Trivia: The younger brother of former child star Darryl Hickman, Dwayne Hickman was himself a professional actor from the age of 10. Dwayne's early film roles were essentially bits; one of his first worthwhile assignments was a 1950 episode of TV's The Lone Ranger, in which he played a young orphan who grew up to be a character played by his older brother. After guesting on such series as The Stu Erwin Show, Hickman was cast as Bob Cummings' girl-happy nephew Chuck on the popular sitcom Love That Bob (1954-58). Claiming to have no natural talent, Hickman has insisted that he learned everything he knows about comic acting from Cummings, whom he admired to the point of idolatry. In 1958, he landed his first major screen role, playing a small-town Brando wannabe in Rally Round the Flag Boys. Max Shulman, author of the novel upon which the film was based, was impressed by Hickman, and recommended that the actor be starred in another Shulman adaptation, the weekly TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. During the Dobie run, Hickman briefly enjoyed Top-40 radio airplay with his recording of the folk-song parody "I'm a Lover, Not a Fighter." When Dobie Gillis folded in 1963, Hickman returned to feature films, offering comedy support to Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (1965) and Frankie Avalon in The Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1966). Temporarily retiring from acting in 1970, Hickman worked as a publicist, and later as entertainment director of Las Vegas' Landmark Hotel. In 1977, he followed brother Darryl's lead by joining the production staff at CBS television. Hickman served as CBS' executive in charge of daytime programming, and as supervisor of the network's comedy series. Every so often, he'd accept an acting role, and on two occasions revived his Dobie Gillis characterization for a brace of "retro" TV movies. In 1994, Dwayne Hickman and his wife Joan collaborated on his autobiography, Forever Dobie.

Trivia: Before becoming a comic actor, Bob Denver had previously worked as an athletic coach and history and math teacher at Corpus Christi Children's School of Pacific Palisades, CA. The puckish Denver first gained popularity when, at age 24, he played half-baked hipster Maynard G. Krebs on TV's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Before the first season was over, after completing only four episodes, "Maynard" would leave Dobie Gillis when he was drafted into the Army. This contingency was written into the Gillis series by having Maynard answer Uncle Sam's call to arms, and then by having Maynard return to the show after Denver was classified 4-F due to a neck injury. When Dobie Gillis was canceled in 1963, Denver let it be known that he was available for non-beatnik parts, only to be immediately cast as a young bongo-playing bohemian in the theatrical feature Take Her, She's Mine. The following year, Denver was finally able to shake the Maynard image when Jerry Van Dyke turned down the opportunity to play the lead in the simplistic sitcom Gilligan's Island. Denver stepped into the role of eternally bumbling castaway Gilligan, making it firmly and uniquely his own for the next three years.Denver's first post-Gilligan's Island project was the unsuccessful Phyllis Diller film vehicle Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady? (1968). In 1968, he was back to the weekly sitcom fold as cabdriver Rufus Butterworth, best pal and business partner of restaurateur Bert Gamus (Herb Edelman), on The Good Guys. This show ended after two seasons, whereupon Denver scored a personal and professional triumph as Woody Allen's replacement in the long-running Broadway comedy Play It Again, Sam. With Gilligan's Island attaining cult status in the early '70s, it was only natural that Denver cash in on the phenomenon, first as star of the Gilligan-like syndicated sitcom Dusty's Trail (1974), then as cohort to Chuck McCann on another "castaway comedy," the 1975 Saturday-morning kiddie show Far out Space Nuts. He also provided the voice to his animated likeness on a brace of cartoon series, The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974-1976) and Gilligan's Planet (1980), and reprised Gilligan in the flesh in a trio of made-for-TV features based on the original series. He also revived Maynard G. Krebs, older but no wiser, in a pair of abortive Dobie Gillis revival pilots.

