Trivia: Best remembered for his high-profile acting roles on two 1970s television sitcoms -- that of genial news writer Murray Slaughter on CBS's The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977) and that of sweet-natured Captain Merrill Stubing on ABC's The Love Boat (1977-1986), stage-trained actor Gavin MacLeod in fact began his career typecast as a villain. He landed parts in Hollywood features including The Sand Pebbles (1966), Deathwatch (1966), and The Comic (1969), and enjoyed a tenure as Joseph "Happy" Haines on the sitcom McHale's Navy from 1962 through 1964. After The Love Boat permanently laid anchor in the mid-'80s, MacLeod signed on as a spokesperson and pitchman for Princess Cruises and returned to regional theatrical work. He also tackled guest spots on programs including Touched by an Angel and (in a move that surprised everyone) the HBO prison drama Oz. Off-camera, MacLeod is an outspoken born-again Christian. He hosted a popular talk show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, along with his wife, Patti (whom he divorced in 1982 and remarried three years later), called Back on Course, and personally funded many of the Greatest Adventure Stories from the Bible animated videos for children.

Trivia: Universally recognized as Ship's Doctor Adam Bricker on the blockbuster prime-time sitcom The Love Boat (1977-1986) -- a part he held for the entire nine-season run of the series -- actor Bernie Kopell entered the doors of show business via a most unlikely route. Born in Brooklyn, Kopell attended Erasmus High and then New York University (with a dramatic art major). After a stint at sea aboard the naval vessel USS Iowa, Kopell signed on to drive a taxicab in Southern California -- and achieved his big break on the day that Oregon Trail (1959) film producer Dick Einfeld hitched a ride in the back of his cab. In a span of minutes, Kopell reportedly managed to convince Einfeld that he was not really a cab driver but an actor in serious need of work. The effort paid off, and Kopell snagged his first part -- a two-line part in Oregon as an aide to president James K. Polk. In the early '60s, Kopell joined the Actors' Ring Theatre in Los Angeles, where he developed a knack for characterizations and voices; this led, in turn, to character-type roles on a myriad of television programs including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Steve Allen Show, and My Favorite Martian (which often, though not always, cast the wiry Kopell as a Hispanic). By the early '70s, Kopell had landed steady assignments on Get Smart, Bewitched, That Girl, and other series. The Love Boat, however, embodied his breakthrough. He followed it up with an emcee assignment on The Travel Channel (hosting its Railway Adventures Across Europe) and a surge in theatrical work, with portrayals in regional productions of such plays as Rumors, A History of Shadows, and Death of a Salesman.

Trivia: Actor Fred Grandy enjoyed two distinct careers -- an initial career as an actor and a proverbial second wind on the political stage. As a thespian, Grandy signed for guest spots on early-'70s series including Maude and Phyllis, but built his reputation via his nine-season portrayal of Yeoman-Purser Burl "Gopher" Smith, right-hand man to Captain Merrill Stubing (Gavin MacLeod), on the popular television sitcom The Love Boat (1977-1986). He proved popular with audiences, but by the mid-'80s reportedly grew tired of acting and gravitated to the political arena because he found it more challenging. Indeed, in 1986 -- the year of Boat's cancelation -- Grandy was elected as a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Iowa.

Trivia: For millions of Americans, the prime-time situation comedy The Love Boat will be forever inseparable from the image of Ted Lange, an actor cast for nine seasons as the genial Isaac the Bartender on the Pacific Princess luxury liner and trademarked by his iconic "two-finger drop" greeting. Yet Lange's portrayal of Isaac scarcely hinted at the actor's dexterity or dramatic range. In truth, this actor received classical dramatic training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and would go on, after the Princess took its final voyage in September 1986, to establish himself as a revered creative force in regional theater.Lange initially broke into films with many portrayals in Hollywood programmers during the early '70s, including Trick Baby (1972), Blade (1972), and Black Belt Jones (1974), and landed a regular role in the one-season ethnic sitcom That's My Mama (1974), as a streetwise philosopher opposite Clifton Davis (Amen) and Theresa Merritt. The Love Boat, of course, brought Lange his most widespread recognition; nonetheless (as indicated), he hearkened back to his theatrical roots beginning in the late '80s and divided his time between writing, directing, and stage acting roles. His resumé as a scribe sports at least 17 original plays including Lemon Meringue Facade, Behind the Mask -- An Evening with Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Evil Legacy -- The Story of Lucretia Borgia, while he has appeared dramatically in productions including Hair and Taming of the Shrew and has directed plays ranging from Othello to the rock & roll musical Born a Unicorn.

