Trivia: Jockey turned singer/actor, Davy Jones played the adorable mop-top Davy on the mid-to-late '60s phenom television series, The Monkees. He and his fellow manufactured bandmates Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith made one film together -- Head (1968). After the group's demise, Jones occasionally played himself as a guest star on television (Brady Bunch) and in commercials. In 1995, he again played himself in The Brady Bunch Movie. Jones and all the other Monkees, except Nesmith, periodically got back together for tours and reunion concerts.

Trivia: Starred in the 1950s series Circus Boy. Learned to play the drums after being cast as the Monkees' drummer. Played the first synthesizer on a rock recording (the Monkees' "Daily Nightly" from the 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.). Cowrote and directed the final episode of The Monkees. Voiced various characters on Saturday-morning cartoons during the 1970s, including The Funky Phantom and The Scooby-Doo Show. Auditioned for the role of Fonzie on Happy Days. Moved to London in 1977 to costar in Harry Nilsson's musical The Point! with fellow Monkee Davy Jones. Worked as a director-producer in England during the late 1970s and early '80s. His credits include a stage version of Bugsy Malone that starred a 14-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Created-produced the early 1980s British children's show Luna. Studied physics during the 1970s and '80s at the Open University, a UK correspondence college.

Trivia: Multi-talented Michael Nesmith has come a long way from playing the quiet Monkee in the little wool cap on the popular 1960s sitcom The Monkees. Since then he has proven himself an innovator in musical genres and music videos -- his work in the latter area led to the creation of the MTV network. Nesmith is also a movie and television producer. Born in Houston, TX, Nesmith is the son of Bette Nesmith Graham, the woman who invented Liquid Paper correction fluid. Before auditioning for The Monkees in 1965, Nesmith had served a two-year stint in the Air Force, worked as a backup musician in Nashville, performed in a Los Angeles-based folk-rock duo with his friend John London, composed songs, including "Mary, Mary" and "Different Drum," and recorded a few singles. While with the Monkees, Nesmith wrote several of their hits and helped persuade the Monkees' "handlers" to allow them to produce their own records. He left the television group after completing their only feature film, Head (1968), to form his own band and then launched his solo career. In 1977, he designed a new television show called Popclips, in which he utilized live music clips while counting down the week's chart-toppers. The show is credited for inspiring the genesis of MTV. Nesmith's mother died in 1980 and left him half of her Liquid Paper fortune (worth over 20 million dollars). Nesmith then launched his own record and film production company, Pacific Arts, which became the number one source of American music videos in the '80s, and won the first Video Grammy for it in 1981. In the late '80s, Nesmith made his own filmmaking debut with the inventive music video "Elephant Parts." He reunited with the Monkees and continued to occasionally perform with them. In 1997, he and the group appeared in an hour-long television special and also released a new album, Justus.

Trivia: Learned to play piano at the age of 9. Was part of Edwin O. Smith High School's first graduating class. Landed his spot in the Monkees thanks to a recommendation from friend and fellow musician Stephen Stills. In 1972, he spent three months in jail for hashish possession. Portrayed Topanga Lawrence's father in episodes of the TV series Boy Meets World. Battled a rare form of cancer known as adenoid cystic carcinoma in 2009.

Trivia: A Broadway actor since 1931, Philip Ober first appeared before the cameras in 1951, when he was invited by actor/director Mel Ferrer to play a supporting role in The Secret Fury (1951). Adept at portraying executive types who seemed to be up to something shady, Ober was often as not cast as a corporate villain. His most famous film role was in the 1953 Oscar-winner From Here to Eternity as the hateful Army officer who, while his wife, Deborah Kerr, carries on an affair with Burt Lancaster, tries to strongarm Montgomery Clift into entering a boxing competition. Ober voluntarily gave up his acting career in the mid-'60s when he joined the U.S. Consular Service in Mexico. Married three times, Philip Ober was the former husband of I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance.

Trivia: Wacky comic actor Doodles Weaver started appearing in films in the late '30s, usually playing country-bumpkin bits. He rose to fame as a musician/comedian with the Spike Jones Orchestra, regaling audiences with his double-talk renditions of such tunes as "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" and "The Whiffenpoof Song." His most popular routine was his mile-a-minute parody of an overly excited sports announcer ("And the winnerrrrrrrr....Bei-del-baum!!!!). So valuable was Weaver to Jones' aggregation that Doodles was the only member of the group who was allowed to drink while on tour. This indulgence, alas, proved to be Weaver's undoing; though he'd scaled the heights as a radio and TV star in the 1940s and 1950s, Doodles had lost most of his comic expertise by the 1960s thanks to his fondness for the bottle. A bitter, broken man in his last years, Weaver died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 71. Doodles Weaver was the brother of TV executive Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, and the uncle of actress Sigourney Weaver.

Trivia: Olan Soule was so familiar as a character actor in movies and television during the 1950s and 1960s -- and right into the 1980s -- that audiences could be forgiven for not even reckoning with his 25-year career on radio. Soule was born in 1909 in La Harpe, Illinois, to a family that reportedly could trace its ancestry back to three passengers on the Mayflower. He began acting in tent shows in his teens, and made his first appearance on radio in 1926. With his rich, expressive voice -- which frequently seemed to belong to characters that audiences thought of as more physically imposing than the slightly built, 135-pound actor -- he quickly found himself in demand for a multitude of roles. Soule ultimately became closely associated with two series, spending more than a decade on the radio soap opera Bachelor's Children, and a nine-year run on The First Nighter, starting in the 1940s. He made the jump to television in 1949, but even in the visual medium his voice was initially part of his fortune -- one of his early movie assignments was as the narrator of the feature film Beyond The Forest (1949), starring Bette Davis. And many of those early on-screen assignments in features were uncredited, such as his appearance as Mr. Krull in Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Still, Soule did attract attention, with his signature thin physique and the fact that he seemed to show up dozens of times a year, all over television and in movies. By the start of the 1960s, he'd amassed literally hundreds of screen appearances, making him one of the most recognizable character actors of the time period.One producer who took full advantage of Soule's skills early and often was Jack Webb, himself a radio veteran, who cast him in well over two dozen episodes of the original in 1950s Dragnet television series, principally in the recurring role of Ray Pinker. When Webb revived Dragnet in the second half of the 1960s, Soule was no less active, showing up at least a half dozen times each season, often in the role of police-lab scientist Ray Murray. Soule's studious, cerebral portrayal of Murray was reminiscent of the lab technician portrayed by Webb himself in He Walked By Night, the movie that led Webb to create Dragnet in the first place. In between those assignments, Soule appeared in dozens of features and was seen on the small screen in everything from Bonanza and Petticoat Junction to My Three Sons and the Herschel Bernardi series Arnie. Later in his career, Soule returned to his roots, lending his vocal talent to the animated series Super Friends.

Trivia: Known to legions of fans as Donna Culver Krebbs on the popular series Dallas, Susan Howard was born in Texas, where she lived until her second year of college, dropping out of the University of Texas and moving to L.A. to pursue her acting career. She began with numerous guest appearances, showing up on various shows throughout the late '60s, including Star Trek and Bonanza. Following a Golden Globe-winning role on the series Petrocelli, the actress accepted a guest appearance on Dallas, which turned out to be such a hit that the network expanded her character to make her part of th regular cast. She stayed with the show for nine years, until the network declined to renew her contract in 1987. Howard subsequently retired from the screen, with the exception of an appearance in 1993's Come the Morning.