Trivia: An actor indelibly associated with classic Americana given his iconic portrayals of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, tall, tousle-haired Fess Parker began life in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in nearby San Angelo, where his parents farmed peanuts and watermelons, and raised cattle. Following service in the military during WWII (where he participated in "clean-up" operations in the Philippines), Parker returned to the United States, and attended both the University of Texas and the University of California. He soon discovered a flair for acting and hit the stage in the touring company of Mister Roberts, then entered films in 1952, enjoying his first sizeable role -- a Southern-accented ballplayer -- in The Kid From Left Field (1953). It was his one-scene bit as a terrified witness to an "alien close encounter" in the 1954 horror classic Them! (1954), however, that brought Parker to the attention of Walt Disney, and somewhat ironically. Disney had considered casting a major Hollywood star as Crockett (such as Glenn Ford or Sterling Hayden), but gave up on this idea and, it is said, briefly considered future Gunsmoke headliner James Arness. Walt went to see the Arness-starrer Them! for this reason, and passed on Arness for Crockett but felt instantly convinced (and supposedly shouted out "There's our Crockett!") when Parker appeared on the screen. The actor began by portraying Crockett on ABC's Disneyland television series, and the rest is history: during the period of 1954-6, Davy Crockett mania swept through the country, first with the smash single "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," then with a blizzard of Crockett-themed merchandise aimed squarely at small children - everything from lunchboxes, to action figures, to the quintessential Davy Crockett coonskin cap.Disney and Parker parlayed the Crockett success into features in 1955 and 1956, but two years after the Crockett popularity began, it fizzled. Parker remained on the Disney lot until 1958, starring in such films as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Westward Ho, the Wagons! (1957), Old Yeller (1957), and Light in the Forest (1958). His relationship with Disney more or less ended, however, when he refused to appear in the studio's Native American drama Tonka (1958) (a revisionist version of Custer's Last Stand) opposite Sal Mineo - and was promptly suspended for doing so.His film stardom leveling off after 1959, Parker started a family by marrying Marcella Rinehart in 1960, with whom he had numerous children and grandchildren. He began a television comeback in 1962 with an indifferent sitcom version of the old Capra drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962). He was more successful, though, with his five-year tenure in the title role of the weekly NBC adventure-fest Daniel Boone, which lasted six seasons (1964-70), running consistently on Thursday nights from 7:30-8:30pm; at its peak, the program's popularity even topped that of Crockett. Parker signed for his last dramatic role in the 1972 Climb An Angry Mountain.In the years that followed, Parker bowed out of the limelight, and entered an entirely unrelated field: that of real estate. He became an entrepreneur in the mid-1970s, and built his holdings into a small yet phenomenally lucrative empire that included a mobile home park, luxury hotels, and a sprawling vineyard with a gift shop that sold Crockett memorabilia. Parker died of natural causes at the age of 85 in March 2010, at his home in California's Santa Ynez Valley.

Trivia: After serving in World War Two he began acting, training at the Dramatic Workshop of the American Theater Wing and at the Actors Studio. He performed off-Broadway and in live TV drama; in 1955 he appeared to much acclaim in Broadway's Bus Stop. He began appearing in films in 1958, going on to a sporadic but intermittently busy screen career; he often played cowpokes and "good ol' boys." Meanwhile, most of his work was done on TV. From 1956-63 he was married to actress Peggy Ann Garner. In 1990 he was found dead next to the body of his estranged wife; a police investigation suggested that he had killed his wife and then himself.