Trivia: American actor Frank Faylen was born into a vaudeville act; as an infant, he was carried on stage by his parents, the song-and-dance team Ruf and Clark. Traveling with his parents from one engagement to another, Faylen somehow managed to complete his education at St. Joseph's Prep School in Kirkwood, Missouri. Turning pro at age 18, Faylen worked on stage until getting a Hollywood screen test in 1936. For the next nine years, Faylen played a succession of bit and minor roles, mostly for Warner Bros.; of these minuscule parts he would later say, "If you sneezed, you missed me." Better parts came his way during a brief stay at Hal Roach Studios in 1942 and 1943, but Faylen's breakthrough came at Paramount in 1945, where he was cast as Bim, the chillingly cynical male nurse at Bellevue's alcoholic ward in the Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend. Though the part lasted all of four minutes' screen time, Faylen was so effective in this unpleasant role that he became entrenched as a sadistic bully or cool villain in his subsequent films. TV fans remember Faylen best for his more benign but still snarly role as grocery store proprietor Herbert T. Gillis on the 1959 sitcom Dobie Gillis. For the next four years, Faylen gained nationwide fame for such catch-phrases as "I was in World War II--the big one--with the good conduct medal!", and, in reference to his screen son Dobie Gillis, "I gotta kill that boy someday. I just gotta." Faylen worked sporadically in TV and films after Dobie Gillis was canceled in 1963, receiving critical plaudits for his small role as an Irish stage manager in the 1968 Barbra Streisand starrer Funny Girl. The actor also made an encore appearance as Herbert T. Gillis in a Dobie Gillis TV special of the 1970s, where his "good conduct medal" line received an ovation from the studio audience. Faylen was married to Carol Hughes, an actress best-recalled for her role as Dale Arden in the 1939 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and was the father of another actress, also named Carol.

Trivia: A leading teen ingénue of the 1950s and 1960s, Tuesday Weld later emerged as one of the more intriguing actresses in Hollywood, delivering a string of well-received performances in the kinds of offbeat and idiosyncratic projects rarely visited by performers of her beauty and glamour. Born Susan Weld August 27, 1943, in New York City, the name "Tuesday" was an extension of a girlhood nickname, "Tu-Tu." She began working as a child model at age four to help support her family after the death of her father, quickly moving from mail-order catalogues to television commercials. She made her film debut in 1963's Rock, Rock, Rock before understudying in Broadway's 1957 production of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Upon signing a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox, Weld was labeled by the press as "Fox's answer to Sandra Dee," but after just one film, 1959's Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, the studio dropped her.Weld shot to prominence through her work in the television comedy The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which premiered in 1959. That same year she appeared on the silver screen opposite Danny Kaye in The Five Pennies, followed in 1960 by the campus drama Because They're Young. Also in 1960, Weld began appearing under schlockmeister Albert Zugsmith, first in Sex Kittens Go to College and later in the following year's The Private Lives of Adam and Eve. Successive roles in Return to Peyton Place and the Elvis Presley vehicle Wild in the Country further crippled her attempts to mount a serious acting career, although her turn in the 1962 Frank Tashlin comedy Bachelor Flat showed signs of life. Weld then turned down the seemingly tailor-made title role in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita in order to study her craft at the Actors' Studio, and after holding her own opposite Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason in 1963's Soldier in the Rain, she announced she would no longer accept teenage roles.However, teen roles were all that continued to come Weld's way, and after a two-year absence from the screen she resurfaced in 1965's I'll Take Sweden as the young daughter of star Bob Hope. She followed with an appearance in the McQueen gambling drama The Cincinnati Kid, and in 1966 delivered her strongest performance to date in George Axelrod's little-seen satiric gem Lord Love a Duck. That same year Weld married, later giving birth to her first child. Motherhood brought a temporary halt to her career, forcing her to turn down plum assignments including Bonnie and Clyde, Cactus Flower, True Grit, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. She returned to work in 1968's Pretty Poison, again earning strong critical notices, but after 1970's I Walk the Line, it was reported that she had moved to Britain and retired from film.The move was not permanent, for in 1971 Weld appeared in her friend Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place. After 1972's Play It As It Lays, she returned to television work, starring in the TV films Reflections of Murder and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. In 1977, Weld appeared in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and a year later she starred in Who'll Stop the Rain? From 1980 to 1985, Weld was married to Dudley Moore, a period during which she appeared in Michael Mann's 1981 thriller Thief and Sergio Leone's 1984 classic Once Upon a Time in America. In the latter half of the decade, however, she appeared more infrequently before the camera, with only a pair of TV-movie credits, 1986's Something in Common and Circle of Violence: A Family Drama, and a lead role in the 1988 feature Heartbreak Hotel. In the 1990s, Tuesday Weld sightings were even more rare, including only 1991's Mistress, 1993's Falling Down, and 1996's Feeling Minnesota.

