Trivia: American actor Gary Cooper was born on the Montana ranch of his wealthy father, and educated in a prestigious school in England -- a dichotomy that may explain how the adult Cooper was able to combine the ruggedness of the frontiersman with the poise of a cultured gentleman. Injured in an auto accident while attending Wesleyan College, he convalesced on his dad's ranch, perfecting the riding skills that would see him through many a future Western film. After trying to make a living at his chosen avocation of political cartooning, Cooper was encouraged by two friends to seek employment as a cowboy extra in movies. Agent Nan Collins felt she could get more prestigious work for the handsome, gangling Cooper, and, in 1926, she was instrumental in obtaining for the actor an important role in The Winning of Barbara Worth. Movie star Clara Bow also took an interest in Cooper, seeing to it that he was cast in a couple of her films. Cooper really couldn't act at this point, but he applied himself to his work in a brief series of silent Westerns for his home studio, Paramount Pictures, and, by 1929, both his acting expertise and his popularity had soared. Cooper's first talking-picture success was The Virginian (1929), in which he developed the taciturn, laconic speech patterns that became fodder for every impressionist on radio, nightclubs, and television. Cooper alternated between tie-and-tails parts in Design for Living (1933) and he-man adventurer roles in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) for most of the 1930s; in 1941, he was honored with an Oscar for Sergeant York, a part for which he was the personal choice of the real-life title character, World War I hero Alvin York. One year later, Cooper scored in another film biography, Pride of the Yankees. As baseball great Lou Gehrig, the actor was utterly convincing (despite the fact that he'd never played baseball and wasn't a southpaw like Gehrig), and left few dry eyes in the audiences with his fade-out "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech. In 1933, Cooper married socialite Veronica Balfe, who, billed as Sandra Shaw, enjoyed a short-lived acting career. Too old for World War II service, Cooper gave tirelessly of his time in hazardous South Pacific personal-appearance tours. Ignoring the actor's indirect participation in the communist witch-hunt of the 1940s, Hollywood held Cooper in the highest regard as an actor and a man. Even those co-workers who thought that Cooper wasn't exerting himself at all when filming were amazed to see how, in the final product, Cooper was actually outacting everyone else, albeit in a subtle, unobtrusive manner. Consigned mostly to Westerns by the 1950s (including the classic High Noon [1952]), Cooper retained his box-office stature. Privately, however, he was plagued with painful, recurring illnesses, and one of them developed into lung cancer. Discovering the extent of his sickness, Cooper kept the news secret, although hints of his condition were accidentally blurted out by his close friend Jimmy Stewart during the 1961 Academy Awards ceremony, where Stewart was accepting a career-achievement Oscar for Cooper. One month later, and less than two months after his final public appearance as the narrator of a TV documentary on the "real West," Cooper died; to fans still reeling from the death of Clark Gable six months earlier, it seemed that Hollywood's Golden Era had suddenly died, as well.

Trivia: Sultry blues vocalist Julie London began her film career long before she achieved fame as a recording artist. In 1945, 18-year-old London was selected to play a bargain-basement jungle princess, appearing opposite a gorilla in the PRC cheapie Nabonga. She was pretty bad, but no worse than the film itself. By the time she was cast as a sexy teenager in The Red House (1947), her acting had improved immensely, and by the time she played the female lead in the 1951 programmer The Fat Man, it looked as though she actually had a future in films. Still, London's greatest claim to fame was her long string of hit records ("Cry Me a River" et. al.) of the 1950s; many male admirers bought her albums simply to gaze upon her come-hither countenance on the dust jacket. Her status as every red-blooded American boy's wish dream was gently lampooned in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which she appears as a spectral vision who transfixes a wistful Tom Ewell. Her best dramatic film appearances of this period include her leading-lady gigs in Voice in the Mirror (1958) and Man of the West (1958). From 1945 through 1955, Julie London was the wife of actor/producer Jack Webb; years after the divorce, London played Nurse Dixie McCall on the popular Jack Webb-produced TV series Emergency, in which she co-starred with her second husband, actor/jazz musician Bobby Troup.

Trivia: American character actor of stage, screen, and TV Lee J. Cobb, born Leo Jacob or Jacoby, was usually seen scowling and smoking a cigar. As a child, Cobb showed artistic promise as a virtuoso violinist, but any hope for a musical career was ended by a broken wrist. He ran away from home at age 17 and ended up in Hollywood. Unable to find film work there, he returned to New York and acted in radio dramas while going to night school at CCNY to learn accounting. Returning to California in 1931, he made his stage debut with the Pasadena Playhouse. Back in New York in 1935, he joined the celebrated Group Theater and appeared in several plays with them, including Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. He began his film career in 1937, going on to star and play supporting roles in dozens of films straight through to the end of his life. Cobb was most frequently cast as menacing villains, but sometimes appeared as a brooding business executive or community leader. His greatest triumph on stage came in the 1949 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in which he played the lead role, Willy Loman (he repeated his performance in a 1966 TV version). Between 1962-66, he also appeared on TV in the role of Judge Garth in the long-running series The Virginian. He was twice nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" Oscars for his work in On the Waterfront (1954) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958).

Trivia: A veteran vaudevillian, American actor Arthur O'Connell made his legitimate stage debut in the mid '30s, at which time he fell within the orbit of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Welles cast O'Connell in the tiny role of a reporter in the closing scenes of Citizen Kane (1941), a film often referred to as O'Connell's film debut, though in fact he had already appeared in Freshman Year (1939) and had costarred in two Leon Errol short subjects as Leon's conniving brother-in-law. After numerous small movie parts, O'Connell returned to Broadway, where he appeared as the erstwhile middle-aged swain of a spinsterish schoolteacher in Picnic -- a role he'd recreate in the 1956 film version, earning an Oscar nomination in the process. The somewhat downtrodden-looking O'Connell was frequently cast as fortyish losers and alcoholics; in the latter capacity he appeared as Jimmy Stewart's boozy attorney mentor in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and the result was another Oscar nomination. O'Connell continued appearing in choice character parts on both TV and films during the '60s (he'd graduated to villainy in a few of these roles), but avoided a regular television series, holding out until he could be assured top billing. The actor accepted the part of a man who discovers that his 99-year-old father has been frozen in an iceberg on the 1967 sitcom The Second Hundred Years, assuming he'd be billed first per the producers' agreement. Instead, top billing went to newcomer Monty Markham in the dual role of O'Connell's father (the ice had preserved his youthfulness) and his son. O'Connell accepted the demotion to second billing as well as could be expected, but he never again trusted the word of any Hollywood executive. Illness forced O'Connell to cut down on his appearances in the mid '70s, but the actor stayed busy as a commercial spokesman for a popular toothpaste. At the time of his death, O'Connell was appearing solely in these commercials -- by his own choice. For a mere few hours' work each year, Arthur O'Connell remained financially solvent 'til the end of his days.

Trivia: Brooklyn-born actor John Joseph Patrick Ryan borrowed his stage name "Jack Lord" from a distant relative. Spending his immediate post-college years as a seafaring man, Lord worked as an engineer in Persia before returning to American shores to manage a Greenwich Village art school and paint original work; he flourished within that sphere (often signing his paintings "John J. Ryan,") and in fact exhibited the tableaux at an array of prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern Museum of Art. Lord switched to acting in the late 1940s, studying under Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. In films and television from 1949, Lord (a performer with stark features including deep-set eyes and high cheekbones) played his share of brutish villains and working stiffs before gaining TV fame as star of the critically acclaimed but low-rated rodeo series Stoney Burke (1962). At around the same time, Lord played CIA agent Felix Leiter in the first James Bond film, Dr. No. From 1968 through 1980, Lord starred on the weekly cop drama Hawaii Five-O; producers cast him as Steve McGarrett, a troubleshooter with the Hawaii State Police who spent his days cruising around the islands, cracking open individual cases, and taking on the movers and shakers in Hawaiian organized crime, particularly gangster Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), who eluded capture until the program's final month on the air. Lord also wrote and directed several episodes. After Hawaii 5-0 folded, Jack Lord attempted another Hawaii-based TV series, but M Station: Hawaii (1980) never got any farther than a pilot film. Lord died of congestive heart failure in his Honolulu beachfront home at the age of 77, in January 1998. He was married to Marie Denarde for 50 years.

