Trivia: Rough-hewn American leading man Richard Boone was thrust into the cold cruel world when he was expelled from Stanford University, for a minor infraction. He worked as a oil-field laborer, boxer, painter and free-lance writer before settling upon acting as a profession. After serving in World War II, Boone used his GI Bill to finance his theatrical training at the Actors' Studio, making his belated Broadway debut at age 31, playing Jason in Judith Anderson's production of Medea. Signed to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1951, Boone was given good billing in his first feature, Halls of Montezuma; among his Fox assignments was the brief but telling role of Pontius Pilate in The Robe (1953). Boone launched the TV-star phase of his career in the weekly semi-anthology Medic, playing Dr. Konrad Steiner. From 1957 through 1963, Boone portrayed Paladin, erudite western soldier of fortune, on the popular western series Have Gun, Will Travel. He directed several episodes of this series. Boone tackled a daring TV assignment in 1963, when in collaboration with playwright Clifford Odets, he appeared in the TV anthology series The Richard Boone Show. Unique among filmed dramatic programs, Boone's series featured a cast of eleven regulars (including Harry Morgan, Robert Blake, Jeanette Nolan, Bethel Leslie and Boone himself), who appeared in repertory, essaying different parts of varying sizes each week. The Richard Boone Show failed to catch on, and Boone went back to films. In 1972 he starred in another western series, this one produced by his old friend Jack Webb: Hec Ramsey, the saga of an old-fashioned sheriff coping with an increasingly industrialized West. In the last year of his life, Boone was appointed Florida's cultural ambassador. Richard Boone died at age 65 of throat cancer.

Trivia: One of England's best and most successful action directors of the '30s, Robert Stevenson became a filmmaker whose work was seen by tens of millions of filmgoers well into the late '60s His name was seldom noticed, however, as the director of such Walt Disney hits as Mary Poppins, Son of Flubber, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor, and The Love Bug. The son of a businessman, Stevenson was a science student at Cambridge, and was led to film through his graduate work in psychology. He began directing movies in 1932, and soon proved himself equally adept in all genres and subject material, capable of deriving bracing tension and excitement from material as diverse as historical drama, African adventure epics, and contemporary thrillers -- among his most notable movies in those categories, respectively, are Tudor Rose, King Solomon's Mines (the 1937 version with Paul Robeson), and Non-Stop New York. Like Alfred Hitchcock, he was signed by David O. Selznick in 1939 and brought to America, but unlike Hitchcock, Stevenson never made a movie for Selznick during the 10 years he was under contract to him. He joined the Disney organization in 1957, and became their top filmmaking hand in live-action films, directing at least a half-dozen Disney classics and another half-dozen confirmed hits over the next 20 years.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Arthur Space was active in films from 1940. Tall, tweedy, and usually sporting a mustache, Space played just about every kind of supporting role, from Western banker to big-city detective to jewel thief. One of his largest film roles was as the delightfully eccentric inventor Alva P. Hartley in the 1944 Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Big Noise. As busy on television as in films, Arthur Space was seen on a weekly basis as Herbert Brown, the father of horse-loving teenager Velvet Brown, in the TV series National Velvet (1960-1961).

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Vic Perrin's first significant stage credit was in the touring company of Helen Hayes' Victoria Regina. While working as a news announcer with the ABC radio network in the mid-'40s, he decided to return to acting, and within a few years was one of radio's busiest character players. He was one of the regulars on the long-running soap opera One Man's Family, and could also be heard on such prestigious anthologies as Escape and Suspense. He is most closely associated with the original radio versions of Dragnet and Gunsmoke, writing several scripts for the latter series. He continued his association with Dragnet creator Jack Webb into the TV versions of the 1950s and 1960s, playing a wide variety of kindly priests, two-bit crooks, soft-spoken detectives, suburban alcoholics, liberal professors, and homicidal maniacs. In films from 1952, he was seen as a publicity-seeking gunman in The Racket (1953), a gay art director in Forever Female (1956), and a bearded pedant in The Bubble (1969), among other films. A prolific voice-over specialist, Vic Perrin provided countless characterizations for such television cartoon series as Jonny Quest and Fantastic Four; he is perhaps best known for his two-year stint as the unseen Control Voice ("There is nothing wrong with your television set?") on TV's The Outer Limits (1963-1965).