Trivia: It might have been easy to write off American actor Warren Beatty as merely the younger brother of film star Shirley MacLaine, were it not for the fact that Beatty was a profoundly gifted performer whose creative range extended beyond mere acting. After studying at Northwestern University and with acting coach Stella Adler, Beatty was being groomed for stardom almost before he was of voting age, cast in prominent supporting roles in TV dramas and attaining the recurring part of the insufferable Milton Armitage on the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis. Beatty left Dobie after a handful of episodes, writing off his part as "ridiculous," and headed for the stage, where he appeared in a stock production of Compulsion and in William Inge's Broadway play A Loss of Roses.The actor's auspicious film debut occurred in Splendor in the Grass (1961), after which he spent a number of years being written off by the more narrow-minded movie critics as a would-be Brando. Both Beatty and his fans knew that there was more to his skill than that, and in 1965 Beatty sank a lot of his energy and money into a quirky, impressionistic crime drama, Mickey One (1965). The film was a critical success but failed to secure top bookings, though its teaming of Beatty with director Arthur Penn proved crucial to the shape of movie-making in the 1960s. With Penn again in the director's chair, Beatty took on his first film as producer/star, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Once more, critics were hostile -- at first. A liberal amount of praise from fellow filmmakers and the word-of-mouth buzz from film fans turned Bonnie and Clyde into the most significant film of 1967 -- and compelled many critics to reverse their initial opinions and issue apologies. This isn't the place to analyze the value and influence Bonnie and Clyde had; suffice it to say that this one film propelled Warren Beatty from a handsome, talented film star into a powerful filmmaker.Picking and choosing his next projects very carefully, Beatty was offscreen as much as on from 1970 through 1975, though several of his projects -- most prominently McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Parallax View (1974) -- would be greeted with effusive praise by film critics and historians. In 1975, Beatty wrote his first screenplay, and the result was Shampoo (1975), a trenchant satire on the misguided mores of the late '60s. Beatty turned director for 1978's Heaven Can Wait, a delightful remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan that was successful enough to encourage future Hollywood bankrolling of Beatty's directorial efforts. In 1981, Beatty produced, directed, co-scripted and acted in Reds, a spectacular recounting of the Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of American Communist John Reed. It was a pet project of Beatty's, one he'd been trying to finance since the 1970s (at that time, he'd intended to have Sergei Bondarchuk of War and Peace fame as director). Reds failed to win a Best Picture Academy Award, though Beatty did pick up an Oscar as Best Director. Nothing Beatty has done since Reds has been without interest; refusing to turn out mere vehicles, he has taken on a benighted attempt to re-spark the spirit of the old Hope-Crosby road movies (Ishtar [1984]); brought a popular comic strip to the screen, complete with primary colors and artistic hyperbole (Dick Tracy [1991]); and managed to make the ruthless gangster Bugsy Siegel a sympathetic visionary (Bugsy [1992]). In 1998 he was able to breath new life into political satire with Bulworth, his much acclaimed film in which he plays a disillusioned politician who turns to rap to express himself. In 2001, Beatty rekindled memories of Ishtar as he starred in another phenomenal bust, Town & Country. Budgeted at an astronomical 90 million dollars and earning a miserable 6.7 million dollars during it's brief theatrical run, Town & Country was released three years after completion and pulled from theaters after a mere four weeks, moving critics to rank it among the biggest flops in movie history.Fiercely protective of his private life, and so much an advocate of total control that he will dictate the type of film stock and lighting to be used when being interviewed for television, Beatty has nonetheless had no luck at all in keeping his many amours out of the tabloids. However, Beatty's long and well-documented history of high-profile romances with such actresses as Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and Madonna came to an abrupt end upon his 1992 marriage to Bugsy co-star Annette Bening, with whom he later starred in 1994's Love Affair, his blighted remake of the 1957 An Affair to Remember.

Trivia: Supporting actor Tommy Farrell first appeared onscreen in 1950. He is the son of actress Glenda Farrell.

