Trivia: Born February 18, 1954, in Englewood, John Travolta was the youngest of six children in a family of entertainers; all but one of his siblings pursued showbusiness careers as well. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group, and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. By age 16, he dropped out of high school to take up acting full-time, relocating to Manhattan to make his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in Rain, and a minor role in the touring company of the hit musical Grease followed.In 1975, Travolta was cast in an ABC sitcom entitled Welcome Back, Kotter. As Vinnie Barbarino, a dim-witted high school Lothario, he shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Before the first episode of the series even aired, he also won a small role in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror picture Carrie, and at the early peak of his Kotter success he even recorded a series of pop music LPs -- Can't Let Go, John Travolta, and Travolta Fever -- scoring a major hit with the single "Let Her In." Approached with a role in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, he was forced to reject the project in the face of a busy Kotter schedule, but in 1976 he was able to shoot a TV feature, director Randal Kleiser's The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, which won considerable critical acclaim. Diana Hyland, the actress who played Travolta's mother in the picture, also became his offscreen lover until her death from cancer in 1977.In the wake of Hyland's death, Travolta's first major feature film, John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), emerged in the fall of that year. A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture. In 1978, he starred in Kleiser's film adaptation of Grease, this time essaying the lead role of 1950s greaser Danny Zuko. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's, becoming a perennial fan favorite and, like its predecessor, spawning a massively popular soundtrack LP. In the light of his back-to-back successes, as well as the continued popularity of Welcome Back, Kotter -- on which he still occasionally appeared -- it seemed Travolta could do no wrong - but things wouldn't always be so rosy for the performer.Travolta's first misstep was 1978's Moment By Moment, a laughable May-December romance with Lily Tomlin. He then reprised the role of Tony Manero in the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive. Directed by Sylvester Stallone as a kind of Rocky retread, the film was released in 1983 to embarrassing returns and horrendous reviews. It would prove to be just one in a string of '80s stinkers for the actor, followed by disappointments like Two of a Kind, Perfect, and The Experts. He made a minor comeback with 1989's Look Who's Talking, which fared well at the box office, but the movie did little for Travolta's reputation, and the performer was all but completely washed up by the beginning of the '90s.Then, in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Pulp Fiction, a lavishly acclaimed crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan who wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind; Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it.In the wake of Pulp Fiction, the resurrected Travolta became one of the hardest-working actors in Hollywood, and on Tarantino's advice he accepted the starring role in director Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. Acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date, it was another major hit, and he followed it by appearing in the 1996 John Woo action tale Broken Arrow. Phenomenon was another smash that same summer, and by Christmas Travolta was back in theaters as a disreputable angel in Michael. The following year he reunited with Woo in the highly successful thriller Face/Off, which he trailed with a supporting turn in Nick Cassavetes' She's So Lovely. After 1997's Mad City, Travolta began work on Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' political satire, portraying a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President. An adaptation of the acclaimed book A Civil Action followed, as did the 1999 thriller The General's Daughter, in which Travolta co-starred with Madeline Stowe. Travolta did suffer an embarrassment in 2000, when he produced and starred in the sci-fi thriller Battlefield Earth, based on the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (whose teachings Travolta publicly admired and advocated). The film was universally panned as so bad it was funny, but Travolta bounced back, shedding some pounds to play the baddie in 2001 action thriller Swordfish. A complex tale of mixed loyalties, computer hacking, and espionage, Swordfish teamed Travolta with X-Men star Hugh Jackman in hopes of dominating the summer box office. This put Travolta in good shape to weather another disappointment, when his dramatic Oscar contender A Love Song for Bobby Long, was not well received by audiences or critics. While he received more praise for his performance in Ladder 49, a film about the lives of firefighters, his career took another hit in 2004 when he reprised the role of Chili Palmer in Be Cool, a sequel to Get Shorty that proved to have none of the magic that made its predecessor so successful. Unfazed, Travolta signed on to star in the 2007 Baby Boomer comedy Wild Hogs, alongside a dream cast of Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy, who played four listless suburbanites who decide to "live on the edge" by grabbing their sawed-off choppers and hitting the open road as would-be Hell's Angels. Later that year, Travolta took another comedic turn in Hairspray, Adam Shankman's screen adaptation of the stage musical (which, in turn, is an adaptation of John Waters's 1988 feature), which put Travolta in drag to play the heavy set, bouffant hair-do'd mother once played by drag queen Divine. He would follow this up with some middling action fare, with The Taking of Pelham 13 and From Paris with Love, as well as a sequel to Wild Hogs, 2009's Old Dogs.

