Trivia: American actress Candice Bergen was a celebrity even before she was born. As the first child of popular radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his young wife Frances, Candice was a hot news item months before her birth, and headline material upon that blessed event (her coming into the world even prompted magazine cartoons which suggested that Edgar would try to confound the nurses by "giving" his new daughter a voice). Candice made her first public appearance as an infant, featured with her parents in a magazine advertisement. Before she was ten, Candice was appearing sporadically on dad's radio program, demonstrating a precocious ability to throw her own voice (a skill she hasn't been called upon to repeat in recent years); at 11 she and Groucho Marx's daughter Melinda were guest contestants on Groucho's TV quiz show You Bet Your Life. Candice loved her parents and luxuriated in her posh lifestyle, though she was set apart from other children in that her "brothers" were the wooden dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd - and Charlie had a bigger bedroom than she did! Like most 1960s teens, however, she rebelled against the conservatism of her parents and adopted a well-publicized, freewheeling lifestyle - and a movie career. In her first film, The Group (1965), Candice played a wealthy young lesbian - a character light years away from the sensibilities of her old-guard father. She next appeared with Steve McQueen in the big budget The Sand Pebbles (1966), simultaneously running smack dab into the unkind cuts of critics, who made the expected (given her parentage) comments concerning her "wooden" performance. Truth to tell, Candice did look far better than she acted, and this status quo remained throughout most of her film appearances of the late 1960s; even Candice admitted she wasn't much of an actress, though she allowed (in another moment that must have given papa Edgar pause) that she was terrific when required in a film to simulate an orgasm. Several films later, Candice decided to take her career more seriously than did her critics, and began emerging into a talented and reliable actress in such films as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and The Wind and the Lion (1975). Most observers agree that Candice's true turnaround was her touching but hilarious performance as a divorced woman pursuing a singing career - with little in the way of talent - in the Burt Reynolds comedy Starting Over (1979). Candice's roller-coaster offscreen life settled into relative normality when she married French film director Louis Malle; meanwhile, her acting career gained momentum as she sought out and received ever-improving movie and TV roles. In 1988, Candice began a run in the title role of the television sitcom Murphy Brown, in which she was brilliant as a mercurial, high-strung TV newsmagazine reporter, a role that won Ms. Bergen several Emmy Awards. While Murphy Brown capped Candice Bergen's full acceptance by audiences and critics as an actress of stature, it also restored her to "headline" status in 1992 - when, in direct response to the fictional Murphy Brown's decision to become a single mother, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his notorious "family values" speech.Murphy Brown finished its successful run in 1997, and Bergen would make a handful of big-screen appearances in the ensuing years including Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, and The In-Laws. In 2004 she became part of the cast of Boston Legal, another hit show that ran for five often award-winning seasons. When that show came to a close, she appeared in films such as The Women, Sex and the City, and Bride Wars - where she portrayed the country's leading wedding planner.

Trivia: She is best known for creating a multitude of memorable comic characters, including Ernestine the telephone operator and the rotten five-year-old rugrat Edith Ann, on television and in her stage shows, but let it not be forgotten that Lily Tomlin is also a talented dramatic actress, something she has thus far only demonstrated in two films. She was born Mary Tomlin in Detroit, MI. She was studying premed at Wayne State University when she heard the stage calling and so dropped out to perform skits and characterizations in cabarets and coffeehouses. Tomlin made her television debut on The Garry Moore Show but didn't get her first real break until she became a regular on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1970 and stayed through 1973. The series' machine gun pace proved the perfect outlet for Tomlin's offbeat humor and gave her the opportunity to hone her skills and develop her characters. She made an auspicious film debut with a touching dramatic role as a troubled gospel singer trying to deal with her hearing-impaired children and a womanizing Keith Carradine in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), winning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a New York Film Critics award for the same category. Her next film, The Late Show (1977), was also more dramatic than comic and Tomlin again won kudos, though not in the form of awards, for her work. While she started off strongly in films, her subsequent output has been of uneven quality ranging from the entertaining All of Me (1984) to the abysmal Big Business (1988). But while her film career has never quite taken flight, Tomlin remained successful on-stage, in clubs, and on television. On Broadway, Tomlin has had two successful one-woman shows, Appearing Nitely (1976) and The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986), which Tomlin made into a film in 1991. In 1996, Tomlin became a regular on the cast of the long-running sitcom Murphy Brown playing a canny news producer and foil for Candice Bergan's Murphy. That same year she would work for the first time with director David O. Russell on the film Flirting With Disaster. After returning to film with the demise of Murphy Brown, Tomlin took on supporting roles in a variety of films, such as Tea with Mussolini and Disney's The Kid. But television soon came calling again in the form of a recurring role on NBC's The West Wing as The President's eccentric personal secretary.In 2004, Tomlin teamed with Russell again for the ensemble comedy I Heart Huckabees. A subsequent visit to the animated town of Springfield found Tomlin dropping in on The Simpsons the following year, withg recurring roles on both Will and Grace and The West Wing preceding a turn as one-half of a sisterly singing act along with Meryl Streep in the 2006 Robert Altman radio-show adaptation A Prairie Home Companion. At the Oscar telecast in 2006 Streep and Tomlin presented Altman with a lifetime achievement award, delivering their speech in a style that emulated the distinctive rhythms of his films. That same year she leant her vocal talents to an animated film for the first time in her career providing the voice for Mommo in The Ant Bully, which coincidently also featured her Prairie Home Companion cohort Meryl Streep. She had a major role in Paul Schrader's The Walker, and provided a voice in the English-language version of Ponyo. She joined the cast of the award-winning cable series Damages in 2010 for that show's third season and was a series regular on Malibu Country in 2012-13, playing Reba McEntire's mother.

Trivia: Sweet, Southern Faith Ford is perhaps best known as perky anchorwoman Corky from the long-running sitcom Murphy Brown. After growing up in Virginia, where she honed her passion for acting in school plays, Ford headed off to New York at the age of 17 to pursue a career in show business. She began landing appearances on shows like Webster and the soap opera Another World before changing coasts and trying her luck in Hollywood. She landed a recurring role on the drama thirtysomething, and shortly following, she landed the now-iconic role of Corky on Murphy Brown. Ford stayed with the show through all of its nine seasons, using her downtime to try out other projects like the family movie North. When Murphy Brown ended its run, Ford executive produced and starred in the series Maggie Winters, which got excellent reviews but sadly lasted for only one season. Ford had no shortage of projects, however; she was cast in the hit show Norm in 1999, and in 2003, she took a starring role in the ABC series Hope & Faith, playing a typical, Midwestern mom whose world is turned upside down when her movie-star sister shows up at her door. The popular series lasted until 2006, when Ford started looking for a new project. She found what she was looking for with 2007's comedy series Carpoolers, a show about the hilarious and strange goings-on between a group of men who drive to work together.

Trivia: Joe Regalbuto has been seen in films since 1982, when he played an investigative reporter in Costa-Gavras' Missing. Before his big-screen debut, Regalbuto played shifty Wall Street lawyer Elliot Streeter in the 1979 TV series The Associates. His other TV roles included Toomey, the CPA assistant to bumbling detective Tim Conway in Ace Crawford, Private Eye (1982), and Harry Fisher in Knots Landing (1985-86 series). Regalbuto also labored in what one journalist described as "relative obscurity" on the TV-movie circuit, playing such roles as William C. Sullivan in 1987's J. Edgar Hoover. In his most famous characterization, Joe Regalbuto travelled full circle from his Missing days, playing investigative reporter Frank Fontana on the TV sitcom Murphy Brown (1988- ).

