Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

Trivia: Chinese/American actor Victor Sen Yung would always be limited by stereotype in his selection of film roles, but it cannot be denied that he did rather well for himself within those limitations. Billed simply as Sen Yung in his earliest films, the actor was elevated to semi-stardom as Jimmy Chan, number two son of screen sleuth Charlie Chan. He first essayed Jimmy in 1938's Charlie Chan in Honolulu, replacing number one son Keye Luke (both Luke and Yung would co-star in the 1948 Chan adventure The Feathered Serpent). Not much of an actor at the outset, Yung received on-the-job training in the Chan films, and by 1941 was much in demand for solid character roles. With the absence of genuine Japanese actors during World War II (most were in relocation camps), Yung specialized in assimilated, sophisticated, but nearly always villainous Japanese in such films as Across the Pacific (1942). Remaining busy into the '50s, Yung co-starred in both the stage and screen versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. His longest-lasting assignment in the '60s was as temperamental cook Hop Sing on the TV series Bonanza. Victor Sen Yung died in his North Hollywood home of accidental asphyxiation at the age of 65.

Trivia: Burly character actor Peter Whitney was under contract to Warner Bros. from 1941 to 1945. Whitney spent much of that time on loan-out, playing a variety of moronic thugs and henchmen. His best-ever screen role (or roles) was as identical twin hillbilly murderers Mert and Bert Fleagle in the 1944 screwball classic Murder He Says. He enjoyed a rare romantic lead in the 1946 horror film The Brute Man (the title character was played by Rondo Hatton). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Whitney supported himself by portraying some of TV's most scurrilous and homicidal backwoods villains. Peter Whitney essayed a more comical characterization as rustic free-loader Lafe Crick in several first-season episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Trivia: Paul Wexler was born to play character roles -- well over six feet tall but seemingly thinner than the young Frank Sinatra, he was no one's idea of a leading man, but he could dominate a scene simply by standing in the shot with his long features and imposing height, and embellish the effect with his deep voice. Born in Oregon, Wexler's screen career began in 1952, when he was 23 years old, with a performance as a hillbilly in the Bowery Boys comedy Feudin' Fools. He had little to do in the movie except look and act like a slow-witted country bumpkin, in tandem with such gifted young players as Robert Easton and veterans like Russell Simpson; he obviously made an impression on the producers, because two years later he appeared in one of the most popular of all the movies in that series, The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters, playing Grissom, the butler to a household of mad scientists seemingly lifted right out of Arsenic and Old Lace. He was funny in that film, but Wexler's first truly memorable role was much more serious, in Lewis Allen's presidential assassination thriller Suddenly (1954); portraying Slim the deputy, he managed to melt into the scenery despite his appearance, and into the part as well, portraying a tough, no-nonsense peace officer to the hilt, culminating with a violent shootout midway through the movie. In The Kentuckian, released the following year, it was back to playing backwoods roles as one of the murderous Frome brothers, alongside Douglas Spencer. Perhaps owing to his appearance, Wexler tended to get roles with a certain component of the macabre, or an element of threat, but he never had a role stranger or more memorable than his non-speaking part in Edward L. Cahn's The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959). His portrayal of Zutai, the mute Jivaro Indian zombie (his tissues permeated with curare), always ready with a curare-tipped blade to paralyze a victim and a basket for their head, was a brilliantly mimed portrayal and one of the grisliest elements of a very nasty horror film. Seemingly almost as a balance to his mute role in that movie, Wexler's next film involved only speaking, as he was one of the voice actors in Disney's original 101 Dalmatians (1961). He made appearances onscreen in roles of various sizes as late as 1967, in Andrew V. McLaglen's The Way West and the William Castle comedy The Busy Body. He cut back on his acting after that, possibly due to declining health, and gave one last film performance in the 1975 in Michael Anderson's feature Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. On television, Wexler tended to work in Westerns, including The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, and Death Valley Days, although he also turned up during the later '60s in episodes of Get Smart and made his final onscreen appearance on an episode of Charlie's Angels in 1976. Wexler died of leukemia in 1979.

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).