Trivia: An actress with the kind of versatile beauty that has allowed her to effortlessly alternate between earthy and glamorous roles, Veronica Cartwright's steel-blue eyes have a strange way of piercing through the screen and transcending their two-dimensional restraints. Having successfully made the transition from child actor to seasoned screen veteran, Cartwright continued a career which allowed her to explore roles that ran the gamut from straight drama to chilling horror. A native of Bristol, England, Cartwright's family emigrated to the United States when she was still very young. Following a series of modeling jobs and print ads, the aspiring actress became a familiar face to television viewers as the "Kellogg's Girl" in a series of breakfast cereal commercials. She made her screen debut in the 1958 war drama In Love and War, and, in the years that followed, alternated between film and TV work with roles in such features as The Children's Hour (1961) and The Birds (1963), in addition to a turn as Lumpy's sister on the small-screen classic Leave It to Beaver. From 1964-1968, the actress endeared herself to television viewers as Jemima Boone on the popular Daniel Boone series. Although the transition from adorable child star to serious adult actor has been a serious stumbling block for generations of young stars, Cartwright skillfully avoided this pitfall with a series of memorable roles in the 1970s. Playing opposite such heavies as Richard Dreyfuss in Inserts (1975) and Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Cartwright was well on her way to crafting an enduring film career. A role as the ill-fated navigator in the 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien found her taking part in what would become one of the most lucrative and prolific franchises in cinema history, and a memorable performance in the 1983 space program drama The Right Stuff (in which she worked again with Body Snatchers director Philip Kaufman) helped to sustain her career through the '80s. Subsequent roles in Flight of the Navigator (1986) and Wisdom (1987) offered little in the way of dramatic depth, though Cartwright's winning performance in George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) found her nearly stealing the show from stars Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Despite the fact that Cartwright kicked off the '90s with a memorable turn in the popular weekly drama L.A. Law, the roles which followed were mostly comprised of thankless appearances in made-for-TV features and forgettable horror sequels. Although she remained busy, her parts just weren't as rich as they had been. Despite the dry spell, however, Cartwright was nominated for an Emmy for three memorable appearances in the popular small-screen chiller The X Files. The following decade found her edging back toward memorable film work with appearances in In the Bedroom (2001), Scary Movie 2 (2001), and Just Married (2003). After facing off against a cat-munching alien in the 2002 short Mackenheim, Cartwright essayed a substantial role in Richard Day's 2004 comedy Straight Jacket. She played the wife of famous sexual researcher Alfred Kinsey in the 2004 biopic of the man, and appeared in the 2007 sci-fi film The Invasion. In 2009 she returned to familiar ground with a part in the small-screen adaptation Eastwick, and she landed a major part in the 2011 thriller InSight.

Trivia: Forrest Tucker occupied an odd niche in movies -- though not an "A" movie lead, he was, nonetheless, a prominent "B" picture star and even a marquee name, who could pull audiences into theaters for certain kinds of pictures. From the early/mid-1950s on, he was a solid presence in westerns and other genre pictures. Born Forrest Meredith Tucker in Plainfield, Indiana in 1919, he was bitten by the performing bug early in life -- he made his debut in burlesque while he was still under-age. Shortly after graduating from high school in 1937, he enlisted in the United States Army, joining a cavalry unit. Tucker next headed for Hollywood, where his powerful build and six-foot-four frame and his enthusiasm were sufficient to get him a big-screen debut in The Westerner (1940), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Signed to Columbia Pictures, he mostly played anonymous tough-guy roles over the next two years, primarily in B pictures, before entering the army in 1943. Resuming his career in 1946, he started getting bigger roles on a steady basis in better pictures, and in 1948 signed with Republic Pictures. He became a mainstay of that studio's star roster, moving up to a co-starring role in Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), which also brought him into the professional orbit of John Wayne, the movie's star. Across the early/middle 1950s, Tucker starred in a brace of action/adventure films and westerns, alternating between heroes and villains, building up a significant fan base. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the company's top box-office draws. As it also turned out, Tucker's appeal was international, and he went to England in the second half of the decade to play starring roles in a handful of movies. At that time, British studios such as Hammer Films needed visiting American actors to boost the international appeal of their best productions, and Tucker fulfilled the role admirably in a trio of sci-fi/horror films: The Crawling Eye, The Cosmic Monsters, and The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Part of Tucker's motivation for taking these roles, beyond the money, he later admitted, was his desire to sample the offerings of England's pubs -- Tucker was a two-fisted drinker and, in those days, was well able to handle the effects of that activity so that it never showed up on-screen. And he ran with the opportunity afforded by those three science fiction movies -- each of those films, he played a distinctly different role, in a different way, but always with a certain fundamental honesty that resonated with audiences. When he returned to Hollywood, he was cast as Beauregard Burnside in Auntie Mame (1958), which was the top-grossing movie of the year. Then stage director Morton De Costa, seeing a joyful, playful romantic huckster in Tucker (where others had mostly seen an earnest tough-guy), picked him to star as Professor Harold Hill in the touring production of The Music Man -- Tucker played that role more than 2000 times over the years that followed. He was also the star of the 1964 Broadway show Fair Game For Lovers (in a cast that included Leo Genn, Maggie Hayes, and a young Alan Alda), which closed after eight performances. The Music Man opened a new phase for Tucker's career. The wily huckster became his image, one that was picked up by Warner Bros.' television division, which cast him in the role of Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, the charmingly larcenous post-Civil War cavalry soldier at the center of the western/spoof series F-Troop. That series only ran for two seasons, but was in syndicated reruns for decades afterward, and though Tucker kept his hand in other media -- returning to The Music Man and also starring in an unsold pilot based on the movie The Flim-Flam Man (taking over the George C. Scott part), it was the part of O'Rourke with which he would be most closely identified for the rest of his life. He did occasionally take tougher roles that moved him away from the comedy in that series -- in one of the better episodes of the series Hondo, entitled "Hondo And The Judas", he played Colonel William Clark Quantrill very effectively. At the end of the decade, he returned to straight dramatic acting, most notably in the John Wayne western Chisum, in which he played primary villain Lawrence Murphy. That same year, he appeared in a challenging episode of the series Bracken's World entitled "Love It Or Leave It, Change It Or Lose It", playing "Jim Grange," a sort of film-a-clef version of John Wayne -- a World War II-era film star known for his patriotism, Grange is determined to express his political views while working alongside a young film star (portrayed by Tony Bill) who is closely associated with the anti-war movement. Tucker continued getting television work and occasional film roles, in addition to returning to the straw-hat circuit, mostly as Professor Harold Hill. None of his subsequent series lasted very long, but he was seldom out of work, despite a drinking problem that did worsen significantly during his final decade. In his final years, he had brought that under control, and was in the process of making a comeback -- there was even talk of an F-Troop revival in film form -- when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema. He died in the fall of 1986 at age 67.

