Trivia: Blaxploitation superstar Richard Roundtree earned screen immortality during the 1970s as the legendary Shaft, "the black private dick that's the sex machine to all the chicks." Born July 9, 1942, in New Rochelle, NY, Roundtree attended college on a football scholarship but later gave up athletics to pursue an acting career. After touring as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, he joined the Negro Ensemble Company's acting workshop program in 1967. He made his film debut in 1970's What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, but was still an unknown when filmmaker Gordon Parks Sr. cast him as Shaft. The role shot Roundtree to instant fame, launching the blaxploitation genre and proving so successful at the box office that it helped save MGM from the brink of bankruptcy. Thanks to the film's popularity -- as well as its two sequels, 1972's Shaft's Big Score! and the following year's Shaft in Africa, and even a short-lived television series -- Roundtree became an icon of '70s-era cool, and his image graced countless magazine covers. Outside of the Shaft franchise, he also appeared in films including the 1974 disaster epic Earthquake, 1975's Man Friday, and the blockbuster 1977 TV miniseries Roots. By the end of the decade, however, the blaxploitation movement was a thing of the past, and Roundtree's stardom waned; apart from the 1981 big-budget flop Inchon, he spent the 1980s appearing almost exclusively in TV roles or low-rent, direct-to-video features. Still, he continued working steadily, and in 1995 appeared in David Fincher's smash thriller Seven. The following year he co-starred in the acclaimed Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored, and also teamed with fellow blaxploitation vets Pam Grier and Fred "the Hammer" Williamson in Original Gangstas. In 1997, Roundtree returned to series television in 413 Hope St.

Trivia: Dynamic African-American actor Moses Gunn was one of the founders of the Negro Ensemble Company. Educated at Tennessee State and the University of Kansas, Gunn made his first New York appearance in a 1961 production of Measure for Measure; he remained active on the off-Broadway scene throughout his career, winning several Obie awards. His 1962 Broadway debut came by way of Jean Genet's The Blacks, which served to introduce many of the powerful black acting talents of the era. In films dating from 1964's Nothing But a Man, Gunn is best-remembered for his portrayal of gangster Bumpy Jonas in the first two Shaft films, and for his brief but telling cameo as Booker T. Washington in Ragtime, a performance which won him an NAACP Image award. On series television, Gunn was top-billed as Jebediah Nightlinger in The Cowboys (1972), played boxing trainer George Beifus in The Contender (1980), was featured as miner Moses Gage in Father Murphy (1981-84) and chewed the scenery as the epigrammatical "Old Man" in A Man Called Hawk (1989). He also played Carl Dixon, the man who married Florida Evans (Esther Rolle) after a whirlwind courtship during the 1976-77 season of Good Times. In 1977, Moses Gunn received an Emmy nomination for his appearance as tribal chieftain Kintango in the groundbreaking miniseries Roots.

Trivia: Planned to study orchestral conducting in college and was a candidate for a Fulbright Scholarship, until a drama teacher suggested he try acting. Played clarinet with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York for two years to support himself while studying acting with Stellar Adler. First major stage role was in A View From the Bridge with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Made TV history when he appeared on a 1974 episode of All in the Family and became the first person, other than Archie, to sit in Archie Bunker's beloved chair. Days of Our Lives writer Pat Falcon-Smith created the villain Stefano DiMera for him after seeing him on the 1981 mini-series The Gangster Chronicles. Won Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Villain in 1984, 1985 and 1987. Appeared on The Bold and the Beautiful from 2001-06 before reprising his role as Stefano on Days of Our Lives in 2007. Has a road in Ocilla, Ga., named after him in appreciation for his charity work.

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: An African-American supporting actor, onscreen from 1972, Blakely often appeared in blaxploitation films.

Trivia: African-American filmmaker Gordon Parks had little chance of cracking the all-white Hollywood cinematographers' fraternity in the '50s, despite impeccable credentials as a photojournalist for Life magazine. Parks' entry into feature-length moviemaking came by way of the 1969 adaptation of his own autobiographical work The Learning Tree, which related the experience of growing up black in Kansas. Parks sold the story to Hollywood on the proviso that he be allowed to direct -- thus making him the first-ever "mainstream" black director. 1971's Shaft (starring Richard Roundtree), wherein Parks utilized the no-nonsense street savvy he'd gleaned in his teen years as a whorehouse piano player and dope runner, put the director on Hollywood's A-List. He helmed Shaft's Big Score in 1972 (and composed the music for it), but his subsequent films, Leadbelly and Supercops, while critically acclaimed, failed to match the box-office appeal of the street hero that Parks and Roundtree had created. He took his final bow as a director with 1985's Solomon Northrup's Odyssey, a slavery-era period piece produced for PBS' American Playhouse, but - despite his retirement from the cinema -- remained incredibly active in many other arenas, proving himself a bona fide renaissance man of innumerable talents. His additional accomplishments include authoring fiction (the 1978 Flavio and the 1981 Shannon), poetry (the 2000 collection A Star for Noon), a myriad of photographic compilations, memoirs, and even a ballet, Martin, on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Parks triumphed in every arena, consistently drawing critical adulation, and worked well into his nineties. He died at age 93, on Tuesday, March 7, 2006.Parks fathered four children, one of whom -- Gordon Parks Jr. -- became a successful director in his own right (Superfly).

Trivia: Steely-eyed, incisive African American character actor Julius W. Harris made his first movie appearance in 1964's Nothing But a Man. Harris' subsequent screen roles included the menacing Tee Hee in the 1973 James Bond entry Live and Let Die and African premiere Longo in First Family (1980), who in the film's funniest scene negotiates a slave-trade operation with American President Bob Newhart. On TV, Harris starred in the Flipper-like syndicated series Salty (1974). One of Julius W. Harris' most memorable TV portrayals was as Ugandan President Idi Amin (substituting for Godfrey Cambridge, who died during production) in the feature-length Victory at Entebbe (1976).