Trivia: Starting out as an assistant animator at the Walt Disney studios, John Dehner went on to work as a professional pianist, Army publicist, and radio journalist. From 1944 until the end of big-time radio in the early '60s, Dehner was one of the busiest and best performers on the airwaves. He guested on such series as Gunsmoke, Suspense, Escape, and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and starred as British news correspondent J.B. Kendall on Frontier Gentleman (1958) and as Paladin in the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel (1958-1960). On Broadway, he appeared in Bridal Crown and served as director of Alien Summer. In films from 1944, Dehner played character roles ranging from a mad scientist in The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954) to Sheriff Pat Garrett in The Left-Handed Gun (1958) to publisher Henry Luce in The Right Stuff (1983). Though he played the occasional lead, Dehner's cocked-eyebrow imperiousness generally precluded any romantic entanglements; he once commented with pride that, in all his years as an actor, he never won nor kissed the heroine. As busy on TV as elsewhere, Dehner was seen regularly on such series as The Betty White Show (1954), The Westerner (1960), The Roaring '20s (1961), The Baileys of Balboa (1964), The Doris Day Show (1968), The Don Knotts Show (1969), Temperatures Rising (1973-1974), Big Hawaii (1977), Young Maverick (1979-1980), and Enos (1980-1981). He also essayed such TV-movie roles as Dean Acheson in The Missiles of October (1974). Working almost up to the end, John Dehner died of emphysema and diabetes at the age of 76.

Trivia: Cadaverous, hollow-eyed Royal Dano made his theatrical entree as a minor player in the Broadway musical hit Finian's Rainbow. Born in New York City in 1922, he manifested a wanderlust that made him leave home at age 12 to travel around the country, and even after he returned home -- and eventually graduated from New York University -- he often journeyed far from the city on his own. He made his acting debut while in the United States Army during World War II, as part of a Special Services unit, and came to Broadway in the immediate postwar era. In films from 1950, he received his first important part, the Tattered Soldier, in John Huston's 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Thereafter, he was often seen as a Western villain, though seldom of the cliched get-outta-town variety; in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), for example, he fleshed out an ordinary bad-guy type by playing the character as a compulsive reader with a tubercular cough. He likewise did a lot with a little when cast as Mildred Natwick's deep-brooding offspring in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. With his deep, resonant speaking voice and intense eyes, Dano could make a recitation of the telephone book sound impressive and significant, and some of his non-baddie characters include the prophet Elijah, who predicts the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Ahab, in Huston's Moby Dick (1956), Peter in The King of Kings (1961) and Mayor Cermak in Capone (1975); in addition, he played Abraham Lincoln in a multipart installment of the mid-'50s TV anthology Omnibus written by James Agee. On the small screen, the producers of The Rifleman got a huge amount of mileage out of his talent in five episodes in as many seasons, most notably in "Day of Reckoning" as a gunman-turned-preacher. He also appeared in memorable guest roles in the high-rent western series The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Bonanza, and had what was probably his best television role of all as the tragically insensitive father in the two-part Little House On The Prairie episode "Sylvia." Toward the end of his life, Royal Dano had no qualms about accepting questionable projects like 1990's Spaced Invaders, but here as elsewhere, he was always given a chance to shine; one of Dano's best and most bizarre latter-day roles was in Teachers (1982), as the home-room supervisor who dies of a heart attack in his first scene -- and remains in his chair, unnoticed and unmolested, until the fadeout.

Trivia: A former Miami Beach lifeguard, strapping Ohio-born Bob Wilke performed stunt work in Hollywood films from 1936, often working for low-budget studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram. He began earning better roles in the mid- to late '40s, mostly villainous, and went on to become one of the busiest supporting players on television in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in small-screen Western fare ranging from Gene Autry to Lancer.

Trivia: "A very funny guy -- funnier than most gave him credit for," as one director described him, lanky, slow-moving Guy Wilkerson is fondly remembered for playing comedy sidekick Panhandle Perkins in the 1942-1945 PRC Texas Rangers film series, a low-rent competition for Republic Pictures' popular Three Mesquiteers Westerns. As Panhandle, Wilkerson's comedy was never intrusive and often used merely as a slow-witted counterpoint to the action. In Hollywood from at least 1937 (some sources claim he appeared onscreen as early as the 1920s), Wilkerson had honed his skills in minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, but away from his sidekick duties at PRC, he was usually seen playing less humorous characters, notably ministers or undertakers. Appearing in hundreds of feature films and television series over three decades, Guy Wilkerson was last seen in the crime thriller The Todd Killings in 1971, the year of his death from cancer.

