Trivia: Jockey turned singer/actor, Davy Jones played the adorable mop-top Davy on the mid-to-late '60s phenom television series, The Monkees. He and his fellow manufactured bandmates Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith made one film together -- Head (1968). After the group's demise, Jones occasionally played himself as a guest star on television (Brady Bunch) and in commercials. In 1995, he again played himself in The Brady Bunch Movie. Jones and all the other Monkees, except Nesmith, periodically got back together for tours and reunion concerts.

Trivia: Starred in the 1950s series Circus Boy. Learned to play the drums after being cast as the Monkees' drummer. Played the first synthesizer on a rock recording (the Monkees' "Daily Nightly" from the 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.). Cowrote and directed the final episode of The Monkees. Voiced various characters on Saturday-morning cartoons during the 1970s, including The Funky Phantom and The Scooby-Doo Show. Auditioned for the role of Fonzie on Happy Days. Moved to London in 1977 to costar in Harry Nilsson's musical The Point! with fellow Monkee Davy Jones. Worked as a director-producer in England during the late 1970s and early '80s. His credits include a stage version of Bugsy Malone that starred a 14-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Created-produced the early 1980s British children's show Luna. Studied physics during the 1970s and '80s at the Open University, a UK correspondence college.

Trivia: Multi-talented Michael Nesmith has come a long way from playing the quiet Monkee in the little wool cap on the popular 1960s sitcom The Monkees. Since then he has proven himself an innovator in musical genres and music videos -- his work in the latter area led to the creation of the MTV network. Nesmith is also a movie and television producer. Born in Houston, TX, Nesmith is the son of Bette Nesmith Graham, the woman who invented Liquid Paper correction fluid. Before auditioning for The Monkees in 1965, Nesmith had served a two-year stint in the Air Force, worked as a backup musician in Nashville, performed in a Los Angeles-based folk-rock duo with his friend John London, composed songs, including "Mary, Mary" and "Different Drum," and recorded a few singles. While with the Monkees, Nesmith wrote several of their hits and helped persuade the Monkees' "handlers" to allow them to produce their own records. He left the television group after completing their only feature film, Head (1968), to form his own band and then launched his solo career. In 1977, he designed a new television show called Popclips, in which he utilized live music clips while counting down the week's chart-toppers. The show is credited for inspiring the genesis of MTV. Nesmith's mother died in 1980 and left him half of her Liquid Paper fortune (worth over 20 million dollars). Nesmith then launched his own record and film production company, Pacific Arts, which became the number one source of American music videos in the '80s, and won the first Video Grammy for it in 1981. In the late '80s, Nesmith made his own filmmaking debut with the inventive music video "Elephant Parts." He reunited with the Monkees and continued to occasionally perform with them. In 1997, he and the group appeared in an hour-long television special and also released a new album, Justus.

Trivia: Learned to play piano at the age of 9. Was part of Edwin O. Smith High School's first graduating class. Landed his spot in the Monkees thanks to a recommendation from friend and fellow musician Stephen Stills. In 1972, he spent three months in jail for hashish possession. Portrayed Topanga Lawrence's father in episodes of the TV series Boy Meets World. Battled a rare form of cancer known as adenoid cystic carcinoma in 2009.

Trivia: The year (give or take a few) was 1929: Stepping on to the stage of New York's Mecca Theatre was 3-year-old Rose Marie Mazetta, offering a surprisingly full-throated rendition of the torch ballad "What Can I Say, Dear, After I Say I'm Sorry." By the time she'd finished dancing her Charleston, Rose Marie had won a trip to Atlantic City and a spot on a major radio program. Amazingly, Rose Marie's father, a professional singer-musician, had nothing to do with this star-making turn: the girl had been entered in the contest by her next-door neighbors. By 1932, Rose Marie--or rather, "Baby Rose Marie"--was one of the hottest stars on the NBC radio network. Her raspy, insinuating singing style was mature beyond her years, so much so that some people wrote into NBC, angrily accusing them of passing off an adult midget as a child. She successfully toured in vaudeville, was spotlighted in a handful of movies (the best-known was 1933's International House), then disappeared completely at the age of 12. No, Rose Marie wasn't washed up; her family had moved from New York to New Jersey and had placed their daughter in a convent school. Resuming her career at 17 as "Miss Rose Marie," the former child sensation endured a few lean years before establishing herself as a comedienne. Wearying of traversing the nightclub circuit by the 1950s--she now had a husband and daughter to look after--Rose Marie began accepting guest-star assignments on such dramatic TV series as Jim Bowie, Gunsmoke and M Squad. She was also seen in continuing roles on the video sitcoms Love That Bob and My Sister Eileen, and was co-starred with Phil Silvers in the 1953 Broadway musical Top Banana. In 1961, Carl Reiner cast Rose Marie as wisecracking, man-chasing Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The close-knit camaraderie of her Dick Van Dyke co-stars helped her survive the untimely death of her husband, jazz musician Bobby Guy. Rose Marie's post-Van Dyke projects have included such films as Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title (1966) and Cheaper to Keep Her (1980), frequent appearances on the daytime quiz show The Hollywood Squares, and regular roles on the prime time TVers The Doris Day Show (1969-71, as Myrna Gibbons), Scorch (1992, as Edna Bracken) and Hardball (1994, as Marge Schott-like baseball club owner Mitzi Balzer).

