Trivia: The younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, American actor Peter Graves worked as a musician and radio actor before entering films with 1950's Rogue River. At first, it appeared that Graves would be the star of the family, since he was cast in leads while brother Jim languished in secondary roles. Then came Stalag 17 (1953), in which Graves was first-rate as a supposedly all-American POW who turned out to be a vicious Nazi spy. Trouble was, Graves played the part too well, and couldn't shake the Nazi stereotype in the eyes of most Hollywood producers. Suddenly the actor found himself in such secondary roles as Shelley Winters' doomed husband in Night of the Hunter (1955) (he was in and out of the picture after the first ten minutes), while sibling James Arness was riding high with Gunsmoke. Dissatisfied with his film career, Graves signed on in 1955 for a network kid's series about "a horse and the boy who loved him." Fury wasn't exactly Citizen Kane, but it ran five years and made Graves a wealthy man through rerun residuals--so much so that he claimed to be making more money from Fury than his brother did from Gunsmoke. In 1966, Peter Graves replaced Steven Hill as head honcho of the force on the weekly TV adventure series Mission: Impossible, a stint that lasted until 1973. Though a better than average actor, Graves gained something of a camp reputation for his stiff, straight-arrow film characters and was often cast in films that parodied his TV image. One of the best of these lampoonish appearances was in the Zucker-Abrahams comedy Airplane (1980), as a nutty airline pilot who asks outrageous questions to a young boy on the plane (a part the actor very nearly turned down, until he discovered that Leslie Nielsen was co-starring in the film). Peter Graves effortlessly maintained his reliable, authoritative movie persona into the '90s and 2000s, and hosted the Biography series on A&E, for which he won an Emmy; he also guest-starred on programs including Cold Case, House and American Dad. Graves died of natural causes in March 2010, at age 83.

Trivia: A former University of Illinois sociology major, ash-blonde leading lady Barbara Bain studied for a theatrical career at New York's Actors Studio and Neighborhood Playhouse. While attending an actor's workshop in 1956, Barbara made the acquaintance of an intense young performer named Martin Landau. It was love at first sight, and they married in 1957. Landau and Bain strove to maintain separate careers, and while her husband tended to work more often than she did, Barbara was well-represented with guest appearances on such series as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Get Smart and The Dick Van Dyke Show. In 1964, the Landaus worked together for the first time on an episode of The Greatest Show on Earth. They didn't care much for the experience, and vowed not to co-star again -- at least, not until producer Bruce Geller made them an offer they couldn't refuse with the weekly TV suspenser Mission: Impossible. Cast as silken espionage agent Cinammon Carter, Bain won three consecutive Emmies for her work on the series (if you're wondering why Cinammon never adopted elaborate disguises, as did practically everyone else on the program, it is because Bain suffered from claustrophobia, and could not abide being hemmed in by heavy makeup). Then, after three seasons' worth of Mission: Impossible, the Landaus quit the series in 1969, citing poor scripts and insufficient creative challenges. In later years, Bain would comment ruefully that leaving the show ruined her career. The record doesn't quite bear this out: indeed, during the early 1970s she racked up an impressive list of TV movie appearances, and was offered a great deal of money to reteam with Landau in the syndicated sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77). In 1989, Bain appeared in her very first theatrical feature, Trust Me (1989), playing a truculent, dishonest art collector. Though long-divorced from Martin Landau, Barbara Bain did not express an aversion to the possibility of playing a cameo alongside her ex-husband in the 1996 film version of Mission: Impossible, should either one of them be asked to do so (alas, they weren't).

Trivia: Fans of the original action /espionage series Mission Impossible (1966-70) may recognize black actor Greg Morris for playing electronics wizard Barney Collier. Morris spent most of his career on television, appearing on such shows as Ben Casey, The Dick Van Dyck Show and The Twilight Zone. During the 1970s, Morris was a regular on Vega$ (1978-81), playing police officer Lt. David Neslon. A native of Cleveland who spent part of his childhood in New York City, his mother worked as a secretary for black labor leader A. Phillip Reynolds. Before becoming a television actor during the early '60s, Morris attended Ohio State University and the University of Iowa. Morris passed away at the age of 61 on August 27, 1996. The cause of death was unreported.

