Trivia: The son of a New York jeweler, American actor Gene Barry emerged from his pinchpenny Depression-era childhood with an instatiable desire for the finer things in life. The acting profession seemed to hold out promise for fame and (especially) fortune. Making the rounds of theatrical agents in the 1940s, Barry, no matter his true financial situation, showed up dressed to the nines; grim reality soon set in, however, and the actor found himself clearing little more than $2000 a year -- on good years. When stage work seemed to yield nothing but bits, Barry turned to early television, then signed a movie contract in 1951. The only truly worthwhile film to star Barry was 1953's War of the Worlds, but even with top billing he had to play second banana to George Pal's marvelous special effects. Finally in 1956, Herb Gordon of Ziv Productions asked Barry if he'd like to star in a western. The actor resisted -- after all, everyone was doing westerns -- until Gordon pointed out that role would include a derby hat, a cane, and an erudite Eastern personality. Barry was enchanted by this, and from 1957 through 1961 he starred on the popular series Bat Masterson. The strain of filming a weekly western compelled Barry to declare that he'd never star on a series again - until he was offered the plum role of millionaire police detective Amos Burke on Burke's Law. This series ran from 1963 through 1965, and might have gone on longer had the producers not tried and failed to turn it into a Man From UNCLE type spy show. Barry's next series, Name of the Game, was another success (it ran from 1969 through 1971), and wasn't quite as grueling in that the actor only had to appear in one out of every three episodes. Always the epitome of diamond-in-the-rough masculinity, Barry astounded his fans in the mid 1980s by accepting the role of an aging homosexual in the stage musical version of the French film comedy La Cage Aux Follies. Yet another successful run followed, after which Barry went into semi-retirement, working only when he felt like it. In 1993, Gene Barry was back for an unfortunately brief revival of Burke's Law, which was adjusted for the actor's age by having him avoid the action and concentrate on the detecting; even so, viewers had a great deal of difficulty believing that Burke (or Barry) was as old as he claimed to be.

Trivia: One of the most beloved of movie clichés concerns the violinist who must give up his music for sports -- or vice versa. Gary Conway was lucky enough to be able to keep up with his violin studies (and even play at the Hollywood bowl) while remaining heavily active in high school athletics. Conway was also an accomplished painter in his teen years, winning a scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, and later transferring to the art department at U.C.L.A. Invited to participate in a campus production of Volpone, Conway switched his major to drama. In films and TV from 1956, Conway's best-known (and, in many ways, most notorious) screen role was the title character in the deathless I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). In 1963, Conway was cast as detective Tim Tilson in the lighthearted TV cop series Burke's Law. He left the show in 1965, hoping to go on to "a wider spectrum of creative challenge." One such challenge was the 1968 Irwin Allen weekly Land of the Giants, in which, as Captain Steve Burton, Conway spent his time reacting in amazement at king-sized special effects. After Giants left the air in 1970, he went into films as an actor, producer (1977's The Farmer) and screenwriter (1987's American Ninja 2: The Confrontation). He has also worked as a drama teacher. Gary Conway was married to former Miss America Marian McKnight.

Trivia: Taking up dramatics while attending the University of Pittsburgh, Regis Toomey extended this interest into a profitable career as a stock and Broadway actor. He specialized in singing roles until falling victim to acute laryngitis while touring England in George M. Cohan's Little Nellie Kelly. In 1929, Toomey made his talking-picture bow in Alibi, where his long, drawn-out climactic death scene attracted both praise and damnation; he'd later claim that, thanks to the maudlin nature of this scene, producers were careful to kill him off in the first or second reel in his subsequent films. Only moderately successful as a leading man, Toomey was far busier once he removed his toupee and became a character actor. A lifelong pal of actor Dick Powell, Regis Toomey was cast in prominent recurring roles in such Powell-created TV series of the 1950s and 1960s as Richard Diamond, Dante's Inferno, and Burke's Law.

Trivia: Carl Benton Reid determined he wanted to be an actor and nothing else while still in high school. Graduating from the drama department at Carnegie Tech, Reid worked for several seasons with the Cleveland Playhouse in the 1920s. He appeared in abbreviated Shakespearean productions at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, then went on to a fruitful Broadway career. Reid was brought to Hollywood in 1941 to re-create his stage role of Oscar Hubbard in the film version of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes. Trafficking in "heavy" roles for most of his film career, Reid's favorite film assignment was also his least villainous: Clem Rogers, father of the title character in 1953's The Story of Will Rogers. As busy on television as he'd previously been on-stage and in films, Carl Benton Reid was seen regularly as "the Man," a shadowy espionage chief, in the 1965 TV series Amos Burke, Secret Agent.

