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: Actress Kathryn Harrold seems content with merely being one of the most brilliant, experimental actresses on the off-Broadway and "small" movie scene. Trained in her craft by Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen, Harrold began building her theatrical reputation in the mid-1970s while teaching acting classes at NYU and Connecticut College. She made her first film, Nightwing, in 1979, and has since appeared intermittently in films ranging from the nirvana of Into the Night (1985) to the nadir of Yes, Giorgio (1982). She has been a regular on several television series, and in 1980 was cast as Lauren Bacall in the made-for-TV biopic Bogie. Long-time televiewers will probably be most familiar with Kathryn Harrold as Nola Dancy on the NBC daytimer The Doctors, as Christina LaKatzis on the succes d'estime series I'll Fly Away and as talkshow host Garry Shandling's ex-wife on cable's The Larry Sanders Show.

Trivia: Born in New York City while his father Noah Beery Sr. was appearing on-stage, Noah Beery Jr. was given his lifelong nickname, "Pidge," by Josie Cohan, sister of George M. Cohan "I was born in the business," Pidge Beery observed some 63 years later. "I couldn't have gotten out of it if I wanted to." In 1920, the younger Beery made his first screen appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro (1920), which co-starred dad Noah as Sergeant Garcia. Thanks to a zoning mistake, Pidge attended the Hollywood School for Girls (his fellow "girls" included Doug Fairbanks Jr. and Jesse Lasky Jr.), then relocated with his family to a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, miles from Tinseltown. While some kids might have chafed at such isolation, Pidge loved the wide open spaces, and upon attaining manhood emulated his father by living as far away from Hollywood as possible. After attending military school, Pidge pursued film acting in earnest, appearing mostly in serials and Westerns, sometimes as the hero, but usually as the hero's bucolic sidekick. His more notable screen credits of the 1930s and '40s include Of Mice and Men (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (again 1939, this time as the obligatory doomed-from-the-start airplane pilot), Sergeant York (1941), We've Never Been Licked (1943), and Red River (1948). He also starred in a group of rustic 45-minute comedies produced by Hal Roach in the early '40s, and was featured in several popular B-Western series; one of these starred Buck Jones, whose daughter Maxine became Pidge's first wife. Perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, Beery appeared with his camera-hogging uncle Wallace Beery only once, in 1940's 20 Mule Team. Children of the 1950s will remember Pidge as Joey the Clown on the weekly TV series Circus Boy (1956), while the more TV-addicted may recall Beery's obscure syndicated travelogue series, co-starring himself and his sons. The 1960s found Pidge featured in such A-list films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and as a regular on the series Riverboat and Hondo. He kicked off the 1970s in the role of Michael J. Pollard's dad (there was a resemblance) in Little Fauss and Big Halsey. Though Beery was first choice for the part of James Garner's father on the TV detective series The Rockford Files, Pidge was committed to the 1973 James Franciscus starrer Doc Elliot, so the Rockford producers went with actor Robert Donley in the pilot episode. By the time The Rockford Files was picked up on a weekly basis, Doc Elliot had tanked, thus Donley was dropped in favor of Beery, who stayed with the role until the series' cancellation in 1978. Pidge's weekly-TV manifest in the 1980s included Quest (1981) and The Yellow Rose (1983). After a brief illness, Noah Beery Jr. died at his Tehachapi, CA, ranch at the age of 81.

Trivia: When asked why he decided upon becoming an actor, Joe Santos tended to trot out the tried-and-true rationale "because I failed at everything else." While attending Fordham University, Santos excelled at football, but lost interest in the sport after a few semi-pro years. By the time he was 30, Santos had been remarkably unsuccessful in a variety of vocations, including railroad worker, tree cutter, automobile importer and tavern owner. While working a construction job in New York, Santos was invited by a friend to sit in on an acting class. This seemed like an easy way to make a living, so Santos began making the audition rounds, almost immediately landing a good part on a TV soap opera. This gig unfortunately led nowhere, and for the next year or so Santos drove a cab for 10 to 11 hours a day. The novice actor's first big break was a part in the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park, which he received at the recommendation of the film's star (and Santos' frequent softball partner) Al Pacino. With the plum part of Sergeant Cruz in the four-part TV drama The Blue Knight (1973), Santos inaugurated a fruitful, still-thriving career in "cop" roles, the best and longest-lasting of which was detective Dennis Becker on the James Garner series The Rockford Files (1974-80). Joe Santos' other series-TV credits include the top-billed part of deadbeat dad Norman Davis in Me and Maxx (1980), Hispanic nightclub comic Paul Rodriguez' disapproving father in AKA Pablo (1984), and Lieutenant Frank Harper in the 1985-86 episodes of Hardcastle and McCormick. One of his final roles was a recurring gig on The Sopranos. Santos died in 2016, at age 84.