Trivia: While attending San Diego's St. Augustine High School, Victor Buono appeared in three plays a year - including the title role in Hamlet! After planning to attend medical school, Buono was rechannelled into an acting career, spending the summer of his 18th year at the municipal Globe Theatre in San Diego, then studying drama at Villanova University. He made his first network TV appearance at age 21, playing bearded poet "Bongo Benny" in an episode of 77 Sunset Strip; this led to 45 TV guest spots over the next three years, during which Buono would later claim he always played "Standard Bad Man 49-B. Buonogenerally played characters much older than himself, his expressive facial features and excess weight helping him pull off the deception. Robert Aldrich cast Buono as the third-rate songwriter who leeches off of faded child star Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). Davis' was opposed to the casting, insisting that Buono was "grotesque," but after filming finished the actress went up to Buono and apologized for her earlier attitude; even more gratifying to Buono was his Oscar nomination for Baby Jane. Buono's greatest period of TV activity were the years between 1964 and 1970, when he was much in demand to play villains of various nationalities and ethnic origins on the many secret-agent programs of the period. As bad as Buono's bad guys were, he always played them with a rogueish twinkle in the eye just to let the audience know it was all in fun. His best remembered roles during the late 1960s were Count Manzeppi on the adventure series Wild Wild West, and King Tut on the weekly campfest Batman. Also during this period Buono began going the talk-show route, regaling audiences with his self-deprecating poetry, most of it centered on his avoirdupois ("I think that I shall never see / My feet"). These appearances led to nightclub and lecture dates, a popular comedy record album, and a slim volume of poems, It Could Be Verse. In the 1970s and 1980s, Buono's screen characters began to veer away from outright villainy; now he was most often seen as pompous intellectuals or shifty con men. That he could also play straight, and with compassion, was proven by Buono's appearance as President Taft in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House, wherein he delivered a poignant tribute to the late Mrs. Taft. Victor Buono was 43 when he died suddenly at his ranch home in Apple Valley, California.

Trivia: The son of a movie stunt man, Victor French made his screen entree in westerns, where his unkempt beard and scowling countenance made him a perfect heavy. He carried over his robbin' and rustlin' activities into television, making multiple appearances on such series as Gunsmoke and Bonanza. It was former Bonanza star Michael Landon, a great friend of French's, who "humanized" the veteran screen villain with the role of farmer Isiah Edwards in the weekly TV drama Little House on the Prairie. French temporarily left Little House in 1977 to star in his own sitcom, Carter Country, in which he played an affable Southern sheriff who tried his best to accommodate the ever-changing racial relationships of the 1970s. In 1984, Landon cast French as ex-cop Michael Gordon, whose bitterness at the world was softened by the presence of a guardian angel (Landon), in the popular TV series Highway to Heaven. French directed every third episode of this series, extending his directorial activities to the Los Angeles theatre scene, where he won a Critics Circle award for his staging of 12 Angry Men. In contrast to his earlier bad-guy roles, French went out of his way in the 1980s to avoid parts that required him to exhibit cruelty or inhumanity. Victor French died in 1989, shortly after completing work on the final season of Highway to Heaven.