Trivia: The younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, American actor Peter Graves worked as a musician and radio actor before entering films with 1950's Rogue River. At first, it appeared that Graves would be the star of the family, since he was cast in leads while brother Jim languished in secondary roles. Then came Stalag 17 (1953), in which Graves was first-rate as a supposedly all-American POW who turned out to be a vicious Nazi spy. Trouble was, Graves played the part too well, and couldn't shake the Nazi stereotype in the eyes of most Hollywood producers. Suddenly the actor found himself in such secondary roles as Shelley Winters' doomed husband in Night of the Hunter (1955) (he was in and out of the picture after the first ten minutes), while sibling James Arness was riding high with Gunsmoke. Dissatisfied with his film career, Graves signed on in 1955 for a network kid's series about "a horse and the boy who loved him." Fury wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but it ran five years and made Graves a wealthy man through rerun residuals--so much so that he claimed to be making more money from Fury than his brother did from Gunsmoke. In 1966, Peter Graves replaced Steven Hill as head honcho of the force on the weekly TV adventure series Mission: Impossible, a stint that lasted until 1973. Though a better than average actor, Graves gained something of a camp reputation for his stiff, straight-arrow film characters and was often cast in films that parodied his TV image. One of the best of these lampoonish appearances was in the Zucker-Abrahams comedy Airplane (1980), as a nutty airline pilot who asks outrageous questions to a young boy on the plane (a part the actor very nearly turned down, until he discovered that Leslie Nielsen was co-starring in the film). Peter Graves effortlessly maintained his reliable, authoritative movie persona into the '90s and 2000s, and hosted the Biography series on A&E, for which he won an Emmy; he also guest-starred on programs including Cold Case, House and American Dad. Graves died of natural causes in March 2010, at age 83.

Trivia: Fans of the original action /espionage series Mission Impossible (1966-70) may recognize black actor Greg Morris for playing electronics wizard Barney Collier. Morris spent most of his career on television, appearing on such shows as Ben Casey, The Dick Van Dyck Show and The Twilight Zone. During the 1970s, Morris was a regular on Vega$ (1978-81), playing police officer Lt. David Neslon. A native of Cleveland who spent part of his childhood in New York City, his mother worked as a secretary for black labor leader A. Phillip Reynolds. Before becoming a television actor during the early '60s, Morris attended Ohio State University and the University of Iowa. Morris passed away at the age of 61 on August 27, 1996. The cause of death was unreported.

Trivia: The son of a Boston barber, Leonard Nimoy was a star at the age of 8, when he played Hansel in a children's theatre production of Hansel and Gretel. Nimoy remained with his local kiddie theater troupe until 16 (one of his directors during this period was Boris Sagal). After studying drama at Boston College and Antioch College, he took acting lessons from Jeff Corey at the Pasadena Playhouse. In films from 1950, Nimoy played the title character in the low-budget Kid Monk Baroni and essayed bits and minor roles in such productions as Zombies of the Stratosphere (1951), Rhubarb (1951) and Them! (1954). In between acting assignments, he held down a dizzying variety of jobs: soda jerk, newspaper carrier, vacuum-cleaner salesman, vending machine mechanic, pet-shop clerk, cabbie and acting coach. During his 18 months in Special Services at Fort McPherson, Georgia, he acted with Atlanta Theater Guild when he could spare the time. Back in Hollywood in 1956, he became virtually a regular at the Ziv TV studios, playing villains in programs like Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt. For a short while, he specialized in the plays of Jean Genet, appearing in both the stage and film productions of The Balcony and Deathwatch. Impressed by Nimoy's guest turn on a 1963 episode of The Lieutenant, producer Gene Roddenberry vowed to cast the saturnine, mellow-voiced actor as an extraterrestrial if ever given the chance. That chance came two years later, when Roddenberry signed Nimoy to play Vulcanian science officer Spock on Star Trek. At first pleased at the assignment, Nimoy came to resent the apparent fact that the public perceived him as Spock and nothing else: indeed, one of his many written works was the slim autobiography I Am Not Spock. After Star Trek's cancellation, Nimoy joined the cast of Mission: Impossible in the role of "master of disguise" Paris (he replaced the series' previous master of disguise Martin Landau, who ironically had originally been slated to play Spock). In the early 1970s, Nimoy began racking up directorial credits on such series as Night Gallery. He also made his first Broadway appearance in 1973's Full Circle. And, perhaps inevitably, he returned to Spock, thanks to the popular demand engendered by the then-burgeoning Star Trek cult. His initial reacquaintance with the role was as voiceover artist on the 1973 Saturday-morning cartoon version of Star Trek. Then Spock went on the back burner again as Nimoy devoted himself to his theatrical commitments (a touring production of Sherlock Holmes, his one-man show Vincent), his writing and directing activities, and his hosting chores on the long-running (1976-82) TV documentary series In Search Of.... Finally in 1978, Nimoy was back in his Enterprise uniform in the first of several Star Trek theatrical features. The Spock character was killed off in the second Trek picture The Wrath of Khan, but Nimoy stayed with the franchise as director of the next two feature-length Trek entries (PS: Spock also came back to life). He went on to direct such non-Trek filmic endeavors as 3 Men and a Baby (1987), The Good Mother (1988), Funny About Love (1990) and Holy Matrimony (1994). He also produced and acted in the 1991 TV movie Never Forget, and served as executive producer of the 1995 UPN network series Deadly Games. Perhaps because he will always have dozens of professional irons in the fire, Leonard Nimoy now seems resigned to being forever associated with the role that brought him international fame; his most recent autobiographical work was aptly titled I Am Spock. In 2009 he returned to his iconic role portraying Spock in J.J. Abrams smash-hit reboot of the Star Trek franchise. He next took on a recurring role in the sci-fi series Fringe, playing scientist William Bell. Nimoy made a final cameo appearance in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). He died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: Progressing from Miss San Francisco to Miss California, LA-born brunette beauty Lee Meriwether recited a monologue written by Irish playright John Millington Synge and won the 1955 Miss America contest. Lee's first television job was as Dave Garroway's "girl Friday" on NBC's The Today Show. She played small parts on such prime time TV series as Leave It to Beaver and Sergeant Bilko before securing her first recurring role on the 1960 daytime drama Clear Horizons. Subsequent series-TV assignments included Dr. Ann McGregor on Irwin Allen's 1966 sci-fier The Time Tunnel, the star's homespun housewife on 1971's The New Andy Griffith Show, and a regular panelist on the syndicated 1974 edition of Masquerade Party. Lee played The Catwoman in the 1966 theatrical feature Batman (she also appeared on the TV series of the same name, but not in the same part). While in the 1968 cinematic wallow Legend of Lylah Clare she essayed one of her favorite screen parts: a vituperative lesbian who beats the snot out of Kim Novak. Her best-known role was as Betty Jones, daughter-in-law and general factotum of folksy detective Buddy Ebsen, on the long running (1975-82) TV series Barnaby Jones. More recently, Meriwether exhibited a heretofore underexploited gift for broad comedy in the role of the ghoulish Lily Munster on the syndicated 1988 "retro" sitcom The New Munsters. For many years, Lee Meriwether was married to actor Frank Aletter.