Trivia: Olivia Newton-John was an extremely popular country/ pop singer during the seventies whose best known songs include If You Love Me (Let Me know), Have You Never Been Mellow, and I Honestly Love You. Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England but raised in Australia. As a singer she got her start as a teenager performing in England. When she first burst onto the U.S. scene, she was known as a country singer, but soon crossed-over into pop. Newton-John went on to earn numerous gold records and won many awards, including the Grammy. In 1981, she had her biggest hit with Physical. In 1978, she broadened her horizons and became an actress, starring in the smash-hit film adaptation of the Broadway musical Grease. Following the success of that film, she starred in the musical fantasy Xanadu and bombed at the box-office. Still, as did Grease, which provided her with hits such as Hopelessly Devoted to You and the duet with co-star John Travolta You're the One That I Want, the Xanadu soundtrack provided her a hit with the title song, Magic. Her next film Two of a Kind, again co-starring Travolta, also bombed. As an actress she later appeared in a few episodes of Timeless Tales from Hallmark. In 1983, Newton-John returned to Australia because she was being stalked by a killer. Following his arrest, she returned to Hollywood and opened a chain of clothing stores, Koala Blue, in which she served interesting health drinks and Australian clothing. The chain went bankrupt in the early '90s. Newton-John was preparing to jump-start her music career in 1992 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer (her father had died of cancer just two weeks before her own diagnosis).She underwent a partial mastectomy and breast reconstruction. Newton-John returned to film, making a cameo appearance in the 1996 AIDS melodrama It's My Party.In the years to follow, Newton-John continued to record and release music mostly in her native Australia, and toured all over the world to support her music career. She also endured a difficult public struggle in 2005, when her partner Patrick McDermott went missing following a fishing trip along the California coast. The singer would persevere, however, and continue to act, appearing in projects like the TV series Sordid Lives: The Series and in films like A Few Best Men.

Trivia: Born Susan Williams Antonia Stockard Channing Schmidt on February 13, 1944, Channing is the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive, and became interested in the dramatic arts while attending college at Radcliffe. After graduating in the mid-sixties, Channing joined Boston's experimental Theater Company. Several unsuccessful Broadway auditions later, she landed a lead role in a Los Angeles production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Eventually, Channing made it to Broadway, and won a Tony for her performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.In the early '70s, Channing appeared in several small television roles, and made her big screen debut in 1971's The Hospital. In 1973, the actress starred in the Joan Rivers-penned black comedy The Girl Most Likely To..., a TV movie about an overweight college girl who loses weight, gets cosmetic surgery, and sets off in hopes of getting even. Channing's first major film role came two years later, when she starred in Mike Nichols' The Fortune with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. It wasn't until 1978, however, that Channing would win her most memorable role to date -- tough gal Rizzo in the retro-musical Grease. Interestingly enough, although she was cast as a teenager, the actress was in her early thirties when she was chosen for the film. Around the same time, Channing starred in two similar and short-lived sitcoms: Stockard Channing in Just Friends and The Stockard Channing Show. By 1980, Channing's film career was idling in neutral, so she focused her energies on the theater, though she began showing up in various supporting film roles in the mid to late eighties. In 1993, she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for playing the formidable Upper East Side matron of Six Degrees of Separation; the role had also earned her a Tony nomination when she performed it in the film's stage version. Channing subsequently made steady appearances in both film and television, and co-starred as a witch in Practical Magic with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, as well as The First Wives Club, Moll Flanders, Edie & Pen, and An Unexpected Family. In 2000, Channing would play one of the more eccentric residents of a small Oklahoma town in Where the Heart Is. After filming Other Voices in 2001, which was screened at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, Channing would receive a solid amount of critical success for her role in The Business of Strangers (2001), in which she starred as a high-level corporate player who saves her own job only to find out her boss is a rapist. In between filming a variety of television and documentary appearances - namely, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (2002), A Girl Thing (2001), Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The William Haines Story (2001), and New York Firefighters: The Brotherhood of 9/11 (2002) -- Channing joined up with Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie in Stephen Herek's Life or Something Like It. In 2003, Channing made a cameo appearance in Bright Young Things, and went on to co-star in Le Divorce with Kate Hudson, Glenn Close, and Matthew Modine during the same year. The actress also signed on with the legendary Woody Allen in Anything Else, in which she played a middle-aged mother determined to land a role in a cabaret production. She would find particular success on the small screen over the coming years, with a starring role as first lady Abbey Bartlet on The West Wing.

