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: Lola Albright's meat-and-potatoes job as switchboard operator of an Ohio radio station led to on-the-air work in minor roles. She then worked as a model before travelling to Hollywood in 1948. Impressed by Lola's hands-on-hips self-assuredness, producer Stanley Kramer cast her opposite Kirk Douglas in 1949's Champion. The film should have secured Lola's stardom, but didn't; for nearly a year after its release she couldn't get an acting job, and for a long period she subsisted on peanut-butter sandwiches. After marrying her Good Humor Man (1950) co-star Jack Carson, Lola found that her husband preferred her at home rather than in the studio. She acceded to his wishes, taking film and TV work only sporadically; still, by 1958 the marriage dissolved due to the very career conflicts that both Lola and Jack had tried to avoid. From 1958 through 1961, Lola played sultry nightclub songstress Edie Hart on the TV private eye series Peter Gunn. Lola's post-Gunn film roles alternated between fascinating (especially her over-the-hill stripper in Cold Wind in August [1964]) and merely rent-paying (David Niven's antiseptic spouse in The Impossible Years [1968]). In 1966, Albright briefly replaced a seriously ill Dorothy Malone in the role of Constance McKenzie on the prime time TV serial Peyton Place. Albright died in 2017, at age 92.

Trivia: Handsome leading man Rory Calhoun's successful film and television career spanned well over 50 years. In the mid-1940s,after a difficult childhood and adolescence, Calhoun found work as a lumberjack in Santa Cruz, California. It was while there employed that Calhoun was discovered by actor Alan Ladd, who suggested that the rugged young man give movies a try. Billed as "Frank McCown," Calhoun was signed to a brief contract at 20th Century-Fox, but most of his earliest movie scenes (including a sizeable supporting role in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Bullfighters) ended up on the cutting room floor. Free-lancing in the late 1940s, Calhoun first attracted a fan-following with his supporting role as a high-school lothario in 1948's The Red House. He returned to Fox in 1950, enjoying major roles in such films as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and River of No Return (1955). Established as a western player by the late 1950s, Calhoun starred on the popular TV western The Texan from 1958 through 1960. He spent his spare time writing, publishing at least one novel, The Man From Padeira. From 1949 through 1970, Calhoun was married to actress Lita Baron. Perpetuating his career into the 1980s and '90s, a more weather-beaten Rory Calhoun was seen in the lead of the satirical horror film Motel Hell (1980), was quite funny as a washed-up macho movie star in Avenging Angel (1985), and stole the show from ostensible leading-man George Strait in Pure Country (1992).

Trivia: His parents wanted him to be lawyer, but S. Yewell Tompkins decided instead to major in liberal arts at the University of Wisconsin. A professional actor from 1928, he toured in stock companies then spent several lean years in New York, during which time he changed his name to Tom Ewell. He appeared in the first of a string of Broadway flops in 1934, occasionally enjoying longer runs in such productions as Brother Rat and Family Portrait. A trip to Hollywood in 1940 led to a handful of bit parts but little else. After four years in the Navy, Ewell finally landed a bona fide Broadway hit starring in John Loves Mary in 1947. This led to his "official" screen debut as Judy Holliday's philandering husband in Adam's Rib (1949). Hardly the romantic lead type, Ewell's crumpled "everyman" countenance served him well in such screen roles as Bill Mauldin's archetypal G.I. Willie in Up Front (1951) and Willie and Joe Back at the Front (1952). Back on Broadway in 1954, he won a Tony Award for his peerless performance as a "summer bachelor" in George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch, repeating this characterization opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 screen version. He went on to play wry variations of this role in Frank Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1955) and The Girl Can't Help It (1956), in which his screen partners included such lovelies as Sheree North, Rita Moreno, and Jayne Mansfield. In 1960, he starred in The Tom Ewell Show, a one-season sitcom in which he played a standard harried suburbanite. Various illnesses and recurrent alcoholism made it increasingly difficult for Ewell to find work in the 1970s; his best showing during this period was as Robert Blake's disheveled pal Billy on the weekly TVer Baretta. Tom Ewell retired in 1983, after a brief stint as Doc Killian in TV's Best of the West and a character role in the Rodney Dangerfield film Easy Money.

Trivia: American actress Diane McBain was first presented to the paying public as a Warner Bros. contract starlet. Evidently built up as Warner's answer to Carroll Baker, the young blonde actress appeared in such films as Ice Palace (1960), Parrish (1961) and Claudelle Inglish (1963) (in the title role), and also spent two years in the role of "girl Friday" Daphne Dutton on the Warners TV private-eye series Surfside Six (1960-62). McBain also did box-office duty with Elvis Presley in Spinout (1966). Her career petered out towards the late '60s, with such negligible roles as the head of a biker gang in The Miniskirt Mob (1968), but Diane McBain managed to survive into the '80s, when she played the recurring role of Claire Howard on General Hospital.

Trivia: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: When casting about for a non de film, upon embarking on a movie career in 1944, Kansas-born stage actor John Stevenson chose the name of the fellow who allegedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s. As "Steve Brodie," Stevenson spent the 1940s working at MGM, RKO and Republic. He flourished in two-fisted "outdoors" roles throughout the 1950s, mostly in westerns. He holds the distinction of being beaten up twice by Elvis Presley, in Blue Hawaii (1961) and Roustabout (1964). Steve Brodie's screen career was pretty much limited to cheap exploitation flicks in the 1970s, though he did function as co-producer of the "B"-plus actioner Bobby Jo and the Outlaw (1976), a film distinguished by its steady stream of movie-buff "in" jokes.