Trivia: Red-headed, freckle-faced Martin Milner was only 15 when he made his screen debut in Life With Father (1947), and would continue to play wide-eyed high schoolers and college kids well into the next decade. His early film assignments included the teenaged Marine recruit in Lewis Milestone's The Halls of Montezuma (1951) and the obnoxious suitor of Jeanne Crain in Belles on Their Toes (1952). His first regular TV series was The Stu Erwin Show (1950-1955), in which he played the boyfriend (and later husband) of Stu's daughter Joyce. More mature roles came his way in Marjorie Morningstar (1957) as Natalie Wood's playwright sweetheart and in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) as the jazz musician targeted for persecution by Winchell-esque columnist Burt Lancaster. Beginning in 1960, he enjoyed a four-year run as Corvette-driving Tod Stiles on TV's Route 66 (a statue of Milner and his co-star George Maharis currently stands at the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY). A longtime friend and associate of producer/director/actor Jack Webb, Milner was cast as veteran L.A.P.D. patrolman Pete Malloy on the Webb-produced TV weekly Adam-12, which ran from 1968 to 1975. His later TV work included a short-lived 1970s series based on Johan Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson. Later employed as a California radio personality, Martin Milner continued to make occasional TV guest appearances; one of these was in the 1989 TV movie Nashville Beat, in which he was reunited with his Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. He made an appearance on the short-lived series The New Adam-12 and had recurring roles on shows like Life Goes On and Murder, She Wrote. Milner died in 2015, at age 83.

Trivia: George Maharis was one of seven children of Greek immigrant parents. Though he could very easily have gone into his father's restaurant business, Maharis decided to try for a singing career. When his vocal chords were injured by overuse, Maharis switched to acting, studying at the Actors' Studio and making one of his earliest appearances as a Marlon Brando parody on the 1950s TV sitcom Mr. Peepers. Maharis was very active in the off-Broadway scene, appearing in Jean Genet's Deathwatch and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. He gained a fan following (primarily female) through his weekly appearances as handsome drifter Buzz Murdock on the TV series Route 66. He played Buzz from 1960 to 1963, leaving the series for a variety of reasons, among them artistic differences and a bout of hepatitis. His subsequent film career failed to reach the heights of his TV work, and by 1970 Maharis was back in the weekly small-screen grind in the adventure series The Most Dangerous Game. When not performing in nightclubs, summer stock or films, George Maharis spent a good portion of the 1970s and 1980s indulging in his pet hobby, impressionistic painting.