Trivia: Though Jeff Conaway achieved TV fame by playing an actor who couldn't find work, he had in fact been a busy professional since childhood. At age ten, Conaway made his first Broadway appearance in All the Way Home. Eleven years later, after completing his education at N.Y.U., Conaway was seen in his first film, Jennifer on My Mind (1971). He played Kenicke in the New York staging of Grease, then repeated the role for the 1978 film adaptation. Also in 1978, he began a three-year run on the TV sitcom Taxi, in the role of Bobby Wheeler, an incredibly luckless aspiring actor who made ends meet by driving a hack. Conaway then delved into the realm of "fantastic television," appearing as Prince Erick Greystone in Wizards and Warriors (1983) and (occasionally) as Zack Allen on Babylon 5 (1992). Active in the direct-to-video market, Jeff Conaway both directed and acted in Bikini Summer 2 (1992). His problems with substance escalated in later years, and after appearing on several intervention-style reality shows, Conaway succumbed to various health problems and died on May 27, 2011.

Trivia: Little Eunice Quedens' first brush with the performing arts came at age seven, when she won a WCTU medal for her recital of the pro-temperance poem "No Kicka My Dog." After graduating from high school, she became a professional actress on the California stock company circuit. Still using her given name, she played a blonde seductress in the 1929 Columbia talkie Song of Love then joined a touring repertory theater. After another brief film appearance in 1933's Dancing Lady, she was urged by a producer to change her name for professional purposes. Allegedly inspired by a container of Elizabeth Arden cold cream, Eunice Quedens reinvented herself as Eve Arden. Several successful appearances in the annual Ziegfeld Follies followed, and in 1937 Arden returned to films as a young character actress. From Stage Door (1937) onward, she was effectively typecast as the all-knowing witheringly sarcastic "best friend" who seldom got the leading man but always got the best lines. Her film roles in the 1940s ranged from such typical assignments as sophisticated magazine editor "Stonewall" Jackson in Cover Girl (1944) to such hilariously atypical performances as athletic Russian sniper Natalia Moskoroff in The Doughgirls (1944). In 1945, she earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Joan Crawford's sardonic but sympathetic business partner in Mildred Pierce. In July of 1948, she launched the popular radio situation comedy Our Miss Brooks, earning a place in the hearts of schoolteachers (and sitcom fans) everywhere with her award-winning portrayal of long-suffering but ebullient high school teacher Connie Brooks. Our Miss Brooks was transferred to television in 1952, running five successful seasons. Less successful was the 1957 TVer The Eve Arden Show, in which the star played authoress Liza Hammond. This failure was neutralized by her subsequent stage tours in such plays as Auntie Mame and Hello, Dolly! and her well-received film appearances in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960). In 1967, she returned to TV to co-star with Kaye Ballard on the chucklesome The Mothers-in-Law which lasted two years. And in 1978, she became a favorite of a new generation with her performance as Principal McGee in the phenomenally successful film version of Broadway's Grease. In 1985, Eve Arden came out with her autobiography, The Three Phases of Eve.

