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Chuck Connors was born Kevin Joseph Connors in Brooklyn, New York, to Marcella (nee Lundrigan; died 1971) and Alban Francis "Allan" Connors (died 1966), Roman Catholic immigrants of Irish descent from the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada). Chuck and his two-years-younger sister, Gloria, grew up in a working-class section of the west side of Brooklyn, where their father worked the local docks as a longshoreman. He served as an altar boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica School and attended school there. He later became a member of the Bay Ridge Boys' Club and playing sandlot ball as a member of the Bay Ridge Celtics.
A life-long Dodgers' fan, he always dreamed of a baseball career with his favorite team. His natural athletic prowess earned him a scholarship to Adelphi Academy, a private high school, and then to Seton Hall, a Catholic college in South Orange, New Jersey. Leaving Seton Hall after two years, on October 20, 1942, aged 21, he joined the army, listing his occupation as a ski instructor. After enlistment in the infantry at Fort Knox, he later served mostly as a tank-warfare instructor at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and then finally at West Point. Following his discharge early in 1946, he resumed his athletic pursuits. He played center for the Boston Celtics in the 1946-47 season but left early for spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Baseball had always been Connors' first love, and for the next several years he knocked about the minor leagues in such places as Rochester (NY), Norfolk (VA), Newark (NJ), Newport News (VA), Mobile (AL) and Montreal, Canada (while in Montreal he met Elizabeth Riddell, whom he married in October 1948. They had four sons during their 13-year marriage). He finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949, but after just five weeks and one at-bat, he returned to Montreal. After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, Connors wound up with the Cubs' Triple-A farm team, the L.A. Angels, in 1952.
A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Connors and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952). Originally cast to play a prizefighter, but that role went instead to Aldo Ray. Connors was cast as a captain in the state police. He now abandoned his athletic hopes and devoted full time to his acting career, which often emphasized his muscular 6'6" physique.
During the next several years Connors made 20 movies, culminating in a key role in William Wyler's 1958 western The Big Country (1958). Also appearing in many television series, he finally hit the big time in 1958 with The Rifleman (1958), which began its highly successful five-year run on ABC. Other television series followed, as did a number of movies which, though mostly minor, allowed Connors to display his range as both a stalwart "good guy" and a menacing "heavy".
Connors died at age 71 of lung cancer and pneumonia on November 10, 1992 in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery with his tombstone carrying a photo of Connors as Lucas McCain in "The Rifleman" as well as logos from the three professional sports teams he played for: the Dodgers, Cubs and Celtics.Branded (1965-1966)48(2) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058792
The Rifleman (1958-1963)168(5) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051308- Actor
- Producer
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Lorne Greene was born Lyon Himan "Chaim" Green on February 12, 1915, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He began acting while attending Canada's Queen's University, and after graduation got a job in radio broadcasting. His rich, deep, authoritarian voice quickly propelled him to prominence as Canada's top newscaster. He left Canada in the early 1950s for a film career in Hollywood, and soon began appearing regularly in television, films and on radio. His greatest successes came in two television series, the long-running Western Bonanza (1959), in which he played the patriarch of a wealthy frontier family, and the science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica (1978). In 1969 he was awarded Officer of the Order of Canada for his services to the performing arts and community.
Lorne Greene died at age 72 of pneumonia following heart surgery on September 11, 1987, in Santa Monica, CA.Bonanza (1959-1973)430(14)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052451
Battlestar Galactica (1978.05.18.Fri)(2;28)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077215
Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979)21(1)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076984
Galactica 1980 (1980)10(1)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080221- Actor
- Soundtrack
With his lanky frame, big nose, toothbrush moustache and horn-rimmed glasses he looked like someone had decided to cross Groucho Marx with Albert Einstein. The perennial scene-stealer Felix Bressart had two distinct careers as a comic actor: an earlier one, on stage and screen in his native Germany, and a later -- even more prosperous one -- in Hollywood. Trained under Maria Moissi in Berlin, Felix began acting professionally after World War I. He honed his skills in the genres of political parody, musical comedy and slapstick farce in the theatres of Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (with Max Reinhardt). By 1933, he had established his film acting credentials in popular mainstream movies like Three from the Filling Station (1930) and Die Privatsekretärin (1931). Like so many other distinguished actors he was forced to leave the German realm after the Nazis took power in 1933. Felix moved via Switzerland and France to a new domicile in the United States where his connections to fellow émigrés like Joe Pasternak and Ernst Lubitsch guaranteed him rapid and steady employment.
