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: American actor Morris Ankrum graduated from the University of Southern California with a law degree, then went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he founded a collegiate little theatre, eventually turning his hobby into a vocation as a teacher and director at the Pasadena Playhouse. (He was much admired by his students, including such future luminaries as Robert Preston and Raymond Burr.) Having already changed his name from Nussbaum to Ankrum for professional reasons, Ankrum was compelled to undergo another name change when he signed a Paramount Pictures contract in the 1930s; in his first films, he was billing as Stephen Morris. Reverting to Morris Ankrum in 1939, the sharp-featured, heavily eyebrowed actor flourished in strong character roles, usually of a villainous nature, throughout the 1940s. By the 1950s, Ankrum had more or less settled into "authority" roles in science-fiction films and TV programs. Among his best known credits in this genre were Rocketship X-M (1950), Red Planet Mars (1952), Flight to Mars (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953) (do we detect a subtle pattern here?), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). The fact that Morris Ankrum played innumerable Army generals was fondly invoked in director Joe Dante's 1993 comedy Matinee: the military officer played by Kevin McCarthy in the film-within-a-film Mant is named General Ankrum.

Trivia: Paul Carr has been a very busy actor since the '50s on-stage, in television, and in films, after starting his screen career with Alfred Hitchcock. Born in New Orleans in 1934, he grew up in the town of Marrero, in Jefferson Parish, LA. As a teenager, he had an interest in music as well as acting. After a short stint in the Marine Corps in his teens, he began his acting career with a role in a New Orleans production of Billy Budd, and by the mid-'50s was working on live televsion out of New York City, including appearances on Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, while continuing theatrical work in stock companies in Ohio and Michigan, with roles such as Peter Quilpe in The Cocktail Party, Haemon in Antigone, Jack in The Rose Tattoo, and Hal Carter in Picnic, as well as a summer tour in Fifth Season with Chico Marx. Carr made his movie debut in 1955 with a small uncredited role in Alfred Hitchcock's fact-based thriller The Wrong Man. That same year, he portrayed a prisoner of war in the Theatre Guild's production of Time Limit on Broadway. His film career continued with a much larger role in Alfred Werker's The Young Don't Cry (1957), starring James Whitmore and Sal Mineo, and that same year he appeared in the jukebox movie Jamboree. He worked steadily on television in the late '50s and early '60s with guest spots and supporting roles in a lot of Westerns such as Trackdown, Rawhide, The Rifleman, and The Virginian. Later he appeared in detective shows and medical and war dramas, such as 77 Sunset Strip, Dr. Kildare, and Twelve O'Clock High, interspersed with occasional film work, including Captain Newman, M.D. (1963). He had a recurring role as one of the submarine Seaview's junior officers on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in its black-and-white season, and played other parts of the show subsequently. Carr was all over the tube on Burke's Law, Combat, Gunsmoke, and a dozen other shows in the middle of the decade. In 1965, Carr won the role of Bill Horton, the physician son of protagonist Dr. Tom Horton on Days of Our Lives, which kept him busy for the subsequent year. He was later a regular on General Hospital and The Doctors, and between the three soap operas, Carr had put in a lot of time portraying dedicated medical practitioners. He may be remembered best, however, for his appearance on a pop-culture institution that has been exumed and re-examined by the public en masse: In 1966, he was seen in the second Star Trek pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," portraying Lt. Kelso, the affable Enterprise officer who is strangled telekinetically by the ship's rapidly mutating helmsman. Carr has gone on to work in dozens of television shows --everything from Get Smart, Mannix, The Rockford Files, and Murphy Brown, to miniseries and features, both made-for-television (The Deadly Tower). In 2001, his voice was heard in Blood: The Last Vampire, as the school's headmaster.

Trivia: Sullen, sensuous leading lady Luana Anders began making films in her teens, starring in such American-International cheapies as Reform School Girls. During this first stage of her career, Luana enjoyed a few above-average (albeit fleeting) assignments, including the role of walled-up Catherina Medina in Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and a similar "victim" characterization in Francis Ford Coppola's shakedown-cruise picture Dementia 13 (1962). Evidently, she made a lot of valuable professional contacts while toiling away in the "B" mills of the 1950s and 1960s. Cycle-flick refugees Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson both hired Luana to appear in their respective directorial efforts Easy Rider (1969) and Goin' South (1976). She also showed up in Nicholson's starring vehicles The Last Detail (1973, as the prostitute who "services" jail-bound Randy Quaid in a most unexpected and touching manner) and The Two Jakes (1990). In 1984, she was prominently featured in Movers and Shakers, a cinematic labor of love for actor/scripter Charles Grodin; nine years later she again appeared with Grodin, playing a Records Bureaucrat in Hearts and Souls (1993). In 1989, Luana Anders co-wrote the script for Limit Up (1989), a contemporary rehash of the "Faust" legend.

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).