Trivia: Actress Dinah Manoff is the daughter of actress/director Lee Grant and playwright Arnold Manoff. A graduate of California School of the Arts, Dinah made her first acting appearance in a PBS special. She won a Tony award as the neurotic daughter of an irresponsible movie screenwriter in Neil Simon's I Ought to Be in Pictures; she re-created this role in the 1982 film version, acting opposite Walter Matthau and her mother Lee Grant. On television, Manoff played Elaine Lefkowitz on the serial satire Soap (1978-79), securing a niche in TV history as the first sitcom regular to be "murdered" on-camera. Dinah Manoff later co-starred as Carol Weston opposite fellow Soap alumnus Richard Mulligan on the weekly comedy Empty Nest (1988-1993).

Trivia: The son of a Yonkers restaurant owner, Sid Caesar first discovered he could get laughs by imitating the colorful dialects of his multinational classmates. But Caesar actually wanted to be a musician and to that end studied diligently at Juilliard. He paid for his education by working in various Catskills resorts as a saxophone player, dancer, and comedian. While serving in WWII, Caesar was engaged to perform in a touring musical revue staged by Coast Guard personnel called Tars and Spars. When the show was transformed into a motion picture by Columbia Pictures, Caesar went along for the ride, performing his classic war film monologue intact before the cameras. This led to a brief Columbia contract, which came to an end with Caesar's three-minute cameo appearance in The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947). While appearing in the Broadway revue Make Mine Manhattan in 1949, he was hired to co-star with Imogene Coca in a weekly TV variety series, The Admiral Broadway Revue. This in turn led to Your Show of Shows, one of the true landmarks of television's Golden Age. For five inspired seasons, Caesar and his cohorts Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris kept America laughing with an unending stream of brilliant monologues, movie parodies, and various sundry other sketches. Throughout the '50s and early '60s Caesar continued to star on TV in several Show of Shows spinoffs, and in 1963 returned to Broadway in the musical comedy Little Me, playing no fewer than eight roles within the play's two-hour running time. During this period he also returned to films, first as a member of the all-star ensemble in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), then as star of The Busy Body (1967) and The Spirit is Willing (1968). Unfortunately, the pressures of show business, combined with an overabundance of personal problems, led to a dangerous dependency upon alcohol and prescription drugs. So far gone was Caesar during the 1960s and 1970s that, according to his 1982 autobiography Where Have I Been?, there were times that he'd wander on-stage or before the cameras with no idea where he was or what he was saying. He hit rock bottom in 1978, suffering a total nervous breakdown while appearing in a Toronto dinner theater production of The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Slowly and painfully, Caesar overcame his addictions and a multitude of psychological difficulties and made a near-complete recovery. Modern audiences, to whom Your Show of Shows is but a dim and distant memory, remember Sid Caesar best for his supporting appearances in such films as Silent Movie (1976) (directed by Caesar's onetime gag writer Mel Brooks), Fire Sale (1978), Grease (1982), and National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation (1997). Caesar died in 2014 at age 91.

Trivia: One of the more talented members of the "Philadelphia school" of rock-n-rollers, Frankie Avalon was the reigning teen singing idol from 1958 through 1960. Devotees of American Bandstand will hold affectionate memories of such Avalon top-tenners as "Gingerbread" and "Venus." Avalon made a gradual transition from singer to actor beginning in 1957. He successfully essayed supporting roles in such films as Guns of the Timberland (1960) and The Alamo (1960) before starring in a string of inexpensive but moneymaking "Beach Party" flicks for American-International. As his film stardom eclipsed in the early 1970s, Avalon returned to singing, briefly starring in the 1976 nostalgia-oriented TV variety series Easy Does It. In 1987, Frankie Avalon was reteamed with his "Beach Party" leading lady Annette Funicello in the retro film musical Back to the Beach (1987), which he also co-produced. Over the next few years he could be seen in cameo performances portraying himself in a diverse string of projects including Troop Beverly Hills, the kid-friendly ABC sitcom Full House, and Martin Scorsese's violent Vegas gangster film Casino. In 1995 he reteamed with many of his old co-horts, including Annette and Dick Clark, for the feel-good made-for-TV showbiz film A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: The Annette Funicello Story.