Trivia: Chuck Roberson was a rancher before serving in World War II. Upon his discharge, he sought out film work as a stunt man. While under contract to Republic Pictures, Roberson doubled for John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch (1948). Thereafter, he worked in virtually all of Wayne's films as stunt double, action coordinator, second-unit director and bit actor. His best speaking part was Sheriff Lordin in the Duke's McClintock (1963). Chuck Roberson's career served as the inspiration for the Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy (1981-86).

Trivia: Busy character actor Frank Ferguson was able to parlay his pinched facial features, his fussy little moustache, and his bellows-like voice for a vast array of characterizations. Ferguson was equally effective as a hen-pecked husband, stern military leader, irascible neighbor, merciless employer, crooked sheriff, and barbershop hanger-on. He made his inaugural film appearance in Father is a Prince (1940) and was last seen on the big screen in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). Ferguson proved himself an above-average actor by successfully pulling off the treacly scene in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) in which Babe (William Bendix) says "Hi, kid" to Ferguson's crippled son--whereupon the boy suddenly stands up and walks! Among Franklin Ferguson's hundreds of TV appearances were regular stints on the children's series My Friend Flicka (1956) and the nighttime soap opera Peyton Place (1964-68).

Trivia: Trained at Iowa's Morningside College for a career as a musician, American actor Emory Parnell spent his earliest performing years as a concert violinist. He worked the Chautauqua and Lyceum tent circuits for a decade before leaving the road in 1930. For the next few seasons, Parnell acted and narrated in commercial and industrial films produced in Detroit. Determining that the oppurtunities and renumeration were better in Hollywood, Emory and his actress wife Effie boarded the Super Chief and headed for California. Endowed with a ruddy Irish countenance and perpetual air of frustration, Parnell immediately landed a string of character roles as cops, small town business owners, fathers-in-law and landlords (though his very first film part in Bing Crosby's Dr. Rhythm [1938] was cut out before release). In roles both large and small, Parnell became an inescapable presence in B-films of the '40s; one of his better showings was in the A-picture Louisiana Purchase, in which, as a Paramount movie executive, he sings an opening song about avoiding libel suits! Parnell was a regular in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle film series (1949-55), playing small town entrepreneur Billy Reed; on TV, the actor appeared as William Bendix' factory foreman The Life of Riley (1952-58). Emory Parnell's last public appearance was in 1974, when he, his wife Effie, and several other hale-and-hearty residents of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital were interviewed by Tom Snyder.

Trivia: Mexican-born utility actor Joe Dominguez claimed to have entered films in 1913, and to have appeared in over 300 pictures. Primarily a bit player, Dominguez usually showed up in Westerns, serials, and historical films with South-of-the-Border settings. Among Joe Dominguez' larger roles were Gonzalez in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) and the Grandfather in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1970), his last film.

Trivia: Robert J. Wilke's first taste of popularity came while he was performing with a high-dive act at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. Encouraged to give Hollywood a try, Wilke entered films as a stunt man and bit player in 1936. He spent most of his movie career in Westerns like High Noon (1952), Arrowhead (1953), The Lone Ranger (1955), and The Magnificent Seven (1960), generally playing bad-guy roles which required both menace and physical dexterity. In 1965, Robert J. Wilke was seen on a weekly basis as Sheriff Sam Corbett on the TV sagebrusher The Legend of Jesse James.

Trivia: Short, portly, and possessed of a high-pitched laugh that cuts through the air like a buzzsaw, Massachussetts-born Dick Elliott had been on stage for nearly thirty before making his screen bow in 1933. Elliott was a frequent visitor to Broadway, enjoying a substantial run in the marathon hit Abie's Irish Rose. Physically and vocally unchanged from his first screen appearance in the '30s to his last in 1961, Elliott was most generally cast in peripheral roles designed to annoy the film's principal characters with his laughing jags or his obtrusive behavior; in this capacity, he appeared as drunken conventioneers, loud-mouthed theatre audience members, and "helpful" pedestrians. Elliott also excelled playing small-scale authority figures, such as stage managers, truant officers and rural judges. Still acting into his mid 70s, Dick Elliott appeared regularly as the mayor of Mayberry on the first season of The Andy Griffith Show, and was frequently cast as a department-store Santa in the Yuletide programs of such comics as Jack Benny and Red Skelton.