Trivia: The son of an Oklahoma carpet layer, James Garner did stints in the Army and merchant marines before working as a model. His professional acting career began with a non-speaking part in the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), in which he was also assigned to run lines with stars Lloyd Nolan, Henry Fonda, and John Hodiak. Given that talent roster, and the fact that the director was Charles Laughton, Garner managed to earn his salary and receive a crash course in acting at the same time. After a few television commercials, he was signed as a contract player by Warner Bros. in 1956. He barely had a part in his first film, The Girl He Left Behind (1956), though he was given special attention by director David Butler, who felt Garner had far more potential than the film's nominal star, Tab Hunter. Due in part to Butler's enthusiasm, Garner was cast in the Warner Bros. TV Western Maverick. The scriptwriters latched on to his gift for understated humor, and, before long, the show had as many laughs as shoot-outs. Garner was promoted to starring film roles during his Maverick run, but, by the third season, he chafed at his low salary and insisted on better treatment. The studio refused, so he walked out. Lawsuits and recriminations were exchanged, but the end result was that Garner was a free agent as of 1960. He did quite well as a freelance actor for several years, turning in commendable work in such films as Boys' Night Out (1962) and The Great Escape (1963), but was soon perceived by filmmakers as something of a less-expensive Rock Hudson, never more so than when he played Hudson-type parts opposite Doris Day in Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All! (both 1963).Garner fared rather better in variations of his Maverick persona in such Westerns as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and The Skin Game (1971), but he eventually tired of eating warmed-over stew; besides, being a cowboy star had made him a walking mass of injuries and broken bones. He tried to play a more peaceable Westerner in the TV series Nichols (1971), but when audiences failed to respond, his character was killed off and replaced by his more athletic twin brother (also Garner). The actor finally shed the Maverick cloak with his long-running TV series The Rockford Files (1974-1978), in which he played a John MacDonald-esque private eye who never seemed to meet anyone capable of telling the truth. Rockford resulted in even more injuries for the increasingly battered actor, and soon he was showing up on TV talk shows telling the world about the many physical activities which he could no longer perform. Rockford ended in a spirit of recrimination, when Garner, expecting a percentage of the profits, learned that "creative bookkeeping" had resulted in the series posting none. To the public, Garner was the rough-hewn but basically affable fellow they'd seen in his fictional roles and as Mariette Hartley's partner (not husband) in a series of Polaroid commercials. However, his later film and TV-movie roles had a dark edge to them, notably his likable but mercurial pharmacist in Murphy's Romance (1985), for which he received an Oscar nomination, and his multifaceted co-starring stints with James Woods in the TV movies Promise (1986) and My Name Is Bill W. (1989). In 1994, Garner came full circle in the profitable feature film Maverick (1994), in which the title role was played by Mel Gibson. With the exception of such lower-key efforts as the noir-ish Twilight (1998) and the made-for-TV thriller Dead Silence (1997), Garner's career in the '90s found the veteran actor once again tapping into his latent ability to provoke laughs in such efforts as Space Cowboys (2000) while maintaining a successful small-screen career by returning to the role of Jim Rockford in several made-for-TV movies. He provided a voice for the popular animatedfeature Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and appeared in the comedy-drama The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Garner enjoyed a career resurgance in 2003, when he joined the cast of TV's 8 Simple Rules, acting as a sort of replacement for John Ritter, who had passed away at the beginning of the show's second season. He next appeared in The Notebook (2004), which earned Garner a Screen Actors Guild nomination and also poised him to win the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. His last on-screen role was a small supporting role in The Ultimate Gift (2007). In 2008, Garner suffered a stroke and retired acting. He died in 2014, at age 86.

Trivia: Actor Edward Byrnes broke into films around 1957, playing a few bits (he can be seen as one of Jimmy Piersall's buddies in the 1957 biopic Fear Strikes Out) and minor roles. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract, Byrnes connected with the public in the role of a punkish villain in Girl on the Run, the 90-minute pilot episode of 77 Sunset Strip. Audience response to the young actor was so overwhelmingly positive that he was signed as a regular for the Sunset Strip series proper. As hipster parking lot attendant Gerald Lloyd Kookson III, aka "Kookie," he skyrocketed to teen idoldom via the simple expedient of combing his hair at least once per episode. He went on to parlay this schtick into a Top 40 song hit, "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb." During the second season of 77 Sunset Strip, Byrnes followed the example of fellow Warner contractees James Garner and Clint Walker, threatening to quit the series if he wasn't given more money and better scripts. Warners acquiesced to his demands: The studio also improved the social status of Byrnes' character on the series, promoting him to junior detective. After leaving the series in 1963, Byrnes moved to Europe, where he flourished as a star of spaghetti Westerns and espionage flicks. A pop-culture icon by the late '70s, Byrnes made occasional returns to Hollywood in such campy roles as Dick Clark-clone Vince Fontaine in Grease (1978). In addition, Ed Byrnes played "the Emcee" on the 1979 anthology series Sweepstakes, and in 1974, "Kookie" hosted the pilot episode of the evergreen quiz show Wheel of Fortune.

Trivia: Born Peter de Sappe, this lead actor appeared onscreen from 1958.

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: The aptly nicknamed Chubby Johnson didn't give up his journalism career for the movies until he was nearly 50. After a brief tenure as comical sidekick to Republic cowboy star Allan "Rocky" Lane, Johnson became a freelance character actor, appearing opposite practically everyone from Randolph Scott to Ronald Reagan to Will Rogers Jr. Extremely active on television, he was seen on a regular basis as Concho in the 1963 TV Western Temple Houston. Chubby Johnson remained in films until 1969.

Trivia: Actor Michael Dante was first seen in a secondary role in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). A bit too "threatening" for romantic leads, Dante was more effectively cast in antagonistic roles, notably Chief Crazy Horse in the 1967 TV series Custer and the 1990 theatrical feature Crazy Horse and Custer: The Untold Story. Even when ostensibly cast as a good guy in Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1965), he turned out to be a heel in the film's final scenes. Star Trek devotees will recall Michael Dante as Maab in the 1967 episode "Friday's Child."

Trivia: After distinguishing himself in athletics at Rockhurst college, Jim Bannon launched his film career as a stunt man and double. Under contract to Columbia in the mid-1940s, Bannon starred in a brace of films based on the radio series I Love a Mystery. Bannon was also one of four actors to essay the role of B-western hero Red Ryder, and was a regular on such radio series as The Great Gildersleeve and Stars over Hollywood. In 1955, Bannon starred on the Gene Autry-produced TV series The Adventures of Champion. At one time married to actress Bea Benaderet, Jim Bannon was the father of TV actor Jack Bannon.

Trivia: American general purpose actor Howard Negley made his screen bow as Nelson in 20th Century Fox's Smokey. Negley went on to reasonably prominent character parts in such B-pictures as Charlie Chan in the Trap (1947). For the most part, he played nameless bit parts as police captains, politicians, and reporters. Howard Negley was last seen as the Twentieth Century Limited conductor in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).

Trivia: Mainly a bit player, Robert "Buddy" Shaw (born Wilfred Robert Shaw) turned up in scores of Hollywood films and television series from 1931 to the 1960s, in the early years mainly playing college students. His largest role was his first: Blanche Mehaffey's weak-willed brother, innocently accused of murder in Riders of the North (1931). This Robert Shaw should not be confused with the British star (1927-1978) of the same name.