Trivia: Respected in North America and the United Kingdom, actor John Vernon has worked steadily on stage, television, and feature films since the 1950s. A native of Montréal, Canada, Vernon's formal studies began after he won a scholarship to London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Prior to attending the school, Vernon gained experience in amateur theater. During his time in London, Vernon worked with several repertory companies. In 1956, he voiced the part of Big Brother in 1984, but he did not make his formal film debut until 1958 in The Long Rifle and the Tomahawk. By the mid-'50s, Vernon had returned to Canada and went on to specialize in Shakespearean television shows and theater presentations. Vernon made his first Broadway bow in Royal Hunt of the Sun. From there he went to Hollywood to start a prolific career as a supporting and occasional lead actor. Vernon was frequently cast as a villain.

Trivia: Actress Diane Baker's well-scrubbed, all-American beauty has frequently been employed as a cool veneer for film characters of smoldering passions. The daughter of actress Dorothy Harrington, Diane was studying at USC when she was tapped for her first film role as Millie Perkins' sister in 20th Century-Fox's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); the studio then cast Diane as Pat Boone's "girl back home," who didn't get to go along on Boone's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). She remained at Fox until 1962, essaying the title role in the studio's re-remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1961). Her most famous screen assignment was at Columbia, where she portrayed axe murderess Joan Crawford's supposedly well-balanced daughter in Straitjacket (1963). Diane became a documentary director in the 1970s with Ashanya, and a producer with Never Never Land (1982). The best of Diane Baker's latter-day roles was the media-savvy politico mother of the kidnap victim in Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Trivia: Before inaugurating his movie career in 1961, Logan Ramsey and his wife Anne Ramsey established and maintained Philadelphia's Theatre of the Living Arts. While his stage work allowed him full rein in a wide variety of roles, Ramsey was straightjacketed by being typecast in films. When he wasn't playing a redneck sheriff, Ramsey was portraying a backwoods yellow-belly or thick-eared bigot. Ramsey was seen as John Witter in the first two Walking Tall films, and appeared regularly on the TV series The Edge of Night and On the Rocks. He played opposite his wife Ann in The Sporting Club(1971), Any Which Way You Can (1980) and Scrooged (1988). In 1977, Logan Ramsey was cast as J. Edgar Hoover (the resemblance bordered on the spooky) in the TV miniseries Blind Ambition.

Trivia: Character actor Marcel Hillaire frequently played Europeans on-stage, in cinema, and on television. Born Erwin Miller in Germany, he changed his name to Harry Furster -- a name he used in his early stage career -- during the Nazi regime and served in the army until he was discovered and imprisoned. Hillaire escaped and fled to the U.S. where he became known as Marcel Hillaire. He made his film debut playing the professor in the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954) and debuted on Broadway the following year.

Trivia: Australian actress Marjorie Bennett made her first film appearances in the pre-World War I years at the suggestion of her sister, silent film star Enid Bennett. Marjorie wasn't yet under the spell of the acting bug, so she abandoned performing for several years, re-emerging as a stage rather than screen actress. She returned to films in the late 1940s as a character player, notably in Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). A prolific film and TV performer of the 1950s and 1960s, Marjorie Bennett was usually cast as huffy society matrons and haughty domestics; her massive bulk and easily outraged demeanor made her a perfect straight woman for such iconoclastic comedians as Red Skelton and the Three Stooges.