Trivia: Saturnine character actor Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News before switching to acting. In 1955, his career got off to a promising beginning, when out of 2,000 applicants, only he and one other actor (Steve McQueen) were accepted by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. Extremely busy in the days of live, Manhattan-based television, Landau made his cinematic mark with his second film appearance, playing James Mason's henchman in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In 1966, Landau and his wife Barbara Bain were both cast on the TV adventure/espionage series Mission: Impossible. For three years, Landau portrayed Rollin Hand, a master of disguise with the acute ability to impersonate virtually every villain who came down the pike (banana-republic despots were a specialty). Unhappy with changes in production personnel and budget cuts, Landau and Bain left the series in 1969. Six years later, they costarred in Space: 1999 a popular syndicated sci-fi series; the performances of Landau, Bain, and third lead Barry Morse helped to gloss over the glaring gaps in continuity and logic which characterized the show's two-year run. The couple would subsequently act together several times (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981) was one of the less distinguished occasions) before their marriage dissolved.Working steadily in various projects throughout the next few decades, Landau enjoyed a career renaissance with two consecutive Oscar nominations, the first for Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and the second for Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Landau finally won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood; his refusal to cut his acceptance speech short was one of the high points of the 1995 Oscar ceremony. He would continue to work over the next several years, appearing in movies like City of Ember and Mysteria, as well as on TV shows like Without a Trace and Entourage.

Trivia: In films from the mid-'60s, American actor Richard Bull was seen in The Satan Bug (1965), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Secret Life of an American Wife (1969), Newman's Law (1971), and several other major Hollywood productions. Many of these roles were bits or atmosphere characters: guards, policemen, and the like. Television afforded Bull larger character roles, especially in the sitcom field. Within a ten-year period (1964-1974), he guested on Gidget, Family Affair, Gomer Pyle, USMC, The Andy Griffith Show, My 3 Sons, Room 222, and Bewitched (as pilgrim John Alden in a "flashback" episode). He also had a recurring role as a ship's doctor on the mid-'60s fantasy weekly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. From 1974 through 1982, Richard Bull played store proprietor Nels Oleson, the even-tempered, long-suffering husband of overbearing Harriet Oleson on Little House on the Prairie. Bull continued to appear in films and episodes of TV shows until his death in 2014 at age 89.

Trivia: Paul Carr has been a very busy actor since the '50s on-stage, in television, and in films, after starting his screen career with Alfred Hitchcock. Born in New Orleans in 1934, he grew up in the town of Marrero, in Jefferson Parish, LA. As a teenager, he had an interest in music as well as acting. After a short stint in the Marine Corps in his teens, he began his acting career with a role in a New Orleans production of Billy Budd, and by the mid-'50s was working on live televsion out of New York City, including appearances on Studio One and Kraft Television Theater, while continuing theatrical work in stock companies in Ohio and Michigan, with roles such as Peter Quilpe in The Cocktail Party, Haemon in Antigone, Jack in The Rose Tattoo, and Hal Carter in Picnic, as well as a summer tour in Fifth Season with Chico Marx. Carr made his movie debut in 1955 with a small uncredited role in Alfred Hitchcock's fact-based thriller The Wrong Man. That same year, he portrayed a prisoner of war in the Theatre Guild's production of Time Limit on Broadway. His film career continued with a much larger role in Alfred Werker's The Young Don't Cry (1957), starring James Whitmore and Sal Mineo, and that same year he appeared in the jukebox movie Jamboree. He worked steadily on television in the late '50s and early '60s with guest spots and supporting roles in a lot of Westerns such as Trackdown, Rawhide, The Rifleman, and The Virginian. Later he appeared in detective shows and medical and war dramas, such as 77 Sunset Strip, Dr. Kildare, and Twelve O'Clock High, interspersed with occasional film work, including Captain Newman, M.D. (1963). He had a recurring role as one of the submarine Seaview's junior officers on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in its black-and-white season, and played other parts of the show subsequently. Carr was all over the tube on Burke's Law, Combat, Gunsmoke, and a dozen other shows in the middle of the decade. In 1965, Carr won the role of Bill Horton, the physician son of protagonist Dr. Tom Horton on Days of Our Lives, which kept him busy for the subsequent year. He was later a regular on General Hospital and The Doctors, and between the three soap operas, Carr had put in a lot of time portraying dedicated medical practitioners. He may be remembered best, however, for his appearance on a pop-culture institution that has been exumed and re-examined by the public en masse: In 1966, he was seen in the second Star Trek pilot episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," portraying Lt. Kelso, the affable Enterprise officer who is strangled telekinetically by the ship's rapidly mutating helmsman. Carr has gone on to work in dozens of television shows --everything from Get Smart, Mannix, The Rockford Files, and Murphy Brown, to miniseries and features, both made-for-television (The Deadly Tower). In 2001, his voice was heard in Blood: The Last Vampire, as the school's headmaster.