Trivia: Of English, French and Irish descent.At six months old, joined his parents for the first time onstage.Attended business college and worked in an appliance corporation.Developed makeup skills which he learned from his father.Started working in films in 1930 after his father's death.In 1935, changed his stage name to Lon Chaney Jr.Played classic movie monsters like a wolf man, Frankenstein's Monster, a mummy and a vampire (Dracula's son).

Trivia: Character actor Len Lesser worked steadily in film and television since his film debut in Shackout on 101 (1955). Lean, dark, and bushy-browed, he was typically cast as a crook or hitman. Fans of the television sitcom Seinfeld will recognize Lesser as Uncle Leo.

Trivia: The son of actors Lon Chaney and Cleva Creighton, Creighton Tull Chaney was raised in an atmosphere of Spartan strictness by his father. He refused to allow Creighton to enter show business, wanting his son to prepare for a more "practical" profession; so young Chaney trained to be plumber, and worked a variety of relatively menial jobs despite his father's fame. After Lon Sr. died in 1930, Creighton entered movies with an RKO contract, but nothing much happened until, by his own recollection, he was "starved" into changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. He would spend the rest of his life competing with his father's reputation as The Man With a Thousand Faces, hoping against hope to someday top Lon Sr. professionally. Unfortunately, he would have little opportunity to do this in the poverty-row quickie films that were his lot in the '30s, nor was his tenure (1937-1940) as a 20th Century Fox contract player artistically satisfying. Hoping to convince producers that he was a fine actor in his own right, Chaney appeared as the mentally retarded giant Lennie in a Los Angeles stage production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This led to his being cast as Lennie in the 1939 film version -- which turned out to be a mixed blessing. His reviews were excellent, but the character typed him in the eyes of many, forcing him to play variations of it for the next 30 years (which was most amusingly in the 1947 Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Brunette). In 1939, Chaney was signed by Universal Pictures, for which his father had once appeared in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Universal was launching a new cycle of horror films, and hoped to cash in on the Chaney name. Billing Lon Jr. as "the screen's master character actor," Universal cast him as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man in Man Made Monster (1941), a role originally intended for Boris Karloff. That same year, Chaney starred as the unfortunate lycanthrope Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man, the highlight of which was a transformation sequence deliberately evoking memories of his father's makeup expertise. (Unfortunately, union rules were such than Lon Jr. was not permitted to apply his own makeup). Universal would recast Chaney as the Wolf Man in four subsequent films, and cast him as the Frankenstein Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and the title role in Son of Dracula (1943). Chaney also headlined two B-horror series, one based upon radio's Inner Sanctum anthology, and the other a spin-off from the 1932 film The Mummy. Chaney occasionally got a worthwhile role in the '50s, notably in the films of producer/director Stanley Kramer (High Noon, Not As a Stranger, and especially The Defiant Ones), and he co-starred in the popular TV series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans. For the most part, however, the actor's last two decades as a performer were distinguished by a steady stream of cheap, threadbare horror films, reaching a nadir with such fare as Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). In the late '60s, Chaney fell victim to the same throat cancer that had killed his father, although publicly he tried to pass this affliction off as an acute case of laryngitis. Unable to speak at all in his last few months, he still grimly sought out film roles, ending his lengthy film career with Dracula vs. Frankenstein(1971). He died in 1973.