Trivia: Actor Darryl Hickman was discovered at age three by kiddie-troupe entrepreneur Ethel Meglin, to whom Hickman's insurance salesman father had sold a policy. Whenever young Hickman would ask his ambitious mother exactly why he was trodding the boards with Meglin's Kiddies, she would reply, "But, dear, it's what you've always wanted." Hickman's first movie was a minor role in If I Were King (1938), followed by a better, critically lauded role in Bing Crosby's The Star Maker (1939). After free-lancing for several seasons, Hickman signed a five-year MGM contract, which he later considered a mixed blessing in that, while his roles were good ones, he grew up much too quickly for his tastes. During the 1940s, Hickman often played the film's leading adult character as a child: young Ira Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), young Eddie Rickenbacker in Captain Eddie (1945), and so on. Hickman's first mature role, for which he garnered a passel of excellent reviews, was as Clark Gable's son in 1949's Any Number Can Play. Weary of the Hollywood game in 1951, Hickman entered a monastery, but quit this austere existence after 18 months to enroll in Loyola University. Some of Hickman's better adult roles after his Army service included a meaty part in 1956's Tea and Sympathy and a starring part on the 1961 Civil War-based TV series The Americans. In the late 1950s, Hickman found that his fame had been eclipsed by his younger brother Dwayne, who co-starred on TV's Bob Cummings Show and played the lead in the weekly sitcom Dobie Gillis. Like Dwayne, Darryl eventually went into the production side of the business as a CBS executive, though he was still willing to take a part if the project interested him (as 1976's Network obviously did). Darryl Hickman was married to actress Pamela Lincoln, whom he met on the set of The Tingler (1959).

Trivia: The son of the Los Angeles Times' drama editor, William Schallert was, along with Sydney Chaplin, one of the co-founders of Hollywood's highly regarded Circle Theatre troupe. Sent to Great Britain on a Fulbright Fellowship to study British repertory theatre, Schallert guest-lectured at Oxford on several occasion before heading home. A character actor of almost intimidating versatility, Schallert began his long film and TV career in 1951. While he appeared in films of every variety, Schallert was most closely associated with the many doctors (mad or otherwise), lab technicians and scientific experts that he played in such science fiction endeavors as The Man From Planet X (1951), Gog (1954), Them! (1954) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Monolith Monsters (1959). Director Joe Dante paid homage to Schallert's prolific horror-flick work by casting the actor in his Matinee, where he played yet another dabbler in Things Man Is Not Meant to Know in the film-within-a-film "Mant." Schallert's hundreds television credits could fill a book in themselves; the Nickelodeon cable network once tried to put together a montage of the actor's guest star appearances, touching only the tip of the iceberg. He was a regular on such series as Dobie Gillis (as literature teacher Mr. Pomfrit, who always dismissed his class as though announcing the beginning of the Indy 500), Get Smart (as a senile 97-year-old Navy admiral), The Nancy Drew Mysteries (as Nancy's attorney father) The New Gidget (as Gidget's professor father) The Nancy Walker Show, Little Women and Santa Barbara. His most famous TV role was as Patty Lane's ever-patient newspaper-editor dad on The Patty Duke Show, which ran from 1963 through 1966; over twenty years later, Mr. Schallert and Ms. Duke were touchingly reunited--again as father and daughter--on an episode of The Torkelsons (1991-92). William Schallert once served as president of the Screen Actors' Guild, a position later held...by Patty Duke. Shallert continued acting until the early 2010s; he died in 2016, at age 93.

Trivia: American actor Steve Franken was the son of a Hollywood press agent, thus he grew up discoursing in the highly stylized trade-magazine lingo that every show-business functionary was required to learn in the '40s and '50s. Sustaining himself as a stage actor in 1960, Franken was appearing in a Los Angeles production of Say Darling when he was spotted by Rod Amateau, producer-director of the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis. Amateau was looking for someone to play the insufferable rich-boy nemesis of Dobie, a role recently vacated by Warren Beatty. Thus Franken's first assignment on a Hollywood soundstage was in the role of Chatsworth Osborne Jr., snotty young millionaire overachiever (the character had been called "Milton Armitage" when Beatty played it). The character's trademark was a pained look of condescension, which Franken attributed to an ulcer that he'd suffered since the age of 14, when his mother died. Not really a regular on Dobie Gillis, Franken found himself at the unemployment office between his "Chatsworth" stints, and understandably grew to resent the character he played so well. When he did receive an outside job, it was generally as a Chatsworth type, so when Dobie Gillis ended its run in 1963, Franken sought out as many villainous roles as possible--after another "rich buddy" stint on the short-lived series Tom, Dick and Mary. Some of the actor's best work can be caught in reruns of such '60s TV series as Perry Mason and The Wild Wild West. Still, Franken didn't work as often as he should, and it was his contention that Dobie Gillis had all but ruined his career. Steve Franken persevered into the '70s and '80s, notably as an actor/director on the popular religious TV anthology Insight, with frequent appearances on the Jerry Lewis Telethons and in occasional character roles in such films as Westworld (1973).