Trivia: One of the precious few actors of the "pretty boy" school to survive past the 1950s, Robert Wagner was the son of a Detroit steel executive. When his family moved to Los Angeles, Wagner's original intention of becoming a businessman took second place to his fascination with the film industry. Thanks to his dad's connections, he was able to make regular visits to the big studios. Inevitably, a talent scout took notice of Wagner's boyish handsomeness, impressive physique, and easygoing charm. After making his unbilled screen debut in The Happy Years (1950), Wagner was signed by 20th Century Fox, which carefully built him up toward stardom. He played romantic leads with ease, but it wasn't until he essayed the two scene role of a shellshocked war veteran in With a Song in My Heart (1952) that studio executives recognized his potential as a dramatic actor. He went on to play the title roles in Prince Valiant (1954) and The True Story of Jesse James (1956), and shocked his bobby-soxer fan following by effectively portraying a cold-blooded murderer in A Kiss Before Dying (1955). In the early '60s, however, Wagner suffered a series of personal and professional reverses. His "ideal" marriage to actress Natalie Wood had dissolved, and his film career skidded to a stop after The Pink Panther (1964). Two years of unemployment followed before Wagner made a respectable comeback as star of the lighthearted TV espionage series It Takes a Thief (1968-1970). For the rest of his career, Wagner would enjoy his greatest success on TV, first in the mid-'70s series Switch, then opposite Stefanie Powers in the internationally popular Hart to Hart, which ran from 1979 through 1983 and has since been sporadically revived in TV-movie form (a 1986 series, Lime Street, was quickly canceled due to the tragic death of Wagner's young co-star, Savannah Smith). On the domestic front, Wagner was briefly wed to actress Marion Marshall before remarrying Natalie Wood in 1972; after Wood's death in 1981, Wagner found lasting happiness with his third wife, Jill St. John, a longtime friend and co-worker. Considered one of Hollywood's nicest citizens, Robert Wagner has continued to successfully pursue a leading man career into his sixties; he has also launched a latter-day stage career, touring with his Hart to Hart co-star Stefanie Power in the "readers' theater" presentation Love Letters. He found success playing a henchman to Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, and in 2007 he began playing Teddy, a recurring role on the hit CBS series Two and a Half Men.

Trivia: Born Stefania Federkiewicz, she is a lead actress of routine Hollywood films of the '60s and '70s. Soon after graduating from Hollywood High, she debuted onscreen in 1961; early in her career she was billed as Taffy Paul. She starred in the TV series Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Hart to Hart. From 1966-74 she was married to actor Gary Lockwood, then she became the constant companion of aging actor William Holden; following his death in 1981, she continued being active with the William Holden Wildlife Foundation, which worked to create a big-game preserve and study center in Kenya.

Trivia: Hugh Benson was primarily a producer of films made for television. He started off as a publicist in a New York City public relations firm, shortly after he finished his World War II service. Benson was offered a job with Warner Brothers Studios, which he took, in 1955. From there, he went on to run the television division of Warner Bros. for a decade and a half. After he left Warner Bros., he became a wandering executive, of sorts, going from company to company until he found a new challenge in producing made for television fare. He continued to work until 1995 and he succumbed to cancer in 1999.

Trivia: A screenwriter turned director, Don Roos made his celebrated directorial debut with the 1998 The Opposite of Sex, a black comedy that provided hilarious and politically incorrect insights on the nature of love and sex from the point of view of a teen-from-hell anti-heroine (Christina Ricci). One of the year's most acclaimed films, Roos described it as "a post-AIDS kind of tale from the late '50s when there was the pill until AIDS there was a feeling that sex was careless and free and inconsequential and this movie has a different point of view."Born in New York on April 14, 1955, Roos first became involved with screenwriting while an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, where he took a screenwriting course. Following graduation, he moved to Hollywood in 1978 and spent the next eight years writing and producing for television. During a sabbatical he wrote the screenplay for Love Field, which was made into a 1991 film starring Michelle Pfeiffer in an Oscar-nominated performance as a housewife traveling from Dallas to John F. Kennedy's funeral. After scripting the Barbet Schroeder thriller Single White Female (1992), the women-on-the-road movie Boys on the Side (1995) (which he also executive produced), starring Drew Barrymore, Mary-Louise Parker, and Whoopi Goldberg, and the 1996 remake of Diabolique, Roos turned to directing. The shift, he was later quoted as saying, came out of the "sheer frustration of seeing [my] material handled by other people."Following the success of The Opposite of Sex, which premiered to rave reviews at the 1998 Sundance Festival and acted as a critical breakthrough for both Roos (who earned an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature) and star Christina Ricci, Roos began working on his next project, Bounce. A romantic comedy-drama that starred Ben Affleck as a man who falls for a woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose husband's death he indirectly caused, it was released in 2000. That same year, Roos co-wrote Bless the Child, a thriller starring Kim Basinger, Rufus Sewell, and Sex co-conspirator Ricci.

