Trivia: A Chicagoan from head to toe, American comedian Bob Newhart started his workaday life as a certified public accountant after flunking out of law school. As a means of breaking his job's monotony, Newhart would call his friend Ed Gallagher, and improvise low-key comedy sketches. A mutual friend of Newhart and Gallagher's, Chicago deejay Dan Sorkin, tape-recorded some of these off-the-cuff routines and played them for Warner Bros. records. Newhart suddenly found himself booked into a Houston nightclub -- his first-ever public appearance. Armed with telephone-conversation routines which delineated how Abe Lincoln would be handled by a publicity agent, or how Abner Doubleday would have fared trying to sell baseball to a modern-day novelty firm, Newhart recorded his first comedy album in 1960 -- which evidently struck a nerve with fellow white-collar workers, since it sold 1,500,000 copies. The hottest young comic on the club-and-TV circuit, Newhart was offered starring roles in situation comedies, but felt he wasn't a good enough actor to make a single character interesting week after week. Instead, he signed in 1961 for NBC's The Bob Newhart Show, a comedy-variety series which nosedived in the ratings but won an Emmy. Fearing that TV would eat up all his material within a year or so, Newhart went back to nightclubs after his one-season series was cancelled. Sharpening his acting skills in TV guest spots and in several films (his first, 1962's Hell is For Heroes, was so unnerving an experience that Bob repeatedly begged the producers to kill his character off before the fadeout), Newhart felt emboldened enough to attempt a regular TV series again in 1972. This Bob Newhart Show cast the comedian as psychologist Bob Hartley - an ideal outlet for his "button-down" style of dry humor. Six seasons and several awards later, Newhart was firmly established as a television superstar; this time around he wasn't cancelled, but ended the series on his own volition, feeling the series had exhausted its bag of tricks. Most popular sitcom personalities had come acropper trying to repeat their first success with a second series, but Newhart broke the jinx with Newhart in 1982, wherein Bob played author Dick Loudon, who on a whim decided to open a New England colonial inn. Newhart was every bit as popular as his earlier sitcom, and, like the previous show, the series ended (in 1990) principally because Newhart chose to end it. This he did with panache: Newhart's final scene suggested the entire series had been a bad dream experienced by Bob Newhart Show's Bob Hartley! A third starring sitcom, 1992's Bob, found Newhart playing a cult-figure comic book artist; alas, despite excellent scriptwork and the usual polished Newhart performance, this new series fell victim to format tinkering and poor timeslots. Over teh course of the next few decades, Newhart would frequently turn up in guest roles on shows like Murphy Brown, ER, and Desperate Housewives, and though his 1997 odd couple sitcom George & Leo failed to find its footing, he did appear in all three installments of TNT's popular fantasy trilogy The Librarian, starring Noah Wyle. Meanwhile, cameos in such films as Elf and Horrible Bosses continually offered a gentle reminder that comedy's nicest funnyman could still crack us up.

Trivia: Actress Mary Frann (born Mary Frances Luecke), is best remembered for playing the skeptical but loyal wife of Bob Newhart in Newhart (1982-1990). Between 1974 and 1979, Frann was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives and also was a co-star on the short-lived nighttime soap King's Crossing (1982). Since the demise of Newhart, Frann appeared regularly in made-for-television movies, as a guest star in series, and in miniseries.A native of St. Louis, MO, Frann started out as a child model and in high school appeared in local television commercials. After high school she studied drama at Northwestern University. She supported herself working as a weather person on a St. Louis NBC affiliate. Following graduation she was hired to host a Chicago morning television show. As an actress, Frann debuted on the ABC series My Friend Tony. When not acting, Frann was involved in various charitable organizations. The night before she passed away from undisclosed causes, she had been working on a volunteer committee with the Los Angeles Mission on a project to help homeless women.

Trivia: Landed earliest acting gigs on a few soap operas during the 1970s, including Gerry Brayley on CBS's daytime sudser Love of Life, Penny Davis on the NBC serial The Doctors and Karen Wolek on the ABC soap One Life to Live. Made her Broadway debut in 1978's acclaimed revival of Once in a Lifetime. Breakout role was as Stephanie Vanderkellen, a former rich girl-turned-maid, in the popular sitcom Newhart, which she joined in its sophomore season. Joined the cast of the Designing Women as Allison Sugarbaker, the cousin of Julia and Suzanne, in the sixth season. Played the wife of Peter Scolari in two shows; first on Newhart, then later on the Jason Alexander sitcom Listen Up!