Trivia: Learned to read music and play the accordion by the age of 5. At 11, demonstrated the steel guitar at a music trade show in Chicago, where she was discovered by country performer Joe Maphis. Her family formed its own group when she was 14. A member of the band was drummer Ken Dudney, whom she would later marry. Signed with Columbia Records in 1969, scoring her first hit with a cover of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long." Inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 1972. After her family band broke up, she formed the Do-Rites with her sisters, Louise and Irlene. In 1979, won Country Music Association's Female Vocalist of the Year. Headlined the NBC variety series Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters (1980-82). Was the first artist to win CMA Entertainer of the Year for two consecutive years (1980 and '81). Penned her autobiography, Get to the Heart: My Story (1990), which was later made into a TV movie, Get to the Heart: The Barbara Mandrell Story (1997).

Trivia: Van Williams is best remembered for having played the title role in the 20th Century Fox television series The Green Hornet (1966-1967). At the end of the 1950s, he was one of the more promising leading men signed by Warner Bros.' television division. In a group that included Troy Donahue, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Roger Smith, Williams probably had the strangest route to being discovered. Born in Fort Worth, TX, to a cattle-ranching family, he graduated from Texas Christian University and became a professional diver based in Hawaii. He was earning extra money working at industrialist Henry J. Kaiser's Hawaiian Village, and happened to be teaching two of Kaiser's guests -- producer Mike Todd and his wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor -- how to dive, when Todd suggested that the 23-year-old Williams go for a screen test. The producer was killed in a plane crash before the screen test could be done, but Williams still managed to get his shot at an acting career, on the small screen, with help from actress Lurene Tuttle after he arrived in Hollywood. At her urging, he took speech and drama lessons and was ready when a spot opened up in a television production starring Ronald Reagan. A small role followed, and then a contract with Warner Bros. television -- after playing a guest role in an episode of the series Lawman, Williams was cast in the detective series Bourbon Street Beat, set in New Orleans, which wasn't successful. This was followed, however, by Surfside 6, a similar series about private investigators set in Miami, FL, which ended up running for four seasons and took full advantage of Williams' good looks and muscular build. Williams followed it up with a supporting role in The Tycoon, a comedy series starring Walter Brennan and Jerome Cowan, which lasted for only one season -- he had little to do in that program, alas, except play it straight to Brennan's cantankerous multi-millionaire senior citizen, for whom his character worked. Following the cancellation of The Tycoon, Williams was up for the role of a submarine commander in a proposed World War II action series, Pursuit and Destroy, that never made it into production. Instead, he took the role with which he has been most identified for more than 30 years, Britt Reid (aka the Green Hornet) in the 1966-1967 ABC series The Green Hornet. The program ran for only one season, but developed a strong cult following, largely due to the presence of Williams' co-star, Bruce Lee, who dazzled audiences every week with his exhibitions of martial arts skills. Williams had the bad fortune to be caught playing a dual role that didn't really constitute a complete character between them. His portrayal of Britt Reid suffered from the limited time that the character was on the screen, while he was, in turn, limited in what he could do as an actor playing the Green Hornet, who had to remain a man of mystery to those around him. One actually knew more, in terms of background and interior emotional life, about Lee's Kato than one did about Williams' Britt Reid/the Green Hornet. Following the cancellation of the series, Williams made some guest appearances on shows such as Mannix and The Big Valley, and sitcoms like Nanny & The Professor. The best performance of his whole career, however, was probably in the 1974 Gunsmoke episode "Thirty a Month and Found," which garnered strong critical praise on its original airing. Williams obviously found some favor with Gunsmoke star James Arness, because he played in three episodes of Arness' later series How the West Was Won. His last attempt at a series of his own came in 1975 with Westwind, but during the 1980s, as his acting career slowed, he took on numerous outside business interests, including cattle ranches in Texas, Idaho, and Hawaii. He still made a rare foray or two back into television, most notably in "Love Is the Word," a 1979 episode of The Rockford Files, starring his old Warner Bros. stablemate James Garner. He has also served as an auxiliary volunteer for the Los Angeles County Sheriffs' Department. Because of the association of The Green Hornet with Lee's memory, and the reissue of several episodes of the show in edited form on DVD, Williams remains a fondly remembered leading man from 1960s television. Williams died in 2016, at age 82.