Trivia: A lovable star with a vivacious personality, mesmerizing smile, and big blue eyes, Joan Blondell, the daughter of stage comic Eddie Blondell (one of the original Katzenjammer Kids), spent her childhood touring the world with her vaudevillian parents and appearing with them in shows. She joined a stock company at age 17, then came to New York after winning a Miss Dallas beauty contest. She then appeared in several Broadway productions and in the Ziegfield Follies before being paired with another unknown, actor James Cagney, in the stage musical Penny Arcade; a year later this became the film Sinners Holiday, propelling her to stardom. Blondell spent eight years under contract with Warner Bros., where she was cast as dizzy blondes and wisecracking gold-diggers. She generally appeared in comedies and musicals and was paired ten times on the screen with actor Dick Powell, to whom she was married from 1936-45. Through the '30s and '40s she continued to play cynical, wisecracking girls with hearts of gold appearing in as many as ten films a year during the '30s. In the '50s she left films for the stage, but then came back to do more mature character parts. Blondell is the author of a roman a clef novel titled Center Door Fancy (1972) and was also married to producer Mike Todd (1947-50).

Trivia: Born in Missouri and educated at the University of Oklahoma, Alice Ghostley created a sensation in her first Broadway production, New Faces of 1952. In the company of such powerhouse co-stars as Paul Lynde, Robert Clary and Carol Lawrence, Ghostley stole the show with her plaintive renditions of the satirical ballads "The Boston Beguine" and "Time for Tea." Within a year of New Faces, she was headlined in the film version of that popular revue and was cast as a regular on the network-TV series Freedom Ring. Ghostley has been convulsing audiences ever since, playing a rich variety of man-chasing bachelorettes, overprotective mothers and dotty neighbors. While most of her film appearances have been in comedies (Viva Max!, The Graduate, Grease), Ghostley proved quite effective in the comparatively straight role of Stephanie Crawford in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). In 1965, she won a Tony award for her performance in the Broadway seriocomedy The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. In addition, Ghostley has been a regular or semi-regular on a multitude of TV series: The Jackie Gleason Show, Car 54 Where Are You, Captain Nice, The Jonathan Winters Show, The Golddiggers, Designing Women and a host of others. She is most fondly remembered for her portrayal of bumbling witch Esmerelda on the long-running (1964-72) sitcom Bewitched. On both this series and 1972's Temperatures Rising, Alice Ghostley was reunited with her old New Faces cohort, Paul Lynde. Ghostley died of colon cancer at age 81 in September 2007.

Trivia: From his first appearances in the mid-'70s onward, Eddie Deezen has enlivened many a film and TV show, playing a multitude of nerdish, anal-retentive pop-culture freaks. In I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), his idolatry of the Beatles extended to his adopting the personality and mannerisms of Ringo Starr; and in WarGames (1983), he's the ultimate technogeek, spouting out computer-ese with such gleeful abandon that you'd think people were really interested in what he had to say. In later years, he has devoted much of his time to cartoon voice-overs and the cheapjack output of indie producer Fred Olen Ray. On television, Eddie Deezen played zany maintenance man Eddie Malvin during the 1984-1985 season of Punky Brewster.

Trivia: American actress/dancer Dody Goodman gained a measure of newspaper column space for her dancing solos in such '40s Broadway musicals as High Button Shoes and Wonderful Town. Adopting the guise of a fey airhead, Goodman was good for a few off-the-wall quotes whenever she submitted to an interview. She came to the attention of nighttime talkshow host Jack Paar, who after becoming enchanted by Goodman's ditzy persona and seemingly spontaneous malaprops, invited the lady to become a semi-regular on The Tonight Show. As Goodman's fame grew, she became difficult to handle on the show, and Paar wasn't happy with her upstaging habits. Commenting on another guest one evening, Paar quipped "Give them enough rope." "And they'll skip!" ad-libbed Goodman brightly. Dropped summarily by Paar in 1958, Goodman spent the next decade showing up on other talk programs, game shows and summer stock as a "professional celebrity." Goodman staged a comeback in 1976 as Louise Lasser's mother on the TV soap opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. After this, Dody Goodman's career gained momentum with regular appearances on TV's Diff'rent Strokes, movie roles (Grease [1978]) and cartoon voiceover work (The Chipmunk's Adventure [1987]). She died in 2008 at the age of 93.

