Trivia: Following World War II, California native Jack Webb planned to renew the art studies that he'd abandoned for the military. Instead, he turned to acting, appearing on various San Francisco-based radio programs. He briefly hosted his own satirical comedy series before finding his true metier in detective melodramas. In collaboration with future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard L. Breen (who remained a Webb associate until his death in 1967), Webb concocted a hard-boiled private eye show entitled Pat Novak for Hire. The popularity he gained from this effort enabled Webb to secure small film roles -- one of these was as a police lab technician in the 1948 film noir He Walked by Night (1948). Intrigued by the police procedure he'd learned while preparing for the role, Webb immersed himself in the subject until he felt ready to launch what many observers still consider the first realistic radio cop show: Dragnet, which premiered June 3, 1949. Webb carried over his terse characterization of L.A. police sergeant Joe Friday into the Dragnet TV series (which he also directed) beginning in 1952. Armed with a bottomless reserve of police terminology and a colorful repertoire of catchphrases, the laconic, ferret-faced Webb became one of the most successful -- and most widely imitated -- TV personalities of the 1950s; almost always in the Top Ten, Dragnet, produced by Webb's own Mark VII Productions, ran until 1959. Webb's newfound industry clout permitted him to direct for the big screen as well -- his 1950s movie credits (outside of such pre-star efforts as The Men, Sunset Boulevard, and Halls of Montezuma) include the 1954 feature version of Dragnet, 1955's Pete Kelly's Blues (based on another of Webb's radio series), 1957's The D.I., and 1959's 30. In addition, Webb's Mark VII produced such TV series as Noah's Ark, The D.A.'s Man, and the video version of Pete Kelly's Blues. Webb kicked off the 1960s with a rare attempt at directing comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). From 1962 through 1964, he was in charge of Warner Bros.' television division, an assignment which came to an end as a result of several failed TV ventures. A 1966 TV-movie version of Dragnet kicked off Webb's second career. He went on to star in a successful weekly Dragnet revival, which ran from 1967 through 1970, while his Mark VII outfit was responsible for a score of TV series, the most successful of which were Emergency and Adam 12. Regarded as something of a relic by the "hipper" viewers, Jack Webb nonetheless remained profitably active in television until the late '70s; he might have continued into the 1980s had not his drinking and smoking habits accelerated his death at the age of 62. Married three times, Jack Webb's first wife was singing star Julie London, whom he'd first met when he was 21 and she was 15.

Trivia: One of the most prolific actors in television history -- with starring roles in 11 different television series under his belt -- Harry Morgan is most closely identified with his portrayal of Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83). But his credits go back to the 1930s, embracing theater and film as well as the small screen. Born Harry Bratsberg in Detroit, Michigan, in 1915, he made his Broadway debut with the Group Theatre in 1937 as Pepper White in the original production of Golden Boy, alongside Luther Adler, Phoebe Brand, Howard Da Silva, Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Martin Ritt, and Roman Bohnen. His subsequence stage appearances between 1939 and 1941 comprised a string of failures -- most notably Clifford Odets' Night Music, directed by Harold Clurman; and Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, directed by Elia Kazan -- before he turned to film work. Changing his name to Henry Morgan, he appeared in small roles in The Shores of Tripoli, The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, and Orchestra Wives, all from 1942. Over the next two years, he essayed supporting roles in everything from war movies to Westerns, where he showed an ability to dominate the screen with his voice and his eyes. Speaking softly, Morgan could quietly command a scene, even working alongside Henry Fonda in the most important of those early pictures, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Over the years following World War II, Morgan played ever-larger roles marked by their deceptive intensity. And even when he couldn't use his voice in a role, such as that of the mute and sinister Bill Womack in The Big Clock (1948), he was still able to make his presence felt in every one of his scenes with his eyes and his body movements. He was in a lot of important pictures during this period, including major studio productions such as All My Sons (1948), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), and Madame Bovary (1949). He also appeared in independent films, most notably The Well (1951) and High Noon (1952). One of the more important of those roles was his portrayal of a professional killer in Appointment With Danger (1951), in which he worked alongside fellow actor Jack Webb for the first time. Morgan also passed through the stock company of director Anthony Mann, working in a brace of notable outdoor pictures across the 1950s. It was during the mid-1950s, as he began making regular appearances on television, that he was obliged to change his professional name to Harry Morgan (and, sometimes, Henry "Harry" Morgan), owing to confusion with another performer named Henry Morgan, who had already established himself on the small screen and done some movie acting as well. And it was at this time that Morgan, now billed as Harry Morgan, got his first successful television series, December Bride, which ran for five seasons and yielded a spin-off, Pete and Gladys. Morgan continued to appear in movies, increasingly in wry, comedic roles, most notably Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), but it was the small screen where his activity was concentrated throughout the 1960s.In 1966, Jack Webb, who had become an actor, director, and producer over the previous 15 years, decided to revive the series Dragnet and brought Morgan aboard to play the partner of Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday. As Officer Bill Gannon, Morgan provided a wonderful foil for the deadpan, no-nonsense Friday, emphasizing the natural flair for comic eccentricity that Morgan had shown across the previous 25 years. The series ran for four seasons, and Morgan reprised the role in the 1987 Dragnet feature film. He remained a busy actor going into the 1970s, when true stardom beckoned unexpectedly. In 1974, word got out that McLean Stevenson was planning on leaving the successful series M*A*S*H, and the producers were in the market for a replacement in the role of the military hospital's commanding officer. Morgan did a one-shot appearance as a comically deranged commanding general and earned the spot as Stevenson's replacement. Morgan worked periodically in the two decades following the series' cancellation in 1983, before retiring after 1999. He died in 2011 at age 96.

