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: Actor Edward Binns possessed two qualities that many of his contemporaries lacked: he was always reliable, and always believable. On Broadway, he was shown to good advantage in such hit productions as Command Decision, The Lark, A View From the Bridge, and Caligula. In films from 1951's Teresa, Binns' roles ranged from the vacillating Juror #6 in 12 Angry Men (1957) to the authoritative Major General Walter Bedell Smith in Patton (1970). On television, Binns played the title role in the 1959 cop drama Brenner, Dr. Anson Kiley in The Nurses (1962-1964), and secret-service contact man Wallie Powers in It Takes a Thief (1969-1970 season). Edward Binns died suddenly at the age of 74, while traveling from New York to his home in Connecticut.

Trivia: To hear him tell it, Robert Vaughn has spent most of his acting career getting very well paid for being artistically frustrated. Born in Manhattan and raised in Minnesota, Vaughn went straight from college drama classes to his first film, the juvenile delinquent opus No Time to Be Young (1957). Ever on the search for "meaningful" roles, Vaughn signed to play a survivor of a nuclear apocalypse in what he assumed would be a serious, politically potent drama: the film was released as Teenage Caveman (1957). Though Oscar-nominated for his performance as a crippled, alcoholic war veteran in The Young Philadelphians (1959), Vaughn didn't rise to full stardom until 1964, where he was signed to play ultra-cool secret agent Napoleon Solo in the TV espionage series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968). He swore at that time that he'd never, ever subject himself to the rigors of another television series, but in 1972 he was back to the weekly grind in the British series The Protectors. In films, Vaughn has been most effective as an icy, corporate heavy, notably in Bullitt (1968) and Superman III (1982). On-stage, Vaughn has exhibited a special fondness for Shakespeare (Hamlet in particular); he was given an excellent opportunity to recite the Bard's prose on film when he played Casca in Julius Caesar (1970). A dyed-in-the-wool liberal activist, Vaughn worked on his Masters and Ph.D. in political science at L.A. City College during his U.N.C.L.E. years; his doctoral thesis was later expanded into the 1972 history of the HUAC, Only Victims. Vaughn later had several recurring roles on TV shows like The Nanny and Law & Order and the British series Hustle and Coronation Street. He died in 2016, just shy of his 84th birthday.