Trivia: While a still scrawny, undersized pre-teen in Morgantown, WV, Don Knotts dreamed of becoming an entertainer, but was too nervous to offer himself as a "single." Purchasing a dummy named Danny, Knotts worked up a ventriloquist act (admittedly stolen from Edgar Bergen) and headed to New York to seek his fortune. After flunking out twice on Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, Knotts returned to Morgantown. He attended West Virginia University as a speech major, intending to become a teacher. He was given a second opportunity to hone his entertaining skills while in Special Services during World War II. He continued pursuing ventriloquism until the fateful night that he threw his dummy into the ocean: "I wanted to get the laughs," Knotts would explain later. And laughs he got as a monologist from both GI and civilian audiences. Never completely conquering his stage fright, Knotts incorporated his nervousness into his act, impersonating such tremulous creatures as a novice TV weatherman and a tongue-tied sportcaster. In New York after the war, Knotts secured work on a local children's show before spending several years on the daytime soap opera Search for Tomorrow. In 1955, Knotts was cast in two small roles in the Broadway play No Time for Sergeants, which starred another teacher-turned-monologist named Andy Griffith, who would become Knotts' lifelong friend and co-worker. From 1955 through 1960, Knotts was a regular on The Steve Allen Show, provoking uncontrollable bursts of laughter as the bug-eyed, quivering "man on the street." He made his screen debut in the 1958 film version of No Time for Sergeants, re-creating his stage role of the squeaky-voiced coordination therapist. In 1960, he was cast as uptight, self-important, overzealous, magnificently inept deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. This was the role that won Knotts seven Emmies: five during his five-year tenure on the series, and two more when he returned to the show as a guest star in 1966 and 1967. Knotts left the Griffith Show when his contract expired in 1965, hoping to achieve movie stardom. From 1966 through 1971, Knotts ground out a series of inexpensive comedies for Universal (called "regionals" because they played primarily in non-urban and rural theaters). Panned or ignored by the critics on their first release, many of Knotts's starring films, especially The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and Shakiest Gun in the West (1967), became fan favorites. Arguably, however, the best of Knotts' 1960s films was made at Warner Bros. while he was still an Andy Griffith regular: The Incredible Mr. Limpet, a blend of animation and live-action wherein Knotts was ideally cast as a henpecked husband who metamorphosed into a war-hero fish.In 1970, Knotts starred in his own TV variety series, which opened to good ratings but ran out of gas after a single season. He resumed his film career, first at Disney, then teamed with Tim Conway in a handful of cheap but amusing B-grade features (The Private Eyes, The Prize Fighter). He also returned to television as self-styled roué Mr. Furley on Three's Company (1979-1984) and as gung-ho principal Bud McPherson on the syndicated What a Country! (1986). That same year, Knotts reprised his most venerable role of Deputy Fife in the made-for-TV movie, Return to Mayberry, the last act of which saw the character becoming the sheriff of Mayberry, NC.Despite his advancing age, Knotts' output increased in the 1990s and early 2000s. He appeared as a school principal in the Rick Moranis/Tom Arnold comedy Big Bully (1996). Additional roles included a television repairman in Big scribe Gary Ross's 1998 directorial debut, Pleasantville; the voice of T.W. Turtle in Cats Don't Dance, the voice of Turkey Lurkey in the 2005 Disney comedy Chicken Little, and a turn as "The Landlord" on an episode of That '70s Show that represented a deliberate throwback to Three's Company. Knotts spent much of his final decade teaming up with his old friend and co-star, Tim Conway, on the voiceovers for the Hermie and Friends series, contemporary Christian animated videos about a bunch of colorful insects. The world lost Don Knotts on February 25, 2006; he died in Beverly Hills, CA. In his final years, Knotts's appearances on the big or the small screen were greeted with the sort of appreciative laughter and applause that is afforded only to a genuine television icon.