Trivia: For over six decades, Louise Lorimer played character roles on stage, screen and television. She launched her career on Broadway, appearing in I Remember Mama opposite Marlon Brando. Lorimer later worked on My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison. Lorimer made her feature-film debut in Gangster's Boy (1938). She subsequently appeared steadily in feature films through the late 1970s. Her television work includes appearances on Profiles in Courage and Marnie. She also frequently appeared on the Alfred Hitchcock anthology series Hitchcock Presents and on the sitcom Dennis the Menace. On Hopalong Cassidy, Lorimer occasionally played "Stagecoach Sal." Lorimer graduated from the Leland Powers School of Drama in Boston. She served in the USO during WW II. Later in her career, Lorimer became a teacher at the Martha's Vineyard branch of the Leland Powers School of Drama.

Trivia: Six-foot granite-jawed Anthony Eisley came into his own as a leading man on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before switching to more demanding and complex character and supporting roles. The son of a corporate executive, he was born Frederick Glendinning Eisley in Philadelphia, PA in 1925. He spent most of his childhood moving with his family as his father's various positions took them from city to city, every few years. He was bitten by the acting bug early in life, but had no serious was of pursuing a career in the field until he joined a stock company in Pennsylvania. He began getting theater roles after that and by the early 1950s had begun working in television and feature films, the latter usually uncredited, under the name Fred Eisley -- this also included his first series work, in Bonino (1953), starring Ezio Pinza and a young Van Dyke Parks. While his theater work included such prime fare as Mister Roberts and Picnic, when it came to movies and television he was in every kind of production there was, from independent, syndicated TV series such as Racket Squad to high-profile movies like The Young Philadelphians, and Eisley broke through to star billing in the Roger Corman-directed horror film The Wasp Woman (1960) (working opposite Susan Cabot in the title role). Around that same time he took the role of John Cassiano in Pete Kelly's Blues (1959), a short-lived TV series directed and produced by Jack Webb. It was after being seen in a stage production of Who Was That Lady that Eisley was cast as Tracy Steele, the tough ex-cop turned private detective in the series Hawaiian Eye. It was also with that series that he became Anthony Eisley. Following the three-year run of that series, Eisley resumed work as a journeyman actor, but the array of roles that he took on improved exponentially -- in one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, entitled "The Lady And The Tiger And The Lawyer", he guested as a seemingly affable, attractive new neighbor of the Petries who admits, in the end, that he has a problem with spousal abuse that prevents him from choosing either of the women they've aimed at him at a possible match; and in Samuel Fuller's groundbreaking film drama The Naked Kiss, he plays a hard-nosed cop who uncovers a sinister, deeply troubling side to his city's much-publicized children's hospital and the people behind it. Eisley appeared in dozens of television series and movies over the ensuing three decades, always giving 100% of himself even when the budget and the production were lacking (see The Navy Vs. The Night Monsters . . . .. But on the sets of television shows, especially, where the quality was there, his work was without peer -- that was one reason that Jack Webb, who had used him in Pete Kelly's Blues, made Eisley a part of his stock company, using him in six episodes of Dragnet in the 1960s. Those shows are especially fascinating to watch for the quiet intensity of his performances -- he mostly played morally-compromised character, including a man plotting the murder-for-hire of his wife, an affable but corrupt police lieutenant, and career criminal who thinks (incorrectly) that he has outsmarted the detectives who are questioning him. Eisley's credits, in keeping with his image from Hawaiian Eye, were heavily concentrated in series devoted to law enforcement. He continued working through the 1990s, and died of heart failure in 2003, at the age of 78.