Trivia: The son of actors Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, Lorenzo Lamas' first screen appearance was a bit in 1969's 100 Rifles, in which his father co-starred. Originally planning to become a professional race-car driver (he still enters track competitions from time to time), Lamas inaugurated his career as a "heartthrob hunk" in 1979, when he was cast in the short-lived TV weekly California Fever. A brief stint on the prime-time TV serial Secrets of Midland Heights (1980) followed before Lamas graduated to full stardom as Lance Cumston on the nighttime soaper Falcon Crest (1981-1990). Anxious to demonstrate his musical prowess, Lamas signed on as host of the syndicated variety series Dancin' to the Hits in 1986. Perhaps significantly, Lamas has neither danced nor sung in his current project, the weekly adventure series Renegade. Lorenzo Lamas has starred in a plethora of direct-to-video films, and in 1994 both directed and starred in CIA II: Target Alexa. In the years to come, Lamas would remain an active force on screen, appearing in films like Back to Even and Ash Global, as well as on series like The Bold and the Beautiful.

Trivia: Flamboyant comedian, actress, author and screenwriter Fannie Flagg received an Oscar nomination for her first script Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) which was based on her book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (published in 1987). She started out as an actress and comedian, frequently writing her own material. Her first big break came after spending six years trying to win the Miss Alabama contest. From there she worked as a stand-up comedian, during the 1960s writing for Candid Camera and frequently appearing with host Alan Funt. During the early to mid '70s, Flagg made regular and guest appearances on TV sitcoms such as The New Dick Van Dyke Show, and, in 1970, she made her feature-film debut in Five Easy Pieces. She went on to play supporting roles in a few more films during the 1970s, including Rabbit Test and Grease (both 1978). In 1981, Flagg debuted as an author with Coming Attractions.

Trivia: Grew up in an acting family and used to practice and perform in the basement. After college, she performed on stage in New York before taking a 10-year break to raise her children. Played Scott Baio's mother in three different series—Happy Days, spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi and Charles in Charge. Began actively participating in summer theater in Idaho in 1990. Performed opposite her husband, daughter and sister Margaret in a 2012 production of Hello, Dolly! at the Coeur d'Alene Summer Theatre.

Trivia: Director and screenwriter Andy Tennant made his way into film through acting and television directing. The Chicago native studied theatre under John Houseman at the University of Southern California and began acting in such films as Grease (1978), which allowed him to make use of his training as a dancer.After getting his start in acting, Tennant became a television film scriptwriter and began directing TV films and series alike. He helmed multiple episodes of such shows as The Wonder Years, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, the popular sci-fi series Sliders, and the well-received drama Keep the Change (1992). He also gained a moderate dose of pop culture notoriety as the director of The Amy Fisher Story (1993).Tennant made his feature film directorial debut in 1995 with It Takes Two, a children's film starring the Olsen twins. He then tried his hand at romantic comedy with Fools Rush In (1997), starring Salma Hayek and Matthew Perry. The following year, Tennant had his biggest cinematic success to date directing Drew Barrymore (whom he'd directed in The Amy Fisher Story five years earlier) in Ever After, a re-telling of the Cinderella fairy tale. Although the film received lukewarm reviews, it proved to be a commercial success, particularly among teenage girls. With commercial credibility to his name, Tennant subsequently directed Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat in Anna and the King (1999), a sumptuous historical epic based upon the experiences of a British governess working in the court of the King of Siam.

Trivia: As a child, Michael Biehn moved from his Alabama hometown to Nebraska and finally Arizona, where he graduated high school. He went to college and later moved to Los Angeles to begin a film career, making his professional stage debut after two years of intensive training. In 1978, Biehn was cast as Mark Johnson, the hard-veneered but vulnerable ward of psychiatrist Robert Reed in the TV series Operation: Runaway. For the next few years, malevolence was Biehn's onscreen strong suit, first as the psycho title character in 1981's The Fan, then as the neofascist military-school upperclassman in The Lords of Discipline (1982). After switching gears with the sympathetic role of futuristic android-hunter Kyle Reese in James Cameron's The Terminator, Biehn became a member of Cameron's informal stock company, playing colorful leading roles in Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). Biehn would remain a prolific actor and a cult favorite for the next few decades, appearing most notably in movies like The Rock, Clockstoppers, and Grindhouse, as well as TV shows like The Magnificent Seven and Hawaii. Biehn would also inhabit the director's chair, helming thrillers like The Victim.

