a one-shot TV movie, The Macahans (1976). This evolved into the six-hour miniseries How the West Was Won (1977) which in turn led to a single-season weekly series in 1978. All these incarnations starred Arness, back in the saddle as Zeb Macahan. The actor tried to alter his sagebrush image in a 1981 modern-day cop series, McClain's Law -- which being set in the southwest permitted Arness to ride a horse or two. It appeared, however that James Arness would always be Matt Dillon in the hearts and minds of fans, thus Arness obliged his still-faithful public with three Gunsmoke TV movies, the last one (Gunsmoke: The Last Apache) released in 1992. In between these assignments, James Arness starred in a 1988 TV-movie remake of the 1948 western film classic Red River, in which he filled the role previously played by his friend and mentor John Wayne.

Trivia: Milburn Stone got his start in vaudeville as one-half of the song 'n' snappy patter team of Stone and Strain. He worked with several touring theatrical troupes before settling down in Hollywood in 1935, where he played everything from bits to full leads in the B-picture product ground out by such studios as Mascot and Monogram. One of his few appearances in an A-picture was his uncredited but memorable turn as Stephen A. Douglas in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. During this period, he was also a regular in the low-budget but popular Tailspin Tommy series. He spent the 1940s at Universal in a vast array of character parts, at one point being cast in a leading role only because he physically matched the actor in the film's stock-footage scenes! Full stardom would elude Stone until 1955, when he was cast as the irascible Doc Adams in Gunsmoke. Milburn Stone went on to win an Emmy for this colorful characterization, retiring from the series in 1972 due to ill health.

Trivia: Following her training in regional theatre and radio, red-headed actress Amanda Blake was signed by MGM in 1949, where she was briefly groomed for stardom. Among her MGM assignments was 1950's Stars in My Crown, in which she was cast for the first time opposite James Arness. Film fame eluded Amanda, especially after her sizeable role in the 1954 version of A Star is Born was almost completely excised from the release print. By 1955, she had to make do with appearances in such epics as the Bowery Boys' High Society. Amanda's fortunes took a turn for the better later in 1955, when she won the role of Miss Kitty, the euphemistically yclept "hostess" of the Long Branch Saloon on the TV western Gunsmoke, which starred James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon. She remained with Gunsmoke until its next-to-last season in 1974. After Gunsmoke, Amanda went into semi-retirement save for a handful of film projects like the made-for-TV Betrayal (1974), the theatrical releases The Boost (1988) and B.O.R.N (1989), and the 1987 reunion project Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge. Amanda Blake died in 1989 at the age of sixty.

Trivia: John Drew Barrymore the son of actor John Barrymore and actress Dolores Costello, debuted in films as a teenager, and, during the 1950s, appeared in such notable films as the western High Lonesome, Fritz Lang's thriller While The City Sleeps, and the cult melodrama of the evils of marijuana, Jack Arnold's High School Confidential. He acted in several Italian-made historical films in the early 1960s, including The Nights Of Rasputin (aka The Night They Killed Rasputin) and The Trojan Horse (as Ulysses to Steve Reeves' Aeneas). He entered semi-retirement from the mid '60s through the mid '70s; his later films include Larry Cohen's werewolf comedy Full Moon High.

Trivia: Johnny Seven was the quintessential character actor of the television era, with over 600 small-screen appearance to his credit -- on top of several dozen film roles -- in a career lasting over 50 years. He was born John Anthony Fetto II in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1926. The only son among six children in a working-class family, he didn't aspire to a performing career until after he'd served in the U.S. Army. He was assigned to a combat unit, the 187th Gun Battalion, but happened to appear in some shows while in uniform, and in one army instructional film dating from 1950, and he decided to try acting after returning to civilian life. Based in New York, he did a lot of Off-Broadway theater in the early '50s, and made his movie debut as a longshoreman in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). Seven did a lot of live television and also appeared in several episodes of Sgt. Bilko, but he mostly played tough guys in hard-edged crime dramas, such as Cop Hater (1958), starring a young Robert Loggia and featuring a very young Jerry Orbach in a small role; and The Last Mile (1959), with Mickey Rooney.Seven was put under contract with Universal's television division in 1958, and for the next two decades became something of a fixture on their various action shows, right up to and including The Rockford Files in the 1970s. In the early '60s, he turned up in small roles in a few major motion pictures, such as playing Shirley MacLaine's brother in Billy Wilder's The Apartment. But most of his work was in television, on everything from Get Smart to Marcus Welby, M.D. Ironside gave Seven one of his rare chances for a recurring role, as Lt. Carl Reese in over two dozen episodes across the series' run. He also wrote plays, starting with Salvage in 1958, and screenplays, and turned to directing as well as producing in 1964 with the Western Navajo Run, in which he also starred. His other writing and producing credits included the dramatic short Gina & Me (1980). Seven's last screen credit dated from the mid-'90s, and he died of lung cancer in early 2010.

Trivia: Rough-edged character actor Morgan Woodward is the son of a Texas physician. Specializing in Westerns, the 6'3" Woodward has been seen in scores of big-screen oaters, and in 1956 held down the semi-regular role of Shotgun Gibbs in the TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He has also made quite a few non-Western appearances on such video weeklies as Star Trek and The A-Team. In his spare time, Morgan Woodward is a licensed pilot.

Trivia: It was while attending Colorado College that American actor/singer Ken Curtis discovered his talent for writing music. After an artistic apprenticeship on the staff of the NBC radio network's music department in the early '30s, Curtis was hired as male vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, then went on to work for bandleader Shep Fields. Preferring country-western to swing, Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers singing group in the 1940s, and in this capacity appeared in several western films. Columbia Pictures felt that Curtis had star potential, and gave the singer his own series of westerns in 1945, but Ken seemed better suited to supporting roles. He worked a lot for director John Ford in the '40s and '50s, as both singer and actor, before earning starring status again on the 1961 TV adventure series Ripcord. That was the last we saw of the handsome, clean-shaven Ken Curtis; the Ken Curtis that most western fans are familiar with is the scraggly rustic deputy Festus Haggen on the long-running TV Western Gunsmoke. Ken was hired to replace Dennis Weaver (who'd played deputy Chester Good) in 1964, and remained with Gunsmoke until the series ended its 20-year run in 1975. After that, Ken Curtis retired to his spread in Fresno, California, stepping back into the spotlight on occasion for guest appearances at western-movie conventions.

Trivia: Italian-American actor Al Lettieri also dabbled in playwrighting and directing during his years on stage. In films, Lettieri was generally typecast in blunt, gangsterish roles. One of his more prestigious assignments was the part of Sollolo in The Godfather (1972). Al Lettieri also served as producer of the 1971 Richard Burton melodrama Villain.

Trivia: American character actor Allen Jaffe is best known for playing villains in television series of the '60s such as Mannix, Gunsmoke, Get Smart, and Batman, but he also occasionally appeared in films such as Al Capone (1959) and Papillon.

Trivia: Veteran TV actor Jerry Douglas began his career on-screen in the early '60s, appearing on a multitude of shows like Mission: Impossible and Bonanza while supporting his family with a day job as an insurance salesman. He would sustain his career on these singular and often memorable appearances for over two decades before joining the cast of the daytime soap The Young and the Restless in 1985, playing patriarch John Abbott. He would remain with the show until 2008.