Trivia: Pennsylvania-born actress Lauren Tewes achieved broadest recognition for her stint as Cruise Director Julie McCoy on the long-running ABC situation comedy The Love Boat. Unfortunately, Tewes (unlike many of her fellow cast members) left the program prior to the final voyage of the Pacific Princess -- reportedly spiraling into a much-publicized bout of severe cocaine addiction from which she eventually fully recovered, but which cost her the role on the series. Tewes nevertheless demonstrated admirable resilience by returning for at least two Love Boat telemovies and remained active in television and film. Subsequent projects included guest appearances on the small-screen series dramas Hunter and Murder, She Wrote, and roles in features such as The Doom Generation (1995) and It Came From Outer Space 2 (1996).

Trivia: Surely Technicolor was invented for the express purpose of showing to fullest advantage the flaming red hair of actress Rhonda Fleming. Born into a theatrical family, Fleming made her film bow while still attending high school. She was briefly under contract to producer David O. Selznick, for whom she played her first important film role, the nymphomaniac mental patient in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1946). While working at Paramount from 1947 through 1957, Fleming played opposite such diverse leading men as Bing Crosby (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), Bob Hope (The Great Lover), Ronald Reagan (Hong Kong) and Donald O'Connor (The Buster Keaton Story). She fluctuated between good and bad girl roles throughout her Hollywood years, with most of her staunchest devotees preferring the "bad". Closing out her film career in 1969, Fleming briefly entered the business world before making comeback appearances in Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976) and The Nude Bomb (1980). The last two of Rhonda Fleming's five husbands were producer/director Hall Bartlett and theatre-chain executive Ted Mann.

Trivia: "My name is Orson Bean. Harvard '47, Yale Nothing." Actually, that oft-repeated introduction is a double deception: actor Orson Bean didn't go to Harvard, and his name isn't really Orson Bean. As a boy magician, Dallas Frederick Burrows borrowed the first half of his stage name from another prestidigitator of note, Orson Welles. Bean made his legitimate stage bow in 1945, then worked up a nightclub comedy act which premiered in New York at the now-defunct Blue Angel (in 1954, he hosted a summer-replacement TV series emanating from this celebrated nightspot). Landing on Broadway in the 1953 production Men of Distinction, Bean won a Theatre World Award for his work in the 1954 revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac, and Critics' Circle Awards for his performances in Mister Roberts and Say Darling. His later stage credits included Broadway's Subways are for Sleeping (1962) and Never too Late (1964) not to mention his extensive tours in the Neil Simon-Burt Bacharah musical Promises, Promises. In films from 1955, Bean's best-received screen performance was as the testifying army physician in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959). An inescapable presence on TV, Bean has participated in virtually every quiz show known to man, from the familiar (To Tell the Truth, I've Got a Secret) to the obscure (Laugh Line). He was also a regular as the ineffectual Reverend Brim on the Norman Lear syndicated series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1977) and Forever Fernword (1978), and more recently was seen on a weekly basis as cranky general store owner Loren Bray on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Women (1993- ). Outside of his showbiz activities, Bean has proven a difficult subject to categorize: blacklisted for his outspoken liberal views in the early 1950s, he was an ardent supporter of Richard M. Nixon in 1968. A man of many interests, Orson Bean was the founder of the arts-oriented 15th Street School of New York, the author of the oddball 1971 volume Me and the Orgon, and one of the charter members of The Sons of the Desert, the famed Laurel & Hardy appreciation society.