Trivia: Wendie Jo Sperber was born in Hollywood in 1962 and aimed for a performing-arts career from high school onward. She attended the Summer Drama Workshop at California State University, Northridge, during the '70s, and began her screen career at age 15 when she was cast in the small role of Kuchinsky in Matthew Robbins' teen comedy Corvette Summer (1978), starring Mark Hamill. Her talent for comedy was showcased far better in Robert Zemeckis' period comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), as the irrepressible Beatles fan Rosie Petrofsky, stealing a big chunk of the movie with her performance. Sperber was a large woman (over 200 pounds), yet she was also very pretty and as physically dexterous as any gymnast -- and as funny as any comic actress this side of Lucille Ball. She played the title role in the made-for-television feature Dinky Hocker (1979) and got to show off her physical comedy in Steven Spielberg's gargantuan 1941 (1979). Zemeckis (who also worked on 1941) brought Sperber back to the big screen in 1980 with a role in his offbeat comedy Used Cars, but it was on television that year when Sperber finally began getting some serious acknowledgement. She was cast in the role of Amy Cassidy -- a character that was funny, romantic, and exuberant -- in the series Bosom Buddies, starring Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari. It was a fair bet that she'd steal almost any scene in which she was featured. Following its cancellation in 1982, Sperber appeared in the offbeat comedy The First Time (1983) and did a year on the series Private Benjamin before resuming her feature work in the Hanks theatrical vehicle Bachelor Party, directed by Neal Israel, who used her again in Moving Violations (1985). That same year, she finally got to appear in a successful movie with her portrayal of Linda McFly in Zemeckis' Back to the Future. Sperber's roles grew larger in the wake of the goofy sci-fi adventure film, and over the next decade she starred in the series Babes (a comedy about three zoftig women) and had a major supporting part in the series Hearts Afire, as well as numerous big-screen comedies, interspersed with the occasional drama. By her own account, however, she prefers comedy if given the choice. As she told TV Guide in 1990, "I'm an actress who likes to say something funny -- everybody laughs and your job is done." In 1998, Sperber was diagnosed with breast cancer, which seemed to go into remission following treatment. She revealed in April of 2002, though, that the cancer had reappeared and spread throughout her body. She continued to work in television and movies during this period, including episodes of Unhappily Ever After, Home Improvement, Will & Grace, and the movies Desperate but Not Serious (1999) and Sorority Boys (2002).

Trivia: Actor Edward Byrnes broke into films around 1957, playing a few bits (he can be seen as one of Jimmy Piersall's buddies in the 1957 biopic Fear Strikes Out) and minor roles. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract, Byrnes connected with the public in the role of a punkish villain in Girl on the Run, the 90-minute pilot episode of 77 Sunset Strip. Audience response to the young actor was so overwhelmingly positive that he was signed as a regular for the Sunset Strip series proper. As hipster parking lot attendant Gerald Lloyd Kookson III, aka "Kookie," he skyrocketed to teen idoldom via the simple expedient of combing his hair at least once per episode. He went on to parlay this schtick into a Top 40 song hit, "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb." During the second season of 77 Sunset Strip, Byrnes followed the example of fellow Warner contractees James Garner and Clint Walker, threatening to quit the series if he wasn't given more money and better scripts. Warners acquiesced to his demands: The studio also improved the social status of Byrnes' character on the series, promoting him to junior detective. After leaving the series in 1963, Byrnes moved to Europe, where he flourished as a star of spaghetti Westerns and espionage flicks. A pop-culture icon by the late '70s, Byrnes made occasional returns to Hollywood in such campy roles as Dick Clark-clone Vince Fontaine in Grease (1978). In addition, Ed Byrnes played "the Emcee" on the 1979 anthology series Sweepstakes, and in 1974, "Kookie" hosted the pilot episode of the evergreen quiz show Wheel of Fortune.