Trivia: Gail Fisher helped break several barriers as a young black actress in television during the 1960s. She was the first black performer to get dialogue in a nationally aired commercial, and as Peggy Fair on Mannix, only the second black woman (the first being Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek) cast as a regular character in a dramatic hour-long network series, a role for which she won an Emmy award in 1970. Fisher was one of five children born in Orange, NJ. She was later a beauty pageant winner and became a model, using the money she earned in the latter profession and from her regular job in a local factory in New Jersey to take acting lessons in New York. Fisher studied with Lee Strasberg and was later a member of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center, where she worked with Elia Kazan and Herbert Blau, among other directors. It was Blau who gave Fisher her significant stage credit, portraying a major role in a production of Danton's Death. She had already picked up some television work, including commercials, and it was her spot for All detergent that marked a breakthrough for black performers in that field. In 1968, the producers of the series Mannix, starring Mike Connors, revamped the series from its original format, transforming him from an employee of a high-tech security firm into a more traditional private detective, with an office and a secretary. Fisher won the latter role, which allowed her to do far more than answer phones and serve coffee, frequently putting her into the action and the drama. Along with Nichelle Nichols, Greg Morris of Mission: Impossible, Robert Hooks of N.Y.P.D., Don Mitchell of Ironside, and Diahann Carroll of Julia, Fisher was one of the most visible black actors on television during this period, and her Emmy in 1970 confirmed the quality of her work. She took great pride in having helped raised the presence of black performers on television from near invisibility in the early 1960s to major prominence at the end of the decade. After the cancellation of the series in 1975, Fisher's chaotic personal life -- which included several marriages and problems with substance abuse -- caused her to leave acting for a time, although she did play a major role in the 1987 feature film Mankillers and appeared in the made-for-television movie Donor in 1990. Fisher died of kidney failure late in 2000 in Los Angeles.

Trivia: Forceful African American leading man Ivan Dixon first commanded notice from theatergoers for his performance in the 1957 Broadway play The Cave Dwellers. He entered films as Sidney Poiter's double and stand-in with Something of Value (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958), ultimately sharing scenes with Poitier in Porgy and Bess (1959) and Raisin in the Sun (1961). In 1964's Nothing But a Man, Dixon starred as Duff Anderson, an irresponsible Alabama railroad worker whose late-blooming maturity forms the nucleus of the film. Dixon's TV work includes the role of Kinchloe on the POW sitcom Hogan's Heroes and his Emmy-nominated starring role on the 1967 dramatic special The Private War of Olly Winter. In his later years, Ivan Dixon remained active as a director and a performer: he helmed the theatrical features Trouble Man (1972) and The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1992), such TV movies as Love is Not Enough and Percy and Thunder, and several episodes of the TV adventure series Hawaiian Heat (1984). Dixon died at age 76 in March 2008.

Trivia: From a show business family, raspy-voiced comedienne Florence Halop played a bit in Junior G-Men (1940), a Universal serial starring her more famous brother Billy Halop and The Little Tough Guys. She also appeared in Nancy Drew...Reporter (1939) but spent the remainder of the 1940s in radio. A popular and extremely busy television actress, Halop went on to guest star in everything from I Love Lucy to St. Elsewhere but scored her biggest success as the sharp-tongued bailiff in the hit comedy series Night Court. Florence replaced another former radio actress, Selma Diamond, who died of throat cancer after only one season; tragically, the same exact fate befell Halop, who, in turn, was replaced by standup comedienne Marsha Warfield.