Trivia: The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.

Trivia: Redheaded leading lady Arlene Dahl was born, raised and educated in Minnesota. Supporting herself with innumerable day jobs, Dahl finally reached Broadway in 1945, the year before she was chosen New York's "Miss Rheingold." Her first film appearance in MGM's Life With Father (1947) was so fleeting as to be missable, but by 1948 Dahl was playing leads at MGM. In the tradition of such drop-dead-gorgeous redheads as Maureen O'Hara and Rhonda Fleming, Dahl often as not found herself cast in Technicolor swashbucklers, notably Caribbean (1952), Sangaree (1952) and Bengal Brigade (1953). In 1956 Dahl delivered an intimidatingly superb performance as a beautiful psycho in Allan Dwan's Slightly Scarlet. By the 1960s, Dahl was better known as a beauty-product promoter and glamour-advice columnist; her five marriages to such high-profile personalities as Fernando Lamas and Lex Barker also kept her in the public eye. Though her Arlene Dahl Enterprises cosmetics firm earned millions in its heyday, by the mid-1980s Dahl was broke, a fact which compelled her to resume her acting career. Arlene Dahl made her first film appearance in two decades in Night of the Warrior (1991); her co-star was her son, TV hearthrob Lorenzo Lamas.

Trivia: Biting, sarcastic comic actor Paul Lynde made his Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952, which was transferred to film virtually intact in 1953. Far heavier than most of his fans remember him (he tipped the scales at 260 pounds), Lynde scored with a "sick" monologue in which he described the various injuries that had befallen him. The undercurrent of pain inherent in his comedy has been attributed by some observers to Lynde's lifelong insecurities, many of these stemming from the time when his father, mother, and favorite brother all died within a three-month period. By the time Lynde was cast as the long-suffering father in the 1961 Broadway play Bye Bye Birdie, he had slimmed down considerably and his comic gifts had sharpened to a fine point. Beginning with the 1963 Disney film Son of Flubber, Lynde played a series of movie character parts in which he made snide, cynical comments about everyone and everything. Funny in small doses, Lynde's screen character was a bit too much to take on an extended basis, though he was very funny in the recurring character of Uncle Arthur on the '60s TV sitcom Bewitched, and, after several busted pilots, managed to survive a full season with The Paul Lynde Show in 1972. He also provided a number of cartoon voices, notably the villainous Sylvester Sneakley on Hanna-Barbera's Saturday morning opus The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969). During the late '70s, Lynde cultivated a fan following for his wisecracking appearances as the "center square" on the TV celebrity game show The Hollywood Squares. He died in 1982 at the age of 55.

Trivia: Former emcee and television game show host Bert Parks was an American icon during the 25 years he hosted the Miss America Pageant and is best remembered for his affability, ever-present smile, and for singing "There She Is, Miss America," at the end of every pageant. Parks got his start at age 19 when he began working on the New York-based "Eddie Cantor Show" on radio as a singer and straight man. From there, he became an announcer for CBS Radio and during the late '40s became the host of such radio quiz shows as "Break the Bank." When television became generally available, Parks took to hosting game shows during the day and night as well as hosting variety shows. He began his long stint with the annual beauty pageant in 1955 and continued in that position through 1980 when he was replaced by younger host Ron Ely. Audiences didn't much like the change and thanks to a letter writing campaign sponsored by Johnny Carson, Parks returned to Miss America in 1990 to sing his famous song. Audiences were pleased, but the producers weren't and he never returned to the pageant. In addition to emcee work, Parks has occasionally appeared as an actor on-stage and in 1975 appeared in the film That's the Way of the World. In 1990, he played himself in The Freshman.

Trivia: Robust American character actor Donald Diamond was generally typecast as a Spaniard or a Native American. He worked frequently on television and in films from the '50s through the early '70s.

Trivia: From a scene with Charlie Chaplin to a bit part with Elvis Presley to a familiar role as a butler in Madonna's Who's That Girl, Arthur Roland Tovey's career spanned much of the 20th century, during which he worked with some of its biggest stars. Tovey made his film debut in the 1922 Marion Davies feature Yolanda. A longtime Hollywood extra and bit actor, Tovey also doubled for Leslie Howard in the classic Gone With the Wind. In addition to his career as an actor, Tovey was a longtime member of the Musicians Local 47 and the Screen Actors Guild, and also served in the U.S. Army during WWII. In recent years, he made the most of his appearances on television, appearing on programs such as ER and Married With Children until well into his nineties. Arthur Roland Tovey died of natural causes at his home in Van Nuys, CA, on October 20, 2000. He was 95.