Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.

Trivia: American actor William Daniels was teamed at age 6 with his sister Jackie in a song-and-dance act that would become "The Daniels Family" when his other sister Carol joined. At the height of their activity, the Daniels were performing in as many as three radio shows per week, a welcome break from the harshness of their Brooklyn neighborhood. Acting in the long-running Broadway play Life with Father in 1945, Daniels was advised by the play's star and co-author Howard Lindsey to attend college just in case the acting business fell apart; after Army service and graduation from Northwestern University, Daniels found that, for him, the business had fallen apart. His confidence eroded by several years of relative inactivity, Daniels nearly turned down an opportunity to play Brick in a road company production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but the play's author Tennessee Williams insisted upon casting him.In 1960, the actor was cast with George Maharis in the Edward Albee play The Zoo Story, which won him the Obie and Clarence Derwent Awards and led to such choice Broadway assignments as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and A Thousand Clowns. Much to his own amazement, Daniels found himself cast in a superhero-spoof sitcom, Captain Nice, in 1967, which fortunately wasn't on long enough to typecast him. The actor achieved recognition of a more positive nature for his role as Dustin Hoffman's obtuse father in The Graduate (1967) (he was all of ten years older than Hoffman). Daniels' role as John Adams in the 1969 Broadway musical 1776 resulted in another strong film showing when the play was transferred to celluloid in 1972. Reportedly as reserved and taciturn as his screen characters in real life, Daniels was perhaps ideally cast as the abrasive Dr. Mark Craig on the long-running (1982-88) TV drama St. Elsewhere; appearing as Mrs. Craig was Bonnie Bartlett, to whom Daniels had been married since college. Despite his high visibility in both films and television, William Daniels is probably best known internationally for a continuing TV role in which he was never seen--the ever-correct computerized voice of K.I.T.T., the superpowered automobile on the action series Knight Rider (1982-86).In the coming years, Daniels would continue to remain as active as ever, playing the beloved Mr. Feeny on the sitcom Boy Meets World, and making memorable appearances on shows like The Closer and Boston Legal.

Trivia: The oldest child of an itinerant bridge builder, actor Neville Brand intended to make the military his career, and indeed spent ten years in uniform. During World War II, he became America's fourth most decorated soldier when he wiped out a German 50-caliber machine gun nest. He also decided that he'd seek out another line of work as soon as his hitch was up. Paying for acting classes with his GI Bill, he started his career off-Broadway. In 1949, he made his film debut in D.O.A., playing a psychotic hoodlum who delights in punching poisoned hero Edmond O'Brien in the stomach. Brand spent most of the early '50s at 20th Century Fox, a studio that surprisingly downplayed the actor's war record by shuttling him from one unstressed supporting role to another (though he's the principal villain in 1950's Where the Sidewalk Ends, he receives no screen credit). He fared far better on television, where he won the Sylvania Award for his portrayal of Huey Long in a 1958 telestaging of All the King's Men. Even better received was his portrayal of Al Capone on the TV series The Untouchables, a characterization he repeated in the 1961 theatrical feature The George Raft Story. In 1966, Brand briefly shed his bad-guy image to play the broadly hilarious role of bumbling Texas Ranger Reese Bennett on the TV Western series Laredo. His off-camera reputation for pugnacity and elbow-bending was tempered by his unswerving loyalty to his friends and his insatiable desire to better himself intellectually (his private library was one of the largest in Hollywood, boasting some 5000 titles). Fighting a losing battle against emphysema during his last years, Neville Brand died at the age of 70.

Trivia: A proud descendant of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Marshall Thompson moved from his home town of Peoria, Illinois to the West Coast when his dentist father's health began to flag. Intending to follow his father's example by taking pre-med at Occidental Junior college, Thompson was sidetracked by a love of performing, inherited from his concert-singer mother. His already impressive physique pumped by several summers as a rodeo-rider and cowpuncher, Thompson was offered a $350-per-week contract by Universal studios in 1943. He accepted, expecting to use the money to pay for his college tuition. As it happened, Thompson never returned to the halls of academia; from 1944 onward he worked steadily as a film actor at Universal, 20th Century-Fox, MGM and other studios, sometimes as a lead, more often in supporting roles. For a while, he was typed as a mental case after convincingly portraying a psycho killer in MGM's Dial 119 (1950). He also acted in something like 250 TV programs, and for eight weeks in 1953 co-starred with Janet Blair in the Broadway play A Girl Can Tell. The boyish enthusiasm of his early screen roles a thing of the past, Thompson provided maturity and authority to his two-dimensional roles in such Saturday-matinee melodramas as Cult of the Cobra (1955), It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), Fiend Without a Face (1958), and First Man Into Space (1959), assignments that indirectly led to his first TV-series starring stint as the miniaturized hero of World of Giants (1959). In 1960, Thompson briefly went the "dumb sitcom husband" route in the weekly Angel. In 1961, the staunchly patriotic Thompson starred in and directed the low-budget feature A Yank in Vietnam, which he would later insist, with some justification, was the first up-close-and-personal study of that unfortunate Asian conflict (alas, good intentions do not always make good films; abysmally bad, Yank in Vietnam lay on the shelf until 1965). During the early 1960s, Thompson worked in close association with producer Ivan Tors as an actor and director of animal-oriented short subjects. The actor's fascination with African wildlife was later manifested in his two-year starring stint on Tors' TV series Daktari (1966-68), an outgrowth of the feature film Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion, in which Thompson both starred and collaborated on the script. After playing character parts in such films as The Turning Point (1977) and The Formula (1980), Thompson spent the bulk of the 1980s in Africa, where he assembled the internationally syndicated documentary series Orphans of the Wild. While on a visit to Michigan in 1992, Marshall Thompson died of congestive heart failure.

Trivia: Black supporting actor, onscreen from 1972.

Trivia: American actor Bill Zuckert's long career included appearances on stage, screen, radio, and television. He made his acting debut on radio in 1941. During the 1970s, he made frequent television appearances on programs ranging from Dynasty to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Little House on the Prairie. Zuckert made his last appearance in two films of 1994, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. Zuckert was an active member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. For the latter, he played a key role in developing a new member program. Zuckert also launched the practice of holding casting showcases for members of both guilds. Zuckert died of pneumonia in Woodland Hills, CA, at age 76.