Trivia: American writer/producer/director Sidney Sheldon started his career at the lowest rung, as a radio jokewriter; he then moved to a starvation-wage job at Universal, as a reader of other writers' works. Sheldon's first screenplay credit was for the Republic B-plus mystery Mr. District Attorney and the Carter Case (1941). In 1947, he won an Oscar for his bouncy screenplay for the Cary Grant/Myrna Loy/Shirley Temple comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, gaining nationwide fame for a chunk of rhyming doggerel about voodoo ("I know a man!/What man?/The man with the power!/What power?"...etc) which was recited in the film by Grant and Temple. Sheldon worked for most of the major comedians of the '50s, and counted Groucho Marx among his closest friends. He made the transition from writer to director with 1953's Dream Wife, but this film, like most of his other directorial efforts, was a disappointment that did little to bolster his reputation. In 1959, Sheldon earned another industry award, sharing a Tony for his libretto contributions to the Broadway musical Redhead. Six years later, Sheldon produced and created the imperishable Barbara Eden sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. At the conclusion of this popular project, Sheldon turned to writing novels. The Naked Face (1970) was not the blockbuster that such later Sheldon efforts as The Other Side of Midnight and The Stranger in the Mirror became, but like his later works it titillated the reader with luxuriously detailed sex scenes and with "a clef" characters based on famous real-life personages (one of Sheldon's later literary characters was an amalgam of Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis and Groucho Marx, deftly encompassing the best and the worst personal aspects of all three men). Many of Sheldon's books have served as the basis for popular films (Bloodline) and TV miniseries (A Rage in Heaven, Windmills of the Gods) -- which usually bestow upon Sheldon the ultimate (and contracturally obligated) accolade: His name within the title, a la Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline. Sidney Sheldon remains a prolific and profitable writer into his eighth decade, as well as one of the most prominent and sought-after figures of Hollywood's social scene.

Trivia: The son of an immigrant Russian tailor, Aaron Spelling grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Dallas. Traumatized by constant bullying from his WASP schoolmates, Spelling psychosomatically lost the use of his legs at age eight and was confined to bed for a year. He spent his solitude with the written works of Mark Twain, O. Henry, and other masters, developing his own storytelling skills in the process. After wartime service with the Army Air Force, Spelling attended Southern Methodist University, then headed to New York, hoping to find work as an actor and writer. No one was interested in his writing, though he did eventually secure a few good film and TV roles (he was the squirrelly murderer in Vicki, the 1952 remake of 1941's I Wake Up Screaming). He then moved to California in the company of his wife, actress Carolyn Jones. While her career flourished, his dreams of becoming a great writer dwindled, and he reluctantly returned to acting. Spelling's writing skills finally came to the attention of actor/production executive Dick Powell, who hired Spelling as a scripter and producer for Powell's Four Star Productions. Spelling's strong suit during this period was the ability to woo TV-shy film actors into the Four Star fold by writing the sort of parts they'd like to play, but had never been permitted to by the Hollywood typecasting system. After Dick Powell died, Spelling became aligned with comedian/TV mogul Danny Thomas, for whom Spelling produced the hit series The Mod Squad in 1968. His new-found industry clout permitted Spelling to produce one TV hit after another: The Rookies, Starsky & Hutch, S.W.A.T., Charlie's Angels, Dynasty, among others. Whenever accused of merely turning out "schlock," Spelling could point with pride to his highly regarded weekly drama Family, and, much later, to his Emmy win for Day One, a 1989 TV movie about the wartime Manhattan Project. After several years of indifferent projects, Aaron Spelling once more became the king of youth-oriented television with his 1990 series Beverly Hills 90210 (which co-starred his daughter, Tori) and the equally popular follow-up, Melrose Place. Spelling's name continued to grace the credits of numerous youth-oriented soaps on the fledgling WB and UPN networks right up until his death in June of 2006.

Trivia: A veteran character actor of stage and screen, George O. Petrie will be recognized by fans of the NBC sitcom Mad About You as Paul Reiser's film editor. A native of New Haven, CT, and a 1934 graduate from U.S.C., Petrie's interest in acting led him to New York where he landed a role in the Broadway production of Cafe Crown. While serving in the military during WWII, Petrie appeared in the Broadway production of The Army Play by Play, a five-part anthology comprised of vignettes penned by soldiers from as many camps. The show ran for six months and played a command performance before President Roosevelt. Upon transferring to the Air Corps, Petrie was cast in Moss Hart's inspirational Winged Victory. Following its four-month run, Petrie went on to appear in George Cukor's film version. Petrie became a radio performer after his discharge and starred in several dramas, including The Amazing Mr. Malone. He turned to television acting in the '50s and began starring in live soap operas such as As the World Turns and Edge of Night as well as playing a semi-regular part on Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners. Petrie would remain associated with Gleason on various projects through 1969. Petrie's filmography includes Hud (1963), Something in Common (1986), and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). Petrie died of lymphoma in his Brentwood, CA, home at the age 85.