Trivia: Ethel Waters was raised by her grandmother in the dismal ghettoes of South Philadelphia. She began working as a hotel chambermaid for $4.75 a week, and at age 12 she married the first of three husbands. Her goal at that time was to become a maid/companion to a wealthy white woman; instead, she launched a show-business career at 17, when she entered a local talent contest on a dare. Her exquisite, self-trained singing voice attracted the attention of a black vaudeville team, who offered her $10 weekly to join their act. Billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean in honor of her tall, slender frame, Waters toured the black vaudeville circuit singing such standards-to-be as "St. Louis Blues," and continued to hold on to her chambermaid job just in case the bubble burst. Throughout her singer years, Waters fought against performing "hot" -- i.e. sexually suggestive -- songs, preferring instead to perform religious music. But the audiences preferred "hot," and that's what she gave them during her formative years. Her popularity extended to white audiences by way of the recording of her signature tune "Dinah." In 1927, she starred on Broadway in the all-black musical revue Africana, which she followed in quick succession with Vaudeville, Blackbirds of 1930 and Rhapsody in Black. Booked into the Cotton Club, a Harlem night spot catering to a rich white clientele, Waters caught the eye of Irving Berlin with her rendition of "Stormy Weather." Berlin cast her in his 1933 musical revue As Thousands Cheer, supplying her with the hit tunes "Heat Wave," "Harlem on My Mind" and "Supper Time." The difference between As Thousands Cheer and Waters' earlier New York stage appearances was that, for the first time in Broadway history, a black female entertainer was given equal billing with her white co-stars. After spending several years in touring shows, she returned to Broadway in 1939, making her dramatic, nonsinging debut in Mamba's Daughters. The following year, she starred in the musical Cabin in the Sky, in which she introduced "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe" and "Taking a Chance on Love." Her film career, which began with her performance of "Am I Blue?" in the 1929 Warner Bros. musical On With the Show, was jump-started in 1943 with the movie version of Cabin in the Sky, wherein Waters co-starred with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong. Back in New York, Waters was offered the role of housekeeper Bernice Sadie Brown in Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding, but she turned it down, insisting that her character be rewritten to include "more religion." She later accepted the role of mulatto Jeanne Crain's worldly-wise grandmother in the 1949 film Pinky, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination. The following year, she finally opened on Broadway in Member of the Wedding, her role at last rewritten to her specifications. By the time Waters appeared in the film version of Member of the Wedding, she'd become a law unto herself: when director Fred Zinnemann attempted to instruct Waters in a minor bit of stage business, she raised her head to the skies and bellowed "God is my director!" Evidently God knew His business, since Member earned Waters her second Oscar nomination. By rights, Ethel Waters should have spent her last years treated with the reverence and respect due a person of her accomplishments. Unfortunately, she managed to distance herself from her more militant black colleagues by (a) starring as a maid on the TV series Beulah; (b) aligning herself with such white Establishment types as Billy Graham and Richard M. Nixon; and (c) making such proclamations as "I'm not concerned with civil rights. I'm concerned with God-given rights, and they are available to everyone!" Waters worked only sporadically in her eighth decade. She died at the age of 80, in the Chatsworth, California home of the young couple then caring for her. Though she left behind a comparatively tiny financial estate, the artistic legacy of Ethel Waters includes dozens of 1920s recordings, 10 film appearances, and two autobiographies.

Trivia: Hernandez was one of the first "new style" black screen actors, who neither sang nor danced but played characters just as white actors did. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro. In 1922 he first began performing onstage, working in an acrobatic act. Later he lived in the Caribbean and worked as a professional boxer under the name Kid Curley. He went on to work in a minstrel show, in circuses, and in vaudeville. He debuted on Broadway in 1927 in Show Boat. He played a few bit parts in the black audience-targeted films of Oscar Micheaux, and also worked as a radio scriptwriter. He broke through as a screen actor in Intruder in the Dust (1949), in which he played a proud black man wrongly accused of having killed a white Southerner. He played masculine, sensitive, individualistic men. After getting a number of solid roles, he was obliged to accept lesser roles in most of the films he made from the late '50s on. He continued acting until shortly before his death, working in both films and on TV.

Trivia: American actor Frederick O'Neal primarily worked in theater, especially performing in and establishing black theater troupes such as the American Negro Theater, in New York and London. A president emeritus of the Actors' Equity Association and the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, O'Neal also occasionally appeared on television, where he was a regular on Car 54, Where Are You? and in feature films from the late '40s through the early '70s.

Trivia: Bill Gunn was an important figure in the development of contemporary African American cinema. A versatile figure, Gunn also made substantial contributions to the theater, television and literature. His best-known film is Ganja and Hess, a passionate, lyrical vampire movie that blended African and European mythology. While it is considered one of the major films of the early 1970s, it was unfortunately hacked up by producers for American release and its haunting African soundtrack was replaced by a homogenized American one, thereby destroying much of what made the film special. Gunn started out as an actor in the 1950s, and by mid-decade, he was appearing on Broadway. In 1960, he wrote his first play, Murder in the High Grass, and became known as one of the most important black playwrights in American theater. During the '60s, Gunn occasionally appeared on television series, and also wrote novels, screenplays and teleplays. In 1972, Gunn won an Emmy for writing the script to Johannas. From the late '70s through the early '80s, Gunn worked on Personal Problems, an unaired television series.