Trivia: The oldest of three sons of Broadway star Alan Arkin, American actor Adam Arkin has had stage and movie work, but is best known for his TV assignments. In 1977 Arkin was starred in his first series, the one-season sitcom Bustin' Loose, wherein the 21-year-old actor played a man finally escaping his overprotective parents. Arkin went on to play an inner-city biology teacher in the brief 1982 TV series Teachers Only; a Chicago bookie in the short-lived 1986 weekly Tough Cookies; and an attorney in 1988's A Year in the Life, which lasted eight months of our lives. In 1990, just when it seemed as though Arkin was going to become the King of Cancellation, he made the first of many guest appearances on the quirky CBS series Northern Exposure as Adam, the sociopathic, in-your-face hermit/gourmet chef. The character reappeared sporadically until 1993, sometimes as a welcome touch of anarchy, other times as merely a loud-mouthed royal pain. In 1994, Adam Arkin was given his most recent crack at regular weekly series work, playing a dedicated but mercurial doctor on the TV drama Chicago Hope, where he was matched insult for insult by the equally obstreperous Mandy Patinkin. Though that well-regarded series came to a close in 2000, Arkin continued to work steadily in both movies and TV appearing in a diverse string of projects including A Slight Case of Murder, the sitcom Baby Bob, and the Will Smith vehicle Hitch. He had a major part on the short-lived TV series Life starting in 2007, and in 2009 appeared in the Coen Brothers Best Picture nominee A Serious Man. He also maintained a steady career as a director of series television helming episodes of Monk, Ally McBeal, and Grey's Anatomy. In 2012 he could be seen in The Sessions, a film that won the audience award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Trivia: The son of actors Eddie Albert and Margo, Edward Albert was educated abroad at Oxford University. While chronologically his movie debut was in 1965's The Fool Killer, Albert didn't seriously pursue acting as a profession until his early twenties. In 1972, he made his film-starring bow in Butterflies are Free (1972), playing a well-adjusted sightless youth who becomes the object of hippie-like Goldie Hawn's affections. His next film, Forty Carats (1973), was like Butterflies an adaptation of a popular stage play, though this time his part was less interesting. Albert's subsequent films are most likely not as rewarding to him as his ongoing hobby of photography. Ardent TV viewers have seen Edward Albert in regular roles on the nighttime soap operas The Yellow Rose (1984) and Falcon Crest (1986).

Trivia: American dwarf actor Billy Barty always claimed to have been born in the early '20s, but the evidence of his somewhat wizened, all-knowing countenance in his film appearances of the 1930s would suggest that he was at least ten years shy of the whole truth. At any rate, Barty made many film appearances from at least 1931 onward, most often cast as bratty children due to his height. He was a peripheral member of an Our Gang rip-off in the Mickey McGuire comedy shorts, portrayed the infant-turned-pig in Alice in Wonderland (1933), he did a turn in blackface as a "shrunken" Eddie Cantor in Roman Scandals (also 1933), and he frequently popped up as a lasciviously leering baby in the risqué musical highlights of Busby Berkeley's Warner Bros. films. One of Barty's most celebrated cinema moments occurred in 1937's Nothing Sacred, in which, playing a small boy, he pops up out of nowhere to bite Fredric March in the leg. Barty was busy but virtually anonymous in films, since he seldom received screen credit. TV audiences began to connect his name with his face in the 1950s when Barty was featured on various variety series hosted by bandleader Spike Jones. Disdainful of certain professional "little people" who rely on size alone to get laughs, Barty was seen at his very best on the Jones programs, dancing, singing, and delivering dead-on impressions: the diminutive actor's takeoff on Liberace was almost unbearably funny. Though he was willing to poke fun at himself on camera, Barty was fiercely opposed to TV and film producers who exploited midgets and dwarves, and as he continued his career into the 1970s and '80s, Barty saw to it that his own roles were devoid of patronization -- in fact, he often secured parts that could have been portrayed by so-called "normal" actors, proof that one's stature has little to do with one's talent. A two-fisted advocate of equitable treatment of short actors, Billy Barty took time away from his many roles in movies (Foul Play [1978], Willow [1988]) and TV to maintain his support organization The Little People of America and the Billy Barty Foundation. Billy Barty died in December 2000 of heart failure.

Trivia: Lead actor Richard Gilliland first appeared onscreen in the '70s.

Trivia: Because the two actresses tended to play the same type of overwrought roles in the mid-1950s, juvenile stars Patty McCormick and Patty Duke were sometimes mistaken for one another during this period. But once seen in her starmaking role as the homicidal preteen Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (in which she starred on Broadway in 1954 and in the film version in 1956), Patty McCormick can never be confused with anyone else. A pro from the age of four, McCormick was in films from 1951 and TV from 1953. After Bad Seed, she was second-billed as a bratty child star in the theatrical-film Kathy O' (1957) and was headlined in her own 1958 sitcom, Peck's Bad Girl. The uniqueness that characterized McCormick's appearances as a child evaporated when she reached maturity; though she was more than competent playing disturbed teenagers in films like The Miniskirt Mob (1967) and The Young Runaways (1968), these were parts that could have been played equally well by a dozen other young actresses. She acted sporadically into the 1970s and 1980s, her longest assignment being the role of Jeffrey Tambor's upwardly mobile wife on the TV sitcom The Ropers. In 1995, Patty McCormick starred in the direct-to-video Mommy, playing a grown-up edition of the murderous Rhoda from The Bad Seed.