In Hollywood, Felix joined the regular company of stock players at MGM. He was immediately typecast, his stock-in-trade being disheveled academics, wistful European philosophers, scientists and music professors of diverse ethnicity. His first major screen success was as one of the Russian commissars in Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), a delightful performance which spawned as similar part being created for him in Comrade X (1940). The role which ultimately defined his career, in equal parts comedy and pathos, was in the classic wartime satire To Be or Not to Be (1942), as Greenberg, a Jewish member of an acting troupe with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. It seemed, that Felix was still underemployed in films, since he managed to practise as a doctor of medicine on the side. Sadly, he died of leukemia in 1949 at the untimely age of 57.- Actor
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Terence was born in London and spent his early years watching American films and dreamed of being like the stars on the screen, He was awarded a scholarship for the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art. In his second year, during an audition, Peter Ustinov signed him for the title role in Billy Budd (1962). This was not only his remarkable film debut but his performance earned him his first and only Oscar nomination too in 1962 and marked the start of his international stardom. He consolidated his career by working with some of the top directors such as William Wyler (The Collector (1965)), Joseph Losey (Modesty Blaise (1966)), John Schlesinger (Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)), Ken Loach (Poor Cow (1967)) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema (1968)). He then took a break from films and traveled around the world returning to cinema in a variety of films including, among others, Superman (1978), Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), Superman II (1980), The Hit (1984) (for which he was awarded the Grand Medaille de Vermeil in Paris), Legal Eagles (1986), The Sicilian (1987), Wall Street (1987), Young Guns (1988), Alien Nation (1988), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Valkyrie (2008) and Unfinished Song (2012). He has also published the first two instalments of his autobiography, Stamp Album, which became a best seller.- Actor
- Producer
Jacob Vargas began his acting career when he was discovered breakdancing in a schoolyard at age 12. His introduction to acting came with a bit part as a breakdancer on the hit TV show Diff'rent Strokes (1978). In 1995 he won the very first ALMA Award (for Emerging Artist of the Year) for his work in both Allison Anders' My Crazy Life (1993) and Gregory Nava's My Family/Mi familia (1995). He later starred in films such as Selena (1997), Get Shorty (1995), American Me (1992), Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) and the cult favorite Next Friday (2000) as Ice Cube's nemesis, Joker. He later shined as Tijuana cop Manolo, 'Benicio del Toro''s partner in Steven Soderbergh's Academy Award- winning film Traffic (2000), which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award and another ALMA Award. He then made us laugh as Sammy the chef in John Moore's Flight of the Phoenix (2004) and brought depth to Marine sniper Cortez in Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes' war drama Jarhead (2005). In 2006 he starred as a straight-arrow DEA agent opposite Laurence Fishburne and Paul Walker in the action drama _Death and Life of Bobby Z, The (2006)_ and joined an all-star cast as a politically charged busboy in Emilio Estevez's historical drama Bobby (2006) and played a psychologically tortured drone pilot in Alex Rivera's sci-fi political love story _Sleep Dealer, The (2006)_. Not satisfied with just being labeled as an actor, he has also been focusing his talents on writing and producing through his production company, Third Son Productions. In 2001 he executive produced and starred in the independent film Road Dogz (2002). He also co-produced and starred in the stage play "Latinologues", which ran on Broadway in 2005 and is available on DVD. Through Third Son Productions, he is currently developing several feature film and television projects.- Actor
- Director
- Producer
Richard Treat Williams was born in Stamford, Connecticut, to Marian (Andrew), who dealt in antiques, and Richard Norman Williams, a corporate executive. At the age of three, his family moved to Rowayton, Connecticut. Educated at prep-school, he first made a serious commitment to his craft during his days at Pennsylvania's Franklin and Marshall College. Working summers with the nearby Fulton Repertory Theatre at Lancaster in the heart of Amish country, Williams performed the classics as well as contemporary dramas and musicals. After graduating, Williams--whose first name, incidentally, is a family surname on his mother's side--headed for Manhattan where he understudied the Danny Zuko role in "Grease." After working in the The Andrews Sisters musical "Over Here," he made his film debut as a cop in Deadly Hero (1975), then returned to "Grease," this time in the starring role. While he took leaves for two small film roles, in The Ritz (1976) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976), it was his stage work in "Grease" that led to his cinematic breakthrough in Hair (1979). Spotted by director Milos Forman, Williams was asked to read for the role of Berger, the hippie. It took 13 auditions to land the part, but the film's release catapulted Williams into stardom. He then portrayed a GI on the make in Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979) and starred in the romantic comedy Why Would I Lie? (1980) before tackling the role of Danny Ciello, the disillusioned New York City cop who blew the whistle on his corrupt colleagues in Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981). He followed that with The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper (1981), in which he played the legendary plane hijacker who successfully eluded capture (by Robert Duvall); Flashpoint (1984), in which he and Kris Kristofferson starred as a pair of maverick border patrolmen who come upon a large cache of stolen money; Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), in which he played a Jimmy Hoffa-like labor organizer; and Smooth Talk (1985), a screen adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' short story, "Where Are You Going?" Television viewers have seen Williams in a prestigious pair of dramas, Dempsey (1983), a three-hour story of the hard-living heavyweight champ, and John Erman's adaptation of Tennessee Williams' classic "A Streetcar Named Desire," which pitted Williams' Stanley Kowalski against Ann-Margret's Blanche Dubois. Williams has also returned to Broadway sporadically -- first to appear in "Once in a Lifetime" while filming "Hair," and in 1981 to play the role of the pirate king in "The Pirates of Penzance."- Actor
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- Soundtrack
Originally from Kentucky, Sean O'Bryan moved to Los Angeles over ten years ago and has worked extensively in film and TV. Some major key TV guest appearances include Chicago Hope, Beverly Hills 90210, and Felicity. Sean has done several major films including, Phenomenon (1996), Exit to Eden (1994), The Princess Diaries (2001), and Frankie and Johnny (1991). Not only has he focused on working in front of the camera, he's also done several theatrical performances, including: The Lisbon Traviata, It's Only a Play, Money and Friends et al.
In 1995, Sean married Samantha Follows (sister to Megan Follows - star of Anne of Green Gables) and they currently have two children. In 2001, Sean joined the entire Follows family to perform in Noel Coward's "Hay Fever" at the Gravenhurst Opera House in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Canada. As all the Follows are Canadian, Sean was the only American on stage in this British play; however, his character was the only American character so he had it made!
Sean can be seen in the new kids flick, Big Fat Liar (2002) starring Frankie Muniz.