Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: The son of Congregationalist minister, Wendell Corey was pursuing a brief career as a washing machine salesman when he showed up at the rehearsals for a community play to pick up a friend. Invited by the director to read for a part, Corey found he liked performing, and eventually turned pro in summer stock. After a string of Broadway flops, Corey finally scored a success in the original 1945 production of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl. Entering films with a Paramount contract in 1946, the incisive, sharp-eyed Corey spent the next fifteen years alternating between leads (File on Thelma Jordon), "best friend" supporting characters (Rear Window), and, most effectively, villains (The Big Knife). On TV Corey starred in the weekly series Harbor Command (1957) and The Eleventh Hour (1961-63). Intensely interested in politics, Corey was once the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the director of the Screen Actors, and served on the Santa Monica City Council; he ran for but did not win California's Republican congressional seat.

Trivia: Not to be confused with the 1940s bit player of the same name, American leading man Peter Breck was the son of a bandleader. Majoring in drama and minoring in psychology at the University of Houston, Breck went the regional-theater route until selected by Robert Mitchum for a role in Mitchum's Thunder Road (1958). He paid a few further dues on network television, showing up now and then as Doc Holiday on the weekly Western Maverick. In 1959, Breck starred in his own sagebrush series, Black Saddle, in which he played gunslinger-turned-lawyer Clay Culhane. When the series was dropped after one season, he accepted a few low-paying theater assignments, making ends meet with whatever odd jobs came along. His tenacity paid off when, in 1969, Breck was cast as firebrand "number two son" Nick Barkeley on The Big Valley, which ran for four years. A decade later, he appeared in still another Western, playing a megalomaniac miner in the serialized Secret Empire. Peter Breck has devoted considerable time to teaching drama in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Trivia: An ingenue of the 1930s, Rochelle Hudson insisted to interviewers that her career was due to a "friend of a friend of a friend" of her mother's, who happened to have connections with Fox film studios. Signed to a Fox contract in 1930, Hudson studied with the studio's voice coach, who farmed the girl out for singing work on radio and in cartoons; Hudson was briefly the voice of Honey in Warner Bros.' "Bosko" cartoons. Her first on-camera appearance, on loanout to RKO, was in Fanny Foley Herself. Though often stuck in girl-next-door parts, Hudson was also effectively cast as tomboys and slatterns. She appeared in several Will Rogers pictures, mainly because Rogers liked sharing the spotlight with actors from his home state of Oklahoma. Her career dwindling into "B"-picture leads at Columbia and PRC, Hudson left Hollywood in 1942, spending the war years working in Naval Intelligence with her first husband, reserve officer (and former Disney story editor) Hal Thompson. She returned to films in 1955 to play the mother of Natalie Wood in Rebel Without A Cause. Though her subsequent movie appearances were infrequent, she kept busy on television, co-starring on the 1954 sitcom That's My Boy and showing up on many an anthology series. Retiring from show business for good in 1967, Rochelle Hudson spent her last years as a successful real estate agent.

Trivia: The son of actor John Wayne, Patrick Wayne made his earliest film appearances at 14, playing bits in The Quiet Man (1953) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), both directed by "the Duke"'s mentor John Ford. The younger Wayne's first real film role was in Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955); the following year, as Lieutenant Greenhill, Wayne acted opposite his father in The Searchers (1956). After attending Loyola University, he was given an opportunity to co-star in The Young Land, a film which neither starred his dad nor was directed by John Ford. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't ready for stardom just yet, so it was back to supporting parts in The Alamo (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), McClintock (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971). On his own, Patrick Wayne played leads in the special effects-laden adventures People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), co-starred on the TV series The Rounders (1965) and Shirley (1979), and hosted the syndicated variety weekly The Monte Carlo Show (1980).