Actors

Chuck Norris

Bill Thompson

Chuck Norris doesn’t drink coffee in the morning, he has a mug of nails.

Chuck Norris can dribble a bowling ball.

Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

But a book is how I first met Chuck Norris 32 years ago, in early 1988. He had just written an autobiography and was on tour to promote it.

And it was one of the many times in my interviewing career that I wished I could have had a couple of hours, instead of just 15 minutes, with a subject.

1978’s “Good Guys Wear Black” put Norris on the map. You’ll hear how that movie came to be, in this interview, and Norris answers the one question everybody asks him.

Here now, from 1988, Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris celebrated his 80th birthday last month. He divorced his first wife, Dianne, the year after this interview. He remarried in 1998.

He was most recently seen as a guest star on “Hawaii Five-O.”

Robert Blake

Bill Thompson

Back in the ’70s, Robert Blake was a huge TV star. His career actually began when he was a kid — did you know he was a star in many of those old black and white “Little Rascals” movies?

So it’s kind of sad that many people today only know Robert Blake — if they remember him at all — for his 2005 murder trial, in which he was eventually acquitted in the shoorting death of his second wife Bonnie Lee Bakley.

I mety him many years before all that, in 1986. He was part of a movement called the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” a grassroots, cross-country effort to raise awareness of nuclear proflieration.

All this was taking place over five years before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the effective end of what we called The Col;d War.

In April 1986, 34 years ago this week, Blake came to Washington, DC to promote the march — which, at that time, seemed to have stalled. Blake was trying to do his part to keep it alive.

So here now, from 1986, Robert Blake:

Robert Blake has not worked in film or TV since 1997. He is now 86 years old.

Janine Turner

Bill Thompson

Janine Turner is best known for her roles on TV’s “Northern Exposure” and “Friday Night Lights,” and in the movie “Cliffhanger.”

Photo: Alan Light

But until 2014, much of her private life — how she prevailed over heartbreak, alcoholism, and the death of her father — had remained out of public view.

That was the year she wrote an autobiographjy, a booked she called ““A Little Bit Vulnerable.”

And that’s when I spoke with her.

Here now, from 2014, actress Janine Turner:

Today Janine Turner is 57. She hasn’t been on TV in a few years, but appears in film from time to time. and she remains politically active.