Trivia: The son of Yugoslav immigrants, Karl Malden labored in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana before enrolling in Arkansas State Teachers College. While not a prime candidate for stardom with his oversized nose and bullhorn voice, Malden attended Chicago's Goodman Dramatic School, then moved to New York, where he made his Broadway bow in 1937. Three years later he made his film debut in a microscopic role in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), which also featured another star-to-be, Tom Ewell. While serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Malden returned to films in the all-serviceman epic Winged Victory (1944), where he was billed as Corporal Karl Malden. This led to a brief contract with 20th Century-Fox -- but not to Hollywood, since Malden's subsequent film appearances were lensed on the east coast. In 1947, Malden created the role of Mitch, the erstwhile beau of Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire; he repeated the role in the 1951 film version, winning an Oscar in the process. For much of his film career, Malden has been assigned roles that called for excesses of ham; even his Oscar-nominated performance in On the Waterfront (1954) was decidedly "Armour Star" in concept and execution. In 1957, he directed the Korean War melodrama Time Limit, the only instance in which the forceful and opinionated Malden was officially credited as director. Malden was best known to TV fans of the 1970s as Lieutenant Mike Stone, the no-nonsense protagonist of the longrunning cop series The Streets of San Francisco. Still wearing his familiar Streets hat and overcoat, Malden supplemented his income with a series of ads for American Express. His commercial catchphrases "What will you do?" and "Don't leave home without it!" soon entered the lexicon of TV trivia -- and provided endless fodder for such comedians as Johnny Carson. From 1989-92, Malden served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: Major star and producer, and member of one of Hollywood's most prominent families to boot, Michael Douglas was born to movie icon Kirk Douglas and British actress Diana Dill on September 25, 1944, in New Brunswick, NJ. From the age of eight he was raised in Connecticut by his mother and a stepfather, but spent time with his father during vacations from military school. It was while on location with his father that the young Douglas began learning about filmmaking. In 1962, he worked as an assistant director on Lonely Are the Brave, and was so taken with the cinema that he passed up the opportunity to study at Yale for that of studying drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara. At one point he and actor/director/producer Danny De Vito roomed together, and have remained friends ever since. Douglas also studied drama in New York for a while, and made his film debut as an actor playing a pacifist hippie draft evader who decides to fight in Vietnam in Hail Hero! (1969). He appeared in several more dramas, notably Summertree (1971). In 1972, he was cast as volatile rookie police inspector Steve Keller on The Streets of San Francisco. Douglas appeared in the series and occasionally directed episodes of it through 1976. In 1975, Douglas became one of the hottest producers in Tinseltown when he produced Milos Forman's tour de force adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which starred Jack Nicholson in one of his best roles. Originally, Douglas' father Kirk owned the film rights to the story. Having appeared in the Broadway version, the elder Douglas had wanted to star in a film adaptation for years, but had no luck getting it produced. The younger Douglas persuaded his father to sell him the rights and give up the notion of starring in the film. The result: a box-office smash that earned five Oscars, including Best Picture. After this triumph, Douglas resumed acting and began developing his screen persona. His was a decidedly paradoxical persona: though ruggedly handsome with an honest, emotive face reminiscent of his father's, onscreen Douglas retained an oily quality that was unusual in someone possessing such physical characteristics. He became known for characters that were sensitive yet arrogant and had something of a bad-boy quality. Through the '70s, Douglas appeared in more films, most notably The China Syndrome, which he also produced. In 1984, Douglas teamed with Kathleen Turner to appear in Romancing the Stone, an offbeat romantic adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones. Co-starring old friend Danny De Vito, it was a major box-office hit and revitalized Douglas' acting career, which had started to flag. Turner, Douglas and De Vito re-teamed the following year for an equally entertaining sequel, The Jewel of the Nile. It was in 1987 that Douglas played one of his landmark roles, that of a reprehensible yuppie who pays a terrible price for a moment's weakness with the mentally unbalanced Glenn Close in the runaway hit Fatal Attraction. The performance marked Douglas' entrance into edgier roles, and that same year he played an amoral corporate raider in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, for which he earned his first Oscar as an actor. In 1989, Douglas reunited with Kathleen Turner to appear in Danny De Vito's War of the Roses, one of the darkest ever celluloid glances at marital breakdown. By the end of the decade, Douglas had become one of Hollywood's most in-demand and highly paid stars. Douglas found success exploring the darker realms of his persona in Black Rain (1989) and the notorious Basic Instinct (1992). One of his darkest and most repugnantly intriguing roles came in 1993's Falling Down, in which he played an average Joe driven to cope with his powerlessness through acts of horrible violence. In 1995, Douglas lightened up to play a lonely, widowed president in The American President, and returned to adventure with 1996's box-office bomb The Ghost and the Darkness. In 1997 he appeared in the David Fincher thriller The Game, and followed that with another behind-the-scenes role, this time as executive producer for the John Travolta/Nicholas Cage thriller Face/Off. Returning to acting in 1998, Douglas starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder, a remake of Hitchcock's classic Dial M for Murder. As the new millenium rolled in, Douglas remained a force on screen, most memorably in films like the critically acclaimed Wonder Boys, and Steven Soderbergh's drug-war epic Traffic -- a critical and box office smash. Douglas had other life successes as well, such as his marriage to longtime girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000, and the birth of their subsuquent children. Around this time, Douglas formed a new production company, Further Films. which saw its first wide release in 2001 with the ensemble comedy One Night at McCool's. In 2003 he made It Runs in the Family, a comedy concerning three generations of a dysfunctional family attempting to reconcile their longtime differences. Fiction reflected reality in the film due to the involvement of father Kirk and son Cameron portraying, conveniently enough, Michael's father and son respectively. The 2010's would see Douglas playing roles in films like The Sentinel , King of California, You, Me and Dupree, and the long awaited sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. In 2013, he played Liberace in the HBO TV movie Behind the Candelabra, which earned Douglas an Emmy award.

