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Stephanie Zimbalist plays Laura Holt, a private detective who finds that her potential customers are unwilling to hire a woman. Business picks up dramatically when she invents a fictitious male superior named Remington Steele. In the show's pilot episode, which was the second episode broadcast, Laura reveals that she took the name "Remington" from the brand of typewriter that she used and "Steele" from the Pittsburgh Steelers. In the first episode, she encounters a Humphrey Bogart-loving thief, played by Pierce Brosnan, who overhears someone calling for "Remington Steele" and, in order to escape a pair of murderous thugs, impulsively assumes Remington Steele's identity. By the end of the episode, he chooses to make the alias permanent and assumes the role of Laura's "boss". The real name of Brosnan's character was never revealed, although Daniel Chalmers who was Steele's mentor and surrogate father (revealed as his true father in the end) always called him Harry. In one episode, trapped on an island and fearing for their lives, Steele started to open up to Laura, stating that he was of Irish origin (as was Brosnan himself). In later episodes, it was revealed that Steele did not know his own real birth name, and his attempts to discover it became a running theme. One running joke throughout the series was "Remington's" penchant for quoting lines from famous movies as bits of pseudo-philosophy, and occasionally using techniques from cinematic mysteries to attempt to solve crimes, with variable degrees of success. In fact, more often that not, Laura would solve the case, giving Steele the credit as part of the pretense. A number of plotlines were openly inspired by famous film noir thrillers, such as the first-season episode "Steele Flying High" that takes its lead from the Humphrey Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon.