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 John Smith may best be remembered for starring in the television westerns Cimarron City (1958-60) and Laramie (1959-63), but he also played supporting roles in numerous feature films. Smith was born Robert Earl Van Orden in Los Angeles. He began his career singing with the Bob Mitchell Choir Boys. The musical group appeared in two Bing Crosby efforts Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1946). While one might think a distinguished-sounding name such as Robert Van Orden has as star quality all its own, the actor himself didn't agree and partially as a jest decided to change his name to the more generic John Smith. Accompanied by agent Henry Willson (the man who provided Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson with their stage names), Van Orden went before a skeptical judge. When asked why he would adopt such a plain-jane name, Van Orden claimed that he would be the only actor in Hollywood with that name. Thus far, he has been right. As John Smith, his film credits include The Kettles on Old Mac Donald's Farm (1957), Circus World (1964) and Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1981).

Trivia: New Mexico-born Lori Nelson spent much of her childhood in radio stations and photo studios as a juvenile actress and model. Signed by Universal in 1952, Nelson played opposite Jimmy Stewart, and also starred in Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule, all within the space of one year. She freelanced in the mid-'50s, landing reasonably good roles in such films as Warners' I Died a Thousand Times (1955) and Paramount's Pardners (1956) before settling for Grade-Z drive-in fare like Hot Rod Girl. After a year of starring as Greta Lindquist in the syndicated TV sitcom How to Marry a Millionaire, Lori Nelson left the show in 1959 to seek out more challenging roles; when the calls stopped coming in, Nelson reinvented herself as a successful cosmetics manufacturer.

Trivia: One of Hollywood's premiere impressionists and comedians, Frank Gorshin is best remembered for his hypo-manic portrayal of the villainous, green-clad Riddler from the campy Batman television series of the 1960s. Gorshin made his film debut in the 1955 action-drama Hot Rod Girl. As a movie actor, Gorshin has spent the bulk of his career appearing in low-budget fare, but he has also worked in a few major features including Meteor Man (1993) and gave a well-received supporting performance in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1996). He has also been on television as a guest star on comedies, dramas, and variety shows. Lovers of the first Star Trek series will know Gorshin from the anti-prejudice episode, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Following the demise of the Batman series, Gorshin continued his film career as a character actor.

Trivia: One of the most prolific of the "Who IS that?"school of character actors, Dabbs Greer has been playing small-town doctors, bankers, merchants, druggists, mayors and ministers since at least 1950. His purse-lipped countenance and Midwestern twang was equally effective in taciturn villainous roles. Essentially a bit player in films of the 1950s (Diplomatic Courier, Deadline USA, Living It Up), Greer was given more screen time than usual as a New York detective in House of Wax (1953), while his surface normality served as excellent contrast to the extraterrestrial goings-on in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. A television actor since the dawn of the cathode-tube era, Greer has shown up in hundreds of TV supporting roles, including the "origin" episode of the original Superman series, in which he played the dangling dirigible worker rescued in mid-air by the Man of Steel. Greer also played the recurring roles of storekeeper Mr. Jones on Gunsmoke (1955-60) and Reverend Robert Alden on Little House on the Prairie (1974-83). Showing no signs of slowing down, Dabbs Greer continued accepting roles in such films as Two Moon Junction (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990) into the '90s. He died following a battle with kidney and heart disease, on April 28, 2007, not quite a month after his 90th birthday.