Trivia: Fresh out of Temple University, actor Robert Hooks was billing himself as Bobby Dean Hooks when he made his 1962 Broadway bow in Tiger Tiger Burning Bright. Hooks' first film was the independently produced Sweet Love, Bitter (1966), though many reference books regard Hurry Sundown (1967) as the actor's big-screen debut. In 1967, he was co-starred with Jack Warden in the New York-based TV cop series NYPD, and in 1988 he was top-billed as Captain Jim Coleman in the military weekly Supercarrier (1988). A co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company, Hooks was also the creator of the DC Black Repertory Company, based in his hometown of Washington. Robert Hooks is the father of actor/director Kevin Hooks.

Trivia: African American actress Janet MacLachlan began appearing in films in 1968, usually in such "relevance"-oriented productions as Uptight (1968) and tick...tick...tick (1970). MacLachlan went on to co-star on TV as suburbanite Jackie Bruce in the weekly sitcom Love Thy Neighbor, then was seen in the 1979 TVer Friends as Mrs. Jane Summerfield. Her best-known TV role was as caustic housekeeper Polly Swanson in the 1980-81 episodes of Archie Bunker's Place. Janet MacLachlan's 1990s credits include character roles in the theatrical feature Hearts and Souls (1993) and the made-for-cable movie Tuskegee Airmen (1995).

Trivia: Most of actor Steven Keats' earliest film appearances were in such New York-based productions as 1974's Death Wish (in which he played Jack Toby). It was in one such film, director Joan Micklin Silver's Hester Street (1975), that Keats was top-billed as Jake, the young progressive Jewish-immigrant husband of traditional old-world bride Carol Kane. Other films to Keats' credit include the memorable The Gambler (1974) and such forgettables as Turk 182 and Eternity. Steven Keats was also seen in the leading role of garment czar Jay Blackman on the 1977 TV miniseries Seventh Avenue.

Trivia: Rafael Campos moved from the Dominican Republic to New York City at the age of fourteen. After appearing in a handful of Spanish-language plays, Campos rose to fame portraying troubled Hispanic youths in such films as The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Trial (1955) and Dino (1957). His gift for comedy was seldom touched upon, save for his role as a college-bound busboy in 1957's This Could Be the Night. Campos both acted and directed on the New York stage, making his Broadway debut in Infidel Caesar. He also essayed important roles in the TV series Rhoda (as Ramon Diaz Jr.) and Centennial (as Nacho) and wrote articles for Manhattan-based Spanish publications. Rafael Campo's last film was 1985's Fever Pitch, directed by his Blackboard Jungle mentor Richard Brooks.

Trivia: When asked why he decided upon becoming an actor, Joe Santos tended to trot out the tried-and-true rationale "because I failed at everything else." While attending Fordham University, Santos excelled at football, but lost interest in the sport after a few semi-pro years. By the time he was 30, Santos had been remarkably unsuccessful in a variety of vocations, including railroad worker, tree cutter, automobile importer and tavern owner. While working a construction job in New York, Santos was invited by a friend to sit in on an acting class. This seemed like an easy way to make a living, so Santos began making the audition rounds, almost immediately landing a good part on a TV soap opera. This gig unfortunately led nowhere, and for the next year or so Santos drove a cab for 10 to 11 hours a day. The novice actor's first big break was a part in the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park, which he received at the recommendation of the film's star (and Santos' frequent softball partner) Al Pacino. With the plum part of Sergeant Cruz in the four-part TV drama The Blue Knight (1973), Santos inaugurated a fruitful, still-thriving career in "cop" roles, the best and longest-lasting of which was detective Dennis Becker on the James Garner series The Rockford Files (1974-80). Joe Santos' other series-TV credits include the top-billed part of deadbeat dad Norman Davis in Me and Maxx (1980), Hispanic nightclub comic Paul Rodriguez' disapproving father in AKA Pablo (1984), and Lieutenant Frank Harper in the 1985-86 episodes of Hardcastle and McCormick. One of his final roles was a recurring gig on The Sopranos. Santos died in 2016, at age 84.

Trivia: British character actor, onscreen from the late '60s.

Trivia: Veteran TV actor Jerry Douglas began his career on-screen in the early '60s, appearing on a multitude of shows like Mission: Impossible and Bonanza while supporting his family with a day job as an insurance salesman. He would sustain his career on these singular and often memorable appearances for over two decades before joining the cast of the daytime soap The Young and the Restless in 1985, playing patriarch John Abbott. He would remain with the show until 2008.

Trivia: American actor George Murdock's uneven facial features enabled him to play many an offbeat part in his early professional years, none more offbeat than the ventriloquist's dummy come to life in the 1962 Twilight Zone episode "The Dummy." Murdock went on to play obnoxious and intrusive authority figures. He made Sammy Jackson's life hell as Captain Krupnick in the 1964 sitcom version of No Time for Sergeants, and fifteen years later did same for Hal Linden as an internal-affairs snoop on Barney Miller. In his later years, Murdock landed one of his best-known parts, as God in the disastrous Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Trivia: African-American stage and film actor Robert Do Qui was first seen by televiewers on a weekly basis as Detective Cliff Sims in Felony Squad (1968-1969). Do Qui has worked extensively with director Robert Altman, most prominently as the sympathetic nightclub manager in Nashville (1975). In the 1980s and 1990s, he became familiar to action fans as Sgt. Reed in the three Robocop flicks. In addition to his many acting credits, Robert Do Qui served several terms as an officer of the Screen Actors Guild. He died at age 74 in 2008.

Trivia: Black supporting actor, onscreen from 1972.