Trivia: At first intending to become a minister, actor/monologist Andy Griffith (born June 1st, 1926) became active with the Carolina Playmakers, the prestigious drama-and-music adjunct of the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. He spent several seasons portraying Sir Walter Raleigh in the summertime outdoor drama The Lost Colony, spending the rest of the years as a schoolteacher. Griffith continued performing fitfully as an after-dinner speaker on the men's club circuit, developing hilariously bucolic routines on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to football. Under the aegis of agent/producer Richard O. Linke, Griffith returned to acting, attaining stardom in the role of bumptious Air Force rookie Will Stockdale in the TV and Broadway productions of No Time For Sergeants. Before committing Sergeants to film, Griffith made his movie debut in director Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, in which he portrayed an outwardly folksy but inwardly vicious TV personality (patterned, some say, after Arthur Godfrey).After filming Face in the Crowd, No Time for Sergeants and Onionhead for Warner Bros. during the years 1957 and 1958, Griffith starred in a 1959 Broadway musical version of Destry Rides Again; as an added source of income, Griffith ran a North Carolina supermarket. On February 15, 1960 he first appeared as Andy Taylor, the laid-back sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, on an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. This one-shot was of course the pilot film for the Emmy-winning The Andy Griffith Show, in which Griffith starred from 1960 through 1968. Eternally easygoing on camera, Griffith, who owned 50% of the series, ruled his sitcom set with an iron hand, though he was never as hard on the other actors as he was on himself; to this day, he remains close to fellow Griffith stars Don Knotts and Ron Howard. An unsuccessful return to films with 1969's Angel in My Pocket was followed by an equally unsuccessful 1970 TV series Headmaster. For the next 15 years, Griffith confined himself to guest-star appearances, often surprising his fans by accepting cold-blooded villainous roles. In 1985, he made a triumphal return to series television in Matlock, playing a folksy but very crafty Southern defense attorney. A life-threatening disease known as Gillian-Barre syndrome curtailed his activities in the late 1980s, but as of 1995 Andy Griffith was still raking in the ratings with his infrequent Matlock two-hour specials. The actor worked on and off throughout the late nineties and early 2000s, and co-starred with Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion in the romantic comedy Waitress in 2007.

Trivia: A character actor predominantly specializing in "tough" types, such as guards, military personnel, and the like, screen performer Christopher Allport worked in a myriad of genres but placed a markedly strong emphasis on horror and science fiction outings. Efforts included the 1981 zombie movie Dead and Buried, Tobe Hooper's 1986 sci-fi remake Invaders from Mars, and the slasher comedies Jack Frost (1997) and Jack Frost 2 (2000). In the 2000s, Allport increased his television presence via guest work on such series as ER, NYPD Blue, and Mad Men. An avid backcountry skier, Allport was killed in early 2008 by an avalanche in California's San Gabriel Mountains.

Trivia: Ken Foree built a substantial career playing toughs, thugs, and heavies on both sides of the law. He maintained a certain amount of prestige for the first decade or so of his acting tenure. Foree debuted as a goon in one of the more critically respected racially themed films of the 1970s: the sports comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), starring Richard Pryor and Billy Dee Williams. Foree followed it up with a turn as a National Guardsman valiantly defending his nation against hordes of rampaging zombies (from inside a shopping mall) in the cult classic Dawn of the Dead (1978), played a black sportsman in Phil Kaufman's period piece The Wanderers (1979), and re-teamed with George A. Romero for the medieval fantasy Knightriders (1981). Small roles in two critically respected A-listers -- James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and Richard Pryor's Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) -- did much to cement Foree's reputation as a reliable player, but thereafter, he began to sink into less respectable material, with a strong emphasis on long-form work and direct-to-video exploitationers. Pictures such as the 1991 Hangfire and the 1992 Fatal Charm did little to further Foree's career. By the late '90s and well into the 2000s, he seemed typecast as a horror player, in movies such as The Dentist (1996), The Devil's Rejects (2005), and Halloween (2007).

Trivia: An offbeat character actor whose stark features lent him to effective portrayals of villains and seedy figures, Stanley Kamel grew up in New Jersey and attended Boston University, where he received formalized dramatic training under the aegis of noted instructor Sanford Meisner. Kamel began his acting career with roles in off-Broadway productions during the early '70s, and quickly landed his first major on-camera role, as Eric Peters, on the daytime soap Days of Our Lives. His subsequent work over the following three decades consisted largely of recurring roles and guest parts in prime-time series including Cagney & Lacey, Hunter, Melrose Place, and -- most visibly -- the Tony Shalhoub sitcom Monk, as the lead character's shrink, Dr. Charles Kroger.

Trivia: Husky voiced Hispanic-American character actress Wanda De Jesus began appearing onscreen from the late '80s onward, with a particularly strong emphasis on action-oriented material. Early roles included parts in the Anthony Edwards-headlined action comedy Downtown (1989), the futuristic police saga Robocop 2 (1990), and Charles Burnett's cop drama The Glass Shield (1994). De Jesus is perhaps best known, however, as Graciella Rivers, a Latino woman still enraged over the murder of her sister, in the haunting Clint Eastwood procedural Blood Work (2002). She followed that up with a recurring role as Detective Adell Sevilla on the popular crime show CSI: Miami (from 2002-2003), and a prominent role in the Mafia-themed crime thriller Illegal Tender (2007), directed by Franc Reyes.

Trivia: Sturdy, reliable character player Kene Holliday specialized in portrayals of vociferous everymen, with a strong emphasis on television work. Holliday landed one of his first major roles in the small-screen blockbuster Roots: The Next Generations (as Detroit, one of the direct descendants of the iconic Kunta Kinte), and subsequently divided his time between occasional big-screen features (No Small Affair, The Philadelphia Experiment), series work (with many appearances on Matlock), and TV movies, such as the 1988 Dangerous Company. Holliday tackled a rare yet effective lead role in the much-anticipated 2007 drama Great World of Sound, as Clarence, a well-meaning record producer in training who discovers that his parent company isn't exactly all that it professes to be.

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from 1985.

Trivia: Having made her feature film debut in Sex and the College Girl (1964), blonde actress Julie Sommars went on to appear in television movies of the '70s and in the occasional feature film through the mid-'80s. Fans of the television drama Matlock (1986-1995) will recognize her for playing Julie March.