Trivia: Whitman College graduate Adam West began getting his first acting breaks in 1959. That was the year that West, newly signed to a Warner Bros. contract, was cast in the small but pivotal role of Diane Brewster's impotent husband in The Young Philadelphians. After two years' worth of guest-star assignments in Warners' TV product (he was hung by his heels and humiliated by James Garner in a memorable Maverick episode), West accepted the role of Sergeant Steve Nelson on the weekly TVer Robert Taylor's Detectives. In 1962, the series was cancelled, compelling West to free-lance in such films as Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964, as the astronaut who doesn't make it back) and Island of the Blue Dolphins (1964). In 1965, he landed his biggest and best role to date: Millionaire Bruce Wayne, aka the "Caped Crusader", on the smash TV series Batman. Approaching the role with the seriousness and sobriety usually afforded MacBeth or Hamlet, West struck the happy medium between "camp" and conviction. Though in recent years West has apparently basked in the adulation he has received for his two-year stint as Batman, at the time the series was cancelled in 1968, he vowed to distance himself as far from the character as possible, accepting villainous TV and film roles and even fitfully pursuing a singing career. His movie projects ranged from sublime (Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, Hooper) to ridiculous (The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington); no matter what the role, however, West's performance was invariably compared to his Batman work. Finally adopting an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" stance, West began making appearances at nostalgia conventions, supplied his vocal talents to the 1977 animated series The New Adventures of Batman, and publicly expressed disappointment that he was not offered a cameo role in the 1989 big-screen blockbuster Batman (he did however, provide a voice-over for the 1992 Fox TV series Batman: The New Adventures, not as Batman but as a washed-up superhero called the Gray Ghost). Adam West's most recent TV projects have included the weekly series The Last Precinct (1986) and Danger Theatre (1993); he also served as a spokesperson for the Nickelodeon cable network, a service specializing in nostalgia-inducing reruns.He continued to work steadily, often trading in on his own history as a caped crusader. He appeared in the comedy The New Age and Drop Dead Gorgeous. At the dawn of the 21st century he took a regular gig voicing the role of Mayor Adam West on the animated series The Family Guy., a gig that led to more animated work in projects such as Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons. He spoofed his superhero history yet again in 2008's Super Capers and appeared as himself on an episode of The Big Bang Theory. West died in 2017, at age 88.

Trivia: Grew up in Meriden, Connecticut, United States.Played baseball, basketball and football in high school.Rejected an offer to play baseball with the Kansas City Athletics.Was co-captain of the football team during his senior year at University of Connecticut.Was a captain in the U.S. Army JAG Corps.

Trivia: Diminutive American actor Phil Leeds has been trafficking in comedy character roles for well over 50 years. When not showing up on Broadway or on tour, Leeds has been a regular visitor to television. He was seen on a weekly basis as an ensemble player on the DuMont Network's 1950 variety series Front Row Center; as Moscow apartment dweller Vladimir in Ivan the Terrible (1976); as delicatessen habitue Lou Gold in Singer and Sons (1990); and as "The Kid," a 75-year-old con man, in Double Rush (1995). A relative latecomer to films, Phil Leeds has made up for lost time with a steady stream of select character roles; notably his poignantly amusing cameo as the long-dead husband in the hospital emergency room in Ghost (1990), eagerly anticipating a reunion with his about-to-die widow.

Trivia: The son of an editor for the New Yorker, the diminutive comedic actor Wallace Shawn achieved immortality for his portrayal of the Sicilian Vizzini in the 1987 classic The Princess Bride. A graduate of both Harvard and Oxford University, he has taught several courses in English and struggled as a playwright in the early '70s; in 1977 he translated Machiavelli's The Mandrake. Shawn broke into films soon after, building a successful career as a supporting actor to help fund his playwriting. He debuted in two of the best films of 1979: Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's All That Jazz.In 1981, he co-wrote the semi-autobiographical My Dinner With André, a talky comedy starring himself and theater director André Gregory in a dinner conversation, directed by Louis Malle. The movie was acclaimed by critics and a cult favorite. After this personal project, Shawn would build a career out of playing brief but surprisingly memorable roles in a long list of movies. His performance as the leader of the misfit criminal gang in The Princess Bride proved a pivotal moment, and that same year, he supplied the heroic voice for the Masked Avenger in Woody Allen's Radio Days. Shawn would also go on to do voice acting in projects like The Goofy Movie, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and the Toy Story series. He would also continue to work with Woody Allen throughout the next decade, and picked up a new generation of fans playing debate teacher Mr. Hall in the 1995 high school classic Clueless. Shawn would also take his quirky persona to the small screen with appearances on TV shows likeMurphy Brown, The Cosby Show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sex and the City, as well as the ABC sitcom version of Clueless. Throughout his acting career, Shawn has managed to continue writing successful plays, and eventually adapted one of them, The Designated Mourner, for a feature film in 1997. In 2002, he played the publishing boss Mr. Gelb for the "Greta" story in Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity: Three Portraits. Shawn would continue to appear regularly on screen in the years to come, playing recurring roles on The L Word, Gossip Girl, and Eureka,