Trivia: A versatile, commanding, leathery character actor, he learned to raise and ride broncos on his family's ranch during his youth. He attended college for two years, became a seaman, then began his performing career as a radio announcer; he became nationally known as an announcer on the "March of Time" broadcasts. Onscreen from the late '40s, he often portrayed law officers; he was also convincing as a villain. He was well-known for his TV work; he starred in the series Naked City and Wagon Train. He was married to actress Jeanette Nolan, with whom he appeared in Saddle Tramp (1950) and Two Rode Together (1961); they also acted together on radio, and in the late '60s they joined the cast of the TV series The Virginian, portraying a married couple. Their son was actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: Wisconsin-born actor Willard Waterman moved to Chicago in 1936, where he became a busy freelance radio actor. In 1945, he played the lead in the radio sitcom Those Websters, which led to his resettling in Hollywood. Five years later, he was chosen to replace Harold Peary on the long-running comedy series The Great Gildersleeve, a character he carried over to television in 1955. He later played featured roles in a number of TV sitcoms including Dennis the Menace. Willard Waterman's film credits include the roles of pompous Claude Upson in Auntie Mame (1958) and philandering executive Vanderhoff in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960).

Trivia: Born to a well-to-do Southern family, Joseph Cotten studied at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington D.C., and later sought out theater jobs in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1930, and seven years later joined Orson Welles' progressive Mercury Theatre company, playing leads in such productions as Julius Caesar and Shoemaker's Holiday. He briefly left Welles in 1939 to co-star in Katharine Hepburn's Broadway comeback vehicle The Philadelphia Story. Cotten rejoinedWelles in Hollywood in 1940, making his feature-film debut as Jed Leland in Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). As a sort of private joke, Jed Leland was a dramatic critic, a profession which Cotten himself had briefly pursued on the Miami Herald in the late '20s. Cotten went on to play the kindly auto mogul Eugene Morgan in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and both acted in and co-wrote Journey Into Fear, the film that Welles was working on when he was summarily fired by RKO. Cotten remained a close friend of Welles until the director's death in 1985; he co-starred with Welles in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and played an unbilled cameo for old times' sake in the Welles-directed Touch of Evil (1958). A firmly established romantic lead by the early '40s, Cotten occasionally stepped outside his established screen image to play murderers (Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt [1943]) and surly drunkards (Under Capricorn [1949]). A longtime contractee of David O. Selznick, Cotten won a Venice Film Festival award for his performance in Selznick's Portrait of Jennie (1948). Cotten's screen career flagged during the 1950s and '60s, though he flourished on television as a guest performer on such anthologies as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Fireside Theatre, The Great Adventure, and as host of The 20th Century-Fox Hour (1955), The Joseph Cotten Show (1956), On Trial (1959), and Hollywood and the Stars (1963). He also appeared in several stage productions, often in the company of his second wife, actress Patricia Medina. In 1987, Cotten published his engagingly candid autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere. He died of pneumonia in 1994 at the age of 88.

Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.